“Only for the Pemberley tour. You just missed my talk about the abbey’s architectural history, luckily for you.” He looked at her hairline. “Sure you didn’t hit your head?”
“I don’t think my head came into it at all.” She tossed aside the broken stair rail and twisted to look up behind her. She’d destroyed the lowest flight of stairs, leaving a seven-foot drop. She was lucky she’d crashed down step by step, taking them out like dominoes, while breaking her fall. “I’m sorry about your stairs.”
“No,I’msorry about my stairs.” He drew to his feet and held out two white-gloved hands. “May I help you up?”
Numbly, she took them, the smooth, firm contact confirming that he probably wasn’t one of the estate’s ghosts. She let him help her to her feet, which left their faces inches apart, hers angled up, his down. She had to remind herself to breathe. It was like the time she got tongue-tied meeting Mickey Mouse at Disneyland when she was four. She promised herself that on this occasion she would not burst into tears and hide in her granny’s skirts.
“If you’re a thief, take what you like!” he said. “On second thoughts, don’t. Everything of value has been cataloged.”
“I, uh, got separated from the tour,” she said, her hands still in his gloves, which were made of the softest kid leather she’d ever touched.
“No, you didn’t.” He grinned, revealing a single deep dimple.
“Excuse me?” Her face warmed.
“You absconded. You’re not the first. It’s not a very good tour, is it?”
“The guide calledSense and Sensibility‘Sense and Sensuality,’ and she kept saying ‘Darby’ instead of ‘Darcy.’ Also, she appears to believe that’s his first name.”
“Bless. My father gave Xanthe the contract before he died, and I didn’t have the heart to let her go when… It’s not easy to find work in this part of the country.”
“Wait, yourfather? Are you the ‘spare’?”
He laughed, an edge of bitterness in it.
“I mean, I’m sorry, the, ah, shit?—”
“The ‘second son’? Two words to haunt a man for life. Thomas Calder. Just Tom, actually.”
“Nice to meet you, Just Tom, Actually.”
“And you are?”
“Ah, Amelia. Amelia Bennett.”
“Bennett?” he said, raising his eyebrows.
“No relation to Lizzy inPride and Prejudice. Plus, double T in Bennett.”
“A pleasure to meet you, Amelia Bennett with two Ts.” He seemed to consider something, and then smiled broadly. “Now that we’re officially introduced, would you care to join me for a drink? Something strong. It’s the least I can do after nearly killing you on my dodgy stairwell. I was just on my way to the cellars, in fact.”
“It’s eleven a.m.”
“Is it indeed? Well, where are you from?”
“New York.”
“What time is it there?”
She thought for a few seconds. “Six a.m.”
“There you are, you see? Prime drinking time. Come on, let’s find something good.” He dropped her hands and started walking. “Or at least stupidly expensive.”
“Prime drinking time? If I was drinking at six o’clock on a Thursday morning, something would have to have gone very wrong.”
Amelia brushed herself off and followed him through a stone archway into a dimly lit basement—not much more than a tunnel bored through the earth, reinforced with walls of stacked rocks. A vocal minority of her brain wanted to flee, if she even knew which direction to go, but she told it a very firmno. That would be giving in to fear. And hey, she was the intruder here.
“Amelia, this estate is a week away from being sold to a tech bro who plans to turn it into a twenty-first century Playboy Mansion. I think that’s the definition of things going very wrong.”
