“Your next girlfriend, mate,” Nick teased.
“Or an old one,” Freddie joked back. Then he squinted through the window. “Actually, she does look familiar.”
I had heard about Freddie’s addiction to dating gorgeous women—the more the merrier—who were also either odd or ragingly inappropriate enough to keep him entertained for more than a week. The stories he regaled me with over that day’s lunch more than confirmed the rumors, including one about his comparatively lengthy three-month dalliance with a Scottish actress named Turret who’d had to be paid off by the Palace to stop her turning the relationship into a one-woman musical. She was now a party planner in Ottawa. Little wonder Nick’s own taste in women had been the subject of so much media curiosity.
“So when is the big coming-out?” Freddie asked, passing a Bloody Mary pitcher around and then taking a loud bite out of his celery stalk. “Bex should meet the family.”
“Isn’t that what we’re doing?” Nick replied.
“You know what I mean. I don’t count,” Freddie said. “I’m barely even frightening.”
“You know what I mean,” Nick said. “I’m just not ready to hand this relationship to the wolves yet. Any of them.”
The brothers exchanged a silent look, again, that seemed to say a lot in a language that I didn’t yet speak. Freddie nodded slowly.
“Quite right, as usual, Knickers,” he said. “Your secret is safe with me. This particular secret anyway.”
Freddie bounded away and returned with some leather-bound photo albums to show me what he called “all fourteen years of Nick’s awkward period.” They were notable in that both boys were as appealing then as they are now—it was a teen girl’s dream scrapbook—and that there wasn’t a photo of Emma anywhere, although to be fair, Richard wasn’t present much, either. It was largely nannies; Clive’s father, Edgeware; and their uncle Awful Julian, who, despite his reputation as a drunk and a bounder, was clearly adept with the boys. (Freddie once told me that this is because Awful Julian likes them better than his own equally awful son.) We dallied until nine, at which point Freddie suggested we hit up a club he’d been wanting to try in Soho, because he was chasing around a part-time model and party planner called Tuppence.
“And I intend to collect.” He winked.
“Appalling,” Nick said, but he was smiling.
“I should actually get home,” I said. “I’m wiped out, and I need clean clothes.”
“It’s dark already,” Nick said, nudging me affectionately with his knee. “Stay.”
“Won’t that be scandalous?” I asked. “Two nights in a row?”
“Probably,” Nick said. “But Freddie rudely hogged all my time with you today, so I don’t want to say good-bye yet.”
Freddie hopped up and took my hand. “Enchanté,” he said, kissing it lightly. “It was a pleasure being abused by your fists. I hope you hit on me again very soon.”
Then he turned to Nick and waved a mock-scolding finger. “Now, Nicholas, you simply mustn’t sleep in the same bed. Gran will be furious.” To me, he added, “Knickers is a stickler for duty, have you noticed? Oh—speaking of…”
He pulled out his wallet and rummaged through it, before pulling out a folded piece of paper and flicking it at Nick. “Finished yesterday’s cryptic,” he said. “Consider it your new duty to study it and learn.”
Nick threw a coaster at Freddie’s back as his brother fled the room, and we spent the ensuing hour chatting on the couch, our legs in a cozy tangle, until our yawning could no longer be denied.
“We probably do have to aim for propriety here,” Nick said. “Gran is very persnickety about sleeping arrangements. You can stay in mine again, or if the flashbacks to Freddie’s appearance this morning are too horrifying, you can take the Howard Bedroom.”
He escorted me to a cozy, wood-paneled chamber with deep-set windows overlooking a private courtyard, and an intimate seating area with fresh flowers and magazines scattered artfully on an end table. Against the opposite wall was an imposing four-poster bed, begging me to flop onto it. I am a world-class flopper. I can heave myself onto a couch so hard it’s still vibrating five minutes later.
“Despite Freddie’s appalling behavior, that went well, right?” Nick asked, collapsing onto a love seat. “You’re the only girlfriend of mine who’s been able to keep up with him. The one time I invited Ceres for a nightcap, Freddie sent her to a pub down the street. He told her we were out of cups.”
Affection washed over me. In all my nerves about meeting Freddie, I never stopped to think that Nick might have been just as worried.
“Freddie’s great,” I said, sitting down and sticking my feet on the table. My socks didn’t match. As usual. “It would’ve been fun to have a brother like that, although I probably would’ve wanted to throttle him for a few years because he’d have been letting his pervy friends go through my underwear drawer.”
“I often still want to throttle him,” Nick said. “Promise me he didn’t stress you out about meeting the family. Honestly, I don’t have much that’s just mine. I want to keep you to myself for a bit.” He grabbed my foot and started rubbing it. “Mismatched socks and all.”
“Mmm. It’s a shame I’m going to have to turn you out of my maiden bedroom,” I said.
Nick dropped my foot. “Oh, you sweet naïve commoner,” he said.
He pulled me up and led me to one of the bookcases flanking the bed, where he tugged on a peeling volume called Historic Houses of England. The entire bookcase swung inward.
An actual secret passage.
“The hidden perk of the Howard Bedroom is that it connects to mine, which is where the Duke of York slept back in the day. This is where he housed his…”
“His mistress?” I supplied.
“I didn’t realize until the end of that sentence that it was somewhat insulting to you,” Nick said. “Let me try again. Ahem. This room is where the Duke of York housed, ah, the guest he might most wish to visit in the middle of the night, for a variety of respectable reasons, one of which is her advanced taste in hosiery.”
“Of course,” I said. “But that still doesn’t solve the problem of your grandmother not wanting us to defile a royal bedchamber.”
“I thought of that,” Nick said smugly. “Being as this is a guest suite, it isn’t a royal bedchamber at all. In fact, it’s a wickedly unpopular bedchamber because it’s haunted. We’d be doing it a service.”
“Giving it a reason to live,” I agreed. “Or giving the ghost a reason to pretend to live.”
“Quite selfless, really.”
“Sexual philanthropy.”
“Fancy term. Now you’re just showing off for the ghost,” he murmured, lowering his mouth to mine and sliding my sweatpants to the floor. If the ghost was scandalized by what happened next, he certainly never complained.
Chapter Two
But why haven’t you met them?” my mother asked, picking up the white and mint-green teacup and jerking her pinky finger impatiently out to the side, as if scolding herself for it not being innate. “It’s suspicious, Rebecca.”