eyes, and people did tend to remember them.
And she’d spent the months since congratulating herself on a job well done. Sometimes immersion therapy was the only way to go. Even when she’d understood what she’d inadvertently done, she hadn’t regretted what she’d done—only what the result of it would ask of her.
But today, it was creeping toward midday, and the weather was raw. This part of Spain was covered in a brooding winter storm that had made her drive from Madrid dicey. Particularly when she’d skirted around the mountains—the snow-covered peaks of which she could feel, now, in the frigid wind that gusted at her as she waited for the butler’s decision.
She didn’t particularly relish repeating that drive, especially without getting what she’d come for here. But she would do it if necessary. And then she would hole up in a hotel somewhere and either try to come up with a new plan to find Teo and speak to him, or she would simply go back home and get on with this new life of hers.
She was giving herself a little pep talk about what that would look like when the butler stepped back, and inclined his head.
Very, very slightly. Grudgingly, even.
“If madam will wait here,” he said, beckoning her inside to what she supposed was the foyer. Though it bore no resemblance to any other foyer Amelia had ever seen.
It always seemed to her like its own ballroom, dizzy with chandeliers, mosaic-worked mirrors and statuary clearly meant to intimidate. This was not a stately home built to offer invitations. Quite the opposite. It had been, variously, a fortress, stronghold, the seat of a revolution, a bolt-hole for a deposed king, the birthplace of a queen and a long list of other dramatic accomplishments that Amelia had spent two very long, very lonely winters studying. Right here in the vast library that soared up three floors, commanded its own wing and was more extensive than many university collections.
Amelia smiled at the butler, though she could admit it was mostly saccharine, as he shut the heavy door behind her.
He did not return the favor.
He indicated a stone bench against the wall and waited until Amelia sat.
“This is a private home, madam, not a museum,” he intoned. At her. “It is certainly not open to spontaneous visits from the public. Please respect the Duke’s wishes and stay right here. Do not move. Do not explore. Do you understand?”
“Of course,” Amelia said, frowning slightly, as if wandering off into the house where she’d once lived had never occurred to her.
Then again, the last time she’d actually lived here had been ten years ago and she hadn’t felt free to wander gaily about the place then, either. That she was unwelcome here had been made very clear. From Teo, certainly, if not from his distant father, who had been interested only in his scandalous new wife. And certainly from the legion of staff who were possessed of their own opinions about the notorious Marie French as their new mistress. Her teenage daughter had been, at best, a casualty of that war.
Or anyway, that was how Amelia had always felt.
And always stern, usually visibly horrified Teo, with those simmering black eyes, that blade of an aristocratic nose and that cruelly sensual mouth that haunted her dreams in ways that only made sense later—
Well. That had never helped.
The Amelia who had been so bent on exorcism would have launched herself into action even as the butler’s footsteps faded away, echoing off into the maw of the great house that stood proud around her. That version of herself had been deeply committed to reclaiming her life. To making something she wanted out of the things she’d been given and the things that had been pressed upon her, one way or another.
She really had made huge changes in her life last summer. She had settled in San Francisco, for one thing. No longer did she travel about with her mother, forced to act in all kinds of roles that only put strain on their already unconventional relationship.
Her first attempt at setting healthy boundaries with Marie had come when Amelia had insisted on going to college, an enterprise that her mother had found amusing at best and actively baffling at worst.
“There’s only one school that matters, silly girl,” Marie had said, laughing wildly in that sultry way of hers that Amelia had watched pull men to her from across vast ballrooms. “We call it Hard Knocks University and guess what? Tuition’s free.”
Unlike many women who, like Marie, married and divorced with the pinpoint accuracy of an expert marksman, Marie had always delighted in the fact that she’d produced a child. But then, that was the thing the dismissive, disparaging tabloids had never understood about her. Was she a gold digger? Almost certainly. But she was also earthy, charming and frequently delightful. She collected husbands because she fell for them, spent their money because she only fell for wealthy ones and moved on when she was bored. She’d made it her life’s work. And yet many of her discarded ex-lovers still chased after her, desperate for another taste.
Amelia never knew if she admired her mother or despaired of her.
“I don’t think a life of ease, cushioned by alimony payments from some of the richest men alive, constitutes the school of hard knocks,” Amelia had replied drily.
Marie had thrown up her hands. Literally. And Amelia had gotten her first taste of victory.
She had loved college. She had hidden away in Boston for four wonderful years. She’d walked along the Charles. She’d spent lazy, pretty afternoons on the Common. She’d taken trips on the weekend down to the Cape or explored the out-of-the-way harbors that dotted the rocky Maine coast. She’d camped in the Berkshires. She’d hiked through the turning leaves in the New England fall, gotten maple syrup straight from the tap in Vermont and had stayed in stark farmhouses that reminded her of Edith Wharton novels.
She had studied anthropology. Sociology. Poetry. Whatever took her fancy as well as the finance and business courses that gave her a solid foundation to best serve her mother’s needs. And for four glorious years, she’d been nothing more and nothing less than another college student in one of the best college towns in existence.
After graduation, she’d gone straight back to the job she’d been preparing for all her life. Her mother’s personal assistant, financial manager, moving specialist and far-too-often on-call therapist.
It was that last part that got old, and fast. Last June, Amelia had decided that she was never going to live her own life if she was too busy parsing every detail of Marie’s. That was when she’d decided that of all the places she’d been, she could most see herself living in beautiful San Francisco.
“But I almost never go to San Francisco,” Marie had protested. And she’d laughed when Amelia only stared back at her blandly. “Fair enough.”
Her summer in San Francisco had felt like the life Amelia had always wanted. She was twenty-six years old. The perfect age, or so it seemed to her, to be on her own in a marvelous, magical city. She could handle her mother’s affairs from afar, and did, and only rarely had to fly off to sort out whatever disaster her mother had created across the world somewhere.
Amelia had even decided that she might as well start dating. Because that was what normal people did, according to her friends. They did something other than marry in haste, then repent in the presence of swathes of legal teams, the better to iron out advantageous financial settlements.
But
