Belle, to Andrew's relief, is a light packer.

He finds – as he brings the car to a halt in front of her small, pebble-dashed house with a wonky wooden gate and little hedge-walls – the only luggage she deems necessary to fit into his Fiesta and take to Scotland is a small suitcase and her handbag. She is also, it seems, a well-seasoned road-traveller, because she smiles and holds up four different newspapers and magazines for the journey, as well as three packets of Wine Gums, lemon sherbets, and Fruit Pastilles for him to see.

It's been three days since their breakfast meeting where, after signing his contract, he had asked her how long she needed before they could leave. Belle had only asked for three days to settle her affairs, and he'd been more than happy to wait, simply glad and relieved to find such a reasonable and easy-going woman in Belle French.

He would have given her more time, if she had asked, but she hasn't and he's eager to begin work on his– their act.

Andrew unclips his seatbelt, pockets the keys, and opens the door to the car, unable to stop a smile crossing his face as Belle steps onto the cracked pavement to meet him. She's in another of her unflattering floral dresses, with a little brown belt, but he can't help but think she looks prettier every time he sees her.

She's rosy and smiling, and she makes his palms itch with how soft her curls look as they shift in a cool, early morning breeze.

The sun is hiding behind some wispy grey clouds, but Belle is brimming with near-tangible excitement like it's the first fucking day of summer.

"I'm so excited," she rushes out, jiggling slightly where she stands on the curb in her sensible librarian shoes. "And I've brought provisions."

Her sunny spell is contagious, and Andrew feels his lip curl in a grin as he glances at the sherbet lemons in her hand.

"Dibs," he says, and Belle looks positively playful even as she feigns haughtiness.

"There won't be any of that," she huffs, a smile blooming as she steps around him to circle the car. "The lemons are my favourite, too. Haven't you heard of sharing?"

He lifts her suitcase – which is much heavier than he'd anticipated, causing him to let out a grunt and catch the bottom of it with his other hand – and hefts it to the boot, where Belle meets him after putting her provisions onto the passenger seat through the open window.

"Yes, well, doesn't mean I like it," Andrew answers, making Belle breathe a laugh. "Er, keys. Would you..."

Belle follows his eyes and glances down at the fob peeking from his trouser pocket. She gives him a smile and tugs out the keys to open the boot. Andrew smothers the thought of how close she had been to actually touching him.

He settles her case in among his own paltry amount of luggage, before closing the back and joining Belle in the car. She's looking at everything, from the tapes strewn across the backseat to the tiny black and white magic wand hanging from the rear-view mirror on a piece of ancient elastic.

"My son," Andrew explains shortly, unsure if Belle wants to hear this. "He says it's lucky."

She gives him an utterly genuine smile and he knows she won't mind him telling her about Bailey in the future. She reaches out and rubs her thumb over the ageing and sentimental decoration.

"For luck," she says when he looks at her, before glancing at her house and then resolutely ahead.

He turns the key in the ignition and takes off the hand brake, before turning the car around and heading down the small lane, away from Belle's house and towards the M2.

The lemon sherbets last all of two hours, but Belle keeps Andrew entertained, whether it's with stories from the paper or little snippets of information from her life in Australia.

He learns, as she passes him a dark Fruit Pastille, that her father wanted her to marry his best friend's son, George Gaston, and while the bloke was alright, he had a nasty habit of running round on his girlfriend with his exes, and Belle hadn't been keen on getting involved with him.

"My dad blew up," she says, her accent thickening for a moment as she frowns out on the ten o'clock shower the car and the motorway is currently getting. "Apparently he'd been planning our wedding since we were kids, like some spinsterish matchmaker. I wouldn't be surprised if he had our floral arrangements all picked out."

Andrew snorts and glances at her. "So, why acting?"

Belle smiles a little wistfully as she brings another sweet up to her lips. "My mum."

There's such a long pause – only broken by the crackling tune on a radio station that is fading in and out with all the rain – that Andrew thinks she's not going to elaborate, but elaborate she does.

Belle turns to him, looking – from what he can see out of the corner of his eye – excited by the prospect of actually speaking to someone about her family.

"She used to be this ballerina wannabe." She grins. "At least, that's what she always said, before she passed. But grandma wouldn't hear of her going on all the diets and hurting herself training – you know, that stuff – so she enrolled her in a drama club. Mum caught the bug, and that was it. She got into some local productions, and then a few things on T.V. when she got older. She met my dad and had me, but she kept going, kept acting, and then she died, and it felt like she wasn't finished. Like everything was half-done, half-written, and I wanted to finish it for her. I wanted to go where she never got to. And then Killian came along."

For a second, Andrew nearly loses control of the car. He swerves a little, before he catches himself and straightens up, heart pounding.

"Killian Jones?" He hears himself ask, incredulous. "Killian fucking Jones?"

Andrew looks over quick enough to see Belle bite her bottom lip and half-wince in the silence that follows his outburst, a silence punctuated by the creaking scree-scree of the frail windscreen wipers.

"I've never said his name, have I?" She asks eventually, obviously not looking for an answer as she twists her hands in her lap.

"No," he says anyway, staring at the lorry thundering on ahead of them, only half seeing it. "You haven't."

"I didn't want to ruin my chances," Belle sighs. "And you didn't ask."

No, she's right, he hadn't, but...Killian Jones?

The man is a legend, mainly for having had everything and fucking it up. He had been incredibly popular before he'd given up his magic. He'd nearly had his own television show, had been rumoured to be taking up an offer of a huge tour, and had a show that kids had died for, with nautical-themed acts, lots of flash, and beautiful girls hanging off of him.

Andrew has never met him, and now? Well, he never wants to.

"He just left you?" He asks eventually, once he's sorted through his thoughts.

"Kicked me out," she corrects him, opening a glossy magazine. "I had to find a youth hostel for the night."

Andrew is unreasonably angry, both for her and for himself. The latter he's not sure of – shouldn't he be happy now that she's his assistant? But no, he's pissed, because she was put in an awful situation in a foreign country, and by none other than the only magician who Andrew has ever considered to be a true rival.

Jones had been touring the same time Andrew had, and while they had both garnered different types of attention and different audiences, there hadn't really been much call for a traditional magic act at the time. There had only been room for one, and Jones had gone down in flames. Andrew had thought himself safe, but then Milah's storm had hit and wrecked him.

But now he has Belle French, and time to perfect an act, and a spot in a renowned magic festival. He'll blow Killian Jones out of the water for good.

His musings are interrupted by dulcet tones softly strumming from the radio, and he glances over to see a station hasn't magically started working; Belle's taken a tape off of the back seat and put it in.

Her eyes are sparking with good, warm humour. "Thought it was appropriate."

It's The Rain Song by Led Zeppelin, and it makes him want to smile even as he looks back out on the dreary road.

The drive had been long and cold and rain-filled, but, luckily, the heater in his car had decided to play nice and had kept them warm through the hours.

They'd stopped outside of Preston to get lunch in the Burger King at a service station, and it had been nice to stretch his legs and have another easy conversation with Belle.

He glances at her as they drive into Dumfries – where the rain finally lets off enough for her to take a good look around at her new home for the next few months – and he realises dimly that he's been finding himself more attracted to her by the hour.

Andrew has had plenty of long car rides, mostly with assistants, but he's never found himself not wanting to drive a sharp object through his cranium before. Belle has been the perfect companion, and it's driving him crazy.

She's lovely and witty, and she smells like perfume and woman, and...God, he wants her. More than he did before.

Belle distracts him by gasping as they cross over an intersection. "Oh, my God!"

Thinking there's a child running into the road that he hasn't seen, or something else equally terrible, his eyes dart about the slick road and his heart begins to thud sharply.

"What?"

"Robert Burns' house!" She exclaims excitedly, pointing to the white building down a little road with the words emblazoned in large letters on the side. "I didn't know he used to live here."

"Oh,"Andrew breathes a sigh of relief, calming his heart, and nods. "Yeah, it's a museum."

"He writing's wonderful," Belle gushes. "He inspired all my favourite poets! Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley..."

"We can go sometime, if you want," he finds himself promising her. "Before we leave for Edinburgh."

She makes a pleased sound and seems so excited by the prospect of visiting the museum that she immediately leans across the hand brake and kisses his cheek, breathing out a sweet, "Thank you."

Andrew's so distracted he nearly misses the turning he needs to make, and, subsequently, nearly causes an accident by swerving suddenly. He's sure that Belle doesn't have quite so good a handle on the Scottish accent and language so as to understand exactly what the drivers behind him yell out as they lean out of their windows, but his reply of a single, solitary finger must tell her enough, because she smothers a laugh behind her hand and turns rosy.

He tells her they're close to the house, as he makes a few more turnings and trundles down two long streets, and Belle seems just as excited to see his home.

They soon end up on his short street, driving past houses secluded by tall trees and hedges alike, and they head to the very bottom of the close to reach his gravelled drive. He takes the stone-strewn lane, and after about a hundred yards the high hedges guarding his property open up into the forecourt in front of the house.

Andrew turns a full circle around the square, sparing a glance for Belle's expression, before parking close to the drive. Once the engine is off, he can really take in Belle's face.

She's smiling, looking like a great adventure is lying ahead of her, and he cracks his own grin because of it.

The house is fairly old, with three floors, made of dull reddish-brown brick. It boasts two thick chimneys atop the dark, tiled, slate roof, and has eleven windows facing out onto the drive. The lower bay windows have their own miniature weather-beaten battlements, and Andrew likes to think of them as his little castle's defences. The door is a deep blue, painted by Bae – the self-proclaimed artiste – himself, and has a bronze knocker in the shape of a lion's head. Above the door is a small, stained glass window, with the image of a dark red flower in the centre.

He'd bought the house while he was still a successful performer and still had the money for it, and even though he's now eating into his nest egg, and the house is falling into disrepair, and he had to sell his Mercedes-Benz, and he can't afford to pay anyone to look after the place, and...so many other things, he hadn't had (and still doesn't) the heart to sell the house. Not with its door and its window and its battlements.

"Welcome to Rose Cottage," Andrew murmurs, causing Belle's smile to widen and her eyes to meet his.

"It's perfect," she tells him, without a shred of artifice, and he feels like kissing her.

Once they've emptied the car and he's shown her to her room, Andrew lets Belle explore while he gathers together what plans he has for the show in his converted attic study, or his 'inner sanctum' as Bae likes to call it.

He throws his jacket over the back of his worn chair and tidies up the desk, arranging the folders and sketches and little working models of ideas that he's had time to come up with while planning his re-birth into the showbiz world.

He doesn't bother tidying the actual space, because there's so much lying about that it isn't really worth it. It's the largest room in the house, and the one in the state of most disrepair and general untidiness.

Paraphernalia lines the angled walls, sloping up into the roof, along with frayed posters that have seen better days and tattered photographs from the countries he's visited. In the far corner, opposite the set of stairs into the room, there is a lidless chest full of tools, and in the other behind him there are different types and sizes of boxes, painted and unpainted, whether made for making a lovely woman disappear or producing something impossible.

There's an ancient and bursting wardrobe to the left, next to the single circular window in the room, filled with different costumes and rolls of materials, and a rickety table to the right, covered in electrical equipment and coloured filters for the small spotlights fixed to the ceiling.

Andrew props open the window with the empty matchbox on the sill and leaves to see to Belle. He finds her on the ground floor, happily testing his maroon sofa and armchairs for comfort.

He leans his shoulder against the doorframe, fighting a smile. "Still exploring?"

"Of course!" Her blue eyes meet his, and a dimpled grin lights her face. "You know, you should give me the tour."

He can't say no to her – at least, not to those dimples – so he waves her over and begins by the front door. He starts with the hallway and the wonky, framed photographs there, telling her which countries he took the pictures in and which shows had led him there. Belle listens with quiet and palpable interest.

He shows her the lounge, with a smile, and comments on its dark walls and cosy nature like an estate agent trying to make a sale. It makes Belle laugh.

"Can I try out the chairs?" She asks playfully, and he gestures to the sofa laid out in front of the large stone fireplace.

"Be my guest."

He pushes his hands into the pockets of his jeans as she continues the charade, before he has to pry her from the chairs to continue the tour. He shows her the dining room across the hall, which has always been far more elegant than he's ever had a need for, with a too-long mahogany table and matching chairs, though he's sold most of them.

"That's pretty," she comments, pointing at the small chandelier that hangs from the ceiling, above the table.

Andrew nods, though inwardly he curses the thing because he's never been able to get it down. If he had, it would have been sold a long time ago.

Belle becomes enraptured with the two large paintings on either wall, both of Scottish highland scenes and painted by Bae a couple of years ago as a birthday present. They're beautiful, and Andrew looks at them often.

Next, he leads her into the kitchen, which is a little more modern than the rest of the house but not by much. He removed the ancient stove and replaced it with an oven a long time ago and he's bought a few appliances here and there, but he's kept the dark tiled floor and the faintly yellow walls, along with the original polished wood countertops and stone farmhouse sink.

Andrew shows Belle upstairs, letting her peek into Bailey's room – painted by his son in dark gold and carpeted by himself – which is only decorated with the few possessions Bae left, like his deflated leather football and the St. Andrew's flag pinned on the wall above the head of the bed.

Next is the bright white bathroom, and he informs Belle of the squeaky cold tap in the sink and the temperamental hot tap in the bath. Then the master bedroom – his – which looks far grander in reds and oranges and with the four poster bed than it actually is.

He glances into her room at the end of the hall, with its powder blue walls and framed pressed flowers hanging from them, before turning to her.

"Don't think I need to show you around there," he says.

Belle smiles. "Mr Gold, I just want to say that this is a wonderful house, and...I can't thank you enough for letting me stay."

His hands find his pockets again as he attempts to brush off the fluster caused by her frank appreciation. "You can thank me by calling me Andrew. Gold's more my stage persona than my surname."

She nods and clasps her hands behind her back. "Mine was Frenchie."

"What?"

"That's what Killian called me when I came on the stage – Frenchie – and then I'd do this sexy little two-step and everyone would whistle," Belle explains.

Andrew stares at her for a moment. "Well, I won't complain about a sexy dance," he tells her, knowing he really won't. "But I'm not calling you that."

"Thank God," she groans, wrinkling her nose. "I never liked it."

He considers it for a moment, trying not to lose track of his thoughts as he looks into her eyes. "I think you should have something a little more glamorous," he eventually says. "What about..."

"Belle?" She suggests, a little cautiously, and Andrew's eyebrow hitches.

"Not that I'm complaining, but you don't want something different?"

She shrugs a delicate shoulder, the corner of her mouth turning upwards. "I'd like to be known for me this time around."

He can't agree more.

Andrew points to the stairs across the way, leading up to his study, feeling almost fucking giddy with the prospect of beginning their work.

"Want to see what I'm up to?"

Belle heads off up the stairs without him, she's so eager, and he's left to catch up, smothering a grin. He meets her at his desk, once she's looked around to her heart's content, and sits her in his chair, before opening up a battered notebook in front of her.

The first page reads – 'Aquarius Illusion' – and Belle lights up, eyes meeting his over her slim shoulder.

"Lucky I've got my swimming certificates," she quips, and he can't hold back a laugh as he leans over to show her all his other ideas.

This year, Andrew knows, will be one to remember.

Author's note: Okay, so now I'm estimating four/five parts to this fic. The count is gradually increasing with the more of it I complete, so we'll just have to see what it ends up like! Thank you for all the support, it really helps.