The final miles to the Finch estate unspooled in a silence so thick Alistair felt he could catalogue it. He drove his sensible, slightly mud-splattered sedan with a grim precision, his knuckles white on the steering wheel.
The familiar, winding country lanes gave way to unnaturally smooth tarmac, flanked by ancient stone walls that seemed to lean in, whispering of lineage and legacy. Beside him, Chloe was a study in serene composure, but Alistair, a scholar of minute details, noticed the rhythmic tap of her index finger against her knee.
A tell. He was certain it wasn’t in their meticulously drafted contract.
“The main house was built in 1882,” Alistair said, his voice emerging as a dry rasp. He cleared his throat.
“Jacobean revival style. My great-great-grandfather had an obsession with asymmetrical gables and mullioned windows.
He believed symmetry was the hobgoblin of a dull mind.”
Chloe turned from the window, her professional smile clicking into place.
“Emerson, right? ‘A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.’”
Alistair blinked, momentarily startled. “Yes. Correct.”
“I minored in English Lit,” she said with a shrug, as if it were a party trick. “Helps with small talk at weddings.
So, your great-great-grandfather was an Emerson fan with a flair for architecture. Got it.
What else should I know?”
He wanted to tell her that the house wasn’t just brick and mortar; it was a fortress of expectation, each room a silent monument to his own inadequacy. He wanted to explain that the air inside was thin, recycled through generations of judgment.
Instead, he stuck to the facts. “My grandmother, Matilda, will be waiting.
She values punctuality. We are seven minutes late.”
“Traffic outside Reddingford,” Chloe replied smoothly. “Unavoidable.
A perfectly reasonable explanation. She won’t hold it against you.”
“You don’t know my grandmother.” The words came out sharper than he intended.
Chloe’s smile didn’t falter, but her eyes held a new, analytical gleam.
“No, I don’t. But I’m about to meet her.
And she’s about to meet the woman who makes you so happy you’ve finally decided to bring her home.” She straightened her spine, the movement a silent declaration of readiness.
“Showtime, Professor.”
The car rounded a final, sweeping bend, and the house revealed itself. “Opulent,” as the outline had suggested, was a word that felt too small, too common.
The Finch estate didn’t just occupy the landscape; it commanded it. Dark stone, slick with a recent rain, rose in a chaotic yet harmonious collection of towers, gables, and chimneys against a bruised-purple sky.
It looked less like a home and more like a university that had decided to put on aristocratic airs. A pair of stone lions, their faces worn smooth by a century of weather, guarded the entrance, their silent roars frozen in time.
“The Lion’s Den,” Chloe murmured, her professional mask slipping for a fraction of a second to reveal a flicker of genuine awe, or perhaps trepidation.
“Apt,” Alistair said grimly, pulling the car to a halt on the crunchy gravel of the circular drive.
Before he could even turn off the engine, the heavy oak front door swung open. Standing silhouetted in the grand entryway was a woman who seemed to have been carved from the same unyielding stone as the house itself.
Matilda Finch was not tall, but she possessed a gravitational pull that bent the space around her. Dressed in a tweed skirt suit of moss green, her silver hair was swept into an immaculate chignon, and a string of formidable pearls rested at her throat.
Alistair’s heart began to beat a frantic, scholarly rhythm, a staccato drum against his ribs. Fight or flight, his brain supplied unhelpfully.
A limbic system response to a perceived threat.
As they got out of the car, Matilda descended the three stone steps, her movements economical and precise. Her eyes, the color of a winter sky, swept over Alistair in a cursory glance before locking onto Chloe.
It wasn’t a look of welcome; it was an appraisal, as if she were a gemologist examining a stone for flaws.
“Alistair. You’re late,” she said, her voice a low, cultured hum that carried effortlessly on the cool air.
“Grandmother,” Alistair said, his voice stiff. “There was traffic. May I introduce—”
“So, this is the one,” Matilda cut in, her gaze still fixed on Chloe. She extended a hand, her grip surprisingly firm when Chloe took it.
“The historian who finally captured our historian. A novelty.”
Chloe’s smile was warm, genuine, a masterclass in disarming charm. “It’s a pleasure to finally meet you, Mrs. Finch. Alistair has told me so much about you.”
A perfectly executed lie. Clause 7, Section B of their agreement: *Generic pleasantries shall be employed upon initial meeting.*
Matilda’s lips curved into something that might have been a smile on a lesser mortal. “I’m sure he has.
And you are Chloe Jones. He tells me you run a… consultancy.”
The slight pause before the word ‘consultancy’ loaded it with a dozen unspoken questions.
Before Chloe could reply, a smoother voice slid into the conversation.
“Don’t interrogate our guest on the driveway, Grandma. It’s terribly gauche.”
Alistair’s cousin Caleb emerged from the house, moving with the predatory grace of a panther. He was Alistair’s aesthetic opposite: tall, tanned, with dark hair artfully tousled and a smile that was perfectly, dazzlingly white.
He wore a cashmere sweater draped over his shoulders as if he’d just stepped off a yacht.
“Ali, old boy,” Caleb said, clapping a hand on Alistair’s shoulder with enough force to make him rock on his heels.
“Good to see you. And you must be Chloe.”
He turned the full force of his charisma on her, taking her hand and bowing slightly to kiss her knuckles. It was a gesture so theatrical, so overtly charming, that Alistair felt his teeth grind.
“I must say, Alistair, you’ve been holding out on us. I was beginning to think your ideal partner was a forgotten manuscript.”
His eyes, a shade of blue far warmer than his grandmother’s, roamed over Chloe with an appreciative but unnerving intensity. The smile did not, for one second, reach them.
“Manuscripts are quiet and they don’t steal the blankets,” Chloe replied, retrieving her hand with a light, easy laugh that betrayed no discomfort. “But I won him over in the end.”
Caleb’s smile widened. “I can certainly see why.”
The four of them stood there for a moment on the gravel drive, a tableau of forced civility. The air crackled with unspoken challenges and veiled assessments.
Alistair felt like a specimen under a microscope, and Chloe was the unexpected variable he’d introduced into a controlled experiment—an experiment that was already threatening to blow up in his face.
“Well, let’s not stand out in the damp,” Matilda declared, turning with a swish of tweed. “Harris will take your bags.
Come inside. Tea is waiting.”
The inside of the house was just as imposing as the exterior. A cavernous great hall with a soaring, timbered ceiling, a fireplace large enough to roast an ox, and portraits of stern-faced Finches staring down from the walls, their painted eyes following their every move.
The air smelled of old wood, lemon polish, and money.
As a manservant materialized to deal with their luggage, Matilda led them towards a drawing room, Caleb trailing beside Chloe, murmuring something that made her laugh politely. Alistair followed behind, feeling like a ghost in his own family home.
He was an archivist of the past, yet in this place, the past was a living, breathing entity that threatened to swallow him whole.
They were shown to a guest suite on the second floor. It was, of course, a single suite.
One enormous bedroom dominated by a four-poster bed that looked like a carved wooden cage, with an adjoining sitting room and bathroom. Alistair had anticipated this, had even warned Chloe it was a possibility, but the reality of it—the sheer, intimidating domesticity of it—made his throat feel tight.
Harris, the butler, deposited their bags. “Dinner is at eight o’clock, sir. Formal.”
He gave a slight bow and shut the door behind him, the click of the latch echoing in the sudden, deafening silence.
The moment the door closed, Chloe’s entire posture changed. Her shoulders, which had been relaxed and open, slumped forward.
She blew out a long, slow breath and walked over to the window, peering out at the manicured lawns rolling away into the mist.
“Well,” she said, her back to him. “That was… bracing.”
Alistair leaned his own back against the heavy door, the cool wood a comfort against his blazer. “Bracing,” he agreed.
“My grandmother could stare down a basilisk. And win.”
“And your cousin,” Chloe said, turning around. The charming smile was gone, replaced by a look of shrewd, professional analysis.
“He’s a viper. A very handsome, well-dressed viper, but a viper nonetheless.
He was trying to catch me off balance with that manuscript comment.”
“It’s his primary pastime. That and trying to prove I’m a profound disappointment to the family name.”
“He’s not very subtle about it.”
“Subtlety isn’t a Finch trait. We prefer blunt force trauma.”
Alistair pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose, the familiar gesture a small anchor in the churning sea of his anxiety. “I apologize for his behavior. And my grandmother’s.”
Chloe crossed the room and stood before him. Her professional armor was gone, and for the first time, he saw the same thing in her eyes that was ricocheting around his own chest: pure, unadulterated panic.
The pressure of the performance, the weight of the lies they were about to tell, the imposing figures of Matilda and Caleb—it all settled on them in the quiet of the room.
“Don’t apologize,” she said, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. “Just tell me we can do this.”
He looked at her—at Chloe Jones, the whirlwind of competence and charm he had hired from a website. In this opulent, suffocating room, she wasn’t a contractor anymore.
She was his only ally. She was the shield he was holding up against a lifetime of familial expectation, and he was the key to the future she was trying to build for herself.
They were two desperate people bound by a ridiculous contract, standing on the threshold of the lion’s den.
Alistair looked into her wide, worried eyes and found, to his profound surprise, a flicker of something he hadn’t felt since he’d embarked on this insane plan: a tiny, fragile spark of hope. It was the camaraderie of co-conspirators, of soldiers in a trench.
“We can do this,” he said, and the words sounded more convincing than he had any right to expect. “We just have to survive the weekend.”
She gave him a small, shaky smile that was entirely real.
“Right. Just a weekend.
Let’s go put on the show of our lives.”