Excerpt: The Somerset Prints

"Even through the haze of smoke left by the fireworks, she was still wreathed in a halo of beauty that was hers alone. He regarded her at first dubiously, as though such a creature could not set foot on earth without a golden apple having beckoned her approach. But she was made of flesh and bone, of marvelous alabaster skin. She had raven hair that had never seen the injustice of the shears. It fell to the small of her back, and his only regret was that it hid shoulders sculpted by Michelangelo himself. She was exquisite, and although she was young, she carried herself as though this had all happened before. He wanted to speak to her, to hear the musical voice that must surely inhabit such a vision...

He had first noticed her when she strayed from the congregation of dainty woman at the height of the croquet match, stealing away to sit by the pond and admire the mute swan that skimmed the shallows. She stared at him, preening and fluttering his wings in the blues and violets of twilight, and it seemed to Graham that she had the presence of an artist. He could envision her assessing the graceful lines of the bird's arching neck, hands sooty with a charcoal pencil, glancing up from beneath her plentiful dark lashes to catch some strain of his beauty she had not before beheld.

It was only when the blue turned to indigo, and the first flash and crack of the fireworks had burst into the sky unexpectedly, that her vigil at the side of the pond ended. She gathered with the rest under the eaves of the stately home to enjoy the traditional spectacle of light and sound from a safe distance. The gold and white bursts looked like chrysanthemums on the water, overhanging so large that they appeared instead to be life-sized blooms reflected in a puddle. It was the same glorious reflection that Graham saw in her eyes. She watched the fireworks intently, with the exhilaration of a child, hanging on the edge of every silence, yet still startled and delighted by the sudden explosion of light, and the thunderclap that accompanied it. For one moment, she caught him staring, transfixed by her. Rather than blush, she turned her artist’s eye on him, examined him only ever so slightly, and the apples of her cheeks betrayed a smile under the illumination of moonlight and willowy sparkles. A tilt of his head let her know he had noticed her smile, and she brushed her eyes over him once more before turning them to soak up the light of the next large explosion."