The groundskeeper peered in. “Bloody neighbors are shooting in our wood again.”
“Not our wood for much longer, Duncan,” Tom said. “Tell them to save us some venison. I’m joking,” he added, as the man looked at him quizzically. “At least we no longer have to worry about the dogs getting into the chicken coop. We gave away the last of the chickens yesterday,” he explained to Amelia.
“I’d only just got the coop to the point that it was dog-proof,” Duncan grumbled. “The foxes have got nothing on those little blighters.”
“Honestly, Duncan, don’t worry about the neighbors. Don’t worry about anything. Take the rest of the day off. Take the rest of your life off.”
“Plenty to get sorted before the new owner takes over. I’m not leaving the grounds a mess.” Duncan noticed Amelia, and stared as if trying to place her.
“Hi,” she said sheepishly.
“Oh. The American.” He didn’t sound thrilled. His gaze wandered to the bottles sitting on the desk beside Tom. “Not planning to drive anywhere, are we?”
“Of course not, Duncan.” Tom’s gentle, serious reassurance suggested a history there. “I would never.”
The groundskeeper gave a curt nod and turned away. “I have to go into the village later, if anyone wants a ride,” he called back.
“Cheers, Duncan.” Tom shunted the window closed. A slightly sweet burning smell wafted over to Amelia.
“Is something on fire outside?”
“Just in the incinerator. Duncan is having a clear-out. I told him not to bother, but he’s determined to leave the hedges sharply pruned, even if the house is beyond hope. I think it’s his way of saying goodbye. Some of the planting dates back centuries.”
“What will happen to him when the place is sold? He said he’d lived here all his life.”
“As did his father. I suggested the new owners keep him on, but they weren’t keen. He’s a good bloke—as loyal as it gets—but he can come across a little grumpy.”
“Ya think?”
“It’ll be harder on him than any of us, I suspect. Connor, his son?—”
“Your lawyer?”
Tom nodded. “He’s trying to convince Duncan to apply for a job in the parks and wildlife service, but the poor old chap is terrified he’ll be forced to take a desk job. Or, God forbid, retire. If there are three things he detests, it’s change, leisure time, andbeing indoors. Anyway…” Tom settled back down and picked up his goblet. “Where were we?”
“We were moving on.”
“Indeed, we were,” he said with a grin that suggested he was applying the same hidden meaning to “moving on” as she was. Like he’d said, he needed an escape, and so did she. This was fast turning into a win-win.
The afternoon passed in a pleasant blur that became progressively more pleasant and more blurry. Amelia talked about her work, seeing as that was all she could talk about these days without delving into murky territory, and besides, it was pretty much all she did. She’d let it fill her days and her brain, pushing into every dark corner like expanding foam, though the unwelcome thoughts had a habit of pushing right back. At one point she came perilously close to opening up about the robbery but hurriedly U-turned the conversation. Tom noted her abrupt change of subject with a raised eyebrow but didn’t challenge her on it.
He talked about the history of the house and his ancestors, though he seemed to take a wide berth around anything that had happened in his lifetime. Occasionally, she caught a glimpse of something darker in his expression or his tone: a haunted look in his eyes, a note of loneliness in the way his voice echoed through the halls, a sad pat on a wall when the house moaned, a touch ofsomethingwhen he mentioned his immediate family. Guilt? Regret? Grief? She could never pin it down before it was replaced by the dimpled grin and a flippant remark: it was “fate,” it was “meant to be,” it was “the way of the world.” She might not have noticed his avoidance of anything personal, if not for the fact she was consciously doing the same. Maybe he was just as broken as she was. Maybe everyone was, if you looked closely enough. Whatever the reason, escape called for light, charming small talk.
They wandered through the house, bottle in hand, so she could see the fabrics, and he laughed, kindly, at her reverence for them. She flopped with a contented sigh onto a four-poster feather bed in a guest room. For a thrilling few seconds, she thought he might join her and draw the sapphire silk-velvet bed curtains closed behind him, but he seemed to think better of it. They sat in the big old kitchen and ate trout he’d caught in the river outside and smoked himself, along with venison pastrami he’d cured, and lamb from the last of the estate flock, which he seared to perfection in a copper skillet and served with homegrown green beans. All of thatandhe looked good in a cravat and waistcoat. In the ballroom, they took off their shoes and jumped on the trampoline until they fell over, laughing. They cackled over the many British words for drunk. “Squiffy” beat out “lacquered” and “steaming” as her declared favorite. They toasted to ionic columns and silkworms. To trans-Atlantic relations and indoor plumbing. They made up ridiculous wine notes:
“Redolent of dusty horse feces in an abandoned stable, with a hint of urban decay on the nose,” he declared solemnly of a Sauternes, after melodramatically swishing it around his mouth and gargling.
She had to get hold of her grin before she could take a sip, and then she swallowed frantically to avoid snorting it from her nose. “Oh, God,” she said, fanning her watering eyes, “I can taste the dusty horse shit and I don’t know what dusty horse shit tastes like.”
“If I’d said ‘notes of gooseberry, freshly cut summer grass and vanilla,’ would you have tasted that?”
“Totally! In fact, now I am! What do gooseberries even taste like?”
“Sauvignon blanc, I guess. Does anyone eat a gooseberry and say, ‘White wine hints on the nose?’ Does anyone eat gooseberries at all?”
They were sitting facing each other on a cut-velvet carpet—probably Wilton—in the music room. A crackling blaze in an ornate fireplace occasionally spat out glowing missiles, most of them caught by a gilt brass fire screen in the shape of a peacock’s fanned tailfeathers. Outside, an actual peacock occasionally cried out. Tom identified him as a regular named Fabio. The skies were darkening, which they did remarkably early in an English winter.
Tom was right—he was no Darcy, though he was still dressed the part, with the addition of a charcoal-colored overcoat he’d grabbed when they were wandering the halls. He was self-deprecating and funny and teasing and … flirty. Definitely flirty. The way he held her gaze when he listened to her, head cocked, brow furrowed, like he was concentrating carefully on her words. He was obviously well brought up, in an English-gentleman kind of way, but the charm was no empty façade, she was certain of it. If she stood suddenly, she was pretty sure she’d swoon, and only partly from the wine. He’d taken off his cravat some hours earlier, giving him a tousled Regency-guy-at-the-end-of-the-night look, which was even more of a fantasy figure than the buttoned-up version.
