Jumping in Puddles Read Free Page B

get into bloody line.
    Leaning back against the slope he’d slid down, he wedged his feet on the turret, looked up into a relentlessly gray sky, and blinked water from his lashes. When distant thunder rumbled, he stiffened. Up on a roof wasn’t the best place to be in a storm. But maybe he ought to wish for a bolt of lightning to finish him off. He was as crazy as Canute, the long-dead king of Anglo-Saxon times, who thought he could command the sea to retreat, because Sharwood Hall crumbled beneath him as predictably as a sand castle overrun by an incoming tide.
    This place had been continuously occupied by his family for four hundred years. It had withstood civil war, idiot ancestors, two fires, two world wars, but it seemed unlikely to outlast Jago’s tenure. Throughout his childhood, his father had made him promise that he’d never sell Sharwood. It wasn’t a promise he could keep without a miracle. A lottery win, except he couldn’t afford to buy a ticket. Divine intervention, except he didn’t believe. A rich woman, except he wasn’t much of a catch. He had a title but no money, responsibility for a stately home that was no longer stately, and his career was a distant dream.
    He looked down to the bottom of the drive and the gatehouse where Henry lived. The guy had been head gardener for as long as Jago could remember and was quite simply his lifeline. After Jago’s parents died, somehow, and he still didn’t understand how, Henry had paid the huge inheritance tax bill. It was an extraordinarily generous thing to do, because if he hadn’t, the government would have taken the house. Yet perversely, if Henry hadn’t paid it, he wouldn’t be in this mess. Everything in his life seemed to be a case of double-edged swords. Ironic that crossed swords were part of the family crest.
    Jago stared through the rain at the gray fields rolling away into the horizon. All that land had once supported Sharwood. Now the only income was from four lodgers. If he sold, he’d wipe away most of his problems in one fell swoop, but not all. His parents had bequeathed the gatehouse to Henry for as long as he wanted to look after the garden. There was no way Jago would turn him out even after he couldn’t do the job, but would a new owner want him?
    Henry probably expected to die here. He loved this place more than Jago’s father ever had. His father had seen it as his duty to care for Sharwood, but never loved it. At times, he’d actively hated it, so why he had been so insistent Jago never sell it? An outmoded sense of family honor? Jago hated and loved Sharwood in equal measure and depending on how the balance shifted, he was determined to keep it or determined to sell it. But the feeling of being trapped, the constant creeping misery that consumed him, the weight of the unyielding shackle on his life and choices could only push him harder in one direction. I have to sell.
    There was a flash of lightning, and as he pushed himself up, he spotted a red figure dart in and out of the line of yew trees before disappearing. He stretched to see where the person had gone, and both feet slipped. His backside hit the tiles, and as he continued to slide, he grabbed fistfuls of air, trying to find something to hang on to. When his boots landed in the gutter and stopped his descent, he gasped in relief, his heart thumping wildly. Shit . He wasn’t ready to die quite yet. But as he tried to pull himself up, the guttering shifted with a crack louder than the thunder. Jago scrambled backward like a crab with a speed that surprised him until he straddled the ridge. From there he edged his way to the window and threw himself inside.
    “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
    He lay groaning on his back on the bare wooden floor. That had been close. He didn’t like going on the roof at all, let alone when it was raining, but the wetter the plaster became, the more chance the ceiling would come down, and the more expensive it would be to fix. Hard not to wish