By putting her in the drawing room, he felt like he was keeping her from intruding too much while he wasn’t there to contain matters. It was comfortable, and cosy, safe enough. Itwasn’t the heart of the house, like the kitchen, but it was a family room. Formal enough for a de Wilde surely. Nothing much tended to happen in there.
If he could limit where she went and what she got into until she got fed up and left…that might work.
Yes, that was the best idea. And then…
Then he just had to persuade her to leave it alone, to go back to America and let him run the estate for her. There would be a steady income stream, grants and all the rest of it. She didn’t have to sell up. Keeping Wildewood intact, and her far away… It was the best thing.
But he had an awful feeling it could never be that easy.
The house stirred around him, creaking, whispering. The wind was finding a way in through the gaps and with it came…well, it was an old house, he would tell her. He had to.
The lawyers had been no more than irritants, like a stone in his boot. He could ignore them. They didn’t matter.
But Alexandra de Wilde herself – no matter what name she had chosen – she was a different matter.
No,notAlexandra de Wilde. He had to remember that. Theo might have embraced the family name but she didn’t. Dr Alex O’Neill – her stepfather’s surname, a short form of her name, carefully ungendered for professional reasons no doubt, and a title she had earned through her studies. Nothing of the de Wilde inheritance at all. She had rejected everything.
When their mother died, Theo had grieved for months. Nick and Sally had been here for him all through that. Theo had no one else. Alex stayed away and that had hurt him so much. Nick had been angry about it at the time, until Sally warned him to leave it alone.
Oh Alex went to the funeral, in Dublin. She visited the city and saw old friends, and she had spent some time with her brother and their stepfather there.
But not here. She had never come back here. Where Theo had retreated, to hide, to grieve, to lose himself. And even when they had finally persuaded him to message her, for his own sake, to ask her to visit as his only living relative, she had refused point-blank.
And honestly? Nick had been relieved. It meant he and Sally could keep Theo to themselves. For a little while it had been a haven. Until it became his own personal, solitary hell.
Now, having laid eyes on Alex, seeing the echoes of Theo in her face, in the blue of her eyes so like her brother’s, a true de Wilde, all the heartbreaking similarities and the terrible differences, he knew that this was not going to be easy.
And that Wildewood Hall would never want to let her go.
CHAPTER 4
ALEX
‘I can’t believe you’ve inherited, like, acastle, Alex,’ Arnold said, amazement in his voice, made even stronger by his Californian Valley twang. ‘Like…likeDownton Abbey!’
Alex glared at the little squares on the phone screen, each of her friends perfectly framed there with their stream-ready setup, and her own square showing the drawing room, the camera thankfully reversed so they didn’t see that the joke struck home and not in a good way.
‘It’s nothing like that,’ she muttered. ‘It’s…’ How did she begin to describe Wildewood Hall to anyone? Part Manderley, part Thornfield Hall, part Hill House. None of that would help. And technically itwasa castle. Or had been once upon a time. Before her family had spent generations adding bits on and rebuilding and designing a great house in the middle of nowhere. Disguising what it once was as if that was an embarrassment. And when you were little better than robber barons to begin with, maybe it was. ‘You wanted to see it.’ She composed her features and flicked the camera setting around again, back to face her. ‘There, you’ve seen.’
‘Yeah, but we want to seemore,’ Daphne crooned. ‘It’s so atmospheric. You can feel the weight of history there. How many spirits do you think?—’
‘None,’ Alex replied, with all the firmness she could muster. ‘Absolutelynone, Daph.’
‘Statistically, the chances of that—’ said Eduardo.
‘None. And don’t quote statistics at me about things that aren’t real.’
There were stories though. Any number of stories. She and Theo had delighted in them as kids and Gran was always more than happy to share them. Alex wasn’t going to tell them that.
She dropped back into the armchair facing the fire. At least she was warming up at last. She had promised to contact Gabe the moment she arrived, and once she had sorted out her data, she’d video-called him because getting Gabe to just talk on a phone was an impossibility. He’d linked the others in before she knew what was happening. She sensed a conspiracy.
‘It’s beautiful,’ Gabe said, his voice a soft purr, and she could already see the wheels turning in his mind. He was always looking for an angle. Of course he was. ‘We reallyshouldthink about investigating?—’
‘No, Gabe,’ she said again, with even more force. But he wasn’t listening. When was he ever listening?
‘Come on, an international show, a special. They’d lap it up. I can get the network on board like that with you already over there. And it’s not like we’d have to get anyone else’s permission.’
‘You’d needmine. I’m not on the show anymore.’
