“Not yet,” Sam admitted. “But you can make it happen, can’t you?”
“I’ll start making some calls.” He was on his feet in a second. The swinging kitchen door opened, and he shouted through it, “Father!”
A moment, then, from the front study:
“Yes?”
“We’re holding a party on Friday. I’ll be making the arrangements.” Thomas turned and whispered to Sam, “No one calls them balls anymore, by the way, not really.”
“Wonderful!” Their father was more excited than he had been since he’d seen her in the front hallway with the regents. He continued freely, either not knowing or not caring Sam could hear every blessed syllable he said. “Make sure you invite those Animos chaps who were here last weekend. The one with the flat nose has his eye on Samantha and I’d like to see it through.”
Great.Not only would she be dancing with Daniel, she’d have to do it under the Animos’ watchful eye. Her chest tightened, and air suddenly became very scarce indeed. Thomas dropped his hold on the door and shot her an apologetic grimace.
“Sorry.”
“Well, you know what they say,” Sam said, locking her brave face into place. “The more the merrier.”
Chapter Nine
“It’ll take a miracle, but I think we might pull it off.”
The solarium of Ashbrooke Manor had been constructed as a wedding gift in the early 1900s from the lord to the lady of the house. In one of the many glass panels of the room, an inscription of their interlocked initials reminded every successive generation of the great display of devotion it was. Sam couldn’t help but think she’d divorce the Lord of Ashbrooke if he gave her such a present. A solarium was supposed to be a room soaked in sunshine, a place to escape the heat but indulge in the sun.
But this was England. And in England, solariums weren’t so much good for sun as they were for cloud and storm watching. If the fifteenth Lady of Ashbrooke had been a keen meteorologist, then it might have made a fine present indeed, but as it was, Sam thought it was a crappy gift at best.
As the rest of the house was being prepared for a party—a struggle for the household staff, as they’d already had their hands full trying to recover from the Rage weekend—the solarium was the only room with enough space to accommodate Thomas, Sam, and their mountains and mountains of party planning documents. With two laptops, a desktop, an inkjet printer, three cell phones, and a landline, it should have been easy to organize and keep things tidy. However, when Mrs. Long delivered lunch to the slaving pair, she almost passed out at the state of things. Papers and color samples and notecards and sticky pads and pens and highlighters and all other accouterments of party planning lay strewn across the room like fallen battlefield soldiers, their dead limbs twitching under the wind of the overhead fan.
The siblings each sat at opposite ends of the table.
“I’m glad one of us is cheerful,” Sam grumbled, crossing off a prospective caterer from her list. The hoity-toity Frenchman had hung up on her when she’d told him how soon the party was, and she assumed he’d not be calling her back anytime soon. “I should’ve thought this through more. Given myself time.”
“You don’t have any more time. The Mud Duck Ball is in less than a month, and you need to make sure he’s ready.”
“Don’t worry. We’ll be ready.”
Well…Daniel would be ready, at least. With his hand-me-down clothes, the second he opened his mouth to talk about starry-eyed love or to sing one of his love songs, every cynical man in Animos would vote for him. There was nothing more pitiful and pathetic to them than someone poor enough to live honestly.
No, Daniel would be ready. It was herself she had to worry about. She had to be prepared to let him go.
“If what you told me about his music is true, it shouldn’t be too hard. The second he starts playing love songs, they’ll give him the crown, no question. But be careful. They always pick real dogs.”
Whenever they got close to the subject of Mud Duck affair, Thomas’s mood turned knife’s-edge sharp, full of condemnation and judgment.
“What about you? Did you pick a real dog?”
“I don’t want to talk about Iris.”
This was the first piece of real information her brother had ever given her about this woman, and she leaped upon it.
“Iris?”
Thomas typed lightning fast on the nearest keyboard. It was obvious he wasn’t actually typing anything, just trying to look as busy as possible.
“Leave me alone.”
“What was she like?” Sam asked. On the night she’d told Thomas about this event, he’d always hinted at a bigger hatred for it. Now, she was getting some answers. “Did she win?”
“Do you want help or not?” Thomas snapped, a rare break in his kind, unaffected persona. It sent Sam shrinking.
