Careful to park in a field around the corner so Daniel would not come out to retrieve and service her car, Sam took the long way back to Ashbrooke Manor. When she’d first moved there, her own resentment surprised her. The heat licked up her neck with white-hot flames, singeing her cheeks red. Her mother raised her in an apartment roughly the size of a ring box, then she’d been sent to a foster home where the only things she owned could fit in a backpack. All the while, her father maintained a perfectly manicured estate, with rolling lawns of perfect green grass even in the harsh British autumns and rooms enough for fifty bastard children.
Back then, she thought his selfishness was as boundless as the acres of dense hunting ground behind his house. Now, she only saw beauty, a world as it should be, no matter the cost. She figured the fastest way to be accepted by her father was to start thinking like him, so she did. She watched him across the table at dinner and across the room at parties, his mannerisms, inflection, vocabulary, opinions. For hours, she would sit in the mirror and practice, repeating turns of phrase and talking points she’d scribbled down in one of her notebooks until the lines between her own opinions and the ones she’d adopted were too blurry for even her to recognize.
Sam marched up from the rear garden, emerging between two rose bushes to take in the view of the house. She hopped the handful of stone steps up to the veranda and through the French doors into the back wing of the house, fully intending to sneak up the servants’ staircase to her room undetected. Five steps up, though, something caught her ear.
Music.
This wasn’t the Victrola playing tinny Beatles’ voices or one of the radio stations her brother often insisted on playing through the house’s wireless speakers as he cooked. It was real. Live. Familiar? No, it couldn’t have been familiar. Sam didn’t listen to music. The last time she’d heard music was…
Oh no.
Color drained from her face. The last time she’d listened to music—reallylistened to music—she was shivering in her bra and panties in front of Christ Church.
Somewhere in this house, Daniel was playing those songs again.
Of course, it didn’t matter to her. Nope. She trudged up to her room and settled in for a long read from one of the books she was using as the basis of her thesis.
Still, the music played.
She read fifteen pages, parsing ancient Latin as if it were warm butter.
Still, the music played.
She changed into her pajamas, ran a brush through her hair fifty times, and did a few sun salutations to return some limpness to her tense body.
Still,he played his damn music.
“That’s it.” She cursed under her breath, throwing off her bed covers and storming out of her room. She would find where the music was coming from even if it killed her. The sound was too loud; the tune tugged at her. Every chord threatened to open up her chest’s cage and let those strange Saturday night feelings back into the world.
Daniel should have been easy to find. He was a mechanic, and mechanics work in the garage. Only, the garage was detached from the house, some hundred yards away. Surely, the music she heard wasn’t coming from there. She engaged a sweep of the house, opening door after door.
She’d almost given up when she stormed down to the basement servants’ hall—a long, modest dining room. It once served three meals and midnight coffee daily to a staff of thirty, but now only saw twenty people at most for lunch five days a week. There, at the far end of the room, as far as he possibly could be from her, sat the man she’d been looking for.
The sight of him was a punch in the throat. It stole her breath, quickened her pulse, and she found him more than beautiful. The sun crowned his golden head with a shimmering halo, casting light into all corners of the room as if he was its radiant source. His heavy hair cast a shadow over his eyes, but if they’d caught the sun they might have blinded her. He leaned on the back legs of one stiff wooden chair. The guitar sat in his lap.
Sam glanced down and blushed when she realized his strong hands were covered in bandages. He’d made his fingers bleed to play and protect her. A rush of emotion clogged her throat. What emotion it was, she couldn’t tell, but she shoved it away.
After moving to England, she’d finally sat down and watched every season ofDownton Abbey, and besides her father, she had one other role model who helped her craft her aristocratic persona.What would Lady Mary do? What would Lady Mary do?With this framework in mind, she tilted her chin up, her shoulders back, and tried to get the first word in edgewise, only to fail spectacularly and get caught off her game right from the start.
“I was wondering when you’d come and find me,” Daniel said, his head bobbing to the closing notes of a melody she barely recognized.
“What?” Sam stiffened; her brow furrowed.
She yearned to cross the room’s long floor and give him a piece of her mind, to tell him to cut this romanticLove’s-Labour’s-Lost,Singing-a-Song-to-Win-the-Heart-of-the-Princess shit out. Sam’s legs might as well have been rooted to the spot.
“Music seems to be the only way to get your attention,” Daniel said.
God, was she really so transparent? Surely she hadn’t let him know she thought his music was entirely tolerable, unlike all other music, which she found practically unbearable?
“You don’t have my attention,” she sniffed, dismissively. “It takes a lot more than a little guitar ditty.”
“Well, you’re here, aren’t you?”
The barb was sufficient enough for him to look away from his guitar and turn the force of his eyes on her. Even in the shadows, they spoke volumes. The bastard was enjoying needling her. After being around men with near constancy since moving to England, she’d learned to read them with almost pinpoint accuracy. Daniel thought tugging at her strings would get her to unravel, to remove the mask as she had for those few hours in front of the cathedral.
She would never let him get so far under her skin again. Her grip on her own arms tightened painfully. “We don’t play music in this house,” she said.
A sour note corrupted the unbroken stream of music.
