Chapter 7
Samantha was in trouble.
She wasn’t quite sure when she’d gotten into a great big vat of it, but the truth was hard to deny.
She would have been quite happy to be in a Nancy Drew–type level of trouble, where the danger was limited to venturing where she shouldn’t have without a flashlight, but she was well past that.
This was thriller-movie-level trouble, complete with men following her, strangers sitting next to her on benches, and public transportation as her only means of escape.
Take her current situation, for instance.
She was sitting on a train headed toward London.
That in itself wasn’t noteworthy. What was noteworthy, however, was the fact that she was sitting three rows behind a man she had just realized she’d been seeing over the past three days in several different guises.
She wanted to argue herself out of that conclusion, but she couldn’t deny what her eyes were telling her.
She supposed she might have been able to ignore the different colors of his eyes, or the changes of hair, or the glasses, or the clothes, or the languages, but there was one thing a man in a T-shirt couldn’t hide and that was his build.
Even with his jacket on as it was now, he couldn’t hide the set of his shoulders.
She supposed she had her father to thank for giving her the skills that had led to that conclusion, a conclusion that had left her with panic that was running through her like a wildfire.
She had altered so many costumes over the years for either him or his protégés that she could eye a build and have whatever she was working on fit without having to take measurements.
It hadn’t been an ability she’d purposely set out to acquire.
She had certainly never in her wildest dreams thought it might become something critical to her survival.
She had to force herself to take a deep breath or two to calm her racing heart.
She clutched her backpack, her bag tucked underneath it, and hoped she didn’t look as terrified as she felt.
She tried to convince herself that maybe she’d just read too many of her great-aunt Mary’s mystery novels when she was growing up—never mind all the other things Mary had slipped her when her parents weren’t looking.
That helped a little. It was probably just her imagination running away with her.
And besides, what could she possibly have that anyone would want? If the Victorian embroidery had been all that valuable, the Cookes would have hired a professional to take it for them, or taken it south themselves. They certainly wouldn’t have entrusted it to her.
She looked at the map in her hands only because it made her feel like she was doing something constructive, not because she needed it.
She had already memorized it earlier. She could get off the train, take the Tube, then get herself to her hotel without incident if she stayed in a crowd.
Then she would . . . well, she would call . . .
She would call her brother and tell him all about what had happened to her and then have a thorough and well-deserved freak-out—
She took a deep, careful breath. No, she couldn’t do that.
Gavin would lose any faith he might have had in her good sense and arrange for the Cookes to fire her.
Her brother was nothing if not ruthless.
And his recent bouts of generosity aside, he still looked at her as if she were approximately twelve years old.
No, she would have to handle this on her own.
She attempted a silent, scornful laugh. Handle what?
Getting herself to her hotel? That was so easy, even a hapless tourist could manage that.
She might even tempt fate and stop to have something to eat on the way.
That might make up for the fact that she hadn’t been able to enjoy her meal at Hedingham Castle because of that German guy who had been watching her.
Only that German guy was now a grungy guy sitting in front of her.
Why was he changing his appearance?
She took another deep breath. Getting to her hotel could all be done in a calm, measured fashion. Measured, measuring, not needing to measure . . . that was really the problem, wasn’t it?
She looked at the man and wished she wasn’t seeing what she was seeing.
Unfortunately, as much as she would have liked to deny it, there was no denying that not only was he the German from Hedingham, he was the Brit from the Castle in Newcastle, he was the Canadian with the moustache from York, and he was currently the scruffy-looking guy in plain clothes who had walked past her an hour ago and collapsed into the seat three rows in front of her.
“Are you unwell, miss?”
She looked up to find a conductor standing there. He checked her ticket, then handed it back to her. At least she didn’t recognize him, which she found to be rather reassuring somehow.
“I’m fine,” she said, her mouth very dry. “Fine.”
He didn’t look convinced, but she imagined she hadn’t been very convincing.
She wondered if she dared turn the tables on the chameleon in front of her and follow him for a change. She was half tempted to do it, but she could hear her great-aunt Mary telling her not to borrow trouble as clearly as if Mary were sitting next to her.
The train ride was interminable, but somehow just not long enough.
She spent most of that time forcing herself not to wring her hands.
She was very tempted to just get up and scream for help, but for all she knew that would land her in jail.
Then again, considering the craziness that seemed to be swirling around her, maybe that wouldn’t have been a bad thing.
Before she could really work up a good scream, the train pulled into the station.
She had no choice but to get off with the crowd, following after her changeling, who got off in front of her.
He was at least six foot two, which made him easy to keep an eye on.
He didn’t look to see what she was doing, which she found oddly comforting.
Maybe she’d just been imagining things.
She watched him go, then wondered if she could just go another way and lose him.
She looked quickly at the signs, made a decision, then pretended nothing was going on in what was left of her fevered mind.
And she made sure once they left the tracks that he was headed to the left before she turned quickly and headed to the right.
She decided abruptly that food could perhaps wait. She didn’t run, but she didn’t amble. The only thing she stopped for was to double-check her directions so she wound up at the right hotel.
No one shouted her name as she’d hurried down the street.
No one stepped in front of her to prevent her from walking swiftly with the rest of the foot traffic.
Not even the desk clerk looked at her meaningfully, as if he intended to alert every bad guy in the area that yes, indeed, she had arrived and they could come and get her at their leisure.
He simply handed her a key, then went back to a conversation with his coworker that seemingly revolved around what they each hoped might be left warming on the stove by the time they got home.
Samantha was fairly certain she didn’t breathe until she reached her room.
She knew she would have been better off to have just crawled into bed and pulled the covers over her head, but that seemed a little too fragile even for what her family would have expected from her.
She took a deep breath, then lifted her curtain and looked out the window.
There was no one standing under a streetlight looking up at her.
Somehow, though, that just didn’t make her feel any better.
She felt watched. What other reason would there be for that man to have changed himself into three different people to try to hit on her, then a fourth to ignore her?
She paced for a bit, but that didn’t make her feel any better, so she sat down on the bed and looked at her backpack.
It wasn’t large, because the one useful thing she had learned from her mother was how to pack light.
It tended to offset the endless suitcases her father required for a trip across town.
She dumped everything out and sorted through it.
She found nothing else but the usual necessities of travel: clean underwear, a couple of shirts, a rolled-up skirt, and bathroom stuff. She checked all the pockets and zippered pouches inside the pack itself, but they were empty. It was exactly as she’d packed it herself the morning before.
She shook her head. She couldn’t imagine she was being followed because she was so terribly interesting, but she was definitely being followed, so perhaps someone had . . .
Her thoughts ground to a halt.
Had someone planted something on her?
She had the renewed sensation of having fallen into a bad crime drama, made all the more believable by people around her pretending to be who they weren’t and an unidentified bald guy chasing her.
She looked quickly at her door, but it was locked and bolted.
She got up, checked the armoire, the bathroom, and under the bed, just to be safe.
She sank down on the bed and looked at her messenger bag. She’d been using it all the time and certainly hadn’t noticed anything extra in it. The only thing she had in it besides her wallet, her passport, and money was what Lydia had given her.
Samantha took the package out of the zipped compartment and turned it over in her hands. Lydia had shown her the embroidery, of course, then taken it away to wrap it up. Samantha had thought nothing of it at the time, but now even that simple act was beginning to seem a little sinister.