Total pages in book: 128
Estimated words: 120230 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 601(@200wpm)___ 481(@250wpm)___ 401(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 120230 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 601(@200wpm)___ 481(@250wpm)___ 401(@300wpm)
I wasn’t sure I liked Ash’s sudden friendliness. “Can’t wait.”
“The bedrooms we’ve chosen upstairs are cozier,” Darcie added, “with their own fireplaces. Plus, the cleaners Jim hired made them up with fresh sheets, vacuumed, the whole lot.”
“But how old are the beds?” Kaea folded his arms. “How many decades of dust will we be inhaling?”
“Well, yours is an ornate four-poster. Mattress stuffed with rabbit fur.”
“Bullshit, Darceline.”
“Guess you’ll have to wait and see, Mr. Ngata.” With that, she tucked her arm through Aaron’s and tugged him past a huge space that looked like it was meant to hold a dining table, and through a door into what I assumed must be the kitchen.
Vansi joined them, while Nix chatted with Ash as the other man tried to start the fire, and Kaea decided to walk toward the windows at the other end—the very front of the house.
Grace, meanwhile, wandered over to where I was taking a close-up photograph of a detail in a tapestry. “Darcie and Kaea, they always like that?” A sidelong look at Ash out of the corner of her eye. “Straddling that line between sniping and kind of flirting?”
I winced, was struggling to think of a response when Aaron called for her with delight in his voice. Not wanting to be stuck in the gloomy living area—complete with what I’d realized were ratty fur rugs on the floor—I went with her.
Into a kitchen straight out of a museum.
Enormous black woodstove in the corner, the manufacturer’s markings on the front heavy metallic embossing. Copper utensils and pots hanging from a ceiling rack. Huge metal taps. Massive marble counters.
Those, I thought, wouldn’t look out of place in a modern home.
I tapped my knuckles on the dark green stone with veins of gray. Not my kind of color, but I couldn’t deny its beauty. “Where did this come from?”
“Italy.” Darcie leaned a hip against one end, nothing of her pregnancy yet showing in the lines of her body or face. “Where else if you were a nouveau riche former prospector with a gold mine that was throwing out more wealth than any sane person could hope to spend in their entire lifetime. Old man Shepherd was rich. Too bad he lost his mind and a massive pile of his wealth toward the end of his life.”
“Not enough to lose this place,” I pointed out. “Land alone’s got to be worth millions.” One person’s middle-of-nowheresville was a movie star’s dream hideaway.
“True enough now,” Darcie said. “But back then, without money, this place was a dead-end backwater. Even with money, Blake Shepherd wasn’t much of an entertainer, though apparently he allowed a few parties to appease his pretty new wife.”
She made a face. “Clara was twenty-five years younger than him. It can’t have been fun being stuck out here all alone with a grumpy sod of a husband who—rumor has it—had all kinds of venereal diseases from his prospector days. A little too much nighttime fun, if you know what I mean.”
“Ah, romance,” Ash said, entering the kitchen from another doorway that I realized was the hallway entrance.
His tone was even, holding neither anger nor humor.
“What can I say?” Darcie quipped. “Loony Shepherd knew how to woo his wife.” She dropped her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “Though I don’t think he really got to it until at least a couple of years into their marriage, because their first child wasn’t born until four years in. She had three more in quick succession.”
Aaron looked up from stroking the counter. “Could’ve been those diseases cramping his style.”
“Ugh, true.”
Brushing his hand lightly over Darcie’s back as she grimaced, Ash walked over to the bookshelf in one corner and picked up a thick leather-bound tome. “Aaron, look at this. We thought you could try to make a dish using one of the old recipes if we had the ingredients.”
“Wow.” Aaron’s hands trembled as he took the book. “This is a treasure, man. A true heirloom.” While he waxed lyrical over the old recipe book, Darcie led us out to the main hallway, her intent to show us upstairs to our rooms.
But she paused at the bottom of the stairs to point out a sepia photograph on the wall directly opposite. “Clara and Blake Shepherd right after their wedding in England.”
The painfully young woman in the image smiled with her lips, her eyes turbulent, while the much older man beside her looked on, grim faced. “He went all the way over there for her?”
“Guess it was the done thing for rich old men.” She led us up the stairs.
“Luna, you’re over there to the right,” she said once we reached the top landing. “I know you love your soaks, so I put you in the only single room with a claw-foot tub.” She pointed down the narrow hallway already dark with the press of oncoming night. “Grace, come with me. You and Aaron are next to Kaea.”