My insides slumped like a fallen soufflé. With great effort I looked my Best Bud in the eye. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I should have listened. I should have known you’d take something ordinary like a garden shed and do something wonderful with it. And I should have paid attention—I’m supposed to be your friend.’
Robert chose that moment to return with my glass of water, and I took it from him, all the while looking at Adam, who was regarding me with a very un-Adam like expression.
Finally he bent down a little and kissed me softly on the forehead. ‘It’s time you ripped those polka-dot blinkers off. You’d be surprised what you’d see.’
And then he walked back into the drawing room, leaving me clutching the cold glass against my stomach.
I was right about there being a lake at the Chatterton-Joneses’ estate. It lay beyond the formal gardens in artfully landscaped parkland. To the unobservant eye the small body of water might have seemed like a natural feature, but the diminutive island in the centre was almost painfully picturesque, and the weeping willows on the undulating banks were grouped together a little too harmoniously.
The blissful summer’s afternoon only intensified the sense of perfection. The breeze was just right: cool enough to take the edge off the bright sun, but only just strong enough to whisper through the reeds and willows. Dragonflies flitted happily around us, tiny iridescent flashes above the water’s surface.
I didn’t care if all that beauty was man-made and planned. Primped and preened a little. Mother Nature is a woman too, and us girls know we need to emphasise our best assets. I didn’t care if it was too perfect, either. Perfect was what I was here for, after all, and after the disastrous morning I’d had perfect was what I was determined to have.
After breakfast Izzi had frogmarched us through the woods on what was supposed to have been a restful country walk. There had been no mist—the clean sunshine had cut through the summer morning too well. There had been no bluebells—too late in the year, I discovered. No convenient rabbit hole. No being scooped into Nicholas’s arms as if I weighed nothing more than a feather.
Instead Limpet Louisa had monopolised him the whole time.
I had to give her credit, though. She was good.
If I could have been objective, I might have applauded her strategy—one scheming woman saluting another. But I wasn’t in the mood for being objective about that. Not in the slightest.
Izzi, meanwhile, had complained about all the ‘out of character’ chatter and behaviour the entire morning, and had moaned at us periodically for not having uncovered any significant clues yet. After lunch she’d announced her solution: a spot of boating, pairing us up with people we hadn’t talked to much yet, so we could interrogate each other further. And that was how I came to be sitting in the stern of one of a row of beautifully varnished little rowing boats tied to a short wooden jetty.
As the boat bobbed up and down I could barely contain my excitement. Perfection was within my grasp. Izzi had finally done something right! She’d paired me up with Nicholas, and in a few moments he would step into our little craft and row us off into Happily Ever After.
The setting couldn’t have been more romantic if it had tried. There was warm sun, a cloudless forget-me-not sky, and all this achingly perfect scenery. There was even a pair of devoted swans orbiting each other at the edge of the dark green water. Surely this was a sign? Surely the scales would fall from Nicholas’s eyes after this?
He walked along the jetty towards me, his long legs easily covering the distance in a matter of seconds, and then it was happening, just as I’d dreamed it would. Nicholas stepped into the boat and cast off, sat down, grasped the oars and rowed away from the jetty, leaving the others behind.
Nicholas and I were finally alone together.
I fixed my gaze on his strong arms and waited for that delicious tingle to skip from the base of my spine to the nape of my neck. Any moment now…
Okay, in a few seconds, maybe. Once we were away from the bank and he could build up speed, really pull on the oars…
I frowned and concentrated harder on his hands and wrists, since the rest of his arms were covered by his shirt and an off-white linen jacket, and I thought I felt a flicker of something. Unfortunately, after another few minutes, that flicker began to itch. The something turned out to be a mosquito bite.
Flickers and tingles don’t mean anything, I told myself. They weren’t what I was there for. I was there to make Nicholas realise how irresistible I was, remember? The only one who should be tingling was Nicholas, and I needed to focus on that objective without getting distracted.
I decided my next step was to engage Nicholas in conversation, to show him I had brains as well as beauty. In fact, since the ‘beauty’ bit of me was still well hidden underneath Constance’s tweed suit and specs, this was probably the perfect time.
We’d been told by the murder-mystery weekend organisers that we could reveal a piece of confidential information about our characters now, and I decided to set the ball rolling. I gave Nicholas a particularly enticing look and lowered my voice. ‘I can tell you one of Constance’s deep, dark secrets, if you like?’
For the first time since we’d left the jetty Nicholas took his focus off the oars and looked at me. ‘Okay.’
I scanned the small lake, keeping an eye on the other couples in their boats. I suppose it might have looked as if I was being careful who overheard us, but actually I wanted to make sure the other couples were at a safe distance and that I still had Nicholas all to myself.
I looked into his deep blue eyes and my voice became even more husky. ‘Well, this doesn’t seem like anything much, but here goes… I have—or I should say, Constance has—a travel book about India hidden in her luggage. Apparently, she wants to go there to help the poor and needy, but her brother, Harry, has refused to help her raise cash for her passage or give a reference to the missionary society on her behalf, so she’s planning it all in secret.’
Nicholas frowned. ‘I presume she needs significant funds?’
I nodded. ‘The missionary society will sort her out when she gets there, but she needs money for the boat—which I’m guessing must have been an arm and a leg in those days.’
He paused briefly, before taking another stroke with the oars. ‘Could be a motive, I suppose…’ He glanced over at Adam and Izzi’s boat, which was gaining on us a little. Adam had taken his jacket off and rolled his shirtsleeves up to his elbows, and their little boat was zipping through the water. I could tell just by looking at Adam’s back, just by the smooth grace of his oar-stroke, that he wasn’t even rowing at full capacity.
Suddenly I felt all hot and unnecessary. I dabbed at my forehead with Constance’s lace-edged hanky.
‘Is the sun getting to you? You’re quite fair-skinned, despite being a brunette,’ Nicholas said, looking deliciously concerned. ‘I can row into the shade near the bank, if you’d prefer?’
I smiled demurely back at him. ‘That would be marvellous,’ I replied. Not only would I avoid looking all pink and sweaty, but it would take us away from the other boats—especially Marcus and Louisa, who had also started to head our direction.
Nicholas and I chatted about the murder-mystery weekend as he guided the boat into the shadows cast by the willows. I liked listening to him. He had a very analytical way of thinking. Not like me at all. My brain seems to flit from one subject to the next with worrying frequency—although I suppose the compensation is that I have the odd flash of right-brained brilliance now and then.
Nicholas frowned. ‘So, why won’t Harry hear of you going to India? And what has all of that got to do with Lord Southerby’s