Sylvie raised her eyebrows. She’d recognized that Patrick had been conventionally handsome, but she hadn’t before considered him attractive, which was a very different beast. Here, however . . . In the sexiness stakes, she’d personally rank a three-piece suit with a waistcoat well over visible abs, and she could understand the light in his companion’s eyes.
With laughter in every line of her fascinating face, a vivacious brunette looked into the camera, but one hand was caught and held tightly in Patrick’s, their fingers linked together. Even in a photograph, the woman emanated an aura of restrained energy that reminded Sylvie a bit of Pet De Vere.
She wished it were a digital photograph so she could zoom in—so used to Instagram that any time she saw a photo, her finger twitched toward an invisible “like” button—but really, no higher resolution was necessary. In the instant when the camera flash had captured this moment for posterity, their body language was baldly explicit.
The woman had quite rounded cheeks and a very pointed chin, and she’d depicted both features with ruthless accuracy in her pencil drawings on the envelope.
Without a word, Sylvie handed the envelope to Dominic, as she continued to stare at the photo of Prince Patrick and presumably Jessica Maple-Moore.
Jessie.
Dominic studied the pencil drawings without comment, before reaching for the photograph.
“Clearly,” Sylvie said, “Rosie was not the only person who cared about Patrick.”
When Dolores came to collect them at the end of her shift, Dominic indicated the box they’d meticulously repacked and set aside, and suggested quietly that she might want to double-check to whom the contents had been bequeathed.
Dolores glanced at it—and them—curiously, and took the box under her arm. “Found what you were looking for?” she asked them when they returned to the busy, blessedly warm public rooms.
A tiny beat, before Dominic said, “Not yet. But I think the first stones have been laid.”
“Coming back tomorrow?”
A small glint replaced the thoughtful look on his face. “I have to see a man about a horse tomorrow. Or a woman with enough alcohol to anesthetize one.”
When he went to retrieve their coats, Dolores twinkled at her. “Goodness, was that almost a smile I saw? I’d assume that Patrick and Rachmaninoff worked their magic even on Dominic, but I suspect the credit belongs a little closer to home.”
Sylvie’s mind had been half back in the archives room, and it took a moment to register Dolores’s smiling inference. For the fiftieth time that day, a spreading flush was a pulsing beat in her cheeks.
Before she could voice a denial in what would likely be an astounding display of inarticulacy, Dolores said, “I’ve never seen his body language like that. And I’ve known him for some time now. My love has known him even longer.” She nodded over Sylvie’s shoulder, warmth and delight suffusing every line of her face.
Sylvie turned to see another elderly woman sitting patiently on an armchair near the doors. Her dark brown skin creased into countless wrinkles with the most gorgeous smile as she saw them looking. She blew Dolores a kiss.
“Isobel.” Acres of emotion in a few syllables. “My fiancée.”
“Congratulations.” Sylvie returned Isobel’s wave when it moved to her. Smiling, she pulled a card out of her bag. “If you need a cake for the wedding, please give me a call.”
Dolores laughed and took the card. “I’m afraid Dominic won my loyalty a long time ago, but I’ve heard some very interesting tales of a magical forest and bubbling cauldrons in Notting Hill. The cake I can’t commission, but a cocktail?”
“On the house. Anytime.” Sylvie couldn’t help it. She had to ask. “What did you mean about his body language?”
“So entirely tuned into someone else.” Dolores considered. “Somehow curved into someone else, without moving a muscle. Aware of their every movement, without so much as a glance.”
Sylvie shook her head slightly, but it wasn’t quite “no.” She wasn’t sure what it was. She hesitated. “You said you owed Dominic a favor—”
“I owe Dominic my life. Quite literally.” Dolores gestured five more minutes to Isobel, but the other woman was now talking to Dominic, who’d spotted her and walked over to crouch by her chair. “Years ago, he was catering the desserts for a function I’d organized. When he arrived to deliver the cake, I was forty-five minutes late to the venue. I made it clear to him in our initial meetings that I prized punctuality in myself and expected it in others. I’m never late. He barely knew me, and he had another commitment that evening that would have resulted in a lucrative ongoing contract, I was later told by a member of his staff. But he had a feeling something was wrong. He came looking at my former workplace, and he found me. Fallen through the floor of a rotting heritage building, cold, bleeding, and alone.” A shadow momentarily darkened her eyes at the memory. “For hours. Dominic called emergency services, he stayed with me, he talked to me even though he’s clearly about as naturally chatty as The Thinker, and when the structure collapsed again before help arrived, he dislocated his shoulder keeping me from falling another level.”
Sylvie didn’t know what to say.
Before she had to find words, Dolores continued, “It’s no exaggeration to say I would have died that night without him. But he gifted me my life twice. It was through him that I met Isobel. She knew his family when he was a young child and met him again as an adult. He introduced us at an awards dinner.” Where before she had been open, almost garrulous, here she stopped. She looked into Sylvie’s face, and there was something so . . . dissecting in that look, Sylvie felt as if a sci-fi scanner were running over her body, somehow drawing out every last secret of her past, every minute facet of her character.
She felt oddly nervous suddenly, but whatever silent test Dolores was conducting, apparently she passed. The older woman gave small nod. “Isobel has told me,” she said very quietly, “a little of what she knows of Dominic’s early childhood. She wasn’t in a position to intervene, but she wished desperately that she could, on more than one occasion.”
Something cold and angry clutched in a ball in Sylvie’s stomach. She wanted to ask. And she didn’t want to invade Dominic’s privacy so acutely behind his back.
Dolores answered the unspoken. “Not abuse in the form that the law would recognize. Grievous neglect couched in luxury. He was entirely given over to the care of a nanny, who didn’t believe in coddling children, as she put it. The woman shouldn’t have even had the care of a houseplant,” she added with a distinct bite. “Let alone a child with nowhere to go and no one for whom he could reach. ‘I’ve never felt so helpless,’ Isobel said to me once. ‘A touch-starved five-year-old. I’d have liked to load his parents into a cannon.’”
Dominic had said goodbye to Isobel and returned then with their coats. He cast a glance between them, that laser focus sharpening on Sylvie’s face. She was trying very hard to keep her expression clear of emotion. His eyes narrowed. After a moment, he merely queried, “Ready?”
Silently, Sylvie nodded, and Dominic shot her another look before he held out her coat so she could slip her arms into the sleeves.