OKAY, THIS WASN’T working at all.
Keeping his main focus firmly on the road ahead, and the swirling snowflakes that grew heavier with every moment, meant that Jasper could only spare the briefest of glances at his travelling companion. But even that was enough to realise that any hopes he’d had of Tori opening up or even relaxing a little as they took the secluded, picturesque road through the moors were doomed. Curled up in her seat, her coat wrapped tightly around her slim body, she looked almost like a child having a sulk.
Maybe that was what she was doing. And Jasper had teased Felix out of enough sulks in their childhood to know how to fix that.
Except he wasn’t thinking about Felix. Ever.
Think about Tori. And not crashing the car.
Tori Edwards was an enigma. She’d appeared in his life one day and hadn’t left, and despite their night together he wasn’t sure he knew her any better now than the day she’d arrived.
After his father’s revelation about Felix’s parentage, Jasper had worried briefly that Tori was another of the earl’s illegitimate children, but that fear had been quickly dispelled. And given her colouring—her pale skin, her dark hair, and her bright green eyes—he should have known better anyway. He got his own dark hair from his mother, and his eyes were his father’s distinctive golden brown—the same, he realised too late, as Felix’s.
Jasper and Felix had both been about to start their third year of university down in Oxford when Tori had shown up that first summer, a year into her own business degree at York, and working for the earl during the holidays. He’d claimed he’d plucked her from obscurity at some roadside inn where her talents were clearly wasted. Tori had never denied the story, but Jasper suspected that his father’s desire to appear a patron, a benefactor, to a penniless girl who had just needed the right chances in life had had more to do with harking back to a previous era of aristocracy than anything else.
In truth, Jasper assumed the earl had hired Tori because she was very good at her job, patronage be damned. She’d worked hard all that summer learning the ropes at the Flaxstone estate—dealing with the groups of executives there for team building down in the woods, with the paintballing range and the go-kart track; hosting birthday parties for horse-mad little girls; serving teas and coffees in the farm café and even leading walking tours of the land around Flaxstone, up to the ruins of the old hall that had been crumbling away nicely for the last three hundred years. There had been no job she wouldn’t take on, and before long she’d known more about how the estate was run than staff who’d been there for decades.
The earl, for all his many faults, had at least seen the writing on the wall for Britain’s landed gentry, and had found a way to diversify the assets the Flaxstone estate gave them, making the best use of their aristocratic inheritance by turning it into a business. And once Flaxstone itself had been running consistently in the black as a commercial enterprise, he’d turned his sights on the many estates in the country that hadn’t been so prescient—and done the same for them.
And Tori, from what Jasper could gather, had been a big part of that during his absence over the last five years.
But back when she’d first arrived, she’d been nothing more than another girl to flirt with, a challenge when she didn’t flirt back, and then a puzzle for him to solve when he couldn’t get her to open up at all. He and Felix had spent that whole first summer trying to bash holes in those walls she put up; teasing her, asking every question they could think of, even trying to get her drunk on long summer nights. She’d been just nineteen to their nearly twenty-one, close enough in age that it had seemed natural they’d spent time together, even if she’d lived in the staff quarters with the casual summer staff, and they had been up at the main hall.
She had been there again at Christmas that year, organising stalls for the annual Christmas market, decorating trees and staircases in the hall, and corralling carollers. Jasper had wondered briefly why she hadn’t gone home for Christmas, he remembered now. Later, he’d got the feeling that she hadn’t had a home to go to.
But she’d made a new one at Flaxstone. By the time she’d graduated, Tori had earned such respect from the earl that he’d given her the gatekeeper’s cottage and hired her full time, before she’d even attended graduation.
And two years later, the summer he’d found out the truth about Felix, Jasper had finally broken a small hole in those defences of hers, even if only for one night. Or maybe she’d broken a hole in his.
It had been the night that he’d found his father’s will, read about a potential second son he’d never heard of. His father had been out of town for meetings and Jasper had known it wasn’t a conversation he could have over the phone, so he’d resigned himself to waiting until his return the next day for answers.
But patience had never been one of his virtues.
Felix, he remembered now, had been off with some girl he’d fallen for on the summer staff, and not available for drunken oblivion. But Jasper had found Tori hanging bunting on the pop-up coffee stall she’d convinced the earl to install at the start of the garden walk.
‘Don’t you ever stop working?’ he’d asked her, leaning against the nearest tree to watch her work. She’d been methodical, focussed, and the bunting had dipped and hung at precise intervals from the tin roof of the stall.
‘When it’s all done, yes,’ she’d replied without looking at him.
‘When it’s done, I need something stronger than coffee. Join me?’
She’d turned then, looked him in the eye for a long moment, and then nodded.
He hadn’t expected her to say yes, not after so many years of telling him no at every possible opportunity. But maybe she’d seen something desperate in his eyes that evening. Seen that he’d needed her. Or perhaps she’d had her own reasons—if so, she’d never told him what they were.
They’d stolen a bottle of the earl’s finest gin from his healthy drinks cupboard, and drunk most of it while talking about nothing at all. But underneath the inconsequential, and in between them, every now and then there had been glimpses, moments when her armour had slipped. Seconds when he’d been able to see that she was hurting too, even if she’d never tell him why.
Then the alcohol had taken over completely, and soon they’d been giggling their way back to her cottage, pausing only to kiss against the trees that lined the path.
And then when he’d woken up the next morning she was already gone.
Did she ever think about the night they’d spent together? She’d certainly never mentioned it again. Not that she’d had much chance. She’d crept out of her own cottage before he was even awake, and avoided him for the next day. He’d confronted his father about the will the moment he’d returned, and his world had imploded. He hadn’t been thinking about anything beyond the lies he’d been told his whole life when he’d decided to leave Flaxstone, and in the end he’d left in such a whirlwind he hadn’t even seen Tori again. He’d barely said goodbye to his own mother, but that was partly because he couldn’t bear to lie to her about Felix, but couldn’t hurt her either. She couldn’t have known what sort of a man she’d married, he was sure. And if she had…then she’d been lying to him too.
He couldn’t face that possibility right then. So he’d run as far and as fast as he could, until the pain had started to recede.
Since he’d returned to Flaxstone, Tori had barely acknowledged his existence, until today, when she couldn’t possibly avoid it.
Jasper’s gaze darted to the left again to take in her profile, pensive as she stared out at the snow. Then he focussed back on the road again.
One night. Just a few hours. That was the only