by Alys Murray
Eventually, Reginald let Sam go, taking his leave to return to whatever expensive puddle of champagne and cigarette ash he’d crawled out of. She stood in place for a too-long moment, staring at the place he’d been, before rushing off in Daniel’s direction.
“Are you okay?” he asked, reaching for her.
Sam strode right past him, slipping an oversize pair of sunglasses on, concealing everything Daniel wanted to see and understand and unravel.
“Yeah.” She smiled a smile so fake Daniel could actually feel his heart crack at the sight of it. “Let’s get outta here.”
Chapter Fifteen
Two weeks passed. Two weeks of kissing and singing and that laugh that sometimes captured her whole face. Two weeks of not being able to figure her out. On the one hand, she was a duke’s daughter, removed and surrounded by Game of Thrones-style walls. On the other hand, every once in a while, he’d see a flash of someone else. The person he suspected was the real Samantha Dubarry. Sometimes it came in quick flashes of laughter. Other times, it was grander than that, like the time she left a lecture in the middle because she’d seen on Snapchat that his car broke down in Buckland Marsh or the time she sent her family’s handyman to Nan’s house because she’d overheard the old woman talking about a leak in her roof she couldn’t afford to fix. Every time, she’d mutter something about don’t mention it or it wasn’t a big deal, but slowly, he was starting to peel away that exterior of hers. More and more, he captured glimpses of her real, unhidden self.
She cared about people. Deeply. And if there was one thing Daniel thought was sexier than anything else, it was someone who cared.
“Reward, please.”
And considering she’d practically moved her study lounge to a ruddy wooden workbench in the garage where he worked, he’d had many opportunities to take in that quiet sexiness.
“A reward?” he asked, smirking down at the fried engine of a now-extinct Italian sports car with a logo so rusted he couldn’t tell it from a Porsche. “And what did you do to earn that?”
“I read an entire page and a half, thank you very much.”
“And how many pages do you have to read before your lecture tomorrow?”
She sniffed and turned onto her back, laying a thick book with an uncracked spine across her chest. The struggle against ogling the rise and fall of her breasts in a delicate white top was almost irresistible, but resist it he did. “I really don’t think that’s relevant.”
“Well, then, I really don’t think a reward is relevant.”
“Let’s just say I’m a page and a half closer to finishing this book.”
Holding it aloft, she let him glimpse the thickness of the tome. The only book he’d ever read that thick was A Tale of Two Cities, and admittedly, he’d only picked that one up because he got that book and War and Peace mixed up. He shook his head.
“Oh, Sam.”
“What? I’ll finish it tonight. I’m a fast reader when I’m not distracted.”
He pulled himself up from over the metallic innards of the car and slung himself up from the propped-open hood like a pin-up model.
“I distract you?” he asked, raising an eyebrow.
Then, something strange happened. Something that hadn’t yet happened in the entire course of their short acquaintance. She laughed. Not one of those short, polite laughs she often offered or one of those guarded chuckles, mind you, but a laugh that consumed her entire face. Real laughter. Her hand flew to her mouth to control the noise, but it was too late. He’d already seen her in completion. And he loved her all the more for it.
“No,” she managed, her red cheeks quivering as she struggled to compose her face back into a calm mask. “I’m just really into 1950s Italian sports cars.”
It was then that Daniel decided he would pose like the cover art for a 1940s calendar every day of his life if it meant he could drink in the delicious honey of her laughter again.
“What’s the reading for, then?”
“My War, Peace, and World Order lecture.”
“And what’s your discipline again?” he asked, knowing full well she’d never told him what she studied. In spite of days of growing closer and closer, she’d kept her own life as close as a winning hand of cards. She answered coolly as she turned the page of her reading.
“Politics and international relations.”
“And you’re interested in that, are you?”
“Politics should interest everyone. They affect everyone, don’t they? Besides, I thought you’d be excited by the international relations part.”
She waggled her eyebrows and painted on a smirk that clearly told him to drop the issue or at least to ignore it for now. The entendre wasn’t lost on him or on…certain parts of his anatomy, but he soldiered on.
“I’m just curious why any nice person would go into politics.”
Calling her a nice person was an unfair way to bait her, but the words were out of his mouth before he could trap them. Time stretched before she answered.
“I thought it would make my dad proud.”
“Hmm.”
“I don’t like the sound of that.”
“It’s nothing. It’s just…” He shrugged, his hands tightening involuntarily around a wrench as he thought of the man who so coldly dismissed him on his first day at work. To think that man had given the world someone like Sam struck him as nearly impossible. He hadn’t known her long, but he’d seen the way she clung to old traditions that didn’t fit her. Something like that could only come from a parent. “When I wanted to make my parents proud, I did what fulfilled me. Music doesn’t make much money, but they’re proud because I always come home happy, you know?”
“Yeah, but now you’re about to be a big-time recording artist.”
“Maybe.” Pride filled his chest, as it did every time they talked about his future with Icon Records. In just a few days, he’d travel to London and meet with their entire signing staff, singing for them so they could decide whether or not to make his signing official. “But my parents would have supported me even if no one ever heard my music. They want me to be happy.”
“Not everyone can have parents like yours. Not all of us are so lucky.” Her thoughtful response wasn’t an insult, but it cut like one. Setting her book aside, she leaned forward on the bench where she’d made her home these last few days and took stock of his current position, elbow deep in grease and metal, struggling mightily to get the engine running as he needed it to keep his job. “Do you want some help down there?”
“No. I can handle it.”
Before he could tell her all the reasons it was wrong, she’d dropped her book and appeared at his side. As far as he knew, she didn’t know the first thing about cars, but still, she stood at his side. There was something beautiful about her then, shaded in cheap overhead lights as she forgot about the uptight trappings of her station and leaned against a greasy car with him.
“Don’t be silly. What can I do?”
“Just hold onto this.”
“Yeah.”
“And let me…” He turned the wrench once, twice, and three times. Then, when the engine matched all of the pictures he’d read about in his books, he stood up to his full height to share a triumphant yawp with her. “There.” But when he did, he only saw the black marks on the flowing white shirt she’d donned for the day. “Oh, Christ.”
“What?”
“Your clothes. They’re all ruined.”
When had they gotten so close? Their lips only a breath apart? When had he gotten so lost in her eyes he couldn’t offer to help her out of those dirty, dirty things and into something clean? Her breasts pressed against his chest, beckoning him closer with her every breath. He wanted that closeness, wanted to scoop her into his arms and see just how dirty they could get. Her lips turned up in a small, reassuring smile, and he found he couldn’t stop staring at them, wanting to know how they tasted.
“That’s all right. They’re just clothes.”
&
nbsp; …
Please kiss me. I feel like I’m suffocating and the only thing that will make me breathe again is your lips against mine. But Sam’s prayer went unanswered when the shrill ring of Daniel’s cell phone cut through the air. Their tense moment passed, leaving him with an apologetic wince.
“I’m sorry. One second.” The air thus ruined, he fished into the back pocket of his half-worn coveralls—the ones that featured in many of her dirtier dreams about him—and answered. “Angie? What’s wrong?”
From there, Sam only caught snippets of the conversation, both from Daniel’s end of the line and from Angie’s. Daniel’s sentences kept getting cut off by what sounded like loud blubbering, leaving the entire conversation mostly unintelligible until he glanced up at her and muttered into the receiver, “Look. I’m at work. Can I call you back? Yeah… Okay. Bye.”
Jaw set determinedly, Daniel tossed the phone into a pile of car-buffing rags nearby and returned to his work on the old-school engine in silence. Bothersome silence.
“What’s wrong?” she asked, hovering over his shoulder, worried at the cold lines of his forehead.
“I’ve told her a million times she can’t call me while I’m here.” He chuckled, though the laugh didn’t meet his eyes. “This isn’t like working at Crowdwell’s. I have real bosses when I come to Ashbrooke.”
Surely, he hadn’t meant the sentence as a punch to the gut, but that was how it landed—straight between the halves of her rib cage and twice as strong as any physical assault. Everything between them was false, but the selfish parts of her still wanted him to like her. She bristled at the implication in his words.
“You’re worried I’ll snitch.”
“What? No—”
“What did she say?”
A heavy sigh. “Her trumpet has been missing for a few weeks. She’d been going to the police every day to check in, but no one’s doing anything to help her. Today, they called to tell her the case was closed.”
The worry in his eyes was real and gripping. Dropping her textbook in favor of a black sweater that would cover her grease-stained shirt, Sam bolted for the staircase out of the garage and only stopped when his strong voice called after her. “Where are you going?”
“Out. Do you want to come with me?”
“I’m working.”
Confusion replaced worry as he watched her slip into her sweater.
“You work with our cars, right?” She shrugged and tossed him the keys from her pocket. “Drive me there and that’s a full afternoon.”
“Okay, but where are we going?”
“You’ll see.”
After all, she was sacrificing everything to be the daughter of a duke. What was the point of that if she didn’t use it every once in a while? And more than that…she liked Daniel and she liked Angie. If she was going to break his heart, Sam wanted to put as much good into his world as she possibly could.
The police station was everything she expected a British police station to be. Cold, efficient, full of tea, and all too willing to bow to the whims of an MP’s daughter. Within ten minutes of being inside of the building, she’d been awarded an audience with the head of the region, offered no less than three servings of Earl Grey, and given a comfortable rolling chair that previously belonged to one of the detectives. Not to mention that Daniel, even in his grease-stained coveralls, had been mistaken for her bodyguard.
“Now, Miss Dubarry,” the chief superintendent, a tall, spindly man with what looked like a poorly corrected broken nose dotting the center of his otherwise stately face, said, settling into the chair across the desk from her. “What can I do for you today?”
Being Lady Mary Crawley or any of the other British aristocracy she’d wanted to be hadn’t worked on Daniel. But she got the sense it would work on this man. Hugging her sweater tighter around her chest to cover the grease-stains she’d gotten helping Daniel with that car engine, she sat up straighter than she’d ever imagined possible and somehow managed to stare down at the man who stood an entire foot taller than her.
“What can you do for me?” she asked, adopting the brittle tone her father did when he’d been placed at a less-than-respectable table at a restaurant. “I think the better question is what haven’t you been doing?”
“Pardon?”
The glass walls of the superintendent’s office were polished to a mirror-shine, allowing Sam an unfettered view of Daniel, who stood, sentry-like, on the wall behind her. He followed the conversation like a particularly fast-paced tennis match, quiet awe crossing his face.
“A member of my family’s personal orchestra, Angela O’Reilly, had her trumpet stolen no less than two weeks ago, and I was just informed this afternoon that shortly after doing absolutely nothing, you closed the case. Is that correct?”
“I wouldn’t say we’ve done nothing.”
“Oh.” Feigning surprise, she lifted a hand to her chest. “Then you did find the trumpet?”
“No. It’s just that there are other crimes. Other things that require attention.”
“This requires your attention. Without that trumpet, she has no way of making a living, do you want that on your conscience?”
“No, but—”
“I hope you appreciate that I’ve come here to sort this out instead of Lord Dubarry. If we had a party and he realized his favorite trumpet player was out of work because of your ineptitude…” She tilted her head even farther in the air, a feat she wasn’t entirely sure was possible before now. “Well, I just hope you don’t enjoy this desk half as much as you seem to.”
Behind her, Daniel choked on a laugh. At the sound, a smile of her own fought to surface, but she held firm. They weren’t going to get Angie’s trumpet back if she let her mask slip for even a second.
“Yes. I mean. No. I mean—”
“You mean you’ll reopen and solve this case.”
“As soon as possible.”
As soon as possible. Those words brought back a flood of memories from her childhood. When she was little and poor and powerless, everyone tossed expressions like that around before sending her off and promptly forgetting about her. All at once, she felt a kinship with Angie, the nobody from nowhere who had been trampled on by the people she trusted to fix everything. Until now, she’d been trying to convince herself that she was only doing this to win Daniel’s favor, a lie too flimsy to stand up to any serious scrutiny. Really, she just wanted a little justice. She couldn’t get any for the person she had been when the world ignored her, but she could get some for Daniel’s best friend and the woman who’d been so nice to her at their open mic night. “No. You’ll get it done today.”
“Today,” the man repeated, blinking blindly at the air in front of him.
With a flick of her wrist, Sam opened up her lecture reading and began skimming, plucking a pencil from the superintendent’s desk to take notes. “I don’t have anything to do. I’m sure you can find it while I’m waiting here.”
Already bulging eyes widened as he struggled to conjure up a reason for her to leave. “I’m sure you would be more comfortable waiting at home.”
“But then we’d be back where we started. Me out of sight and mind and you with no incentive to finish the job.”
“…I’ll get started right away.”
He was halfway to the door when Sam lazily turned a page and tossed another thinly veiled command his way. “And Mr. Best would also like a cup of tea. One sugar. Just enough milk to change the color.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Over the lip of her book, she only just caught Daniel’s reflection as he blushed. Apparently, he was as surprised as she was that she remembered how he took his tea.
…
Two hours later, he drove her back to her house, the bounty of the unscathed trumpet sitting in her lap like a sacred object. The night around the car was impenetrably dark and thick, too close for comfort, and it kept them in a lulled silence until he finally set the vehicle into park in front of the imposi
ng walls of Ashbrooke Manor. Wordlessly, Sam collected her things and set the trumpet case on her seat, meeting Daniel at her front door, the same one where he’d stupidly missed his first chance to kiss her. He wouldn’t make that same mistake again.
“You know,” he said, shoving his hands in his pockets. “What you did today…that was beyond anything—”
“It was nothing. Really,” Sam dismissed. No longer did she wear the veil of nobility she’d worn with the officer, but there was still something blocking him from seeing the real her that he’d sometimes glimpsed before. A distance. “But I would appreciate it if you didn’t tell her.”
“I don’t understand you.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re so…” He searched for the proper word and when he came up short, settled for something totally beneath her. “Cool. You don’t want me to know that anything affects you. You hide yourself. And then you do something like this.”
“It was the least I could do,” she mumbled.
“You put your neck and your family name on the line for someone you’ve only met once. And then you stand here and tell me you don’t want her to know you did it?”
If she had anything to say, she didn’t offer it. Anger was the furthest thing from his mind, but he did want to understand her. When he’d first seen her, he thought of her as a crossword puzzle. Now, he thought she was more like the Enigma code.
“I just don’t understand why you’re so hell-bent on convincing me you don’t have a heart.”
That caught her. With a rueful shake of her head, she patted his shoulder and moved for the door. “Oh, Daniel.”
“What?”
She hesitated in the shadows. “You’re the only thing convincing me that I do have one.”
Chapter Sixteen
When she and Daniel were alone, it was entirely possible for Sam to completely forget this house and everything it represented. She could kiss him without thinking about her father’s disapproval. She could rescue one of his friends without worrying it would come back to haunt her family name. When she was with him, when her hand was firmly in his and his smile was cutting through her every tightly held defense, she could forget what was coming. She could ignore the guilt snowballing inside of her. She did ignore the guilt inside of her. She could wipe her mind and pretend, for a moment, she was in a real relationship with a real man who really liked her. But as soon as she walked through that door and entered the yawning wings of the mansion, she hurtled back down to reality. This was what life with Daniel was like, too-short stretching hours of joy intercut with too-long increments of absolute misery.
