Audrey would have said more but then Jennifer leaned forward and issued Colin an instruction so trivial that it was blatantly an excuse to end the conversation.
* * *
Ultimately it was a fairly quiet judging with no real surprises. It was close because despite their very different ages and levels of experience, the remaining contestants were all top-of-their-game baking persons. But Doris’s years of getting by on one egg a week and darning her own stockings had paid off and put her just at the top of the Battenberg-from-scratch challenge, while Alanis’s squares had been called out as beingslightlyuneven by Marianne Wolvercote, which—at this stage of the competition—was enough to consign her to the bottom of the pack.
Once the last interview had been concluded—something that happened a lot more quickly when there were only three people—Jennifer took off her headset and snapped her laptop closed. “Get your coat, Lane. You’ve pulled.”
Audrey blinked at her. “Sorry. What?”
“It’s our last night on set. I need to be top of my game tomorrow morning. A single bed fucking sucks. And I’m fucking horny.”
“Okay? How do these all fit together?”
“I booked us into the main hotel.”
The part of Audrey that was slightly on guard against deeply controlling women wasn’t sure if she should be fine with this. The part of Audrey who had spent the past couple of weekends having fumbly, slightly elastic sex—and then trying to sleep—in a bed that was barely designed to fit one adult, let alone two, was very,veryfine. “Great,” said that part of Audrey. “Let’s go.”
Having not that long ago visited the Hotel Metropole in Monte Carlo, Audrey found Patchley House, despite its venerable history and excellent Tripadvisor ratings, a bit of a…if not a letdown, then at least a comedown. It didn’t, for example, have a gargantuan glass sculpture hanging from its lobby ceiling or a dazzling view of the Mediterranean or a jaded aristocrat gazing enigmatically at the horizon. But it had one of those sweeping staircases so beloved of the rich and landed, and the décor was a well-chosen mixture of the modern and the traditional.
“Don’t get too excited,” said Jennifer, storming purposefully down a hallway. “I got this room because it was the only one that wasn’t shit.”
“It’s not, like, a bridal suite or something is it?”
“Fuck no. But it’s a bit…historicalish. And that kind of sentimental fuckbilge makes you all wet and gooey.”
“Can you not?”
“I can not. I don’t not.”
Swiping the keycard, Jennifer pushed open a door and Audrey—neither wet nor gooey—followed her into a room that she couldn’t help noticing was called the Branningham Suite. And it was, indeed, very historicalish. With a four-poster bed draped in red velvet, panelled walls of very dark wood, and oak, oak everywhere.
“Okay,” said Jennifer, putting her laptop down on an old-fashioned writing desk and dropping her bag to the floor. “I’m going to give you two minutes to bask in the melancholy of a bygone age and two sad old women you’re desperate to connect to. Then I’m going to pull the strap-on out my luggage and you’re going to fuck me into seventeen sixty-four.”
“Why,” asked Audrey, still processing that entire speech.“Why seventeen sixty-four?”
“Is that really the detail you want to focus on?”
“Well, I don’t want to overshoot. What if I accidentally end up fucking you into seventeen sixty-three? Or sixteen ninety-one?”
“It’s fine. I’ll use the safe word.”
“We have a safe word?”
“Yeah, it’s cut it the fuck out.”
“You realise”—Audrey had now worked backwards into the two minutes basking part of the deal—“this was probably Arthur Branningham’s room?”
“And probably the room where his son died with a leaky prostate. But I’m sure they’ve changed the sheets since.”
“Jennifer, you’re massively diminishing my desire to fuck you into any time period.”
She gave a familiar frustrated-soundingurghf.“Look, Lane, it’s an old house. It belonged to rich dead men. We can’t get rid of them, but we can still fuck on their bones.”
Put like that, Audrey was almost willing to consider it subversive rather than icky. Because actually therewassomething that felt…if not right, then at least the good sort of wrong, banging her girlfriend in Sir Arthur Branningham’s private quarters. Not, of course, in the study where he’d sat Doris down and told her that his daughter loving her brought shame on the family. But where he’d probably slept easy afterwards.
Christ, no wonder Emily was so fucked up.
“Okay,” Audrey said, “I’m in.”
