Wednesday 6 November 2013

Wednesday, November 06, 2013 -

Country Loving

by Abigail Armani
Published: Sep 24, 2013
Words: 21,968
Category: romance
Orientation: M/F
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OPENING EXTRACT
Country Loving

He had been in the house exactly three weeks. Three weeks of peace and quiet and luxurious solitude - and then he met Dorothy. In under an hour she managed to scrape his car, demolish his gate, and ransack his garden.

There he was, relaxing in the comfortable chair by the window, enjoying a cold beer while he read the Sunday paper. It was bliss. But then the tranquillity was shattered by a sudden series of loud cracks. Thinking someone had been shot, Grant put down the paper and looked out of the window. A battered red car misfired its way down the lane, accompanied by a huge cloud of thick black smoke from the exhaust pipe. As the lane was a dead end and his was the only house located there, he fervently hoped the occupant of the noisy smelly car wouldn't be visiting him. With any luck they would realise they'd taken a wrong turn, and head back the way they had come.

With a nauseating crunch of gears, the car pulled up outside his house. Grant winced. Who the heck was this? A woman emerged from the vehicle, pushed open his gates, ran up the path, and started hammering urgently on the front door.

"Yes?" he enquired, looking into a pair of green eyes beneath a mop of tussled red curls.

"Hi. Hello. Pleased to meet you. I'm Dorothy but you can call me Dotty - everyone else does. I'm your neighbour. I live up there - Gamekeeper's Cottage." She pointed to a low, grey stone building in the valley about two miles across the field. "Not that I'm a gamekeeper of course." She grinned. Her face was full of freckles. "But there used to be one living there, years ago. He had a big nose - a right whopper it was. He kept a goat. It was really smelly. I would have come round to say hello sooner, but I caught mumps off my nephew. You should have seen my face - it was all puffed up. I looked like a hamster. Anyway, I've lost George. I don't suppose you've seen him? Oh - did I say I was called Dotty? I'm a bit forgetful."

She paused for breath, grabbed his right hand and pumped it up and down enthusiastically.

"Dotty," he murmured, thinking she did indeed appear to be completely dotty. "Er, I can't say I've seen anyone else wandering this morning. Hopefully George can find his way back home."

"There's not much chance of that. Damn and blast." She cast an anxious glance round Grant's front garden.

"Who exactly is George?" enquired Grant, somewhat bemused.

"He's been up to his usual tricks, the dirty little devil. I'm afraid he's turned into the most frightful sex pest. He just won't leave my girls alone - he wants to be at it constantly. He's a damn nuisance."

"A sex pest? Surely not. Shouldn't you be calling the police and pressing charges?"