Chapter 3
NICK
Nick wasn’t sure what he had expected. It had never occurred to him that Theo’s twin sister would look…
well, like that! Theo had said she was smart and funny, but he hadn’t thought she’d be so stubborn.
Or that she’d have a voice Nick could listen to reading a dictionary.
Or a fragrance that made him think… so many things he had no right to be thinking.
He needed to be careful, that was all. Very careful.
The problem was, he’d never been very good in social situations. There were many reasons for him to stay up here at Wildewood, on his own, away from prying eyes and prattling tongues. That was just one of them.
‘So it’s not your deal,’ Theo had said. ‘You have other strengths, Nick. And who cares anyway. It’s not everyone who can charm the trees.’
Sally had been even more dismissive. ‘No one else can do what you do here, mo stór.’
But he had always had them there, to deal with people. And now…
Well, he didn’t have anyone.
He’d loved her brother, and missed him every day. Nick had lost far too much over the years but that didn’t make Theo’s loss any less. If anything this was the most painful. They’d worked together, dreamed together. Theo had given him his hope back when he’d thought it lost forever.
Now he had no one.
But here she was. Like a ghost herself. She had some nerve coming back here now after the way she had treated Theo. She’d ignored countless invitations from her brother, even when he had needed her most. Too busy being famous in the States. Ghost hunting. Like that was a real job.
But when he’d seen her sitting there in the car, so pale, staring at the house for so long, Nick hadn’t known what to think.
Theo might have come to terms with what had happened to their father here, but he had been adamant that Alex never would.
‘She won’t come back,’ he had said any time the subject came up. And he had been right.
‘It was worse for her,’ Sally had said, in those soft, sad tones. ‘You know it was. She found him.’
So Nick had never actually expected Alexandra de Wilde to arrive, even with her curt messages insisting that she was on the way. And now she was here.
She was going to sell Wildewood Hall. To be rid of that part of her past for good. He’d been a fool to believe otherwise. Watching her enter the house, he’d known. She didn’t want it. She had never wanted it. She looked so awkward and uncomfortable.
Well, that could work in his favour, surely, help him persuade her to leave. He needed to get her out before she started poking around too much.
By putting her in the drawing room, he felt like he was keeping her from intruding too much while he wasn’t there to contain matters.
It was comfortable, and cosy, safe enough.
It wasn’t the heart of the house, like the kitchen, but it was a family room.
Formal enough for a de Wilde surely. Nothing much tended to happen in there.
If he could limit where she went and what she got into until she got fed up and left… that might work.
Yes, that was the best idea. And then…
Then he just had to persuade her to leave it alone, to go back to America and let him run the estate for her. There would be a steady income stream, grants and all the rest of it. She didn’t have to sell up. Keeping Wildewood intact, and her far away… It was the best thing.
But he had an awful feeling it could never be that easy.
The house stirred around him, creaking, whispering. The wind was finding a way in through the gaps and with it came… well, it was an old house, he would tell her. He had to.
The lawyers had been no more than irritants, like a stone in his boot. He could ignore them. They didn’t matter.
But Alexandra de Wilde herself – no matter what name she had chosen – she was a different matter.
No, not Alexandra de Wilde. He had to remember that.
Theo might have embraced the family name but she didn’t.
Dr Alex O’Neill – her stepfather’s surname, a short form of her name, carefully ungendered for professional reasons no doubt, and a title she had earned through her studies.
Nothing of the de Wilde inheritance at all. She had rejected everything.
When their mother died, Theo had grieved for months. Nick and Sally had been here for him all through that. Theo had no one else. Alex stayed away and that had hurt him so much. Nick had been angry about it at the time, until Sally warned him to leave it alone.
Oh Alex went to the funeral, in Dublin. She visited the city and saw old friends, and she had spent some time with her brother and their stepfather there.
But not here. She had never come back here. Where Theo had retreated, to hide, to grieve, to lose himself. And even when they had finally persuaded him to message her, for his own sake, to ask her to visit as his only living relative, she had refused point-blank.
And honestly? Nick had been relieved. It meant he and Sally could keep Theo to themselves. For a little while it had been a haven. Until it became his own personal, solitary hell.
Now, having laid eyes on Alex, seeing the echoes of Theo in her face, in the blue of her eyes so like her brother’s, a true de Wilde, all the heartbreaking similarities and the terrible differences, he knew that this was not going to be easy.
And that Wildewood Hall would never want to let her go.