‘Are you kidding? I’d give anything to be able to camp out in the woods forever, stay off-grid, like a hermit.’
‘Rubbish. You’d get lonely.’
He grins at me as he walks into the kitchen and switches on the light. ‘Yeah, I probably would. But it’s what I dream about sometimes. Do you want a drink? Wine? Beer? Soft drink?’
‘Something soft would be good. How many bedrooms does this place have?’ I ask, looking around the kitchen. It looks clean, but it hasn’t been updated in years – it’s probably about as old as the 1970s kitchen in the Great Hall.
‘Three bedrooms, one bathroom. The bedrooms are upstairs, bathroom’s just through there.’
‘Ooh, I wouldn’t like that,’ I say as he grabs a couple of cans of lemonade from the fridge.
‘Why not?’
‘Getting up in the middle of the night to go downstairs to the loo?’ I take a can from him before he can decant it into a glass. ‘No, I’d want an en suite.’
‘If I ever build you a cabin in the woods, I’ll take that into account.’
‘I’ll have a hot tub too, please.’
He chuckles and cracks open his can.
‘So is this place yours now? Permanently?’
‘I wish. I wanted my father to sign it over to me after I agreed not to do my master’s—’
‘Wait. You didn’t do your master’s?’ I ask with surprise.
He was set to study astrophysics that September.
He shakes his head and nods towards the living room.‘There wasn’t much point. I’d already delayed a year at my father’s request after we lost Hugo. Running the estate is a full-time job, and he wanted me to be prepared to take over if anything happened to him. I had to learn everything he’d been teaching my brother for years.’
‘So you never went to work in the space sector?’
‘No.’
I’m taken aback by how much it pains me to hear that.
‘Oh, Ash.’
He looks at me, regret in his eyes. ‘It’s okay. I’m just doing what I have to.’ He sounds accepting. He takes a sip of his lemonade before saying, ‘Anyway, the cabin was a consolation prize, although my father could still sell it out from under my feet if he wanted to. I’d love to own it outright – along with the cottages, sawmill and workshop – but he likes to hold them over me in case I go off the rails again.’
‘What do you mean, go off the rails?’
He sighs. ‘This conversation is taking a dark turn.’
‘Ash,’ I implore.
‘A couple of years after Hugo died, I took my bike and just left. I had to get away.’
‘Where did you go?’
‘Back to Europe. Spent some time in Romania. Camped out under the stars in the Carpathian Mountains and had a couple of close calls with brown bears.’ His gaze looks faraway as he remembers. ‘I just needed a break from it all, some space to get my head around everything. And then my father started talking about selling off the cottages and the sawmilland suggested I come home to take up my place at his side so we could work out a solution.’
My stomach drops. ‘He emotionally blackmailed you?’
He huffs out a dark laugh. ‘That’s one way of putting it.’ He shakes his head and asks, ‘Where did you go after Madrid?’ I feel as though he wants to move away from the topic of his father.
‘Home. Well, I stayed there for over a week, first, trying to find you. But then I went back to start work at Knap.’
