Yes, it would appear I reallyamgoing to be reliving that moment for the rest of my life, then.
Shaking my head to get rid of the memory, I step quickly through the doorway, and find myself in a large, but cosy room, with a snooker table at one end, a huge TV at the other, and lots of comfortable couches grouped around coffee tables in between. The walls are lined with bookshelves – the kind that you need a ladder to reach the highest shelves – and the windows all look out onto the same view of the sea I have from my room, only from a different angle, in which white-tipped mountains are just visible further along the coast.
The sun’s fully up now, but a light mist has come in from the sea, wreathing the building in fog and making it feel a bit like we’re floating in a cloud.
How magical.
I step forward for a closer look, and am just about to snap a quick picture of the view with my phone (which Agnes kindly retrieved from the changing room for me last night) when someone clears their throat loudly, making me jump.
‘Looking for something?’
I spin around to find Hunter Stuart silently watching me from a high-backed chair by the fire. He’s wearing a dark-coloured fleece and jeans, which blend in so well with his surroundings that I didn’t even notice him when I walked in.
‘Sorry,’ I say, my entire body cringing as I remember the last time I saw him. ‘I was looking for the dining room. I’m a bit lost.’
‘I can see that,’ he replies gravely. ‘The dining room’s on the ground floor. This is the library. Well, itwasthe library. It’s now what they’re calling the “den”. It’s where guests can come to relax and “mingle”.’
He says the word ‘mingle’ the way I say ‘diet’ – as if it’s personally offensive to him. I kind of get the impression Hunter Stuart isn’t a man given to mingling, somehow. And now hereIam, blundering in and destroying his peace and quiet.
‘Sorry,’ I say again. ‘If you could just tell me how to get to the dining room, I’ll—’
‘You need to stop apologising all the time, Rosie Winter,’ Hunter says, getting to his feet. ‘You’ve been apologising since you got here. You apologise just for existing.’
‘I’ve been messing up since I got here,’ I point out. ‘SincebeforeI got here, in fact. So I’ve had a lot to apologise for.’
He shrugs. ‘Maybe. Not all of it was your fault, though. You didn’t send yourself that email by mistake, did you? And you weren’t the one who jammed the sauna door shut, either.’
‘Jammed? It wasn’t jammed, was it?’ I frown, trying to make sense of this. ‘No, it wasn’t,’ I go on. ‘I distinctly remember checking to make sure I could open it, because I didn’t want to get stuck in there, like I did in the train toilet.’
‘That’s what I thought,’ says Hunter. ‘But the door was definitely stuck when I tried to open it. I had to force it open to get you out.’
I look up at him, my heart skittering nervously in my chest.
‘What are you trying to say?’ I ask quietly. ‘You .?.?. you think someone did it deliberately?’
My legs feel strangely weak again, just like they did last night when I almost died in the sauna.
OK, I didn’t almostdie.
But Icouldhave.
And the thought that someone in this hotel might have been responsible is making me feel like I might just die again; only this time from fear rather than dehydration.
And before anyone gets to see my magic red sweater, too.
‘No, no,’ says Hunter, making a gesture with his hands as if he’s batting away the thought. ‘No one here would do something like that. The door must be faulty. I’ll take a look at it this morning. Wouldn’t want anyone else getting stuck in there. Anyway, come on; I was just about to get to work, so I’ll drop you off at the dining room on the way.’
I follow him out of the library/den, wishing he hadn’t ended the conversation about the sauna door quite so abruptly. Because I know he was trying to reassure me, but I somehow don’t feel reassured. All I feel is a horrible sense of foreboding; and it only intensifies as we make our way through the castle, and back down to the lobby, where Dante is standing behind the reception desk, his jet-black hair and smooth-skinned face making him look a lot like Dracula.
CouldDantehave locked me in the sauna?
No. That’s ridiculous. Why would he, after all?
Why would anyone?
I roll this thought around in my mind as Hunter leads me through the lobby and into yet another corridor, before stopping so suddenly that I walk right into him.
‘Whoops! Sorry,’ I say, quickly removing my foot from his ankle. ‘I was in another world, there.’
