The One In My Heart

“It was okay. I liked playing rugby—always thought American football too wimpy, all those helmets and paddings.”


My lips curved very slightly at that. “Why did your parents put you there, rather than somewhere nearby to keep a closer eye on you?”

“Two years before we met, Moira was arrested in London for being rowdy and in possession of narcotics, so she couldn’t enter Britain. My parents gave my passport to the master of my residence house, so I couldn’t leave. It was a pretty clever plan on their part.”

“So you visited another old lady instead.”

“Huh,” said Bennett.

He gave me a dirty look, but its effect was undercut by a smile. I found myself smiling back at him. And then we were looking at each other and not smiling.

I felt as if there were nothing solid underneath me, as if I might do something regrettable at any moment. Breaking off eye contact, I opened my purse and pretended to check inside. “Did Mrs. Asquith know about Moira?”

“She did after I told her.”

“How’d she take it?”

“With cautious delight. She loves a scandal, that one. I think at one point she almost started the process to get the Home Office’s ruling overturned, so Moira could visit. But in the end she became convinced I’d knock Moira up, and that would be a bigger scandal than even she could handle, especially if it came out that she had something to do with it.”

My head snapped up. “Jesus.”

“I know, as if we’d never heard of contraceptives.”

He was observing me again in that way of his, and I felt like a mechanical watch with its covers taken off, all the wheels and gears inside clearly visible.

“I was talking about Mrs. Asquith almost taking leave of her senses.”

“You wouldn’t want a nice young man to see his girlfriend, whom he missed desperately?”

“I’d rather buy you a hooker for your birthday.”

I almost winced at the hard edge to my answer: I was jealous of a dead woman, of the single-minded devotion she had once inspired in my lover.

He cast me a sidelong glance. “Interesting positions you take, Dr. Canterbury.”

I stared at him. I wanted him to touch me. To ignite and then annihilate me. I wanted the opportunity, even if it was only for a few minutes, to pretend that the fire of lust was something far more substantial and all-encompassing.

His eyes darkened. They lingered on my lips. Then he gazed back into my eyes, and I forgot how to breathe. When he looked at me like this, it was easy to believe that no other woman existed but me, that I was indeed the one he had been waiting for all along.

He tilted his head slightly. My heart beat ridiculously fast. My fingers dug into the supple leather of the seat.

The car door opened. “Here we are,” Hobbs said cheerfully. “Mind your step.”


AT FIRST GLANCE, MRS. ASQUITH didn’t seem like the kind of woman to help with a boy and his more-than-twice-his-age lover: the sharply tailored royal blue dress, the triple strand of pearls, the perfectly coiffed, snow-white hair—if she were to introduce herself as a dowager countess, nobody would blink an eye.

Then she smiled, a smile full of mischief and the-hell-with-it attitude, and suddenly I could see her as a coconspirator in all kinds of outrageous schemes. “Bennett, you scamp. And Evangeline, my dear, how wonderful to meet you at last.”

The skin of her hand was papery, but her handshake was strong. “And may I introduce Mr. Lawrence de Villiers?”

I’d noticed the man to her side the moment we entered the room. He was in his late fifties, with the look of an older Mr. Darcy—he bore a striking resemblance to the actor Colin Firth.

“I rang up Mrs. Asquith a few days ago, and when she said you were going to be here, I asked if I could join you,” Mr. de Villiers said to me. “Zelda and I knew each other from before she emigrated to America.”

He was Zelda’s old boyfriend, the one who left. I’d hoped to learn something more about him from Mrs. Asquith. But here he was in the flesh, a clear-eyed, handsome man to whom Zelda obviously still mattered, or he wouldn’t have invited himself to meet her former stepdaughter.

“Very nice to meet you,” I said.

We sat down to a late lunch of piping-hot soup and warm sandwiches—steak with caramelized onions on ciabatta for the meat eaters and a toasted Camembert sandwich for the vegetarian.

Bennett teased Mrs. Asquith, who had probably never turned on a stove in her life, on her much improved culinary skills.

She harrumphed. “As if I would have given you anything more than tea and plain toast, when you were always using my telephone to ring your girlfriend in America.”

Bennett slanted her an I’m-disappointed-in-you look. “Aren’t you going to tell the full story?”

“All right, so you did pay for a new central heating system and better plumbing. And a new roof. And solar cells. But that was years later. For the better part of a decade I had only my own kindness for consolation.”