They had been suffering through yet another miserable Thanksgiving family gathering when he had casually pulled a book out of his stylish leather portfolio. Samantha didn’t really believe in paranormal happenings, but she couldn’t deny that a hush had fallen over the room, as if something monumental was about to happen.
Gavin had started to hand her a book, but her mother had intercepted it before Samantha could touch it. Gavin had frowned, but there was nothing to be done about it. When Louise McKinnon Drummond wanted something, she always got it. Samantha had watched her mother examine the cover of that rather musty old tome on Victorian ivory buttons, then toss it Samantha’s way with an uninterested sniff.
“Already read it,” she had said.
Samantha had thanked Gavin for something new to read, managed to get through the rest of the evening, then carried the book up to her room—on the top floor, of course. She’d shut the door, then sat on her bed for a few minutes, trying to still her rapidly beating heart. She’d finally opened the book and read the note hidden inside the front cover, taped carefully under the dust jacket.
Have clients in Newcastle who need a house sitter every summer. Interested?
She’d felt faint. Gavin was a boor and a cad, true, but he wasn’t an idiot. He had managed to escape their stuffy little East Coast college town, after all, and get himself out of the country. Of course, he’d known full well that he was leaving behind two sisters who would never have his freedom. Well, Sophronia had managed to escape as well, but she was another story entirely. Gavin had known that she, Samantha, had always been and would always be her parents’ last, best hope for the perfect child. Rapunzel had been a world traveler compared to how locked down she’d been her entire life.
Interested?
No, she hadn’t been interested, she’d been breathless. A desperate hope had bloomed inside her that she might finally manage to get out from under her parents’ collective thumbs.
She hadn’t managed it that first summer; she’d been working like a slave for her mother’s latest exhibition of fine Victorian antiquities. But she’d gotten a message to her brother that next Thanksgiving, a note taped to the bottom of the plate sporting canned cranberry sauce their mother wouldn’t have touched if it had been the last thing in the house left to eat. Gavin had sent an email to the appropriate party, winked at her, then helped himself to the rest of the cranberry sauce.
All of which had led her to where she was, watching the train pull into a station she’d never seen before and wondering if she shouldn’t just rip up the pages in her current journal that spelled out every step she was supposed to take during every day of the three months she was to spend in England so she could just do what she wanted to do instead.
She considered, then slipped the book back into her bag. She would rip later, when she could take a penknife to the book and do a proper job of it. It was a pretty journal, so she thought she actually might like to use the rest of it.
She slung her backpack over her shoulder, pulled her suitcase down from overhead, then got off the train and looked around her.
Unfortunately, the first thing that caught her eye was a grinning idiot holding a bouquet of flowers in one hand—cheap ones, she could see that from where she stood—and a sign in the other that read, Samantha Josephine Drummond, your carriage awaits!
She almost turned around and got back onto the train.
She could hardly believe her eyes, though she supposed she shouldn’t have been surprised. Theodore Alexander Mollineux IV, the fly in her ointment, the suspicious substance in her soup, the annoying insect that kept buzzing around her loudly without really making the commitment to land. She’d heard he planned a summer internship in England and she’d been told it would be in Newcastle, but she had clung to the hope that he would forget she was going to be within shouting distance.
She supposed, looking at it with a jaundiced eye, that he hadn’t come to England merely to intern. Given what she knew of his family and hers, he had likely been assigned the task of not only keeping an eye on her but convincing her to marry him. Her father thought he was just the