“Headache?”
“Mmm-hmm. I came here for Jane Austen and got Stephen King.”
“I have painkillers somewhere,” he said, walking to the cupboards. “I could use some too. Why would we both be so convinced we saw a body if we didn’t?”
“Maybe the cop’s right—we planted the thought in our own heads, and it’s spiraled into something.”
“That is the most logical explanation.” He certainly wanted to believe it, even if he couldn’t bring himself to. “But I’ll feel a whole lot better once we locate Duncan. OnceIlocate Duncan,” he corrected, seeing as this was his puzzle to solve, not hers. “You can always ring me if you remember anything else.”
“Yeah, I guess. From Bath or wherever.”
He began searching the cupboards for the first aid box. Not that he was in a hurry to say goodbye, but no doubt she’d want to clear off smartly, given that their escapist bubble had dramatically burst. He wouldn’t have blamed her if she’d left before he’d woken up. He frowned. “Amelia, were you about to sneak away when I came downstairs this morning?”
“Uh…”
“That’s a pity,” he said lightly, as he continued searching, “because there’s a codicil in my father’s will. If I get married before the deal goes through I’ll inherit a windfall and keep the estate and take his title, so I was assuming, seeing as we spent the night together, we would get married and you would become my countess.” He kept his back to her so she wouldn’t see him smiling. It felt good to smile, after all the tension. He’d done a lot of smiling yesterday, come to think of it, which was not at all what he’d expected of his day.
“Ah, well,” she began, her voice noticeably squeaky, “I’m due back at work very soon and it’s a busy time of year, and I’m not looking for a relationship right now, especially not a complicated long-distance one, as lovely as you are, because I can honestly say that if I was looking for someone… Not to mention that myhead’s really not in a good place, and there are probably visa issues and… But I’m sure you’ll find someone who?—”
He couldn’t help himself—he started laughing.
“You’re kidding, aren’t you? You jerk.”
He turned. Despite her headache, her eyes were lit up in that hypnotic way they did. “I can’t believe that worked. So I’m ‘lovely,’ am I?”
“What if I’d said yes?” Her efforts to act indignant failed and she started laughing. “That would have backfired on you! Ow!” She slapped her hand to her forehead, wincing. “Don’t make me laugh.”
“If I suspected you’d say yes to something as daft as that, I wouldn’t have asked.”
“You don’t even know me! Lucky you didn’t ask me last night. We might well have driven straight up to Gretna Green, or wherever it is people elope to these days.”
“Maybe we did!” He crossed his arms and leaned back against a worktop. “I do remember you vowing to do things you wouldn’t normally do.”
“I think we did those already. I just wish I could remember them, or perhaps it’s just as well I can’t.”
“It makes a lot more sense now to know that we were tripping.”
“I think we had a very good time.”
“I know we did.” He had only been ninety-nine percent kidding about the will. If she’d agreed, maybe he would have gone along with it. It wasn’t like he had any other plan, beyond a fuzzy idea of returning to London and getting a regular job, a regular flat, a regular mortgage.
But now he could see one clear image in this future, and he was ninety-nine percent sure it wasn’t a hallucination. A woman like Amelia. Not the actual Amelia, obviously. She’d made it clear she wasn’t interested in a relationship, she lived an oceanaway, and the timing was awful. But once he sorted his shit out, he’d like to find someone like her.
Someone very much like her.
“God, I need water.” He grabbed a couple of glasses from a cupboard. “You don’t happen to own a railroad, by any chance?”
“I’m sorry, what?”
“That’s what penniless aristocrats do, you know,” he said, filling a glass from the jug in the fridge. “Or used to. Marry an American heiress. Win-win. He’d get money, she’d get a title and an estate. Consuelo Vanderbilt and the Duke of Marlborough, Winston Churchill’s parents, the Marquess of Hartington and Kathleen Kennedy… ‘Dollar princesses,’ they were called. ‘Cash for class.’” Tom placed the glass of water on the table in front of her. “Not that I can offer you an estate. I can’t even offer you a bloody painkiller, apparently.” He started opening and closing random drawers. “It didn’t take long for the Americans to get wise to the fact that marrying into the inbred aristocracy wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. Not to mention that all those enormous dowries were disappearing offshore. So, instead, the Vanderbilts started marrying the Whitneys, and the Roosevelts the Astors, and so on.”
“Do you feel guilty for selling it?Her.”
He smiled at Amelia’s correction. It always felt wrong to refer to the house as an “it.” “I try not to think about that.”
“But I bet you do.”
He tsked. “This estate has been in our family for centuries. It’s tough to be the one who calls it, whether or not it’s inevitable. So many people have devoted their entire lives to keeping her running—the family, servants, employees… And now it’s my name on that piece of paper that ends it all.” He shrugged. “But what can you do?”
