Witch Hunter. Willow Sears

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      Mimi decided early that it was a perfect day for a picnic. She knew the perfect spot too, found just a few weeks ago when she had been out walking alone. She had been drawn off the beaten track after sighting a fox. She had tracked it through to a small clearing where she had stayed crouched behind the greying trunk of a fallen oak, watching it as it played around and pounced upon leaves and insects. It had been a magical few moments. She had felt a sudden surge of elation at this window on nature. She had seemed at one with the world, experiencing a mixture of freedom and security, cosseted as she was by the dense foliage surrounding her.

      She had also felt a rather uncharacteristic urge to frolic. She had flashing images of herself stripping off right there, although such daring public naughtiness was hardly her forte. She might even have gone through with it if it hadn’t been rather too chilly that morning for whipping your bits out, especially when brush-tailed wild animals might be watching. If she had been there with someone else, though, and that someone had taken it upon themselves to ravish her, maybe forcing her over that same fallen trunk and ripping her knickers away to leave her at his mercy, why, then there would have been little she could do about it. No one would have been around to come to her aid, there would be nothing she could do to resist being plundered, maybe even spanked …

      So a picnic it was, and lazy Dominic would have to play the loving boyfriend and drag his arse out of bed to accompany her, even though he had sounded so uninterested in the whole idea on the phone. He didn’t even seem to care that he would be off back to college in a few days and this would be one of their last chances to be alone for a while. Fortunately that morning the Spinster had gone off to garner the latest village tittle-tattle, giving Mimi free rein of the kitchen to prepare a picnic for two without prying eyes and uncomfortable questions. Dominic was her secret and tongues would be ceaselessly wagging if anyone knew they were an item.

      Getting out of her room and having the run of that gorgeous wisteria-covered cottage was a treat in itself, however brief such moments were. She loved the place. One day she hoped to have enough money to buy just such a property within the village, but for now renting a room was a more than acceptable alternative, despite having to share with the spinster landlady. It meant a time-consuming drive to reach work in Oxford, but the quiet leafy lanes could make your heart soar with optimism when the early sun lit the green, flint-strewn fields and the beech woods behind, and brought the hedgerows alive. It had been a different story in her first winter, when any snowfall or thick ice rendered the roads impassable and forced her to exist for days off pub food or remnants in the freezer. She didn’t care though. Anything was worth it to live here. She had coveted a place in the village for as long as she could remember.

      She had grown up in the nearby town where Dominic now lived. Her parents would bring the family out here for summer picnics in the glades or autumn walks amongst the copper-leaved trees. They provided many of her fondest childhood memories: colour-splashed meadows, swallows dipping and zipping over lush-cropped fields, dew-covered cobwebs amid frosty thickets, or pristine snow blankets and freezing breath. Sun or rain, it was always special. She tried to imbue her lethargic boyfriend with the same enthusiasm as they sauntered through those woods on the way to her Secret Location, but he had his standard couldn’t-give-a-fuck face on. He seemed so one-dimensional sometimes that it wearied her. How their short relationship had continued was a mystery.

      He was tall and nicely muscular, and good-looking in a posh-student way. Plus he had the most delectable of pricks: slim but very long and silky-smooth when erect, which was often. It seemed to have a mind of its own. It certainly had more go than the rest of him. A few times when she was making advances he had seemed to be crying off, only to be outvoted by his own member. And once unleashed it could certainly hammer home with the best of them, even if its owner was more than a little unimaginative when it came to dirty business.

      The staying power and speedy recovery rate of his young erection ensured she was never left disappointed. That was not something she had always been able to claim in the past, so it was worth clinging on to, even if the man himself could barely raise the passion to hold her hand, better still delight in the promise of the secret place she was taking him to. He could gather even less zeal for the smells and the promise of the day that were firing her, or for the snatched views across the landscape of her childhood haunts.

      The timelessly pretty villages and hamlets here were dotted around the countryside, some more easily reached across the fields than by the narrow roads. To her they all seemed like miniature empires in sleeping valleys, all unique despite their close proximity, all holding their own wonderful secrets that were jealously guarded from outsiders. In more recent times these outsiders had come to populate the villages. The steep rise in house prices forced the locals elsewhere as wealthy Oxford and London commuters took over. Affluence was pervasive, but nowhere lost its ancient, deep-set notion of serfdom, СКАЧАТЬ