Just to Have You (Blackwood & Friends #3)

Chapter Twenty

Apologies for staggered updates. I appear to be in a flux of some kind of existential dread with the imminent promise of returning to work next week. 

Chapter Twenty

Ben: "By not letting me eat Henevieve, your action of goodwill is entirely self-motivated and only produces your own happiness and satisfaction with little regard for the overall good of society. Therefore, your ideologies are deontological in theory, as specified by Immanuel Kant. However-"

Griff, groaning: "I have not yet had my morning coffee. It is too early for discussions on morality when all I can think about doing is smothering you with a pillow."

(B & G conversation on morality several hours earlier)

"I say, Amy, have you heard a word I have said?" Heather reprimanded lightly from where she stood on the other side of the counter in Mr Coppinger's bookshop.

Amy frowned and cleared her gaze, a heated blush scraping up the back of her neck. She had indeed not been paying one iota of attention to her mother who was currently chewing her ear off about something or the other to do with the event in two days' time. Heather plunked her hands on her hips and cocked her head to the side, the little lace bonnet atop her greying curls bobbing precariously to one side. "Eh?"

"Not 'eh', you must say 'I beg your pardon'," Heather sighed and shook her head. "Who raised you?"

"You did," Amy pointed out dryly, and shifted slightly off the high stool she had been sitting on and apparently gazing into the void of nothingness for the last several minutes.

Damn Oliver.

The wooden countertop was tall, almost as high as her waist, and spread across its surface was the various bottles and jars she had been studiously completing in preparation to sell. In the hollow space underneath the counter was yet more little containers stacked neatly in boxes. Between Heather and herself, they had collected a rather large bounty of glass vestibules over the last year or so in anticipation for the event, insomuch as even roping Oliver in to securing every pot of jam or honey his household used on a regular basis.

Heather brushed her off dismissively and pointed to the jars before her. "I told you to set aside some of those for the apple jam," she said with great import. "Imagine my surprise this morning when I was unable to find any in the cottage."

Heather had been boiling and stewing apples for the last three days. As a result, the cottage reeked of honeyed, sickly sweetness to the extent that it was almost impossible to endure for long periods of time. Oliver, who had spent the last two nights in her bed, had even felt compelled to leave earlier than he normally would, but not before plastering her with kisses, pinning her wrists above her head and pressing her into the downy softness of her pillows, working her nightgown over her waist-

Drat.

Amy blinked owlishly at Heather. "Uh," she began, "I will bring however many you require when I am finished at the shop, mother."

"That simply will not do," she argued. "I need them quite urgently."

Amy gave her a small frown. "Did you bring Chomper with you today? If you did-"

"Heaven's no. You know I am unable to manage all that with these old bones and useless fingers of mine."

With a patient sigh, Amy leaned her elbows on the countertop and considered her mother thoughtfully a moment in hopes a solution would materialise out of thin air. Heather had obviously walked the mile into the village from the cottage purely to lambast her, though it could be said her boredom and inability to actively embody commitment to doing nothing in her days drove her to make the journey so that she could converse, haggle, and sometimes downright harass, other villagers. "I believe Mr Coppinger is making a route today. When he returns shortly, I will enlist his aid to return you to the cottage along with as many jars you can manage."