“Pet, Sylvie’s still not feeling a hundred percent,” he said, taking one hand off the steering wheel to touch hers. She immediately twisted their fingers together. “Cool it with the blood and gore, all right?”
The rough pads of his fingers were gentle on her skin. Multiple times a day, she was still struck by the fact that she was holding hands with Dominic, kissing Dominic, having sex with Dominic.
With each passing second, every part of this had started to feel irrevocable.
And it no longer seemed so strange or unbelievable. Still surprising, definitely not the path she’d imagined her life would take, but a bit wonderful, really. Turning her head and looking at him now, the familiar stubble shadow on his jaw, the bump on the bridge of his nose, the thick, endearingly stubby eyelashes, she was overwhelmed by a sudden surge of feeling. Bubbling joy, possessiveness, protectiveness, lust, a thousand emotions all in a jumble.
Impulsively, she raised their joined hands to her lips and kissed his thumb. His grip tightened, and a strong flash of heat lit his mismatched dark eyes.
“Oh. Sorry.” Pet’s chastened tone brought her back to the reality of their surroundings, the stuffy interior of the car, the endless winding Oxfordshire lanes. The property formerly known as Primrose Cottage appeared to be located in a rural labyrinth.
“Petunia Park must be quite a drive for its aspiring artists,” Pet commented after a twenty-second silence, shifting onto Sylvie’s own train of thought. “Perfect love nest for a clandestine royal romance, though.”
Dominic released her hand to make a sharp turn in the road, and Sylvie rubbed at the foggy side window with her sleeve. She couldn’t see far beyond the glass, but the sporadic cottages and gardens they passed appeared to be thatched and pretty. It was a scene of quiet serenity and must be idyllic in the summer. Tapping her phone on her lap, she brought up the photograph of Patrick and Jessica, happy and in love on the stone steps, circled by primroses and sunshine.
Very lightly, she touched the relaxed lines of Patrick’s face. A fleeting moment of perfect happiness, captured forever.
A short time later, Dominic turned the car through wrought-iron gates and drew to a stop. Jessica’s onetime home was larger than it had appeared in the photo, sprawling backward in a charming hodgepodge of outbuildings. A sort of miniature barn had obviously been converted into studio space; Sylvie could see easels through the windows.
The rain had slowed to a gentle drizzle, so she left her coat hood down when she got out of the car. The cool air was refreshing after the drive. She stood looking at the front of the cottage, lifting her gaze from the photo to the stone stairs where the couple had sat all those years ago. The surrounding gardens were a tangled mass of bare branches, not a flower in sight, but otherwise—
She’d looked at that snapshot so many times over the past few days that the setting in person, so entirely familiar, gave her an eerie tingle. Even the crack in the stone by Jessica’s foot was still there. She could see them in her mind, coming out of the house, laughing, kissing, setting the timer on the camera. For some reason, she was convinced they’d been alone in that moment.
Jessica holding the railing as she sat, Patrick turning his head to look at her, his eyes alight.
Pet looked over her shoulder at the phone screen and shivered a little. “It’s a bit ghostly, isn’t it?”
“Part of me expects that I’ll look up from the photo and they’ll be there,” Sylvie murmured, and for once Dominic’s practicality was a welcome shattering of the spell.
“You’re both under the influence of severed heads and floating corpses. It’s a house. Stones and thatch. Wherever Patrick and Jessica are now, they’re not—”
“What did you say?” The startled voice came from behind them, and for one moment when Sylvie turned, it was as if Jessica had stepped out of time and back into the scene.
The woman who stood staring at them had short dark hair, threaded with silver. She was an age Jessica had never reached, her figure lush and curvy in a print dress and baggy cardigan. Her enviably muscular bare calves ended in muddy Wellington boots, a far cry from Jessica’s flowing skirt and neatly laced shoes. Their faces were different shapes—Jessica’s cheeks had been very round; this woman’s face was long and narrow.
But their eyes were identical. Large and dark with tremendously long lashes, tilted at the outer corners like a cat.
Pet glanced at Sylvie and Dominic before she walked forward with a smile and extended her hand. “Are you Kathleen? I’m Pet De Vere.”
Kathleen took her hand automatically, but her attention remained fixed on Dominic. “Did you say Patrick and Jessica?”
With a few beads of rain rolling down his temple, Dominic studied her for a moment before he spoke. “I’m Dominic De Vere, Pet’s brother, and this is Sylvie Fairchild.”
“I know,” Kathleen said. “I’ve been watching you on TV.” She continued to stare at him, recovering enough from her frozen shock that suspicion was creeping in. “I’m guessing you aren’t really here for a studio tour.”
“No. I’m afraid not.” He glanced at Sylvie, and she stepped forward and held out her phone.
“If you don’t mind,” she said, “we’d like to ask you about Jessica and Prince Patrick.”
Kathleen’s frowning eyes were dragged down to the photograph on the screen. Her breath caught in a little hitch. Slowly, she reached out and took the phone from Sylvie, automatically scissoring her fingers to zoom in on the faces of the couple.
No sound other than the gentle padding of rain against stone.
Finally, she inhaled deeply and lifted her head. “Well. You’d better come in for a cup of tea.”
The unraveling of a royal romance.
The front room of the cottage was delightful, cluttered and cozy, with paintings all over the walls and a fire crackling in the hearth. Sylvie sat on a well-stuffed couch next to Dominic and accepted the cup of tea Kathleen handed her, murmuring her thanks.
“She was the light,” Kathleen said, sitting on an armchair opposite Pet’s. Sylvie had just repeated the words Patrick had spoken to Rosie, Jessica’s sister listening with tears in her eyes. “She was kind and beautiful, and everything he thought she was. And she loved him so much.”
“Did you know him?” Sylvie asked quietly, and Kathleen shook her head.
“I never met him. None of her friends did. I believe I was the only one she told.” She smiled a little. “I was eighteen, and it was the most romantic thing I’d ever heard. A secret romance with a real-life prince. Like something out of a book.” Her smile quivered and faded. “It didn’t end like the fairy tales.”
She picked up the photo album she’d taken from a shelf and set it in front of Sylvie, who looked down at a large studio portrait of Jessica. Once again, a camera had managed to capture the lively spark in her eyes, suppressed laughter in every line of her face.
“She looks . . . joyful.” It was the only word.
Kathleen nodded. “That’s exactly what I associate with her memory. Joy. Pure joy in life, in people, in her hopes for the future. In her love.” She shook her head. “She was a human being; of course she had moods and moments. But if she lost her temper, it never lasted long and she’d apologize very solemnly, and hug you tight, and you’d be laughing again in minutes. I miss her,” she said. “As much now as I did in the days after her death. Over a quarter of a century, and I never stop hoping she’ll walk through the door. This is still her house, really. She always called it Petunia Park. In the summer, the field out the back is just a sea of petunias. She liked to curl up amongst them at night and look up at the stars. I can still feel her presence out there so strongly.” Her voice turned thoughtful, abstracted. “I suppose that’s why I moved here. Why I’ve stayed so long. I can’t leave her.”