“I didn’t like being away from my sister, but she was older and was away boarding in England anyway.”
“You didn’t miss your parents?”
“Nope.” I took a sip of my drink. “My mother was less of a parent and more of a dependent. My father was never around—he disappeared when we were quite young.”
Scarlett flinched but didn’t comment.
“School was good, and during the holidays Darcy and I had my grandparents. He was more a parent to us than our mother and father ever were.”
She paused as if she were trying to find the right words. “And you’re close with Darcy? Even now?”
“Yeah. She’s crazy, but sweet and protective and everything I could ever want in a big sister.” Thank God for Darcy.
“I’m close with my brother and sister as well. We have that in common.” I hadn’t noticed the small freckle on her collarbone before.
“What are their names again?”
“Violet, who you met at the bar that night. She’s the more bohemian of the three of us. Always has a different job, always willing to try new things. She’s a free spirit. My brother Max is older. Super protective. He became a father when he was in college, had to grow up fast.”
“Are they married?”
“Violet, no. I’m not sure she’ll ever get married.” She drew an invisible square on the table with her index finger. “But Max married Harper a few years back—and they all know the truth about this.” She swept the hand holding her champagne flute between us. “Violet and Harper actually talked me into it. Max wasn’t so supportive. He tried to give me the money to pay off the Cecily Fragrance loans, but there was no way I was going to accept that. In the end he gave in and accepted my choice—because he’s a marshmallow.” She grinned as she spoke about her family. “Gruff on the outside only. He’ll do anything for the three of us so long as we’re happy.”
Scarlett talking about her family made our arrangement seem all the stranger. It wasn’t exactly that I hadn’t thought of her as a person—I wasn’t that callous. It was just I hadn’t understood how many people our lie would involve. It made me uneasy—it was much more likely we’d be caught the more people who knew—but I also felt a little shitty that I was asking so much from Scarlett. She was trying to save her business, and I could have just loaned her the money.
“Thanks for doing this,” I said.
She smiled. “Thanks for helping me save Cecily Fragrance.”
We were bonded together in desperation. Soon to be wedded in matrimony.
Quid pro quo.
Twelve
Scarlett
Maybe it was the champagne. Maybe it had been getting to know Ryder over the past few weeks while we made arrangements to spend our lives together. Either way, after takeoff, I’d lost my nervousness and settled into something that’d seemed so natural.
Until now.
As the car turned off the road and up a tree-lined private drive, shit got real. Our lies were about to get oxygen.
“So your sister lives with your grandfather?” I asked. “Isn’t that kind of weird?” We were sitting side by side in the back of the Range Rover, closer than we had been on the plane. Closer than we had been since our night together.
“It’s my family’s country home, so it’s not like we’re sharing bathrooms. You can go days without seeing anyone, though we do normally have dinner together.”
His demeanor seemed to have changed a little since we’d landed. Perhaps I was imagining it but he seemed a little taller, his shoulders a little broader. He’d told me during negotiations that he had no sexpectations when it came to our arrangement. Which on the one hand was good because hooker wasn’t on my list of life goals. But looking at him, his long legs stretching out in front of him, his large hand resting on his strong thigh, I was beginning to think that negotiating no sex into our arrangement would be my loss.
He caught me looking at him and I pretended to be staring at the view.
How big is this place? I didn’t have to wait long to get my answer. The leaves of the trees thinned out to reveal a huge . . . house wasn’t the word. Building, maybe. “It’s like Downton Abbey,” I said, trying hard not to press my nose up against the window of the Range Rover to take it all in.
There was a lake directly to my left and beyond that, Ryder’s family home. As far as the eye could see were miles of neatly cut grass, scattered with different types of trees. There was a formal flat lawn right in front of the house but the land seemed to dip and rise as it stretched to the horizon. It seemed more like a public park than a private garden.
“Capability Brown designed the gardens,” Ryder explained, though I had no idea what that meant. It didn’t matter, whoever they were had done a beautiful job.
Jesus. I’d thought Max and Harper’s place in Connecticut was big now that they’d added the pool house. But this was on another level. “It’s huge,” I said. “And old.”
“It takes a lot of upkeep.”
“I guess you have staff to help.”
He nodded. “We have it down to just five full time, some part-time people as well.”
“Right,” I said.
Ryder chuckled next to me as I looked out of the window. Was he laughing at me? This was a different world. I’d had no idea what I’d be walking into when I agreed to this. I wished Ryder had warned me or I’d used Google for more than my regular search of Ryan Gosling naked or how many calories in . . . whatever I just ate.
“Lane here looks after us all very well,” he said, nodding to our driver. “He runs the place, along with the housekeeper. We also have a cook, a gamekeeper and a gardener. We have to bring in extra hands from time to time. The wedding will mean there are lots of additional people milling about.”
“I thought we agreed on low-key.”
“Oh, well, yes, of course,” he said, dipping his head as if to get a better view of the house in front of us. “We won’t go off the estate for anything. We can do the service in the chapel and use the ballroom for the reception.”
Was he kidding? “You own a chapel?”
“On the grounds. It doesn’t really get used since my grandmother died.”
“And a ballroom?” Was he fucking kidding me? I was out of my depth here. Ryder hadn’t mentioned anything like this.
“That’s standard in a house like this. It’s no big deal.”
It felt like a big deal. My brother had a lot of money, so it wasn’t the wealth that scared me. It was the grandeur of everything. The scale. If a ballroom was no big deal to him, it felt as if there may be other ways he looked at the world that were so completely different to me.
Before I had a chance to wrestle the steering wheel from our driver and race back to Heathrow, we’d pulled up on the gravel drive, in front of the yellow stone steps that led up to the entrance to Ryder’s childhood home.