“Yeah. God, I thought I had it. I thought my memory was back. You?”
She shook her head, releasing his arm. “Still cyclopses. After that, there’s nothing.”
“Me neither. Bugger.”
“That’s encouraging though, right? Our memories are coming back. We just need to trigger them. All this came about because of you getting a craving for eggs!”
“What weneedto do is prioritize getting away from here. I’ll grab a rifle from the gun safe, while we’re down here. And then let’s get up to the study, find that key, and go.”
He didn’t want to lose her. Not to this bastard who was hunting them, not to Mr. Knightley, not to a trans-Atlantic flight. The thought struck him with utter clarity, unlike many of his thoughts from the last day or so. Fate had brought him his dream woman, and now fate had tossed him into a life-or-death fight for her. For so long, his future had looked bleak and gray, but now there was just a glimmer of something brighter, and it was in her eyes.
Half agony, half hope, indeed.
Chapter 13
Tom
They drew to a halt at the basement alcove where the carpet was. Tom couldn’t see anything out of place, though he didn’t want to turn on any overhead lights.
“No sign of a struggle,” he said, doing a three-sixty as Amelia shone the torch from his phone. “So how did the hair come to be down here?”
“Could be they brought the rug down here because they planned to carry everything out through the tunnel but weren’t able to open the hatch? Or maybe they panicked. People do weird things when they panic. And they were arguing, so…”
He shoved open a low wooden door on the other side of the basement and switched on a light in the little gun room, his boot crunching. Broken glass was sprayed over the floor, next to a discarded cricket bat.
“Oh my God!” Amelia whispered. “Isthiswhere it happened?”
“Uh, no.” Tom crossed to a trio of steel gun cabinets lining the far wall. “This is where my mother happened.”
“Your mother?”
“She showed up unannounced a couple of days ago to ‘say goodbye’ to the house, which I did think was odd, because shealways hated this place. She hadn’t been back since Eddie’s aneurysm. She took him to London, and that was that. But it all made sense when she asked where the whiskey decanter was—boxed up in here with some of my grandfather’s personal things. She grabbed the cricket bat from upstairs, marched down here, and smashed it, along with the matching glasses. He loved that decanter, used to boast that generations of earls had used it, but I think she saw it as a symbol of her subjugation. He could be a bitter drunk.” Tom tried the lock code for the first cabinet, then swore.
“The code doesn’t work?”
“No, but I haven’t fired a weapon in years. Duncan’s probably updated the codes since then. We’re supposed to do it regularly. I don’t even know what’s left in here. We sold most of our hunting equipment to the Pritchard boys.”
“The Pritchard boys?”
“Our neighbors—Rhys and Griffin. The ones who now poach in our wood.”
“Did your mother hate the house because of what happened to your brother?”
“That didn’t help, but it went much further back. If it were up to her, she’d douse the place with petrol and watch it burn.” He moved to the next safe.
“That bad?”
“She didn’t realize marrying the heir to an earldom would involve baking four hundred cupcakes for the village fair, holding the ladder while her husband fixed the guttering, and cooking and keeping house for a demanding old-school father-in-law. While trying to prevent two wild little boys from plummeting off a turret. Now it involves being a caregiver for the current earl. So yes, her romantic illusions swiftly soured, and she never did become a countess. Damn, this code’s not working either.”
“Maybe we won’t need a gun.”
“I very much hope we don’t. There’s an older gun safe in my grandfather’s study. No idea what’s in it, but we need to go up there to get the key anyway.”
They left the room, Amelia picking her way around the debris. “Your mother must still feel very strongly.”
“I honestly had no idea,” he whispered as they climbed the stone steps to the ground floor. “She keeps things to herself. It’s lucky for her she did get a divorce—means her finances are no longer tied to the estate, and Eddie is well cared for. She did better out of it than my father, in hindsight. She spent a good deal of the settlement on an ultra-modern apartment in London with all the latest tech and appliances. If anything even threatens to slip out of place she gets it fixed immediately, and she replaces her car with a new one every few years. While we’re here, let’s quickly check if the landline is working.”
They crept along the servants’ hallway, stopping at the laundry so Tom could grab another jumper and then at the butler’s room to check the phone and modem. Both dead. He pointed out the clump of gray hair still sitting beside the robot vac, and Amelia nodded, her lips tightly pursed. As they left, he swiped the paperweight from the desk and tossed and caught it.
