Ever After (Dirtshine Book 3)

by Roxie Noir

  The way she stops. Blinks. The way Arthur and his mate Paul, sitting at the bar, both blatantly turn their heads and look at her before turning back to their beers.

  The way I want to tell them both eyes fucking forward, you louts.

  Finally, she steps up in front of me, and my heart fucking hammers in my chest. She’s pretty, prettier than anyone else I’ve come across in ages, and I’ve got the sinking feeling that she might know me even though I still can’t place her.

  “Yeah?” I ask.

  “Is this where I order?”

  Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.

  The moment she opens her mouth I know exactly who she fucking is. Frankly, I was hoping to never see her again.

  “It’s the bar, isn’t it?” I ask.

  She smiles. It’s just like a fucking American girl to pretend I’m being polite when I’m not.

  “I’m just never quite sure,” she says with a little laugh. “Everywhere seems to have slightly different rules, you know? I’ve just started asking so I don’t offend anyone.”

  It’s the girl from the bridge.

  That night.

  That girl.

  The one who stopped her car a year ago, the one who fucking talked me off a ledge and watched while I walked away.

  Someone who saw me at my lowest point — well, all right, one of the lowest points, there’s been a fair few — and who I really fucking hoped I’d never see again, because the only thing worse than being seen like that is being seen like that by a pretty girl.

  She blinks, and she’s got big hazel eyes framed with long lashes, some kind of eye makeup on but fuck me if I know what, but I know one thing: she’s trying to charm me by being friendly.

  And it’s working. She’s even prettier now, in the pub, than on the verge of tears last year and since I’m stone-cold sober at the moment, I’m in far better shape to appreciate such.

  Still doesn’t mean I fucking want her here. I don’t think she recognizes me and I’d prefer she move on before she does.

  “Right, it’s the bar, you order here,” I say. I don’t move from where I’m leaning, and I don’t uncross my arms. “But I’m fresh out of cosmopolitans, appletinis, lemon drops, or anything a girl could drink enough of to start making a scene, so if that’s what you’re looking for I recommend you look elsewhere.”

  Just leave. Please just leave.

  Of course she doesn’t. She laughs. As if I was joking.

  “This crowd drink you out of appletinis?” she asks, glancing around at the scattered old men each individually nursing a pint in silence.

  I look back at the football highlights on the telly.

  “Right.”

  “What do you have?”

  “Beer, cider, whiskey, gin. It’s a pub, love.”

  “Then give me a pub beer.”

  “We’ve got bitter and stout, and none of that shite with an orange slice. American girls usually don’t like it.”

  She hops up onto a bar stool, flops her purse onto the stool next to her, and wriggles out of her jacket, pushing her hand through her curly hair.

  It’s one hell of a wriggle. It’s a wriggle to make a man forget he wants this nosy, pushy American to leave his pub.

  “I’ll take a pint of bitter,” she says.

  “You sure?”

  She pauses, gives me a quick, annoyed glance up and down.

  “Yeah, I’m sure,” she says. “Are you going to let me exchange money for beer or what?”

  I could refuse, of course. I can refuse to serve anyone for any reason, but as much as I really want her to leave I also don’t, because she’s fucking pretty, she’s giving it right back to me, and maybe she’ll wriggle back into her jacket.

  I pour her the beer, put it down in front of her.

  “Three pounds twenty,” I say. She hands me a five pound note, and as I’m handing her change back, something on her left hand catches the light.

  It’s a diamond ring.

  No: it’s a diamond ring the size of a small lorry. Fucking wonder that she can lift her hand with that thing on it. Clearly someone else has been enticed by her wiggle, someone with quite a lot of money and a need to show it off.

  That’s all it is, obviously. A ring that can be seen from orbit fucking smacks of insecurity and the desire to impress one’s friends more than it does of love, right?

  She takes a sip, watching me, and I realize I haven’t moved. That I’m still standing in front of her, like I’m expecting to converse or something.

  “It’s no appletini, but it’s not bad,” she says.

  I nod once.

  “I’ll tell the brewers,” I say, stepping away from the bar. “They’ll be positively chuffed to hear a good review from some American bird.”

  I turn away before she can respond, hitting a key on the till just for the hell of it. When I glance back she’s got her chin on one hand, watching the football highlights with the same level of moderate disinterest as everyone else in the pub.

  I can’t keep looking at her, and for fuck’s sake I can’t keep talking to her, so I do a round of the pub, picking up glasses and plates and washing them, getting ready to close. I steadfastly ignore her for the next thirty minutes.

  Finally, I glance over again. Sheer habit to see if she needs another drink, but she’s blessedly gone, the bells on the door ringing just as I notice.

  Something inside me turns over. I’m not exactly sure what it is, and given that I’m not quite used to this sort of shit at the moment, I don’t bother to identify it. I just know that the girl from the bridge showed up, didn’t recognize me, had a pint, left, and I felt some kind of way about it.

  “Because it’s three minutes off, you knob!” Giles says, his voice suddenly loud at the other end of the pub.

  “You’re a useless imbecile, this watch was given to me by my father, rest his soul, from his time in the Royal Air—”

  “THAT’S ALL!” I shout, and they both turn, looking at me guiltily.

  I glare. They go back to drinking together.

  It’s nearing 11:45 when I get home. Not late by my old standards — barely midday by my old standards — but most people in Shelton Village have probably been asleep for hours now.

  I toss my keys on the table, my coat on a hook, turn the thermostat up a couple of degrees. It’s why I took this flat in the first place, because everything else I looked at in the countryside at least four hours away from Montford Wye had sodding woodstoves for heating.

  Woodstoves.

  Admittedly, my budget was quite low and my references quite bad and I’m sure central heating would have been easy to come by otherwise, but it did make my decision easy, and now I live in a two-room house, likely two hundred years old, adjacent to a field full of sheep.

  It’s not uncommon that I wake up in the morning to a sheep staring in my bedroom window, chewing away at something, as if it thinks I ought to have been up hours ago.

  I sit in an armchair, take a deep breath, and try not to think about the girl at the bar, who was also the girl from the bridge. I don’t think about her laughing hazel eyes, the freckles scattered across her nose and cheeks, or the surprising swell of her chest against a small waist as she got out of her jacket.

  And I certainly don’t think about the enormous rock on her finger.

  I sigh, stand, check the time. Still not midnight yet, and I did promise myself I’d start today. I don’t fucking want to. Of course I don’t want to, because I’ve been an absolute cock to more than a few people in my life, and it’s not as if apologizing has ever been my strong suit.

  But I’ve got to. Useless as I found NA and AA and all those bloody recovery acronyms, in among their sanctimonious bullshit were a few good ideas, and apologizing to people I fucked over was probably one of them.

  At least Harry, my nominal sponsor who isn’t exactly aware of my attitude on said programs, agreed.

  So, I put the kettle on, sigh again, and get out the list that I wrote dow
n as a procrastination tactic. It’s a long list, made up entirely of people who I’m sure would rather not talk to me. I look at the clock again. Almost midnight, but Los Angeles is eight hours behind Britain, making it barely four in the afternoon there, so that’s no good as an excuse.

  The kettle whistles. I make tea while I try to figure out what the hell I’m going to say to him when I call, because sorry doesn’t cover as much as I’d like. Besides which, I’m sure I don’t even remember all I’ve got to be sorry for.

  I put the tea on the table, consider adding a bit of whiskey to it. Not even that much, half a shot maybe. Enough to take the edge off and make this easier, but I don’t, because drinking while apologizing to people for things to did to them while high rather blunts the point.

  Have a drink when you’re done, I tell myself. Then it’s fine. You were a junkie, not an alcoholic.

  I look at the list, sit down, wonder if I should add American Girl from the Bridge/Pub to it.

  And then I pick up my phone, even though I don’t want to, and I call my former best friend and my old bandmate Gavin before I can talk myself out of it.

  Chapter Three

  Frankie

  “Thanks,” I say to the stable guy, and he just nods as he takes the reins from me. Probably affirming he’s heard me, I don’t know. The more time I spend here, I swear to God the less I understand what I’ve gotten myself into.

  Like today, for example. I was told at ten in the morning that I should get my riding gear on, since Lady Elizabeth, my future sister-in-law, had graciously invited me along on her outing with several of her friends.

  Do I have riding gear? No, I don’t have riding gear. I’ve only got the vaguest idea of what riding gear even looks like, and for the record, it’s a tall, whip-thin blonde woman wearing tight white pants and boots, not a short, curvy, Jewish girl in jeans and sneakers.

  Yeah. Guess how that outing went. My entire right leg is muddy right now, and the mud is probably half horse shit, because I fell trying to get back into the saddle.

  Elizabeth laughed, by the way. She laughed, then she waited a good thirty seconds while I flailed around, and then she finally offered to help me up, all while very obviously trying not to laugh. I’ve never wanted an activity to be over faster in my entire life.

  Instead of heading back to the manor house straight away, because I don’t really feel like facing Elizabeth and her friends again right now, nor do I really feel like explaining to the rest of Alistair’s family and his household staff what happened, I take a stroll through the garden.

  It’s lovely, even though it’s late fall and nothing is blooming. But there’s still plenty of green, and I can get lost there for a few minutes, at least.

  I take a seat in a small grove of I-don’t-know-what, but they smell like Christmas trees, so it’s nice. Even though I’m cold, my leg is muddy, and to be honest I really just want to go home, this is nice.

  I get about three minutes to myself before footsteps approach down the path, and I sit up straight.

  Please be a gardener, I think. Please.

  No such luck, because in another moment, Alistair’s face appears.

  “There you are!” he says brightly. “Elizabeth said you’d probably be moping about somewhere in the garden, though you ought to come in and let Eunice take care of your trousers, and Gloria makes a smashing hot toddy.”

  “She said I’d be moping about in the garden?”

  Alistair just laughs and sits down next to me on the bench, puts his hand on my back.

  “Something about licking your wounds after being quite embarrassed to fall off a horse. No worries, everyone does it their first time. Perfectly normal.”

  It doesn’t make me feel better, because it’s obvious that one’s first time on a horse is not supposed to be in one’s mid-twenties. Besides, it’s not that I fell.

  It’s that his sister was a bitch about it.

  “She said I was licking my wounds because I fell?”

  “Darling, there’s nothing to be embarrassed about, horses are tricky creatures.”

  “I’m not licking my wounds, I’m pissed because she and all her stupid posh friends laughed at me.”

  Alistair frowns.

  “That doesn’t sound like Lizzie.”

  “Well, it happened.”

  “It was probably a misunderstanding,” he says, rubbing my back absentmindedly with his hand. I lean forward onto my knees, feeling some of the tension go out of my muscles. “I know better than anyone that Lizzie can be a bit odd at times. Honestly, I imagine she’s a little bit jealous of you.”

  I sigh hard, looking at my hands between my knees. Unable to imagine why a tall, blonde, rich-as-hell socialite would be jealous of me.

  “I don’t think that’s it,” I tell Alistair, looking over at his face.

  He grins, his light hair flopping out of his face.

  “You get me,” he points out. “Once we’re married, you’ll be the next Lady Winstead, and you’ll quite crush that particular dream for her. Between you and me, Lizzie couldn’t find so much as a minor baron to date her.”

  “How awful,” I deadpan.

  “At this rate she’ll either have to marry a commoner or live out her days as a spinster,” Alistair deadpans right back. “Can you imagine Lizzie as a fishwife, waking every day at dawn and taking down the laundry? Screaming at her five ill-behaved children while she slops gruel into their bowls?”

  I narrow my eyes at him, about ninety percent sure he’s kidding about this. But given the last few days, I can’t quite tell.

  “Marrying a commoner would require her to time travel back to a Dickens novel?”

  “According to her, I’m sure.”

  He rubs my back a bit more, heaving a sigh.

  “Listen, day after tomorrow we’ll take the car into Brougham where there’s a riding boutique that Lizzie and my mother quite like, and I’ll see that you’re outfitted correctly. Maybe even give you some private lessons before you join them again, yeah?”

  I have to join them again?

  I stare ahead at the evergreen bush. It’s got some little red berries on it, and I briefly wonder if they’re poisonous. If I were stuck in bed with some mystery illness, I’d probably get out of riding with Elizabeth again.

  “I definitely can’t afford a riding boutique,” I remind him. “I know you know that.”

  “Don’t be silly, of course we’ll pay for it,” he says. “Honestly, Françoise, I don’t know why you won’t let me pay for anything—”

  My shoulders tense right back up.

  “Frankie,” I say.

  His hand on my back stops for a moment, starts again.

  “Sorry,” he says, in that tone of voice that suggests that maybe he’s not all that sorry, that maybe he’s apologizing so that I stop arguing, not because he actually thinks he’s wrong.

  “Don’t call me Françoise, I hate it,” I say, tears welling in my eyes for some stupid reason.

  Getting called the wrong name might be worse than falling off horses. It’s like they all want me to be Françoise, whoever the fuck she is, instead of Frankie, the person I actually feel like.

  Alistair doesn’t answer right away, just crosses one ankle over the opposite knee and leans back on the bench, his hand still lightly rubbing my back.

  It’s a total Lord-of-the-Manor pose, and I’ve got a bad feeling about it.

  “Don’t you think Frankie is a bit... I don’t know. Unbecoming?” he asks.

  “Unbecoming.”

  “You don’t think it sounds like something you’d call a favorite pet?”

  I stare at him, mouth open. His expression doesn’t change, but he’s swimming in my vision now.

  “A favorite pet?” I whisper, my voice shaking.

  He traces shapes on my back with one finger, and through my unshed tears, I can see him give me that grin again.

  “Not that you aren’t my favorite pet,” he teases.

  I don�
��t respond.

  “But doesn’t Françoise Winstead sound a bit better than Frankie Winstead? That’s a name on a mailbox in a part of London that used to be quite nice but has deteriorated lately.”

  He thinks it’s funny. He thinks that everything here, his sister being a bitch and everyone calling me whatever the hell they want, is funny.

  “Frankie Winstead sounds fine!” I hiss, still doing my damnedest not to cry. “You don’t get to decide what it is! I do! It’s my name! And I don’t even know if I’m changing it!”

  Alistair’s grin doesn’t budge.

  “Oh, come on,” he says, still rubbing my back, perfectly genial. “We both know you’re going to take my name, don’t we?”

  I don’t say anything. I can’t. I thought he’d be on my side, but now he’s telling me that my name is better suited to a dog than a person and that I’m going to change it anyway, and I feel like I’m stuck in a hedge maze with a stranger.

  I stare at him. A tear finally spills over and I sit up straight, looking away, frustrated and angry, at a total loss for words. When we talked about it I knew he wasn’t a huge fan of me keeping my name, but I didn’t think it was all that big a deal.

  “Darling, I’m sorry,” he says instantly, his hand sliding to my shoulder. “Don’t cry, please, I’m just teasing. Of course you can keep your name and I’ll call you whatever you like.”

  Great. Now I feel like an idiot as well as frustrated and muddy.

  “I know,” I whisper.

  “I was just having a go about the mailbox,” he says. “I didn’t realize you’d take it so hard.”

  I take a deep breath, trying to control myself. I can’t believe I’m crying about something this dumb, because of course he was kidding about the mailbox, he was kidding about me being a favorite pet, he was kidding about all of it.

  Right?

  “It’s okay,” I say. “I’m just... tired, and I’m covered in mud, and...”

  “...And Lizzie’s been a haughty bitch all day?”