“Yes. Of course.”
She subsided into silence. Jay wondered if she ever laughed.
“I’m Jay, by the way,” he found himself saying. “If you don’t remember me.” The brunette was watching, and a bit of jealousy did wonders for a girl’s ambition to please. “Jay Orton. We’re neighbours. Of sorts.”
“I know. Though I thought you were called Jeremy.”
“Technically I am, but it makes me sound like a middle-aged man who wears double denim. And I also can’t stand Jez, because that makes me sound like I wear day-glo and drop cheap acid. And really, I only ever take the good stuff. So…” he gave his glass a little swirl before taking a sip. “I prefer Jay.”
“There’s a bird called a Jay,” said Sophia, apropos of very little.
“Irrefutably, this is true,” agreed Jay easily, offering her a smile. But Sophia didn’t see it. She hadn’t once turned her head towards him. He caught sight of the blush on her cheek as she looked down at her empty place setting. Dinner was taking averylong time to be served. The Duke seemed to have disappeared.
Sophia said something in a small voice that Jay couldn’t hear.
He leant towards her. “Pardon?”
“I said… I don’t know why I say the things I say.”
“Lack of practise?” he suggested off-handedly.
But Sophia turned suddenly towards him in surprise, and because he had been leaning in, she ended up being very close, so he got a full hit of those lifeless brown eyes—except the surprise that his inane comment had managed to provoke had produced a little glint of caramel in the centre, near her widened pupils. Her mouth was half open, full lips parted, her lipstick perfectly pink and glossy. It would taste horrible, he thought, he hated kissing lipsticked mouths, but he could soon kiss it all off—
“Practise,” said Sophia, before returning her focus to her plate. “Maybe that’s it.”
He would have asked her to elaborate, but at that moment, dinner was finally served. Jay ate and drank and resumed his flirtation with the girl across the table. And other than noticing that she ate very little, he barely noticed Sophia at all.
Chapter two
Sophia
Aboutamonthafterthe Duke of Cumbria’s dinner, Sophia left her mother’s house at six-fifteen and went for a run as she did almost every morning.
She had done the same when she lived in New York, except there she had only run for forty minutes, needing to be at her desk in the law firm where she worked by eight.
Now, having left her job and New York behind her, she still kept to her morning routine. She liked routines, and she liked running, and without the constraint of work on her time, and with the quiet Yorkshire roads stretching all around her, she found herself running for longer and longer, often going for an hour or more before she returned home on shaking legs, the knot of tension in her skull temporarily unwound.
It was nearly October, and the mornings were dark and damp. Sophia ran with a head torch to light her way, the dancing beam catching dew drops and rising morning mist.
On this particular morning, Sophia hadn’t gone far when a dull noise up ahead grew rapidly louder, resolving itself into the growling roar of a high-powered engine and the thumping beat of a Van Halen song.
Headlights swung around a corner, blinding her, followed a second later by a speeding car. Sophia threw herself to the side of the narrow country road. The car swerved, skidding past her, then spun out of control, hitting a tree side on with a shuddering crash.
The engine cut off, the music too. There was a hissing sound in the sudden silence. One of the car’s headlights was still on, piercing the dark like an accusing eye. The other was smashed. Sophia stared for a moment, knees shaking, her chest heaving, then jogged over, head torch bobbing, dreading what she might find.
The car was dark blue, a sporty thing, a Porsche or something. It was the passenger side that had hit the tree, and Sophia hoped there had been no one sitting there. Cringing in fear at the thought of seeing someone dead, crushed, torn, bloody, she approached the car and looked in through the driver-side window.
Her torch reflected off the glass, but she squinted past the glare. She saw the white balloon of an airbag, and a pale face slumped against the headrest. Dark hair. A trickle of blood.
She knew that fallen-angel face. It was Jay Orton.
Jay
Concussion. Whiplash. A sprained wrist.
It could have been worse, Jay supposed. It could also have been a lot better. Like, for example, if his parents weren’t in such a towering rage they refused to pick him up from the hospital or even send a car. And like, for example, if they hadn’t then sat him down the minute he limped in from the taxi and berated him for an hour straight.
“Irresponsible, feckless fucking idiot!” his father spat. Which was rich, coming from him. “I’d disinherit you if you had a brother!”
