Chapter 28 Andrea #3
If that was true, then how did he know exactly what I was talking about? But self-control is simply good manners. Very Liam.
I smiled. “Well, okay. I just wanted you to know.”
I couldn’t let that hang between us all night. It wasn’t right.
“Thank you, Andrea. I appreciate it.”
Always so polite whenever anything felt even vaguely uncomfortable. Was that what it was like being Liam, living in his world?
But he wasn’t always like that—not behind closed doors.
A shiver ran up my spine and into my chest at the thought of him leaning over me in my bedroom, his eyes dark like he wanted to eat me.
God, I had never been looked at like that by any other man.
It was the most impolite, exquisite sort of feeling—being too close to the edge.
“I’m sorry.” I gestured to my robe. “I’m not quite ready. Did you need to use the room?”
“I wanted to see if you were okay, actually.”
“Oh … thank you. I’m just reading through this guide from Bonnie.”
“Yes. About that,” he said. “I apologize on behalf of my strategic adviser. It was bad manners. Throw it in the bin if you like. You’ll be the most interesting person in the room regardless.”
I bit my lip as a flush crept up my neck and into my cheeks.
“Thanks.” I laughed awkwardly.
Interesting. Why did that feel even more risky than when he’d called me beautiful?
“I did have a question, actually,” I said. “Do you know what Didcot Park Community School is?”
“Didcot Park?” His brow scrunched. “That’s Bonnie’s old school. Why do you ask?”
“That’s odd. It’s in the guide. Says I shouldn’t mention it.”
“Mind if I have a look?” He walked across the room as I turned to pick it up off the bed. “Shall we sit?” He gestured behind him to the sofas.
“Here’s fine.”
He hesitated, then sat next to me on the bed.
What was I doing? We’d only just got here, and already I was sitting on the bed with him in nothing but a robe.
Liam flicked through the guide, frowning. Eventually, he said, “Well, Andrea, she’s given you the keys to the kingdom.”
“What do you mean?”
“This is Bonnie’s guide. She made it years ago. She’s just … updated it.”
What was he talking about? Did Liam have a long history of dating women who didn’t know how to handle themselves in polite society, that Bonnie had had to protect him from?
“I don’t understand.”
“Right. I assume she never told you then.”
“Told me what?”
Liam pressed his lips together like he was fighting some sort of frustration—something other than me, apparently.
“Didcot Park was Bonnie’s secondary school. Just a normal comprehensive.”
He looked at me like he was checking my reaction. Was that meant to be a big deal?
“I always assumed she’d gone to a private school,” I said. “She sounds very … posh.”
Liam laughed. “I know. She worked very hard at that. Watched a lot of Hugh Grant films.”
She did sound a lot like Keira Knightly, come to think of it.
“When she went to Oxford, she felt really overwhelmed, like she didn’t fit in,” he said.
“She shouldn’t have. If anything, getting a place there without all the advantages of private schooling should have made her feel like she deserved to be there more than anyone.
But all she could see were her flaws. So she made herself a list of dos and don’ts, and studied it all the time.
I think this is what you’re looking at here … the basis of it, anyway.”
What? How could Bonnie—perfect, controlled Bonnie—have thought she had any flaws?
“She got a bit obsessed about it. Started reading up about etiquette and manners, Debrett’s, Nancy Mitford, that sort of thing—”
“What?”
“Outdated rule books about what constitutes good form in aristocratic society. Nonsense, Andrea, honestly.”
“But—” My head was spinning. Was that why she was so worried about me saying or doing the wrong thing?
“I know. It’s all ridiculous,” he said quietly. “The unspoken judgment. The expectations. All of it.”
His hand was still resting on the edge of the guide, close enough that our fingers almost touched. Under us, the bed felt soft, the mattress giving to the pressure.
“Is it, though?” I asked. “Everywhere I go with you, it feels like I have to be a certain way, to be careful, to not trip up. It feels like it matters so much.”
“Oh, Andrea, I’m sorry,” he said. “It really doesn’t, you know. None of that stuff matters. Not as much as you—”
From the coffee table, his phone rang, loud and echoey in the quiet room. He stood quickly and walked toward it, silencing it with a swipe, then held it in his hand for a second, staring at the screen.
Not as much as me what?
“I should let you get dressed,” he said, without turning back. “All right if I come back around, say, six thirty, to get ready?”
“Yes, of course.”
He left, and I was sitting alone again, with the guide next to me on the bed. The pages were curling now, where my damp fingers had flicked between them, trying to understand how to get through tonight.
But the real problem wasn’t the guidebook or walking this tightrope of rules.
It wasn’t Bonnie, or the dinner, or even Novexia.
It was how I was going to stop myself from wanting him.