Chapter 3
Samantha walked to the window of her minuscule garret room, pulled the lace curtain—not handmade, which she had expected—back and looked out over the street that definitely had a medieval sort of feel, which she hadn’t expected.
She had been fully prepared to live in a shed if it meant she could put an entire ocean between herself and her former life, but this was definitely a step up.
She was going to have to write her brother a very nice thank-you note.
She sank down on the little bench set under the window and looked at the people walking along the street below her, going about their business as if they had every right to. She watched them for a moment or two, then leaned her head back against the side of the window and closed her eyes.
She hadn’t dared think about it before, on the off chance that her plans went awry, but she was in the middle of perpetrating a strategy.
It was almost ridiculous to think that at the ripe old age of twenty-six she was trying to figure out a way to cut the old apron strings, but that’s what it boiled down to.
It wasn’t that her parents were bad people; they were just .
. . difficult. Her older siblings had been a disappointment, so the burden of perfection had always rested on her.
She’d had enough of that, actually.
It wasn’t that she hadn’t tried over the years to assert her independence. It was true that she was still living in the bedroom she’d grown up in, but she had recently begun to refuse to sleep on a sleeper while accompanying her mother to conferences, insisting instead on a bed of her own.
She paused. All right, so it had been an extra bed in her mother’s room.
She had put her foot down about penny loafers.
She had gotten her master’s in historical textile preservation with an emphasis on Elizabethan offerings instead of Victorian.
And she had begun to insist that her mother pay her for help with exhibitions instead of simply offering her room and board.
She knew she should have gotten an apartment long before now, but every time she made noises about moving out, her parents looked as if she’d said she was going to ditch her conservative uniform of tweed and polyester for tie-dye and dreads.
What was the last child to do but try to keep the peace?
The truth was, her parents weren’t terrible people. They just always both seemed to need an audience. Unfortunately, unlike her older brother and sister, she’d never managed to get out of the front-row seats, much less the theater.
Until two days earlier, that was.
She picked up her bag and slung it over her shoulder.
She had cash, a debit card, and a map Lydia had given her earlier that morning with useful places marked in red.
Lydia had invited her to take the day and investigate the environs so she would be comfortable when they left her alone in their house for the summer. Life was good.
She jogged down the stairs, feeling remarkably fresh for it still being the middle of the night on the East Coast, and almost ran into Lydia bodily in the entryway.
“Oh,” Samantha said in surprise, “I’m sorry—”
Lydia put her finger to her lips quickly. “You have company,” she whispered. “I think you might escape—”
Or maybe not. The door to the salon opened with a flourish and there stood Theodore IV, ready to set sail for points she didn’t want to know about. She managed to suppress a flinch only because she’d had so much practice.
“Off we go,” he said brightly. “Thank you, Mrs. Cooke, for your hospitality.”
And that was that. Before she could say anything, Samantha was hustled out the door and herded toward a taxi. She balked at that.
“I can’t afford a taxi,” she said firmly.
Dory drew himself up. “As if I would ask you to pay,” he said huffily. “I’m treating today.”
Unless things changed later on, of course. Samantha was half tempted as he got in first to simply jump back, shut the door, and run down the street, but she supposed he would just follow her. She sighed, then climbed into the back of the cab with him. Last time. Honestly.
“Where are we going this morning?” she asked reluctantly.
“The Castle,” he said, checking his phone, “then lunch, then the bridge, then the Discovery Museum.”
Her feet hurt just thinking about it, but she supposed she wouldn’t waste breath saying anything. It would just add to her already unwholesome reputation for fragility.
The thing that surprised her the most as they approached Newcastle’s landmark castle was the fact that the taxi dropped them off on a sidewalk that was immediately adjacent to the steps that led up to an enormous wooden set of doors.
She stood on that sidewalk and looked around her in amazement.
She had seen her share of pictures of castles, but they’d always been on a bluff, or out in the country.
Outside of London and Edinburgh, she’d never truly considered that a modern city might sit around a structure that had been more or less intact since the thirteenth century.
She walked up stairs that had no doubt been walked up hundreds of thousands of times over those eight hundred years and felt something slide down her spine—and that wasn’t Dory Mollineux’s hand. She looked over her shoulder, but there was nothing there.
Weird.
She learned at the entrance that they were going Dutch, which she supposed shouldn’t have surprised her.
So much for being treated that day. She pulled out enough money for her own entrance fee, then declined to buy a guidebook when invited to do so by her companion.
If he wanted one, he could buy it himself.
They started on the ground floor with the chapel, but Dory didn’t seem to be particularly eager to stay there.
In fact, she realized almost immediately that his idea of touring was to walk into a room of any size, nod, then stride on off to the next thing.
She hadn’t paid her four pounds to sprint through the entire place, so once they hit the first floor and a room with exhibits, she put her foot down.
“I’m going to read all these,” she announced.
He blew his perfectly highlighted blond locks out of his eyes. “Don’t be ridiculous.”
“I’m not being ridiculous; I’m poor and I’m not going to waste my money on something, then not look it over thoroughly.” She pointed to a bench surrounding a pillar. “Go sit on that if you’re bored.”
He looked at her with a slight frown, as if he couldn’t quite understand why she was forming words that didn’t include of course and whatever you want.
He studied her for a moment or two longer, then walked off to sit down.
She ignored him and decided to start at one corner of the room and work her way around.
Only the corner of the room she had selected was currently occupied. She looked at the man standing three feet from her and felt a sudden and unaccountable increase of temperature in the room.
All right, so she had seen men before, several of them.
She had even gone out with a couple, handpicked by her parents, of course, and possessing pedigrees that would have made any blue blood worth his salt green with envy.
There had even, in the long progression of males she had admired from a distance, been a few who had been tall, dark, and handsome.
But she had the feeling that just a glance from the man standing next to her would have sent all those guys off into therapy for years.
He was tall, substantially taller than Dory’s wishful-thinking not-quite six feet.
He was wearing jeans, boots, and some sort of T-shirt that sported a sentiment in Middle English she would have translated if she’d had the presence of mind to do so.
After all, she’d agreed to Latin and Middle English if her mother laid off her about Scottish Gaelic.
She couldn’t see the color of his eyes, but his hair was dark and his face was, well, flawless was the only word that came to mind. And she knew that his face was flawless because he had turned it toward her and was watching her gape at him.
She quickly turned away and walked toward the nearest case filled with artifacts.
She had no idea what she was looking at.
She read the words written there but found no meaning in them.
She felt as if she’d just come down with a terrible cold, feverish, as if she needed a serious lie-down sooner rather than later.
It made her feel a little silly even thinking that, because she felt as if she were quoting directly from one of those contraband romances her great-aunt Mary had slipped her during high school, buried under balls of tatting thread and musty old patterns included to throw her mother off the scent.
But there was no denying that the man standing over there, leaning over a case with his hands clasped behind his back, was absolutely stunning.
“Hurry up, Sammy,” Dory said loudly.
The annoyance was plain in his voice. She looked over her shoulder to tell him to keep his voice down—and stop calling her that name she loathed—when for the second time in as many minutes, she felt herself stagger in place.
There was a man standing right there next to Dory, a tall, distinguished-looking man with jet-black hair swept artistically back from his forehead.
It wasn’t so much that he was wearing full-blown Elizabethan gear, including an enormous ruff, a heavily embroidered doublet, and a velvet cape tossed artistically over one shoulder, or that he was looking at her as if he found her rather lacking.
It wasn’t even that she suspected that with only a hint of an invitation, he would break forth into a Shakespearean soliloquy right there in front of her.
It was that she had the feeling, crazy as it might have been, that she was looking at someone who just wasn’t quite of the corporeal world.