Nina’s heart felt like it would burst.

“I couldn’t . . . I couldn’t let myself . . . I couldn’t handle another stupid crush, another waste of everything that didn’t go anywhere and just left me feeling stupid, and you did treat me like an idiot . . .”

“Because I am an idiot.”

Nina closed her eyes. “Kiss me, please. Right now. Hard. The way you do.”

His face darkened. “Kate,” he said. Nina winced. “Kate . . . she didn’t like how I was in bed. Said I was too rough.” His face took on an uncharacteristically vulnerable cast.

Nina looked at him, her eyes misting over slightly as she felt a slight cracking in him.

“Everyone is different,” she said, softly but clearly. “Everyone is different in what they like. Which is okay. And what I like, I think . . . is you. Very much.”

“You don’t look the type,” he muttered, plainly embarrassed.

“You can’t tell anything about anyone just by looking at them,” said Nina pertly, and stuck her tongue out, which finally elicited a smile from him.

“No,” he said. “I suppose you can’t. Can we stop talking now?”

And they did. Afterward, there was no laughing or joking or small talk. They simply leaned against each other, out of breath, his head collapsed on the side of her neck, the bristles against her soft skin, a little overwhelmed, almost scared, by what they had done, Nina’s heart still beating fast, the tension relieved momentarily but even now building up again, her chest stained a deep red.

That had been something else altogether, a surprise, something inside herself she didn’t even know was there.

“Can I stay?” he whispered finally.

“Yes,” said Nina abruptly, and she didn’t say thank you and she didn’t say please, because this was a very different Nina in a very different space, and she didn’t know how long it would last.

His face, she realized as he tumbled into sleep for a brief interlude, did not relax in slumber as most people’s did. She couldn’t look at him and admire the prettiness, or the boy he once was, or see a deeper softness beyond his harsh interior, like one could imagine doing with a lover.

No, this was what he was: the steely jaw, the look of utter concentration, whether on the farm or on her. She stared at him in fascination, until he woke up, without a second of confusion, and pulled on her wrists.

“Nina,” he said, as if he was starving for her, and he was, he absolutely was, and as the fiddles and the partying went on late into the night, so did they.

Chapter Thirty-two

By the fourth day after the party, it was getting ridiculous. They couldn’t go on like this. For starters, she was going to end up in the hospital, and bankrupt. And second, they hadn’t spoken at all about what they were actually doing, and that couldn’t go on indefinitely.

Because she couldn’t help herself. She couldn’t think of anything or anyone else at all. She couldn’t handle money, she couldn’t be trusted to work; she recommended nothing but Anaïs Nin, which raised the minister’s wife’s eyebrows (although she notably didn’t return it).

There wasn’t a time of day when he wasn’t either working or coming back to find her, wherever she was, which once involved him walking into the Women’s Institute book swap and telling Nina with a completely straight face that his Land Rover required a tow from the van and could she come at once? Nina assumed, given the sensibleness of the nice ladies discussing Second World War novels, that they all thought this was perfectly normal and she didn’t notice for a second the raised eyebrows and titters as she left and he drove her the shortest distance possible out of town where they couldn’t be seen and took her roughly and without preliminaries behind a tree, and she yelled so hard she thought she might die.

Nina found it extraordinary. For a man so closed up in himself, so uncommunicative, he was wildly inventive and varied as a lover, and extraordinarily passionate. It was as if everything he couldn’t say he could express in other ways. This was how she was getting to know him, getting to the heart of him. Not through long chats or fancy poetry or shared interests, but through the physicality of him, the same way he worked at one with animals, or the landscape, and never felt the need to question why; he was simply a part of the earth, and so was this.

And she was falling in love with him, she realized anxiously, day by day; she was learning to speak his language, and she couldn’t help it, or help herself; she was delirious with it, heady, desperate for him in a way that made her feel utterly vulnerable, and she knew that if he didn’t feel the same way, she wouldn’t be able to bear it.

“We’re so different,” she said on the phone. “Honestly, it’s . . . I don’t know. I don’t know. It might just be sex.”

“Oh my God, that’s everything,” breathed Surinder. “Tell me more.”

“I don’t want to tell you more,” said Nina. “First, you’re disgusting, and second, it’ll just make me miss it and go over there, and if I don’t get some sleep, I’m going to crash the van.”

“I thought he’d be like that as soon as I saw him,” said Surinder.

“You didn’t.”

“I totally did. He’s the type. I could just tell. All buttoned up and devastatingly sexy underneath. All that repressed emotion.”

“Stop it!” said Nina. “I can’t bear it. I have absolutely no idea what he feels and it’s driving me bananas.”

“Oh, sweetie,” said Surinder, contrite. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize . . . I didn’t realize you’d really fallen for him.”

“I haven’t,” said Nina, panicking. “I haven’t. I can’t. I won’t.”

“Right, that’s why you sound completely normal and unfussed when you talk about him. Come on. Did you feel like this about Marek?”

“No,” said Nina. “But I didn’t sleep with Marek.”

“Do you think it would have been like this?”

Nina paused before she spoke. “Nothing has ever been remotely like this.”

“Well then.”

“We haven’t even discussed his ex. He’s probably still in love with her. We haven’t discussed anything.”

“Are you absolutely a hundred percent sure you’re not overthinking this?”