Page 26 of Keep Her from Them

Mia tilted her head. “Not that I know of. Valentine was thinking you might want it.”

My heart thumped, but I shook my head and gestured to myself. “It’s a family home. Resolutely single here.”

“That shouldn’t stop you having a place of your own. Are you interested?”

Another woman appeared in the doorway behind her, Daisy, Ben’s fiancée. She and Mia worked together running a cleaning company, and Daisy had on her branded tabard, but also a panicked expression.

“Oh my God. How do I unsend an email from my phone?”

Mia blinked at her. “I don’t know. Why, what’s wrong with it?”

“Look!”

Daisy held up the screen. Mia and I leaned in to peer at the email in question.

Good afterboob,it started.

I choked.

Mia’s hand flew to her mouth. “Afterboob?”

Daisy moaned in horror. “I know. I wished a potential new client a good afterboob. Oh God, he’s going to think I’m a lunatic.”

Badly, I wanted to crack up in laughter, but that wouldn’t help stricken Daisy. “How long ago did you send it?”

“Yesterday. Does that make a difference? Please tell me I can do something.”

I tapped through the settings then on the email address. “I’m really sorry, I don’t think you can. It’s a Hotmail account. You can’t unsend to them, which I know because I once tried to unsend something daft.”

Daisy took back the phone, clutching it against her chest. “Please tell me it was ridiculous so I can feel better about this.”

I grinned. “Actually, it was. At uni, I had to cancel a session with a flight instructor and told him ‘sorry for the incontinence’ rather than ‘inconvenience’. He never replied.”

Valentine and Jackson came out of the second cottage, and my best friend smirked.

“I remember that. I’ve got a better one. I wrote ‘you go tit’ instead of ‘you got it’ to Ariel recently. It became a whole thing.”

All of us except Daisy burst out with laughter. The woman’s shoulders went down an inch, though.

Valentine pointed at himself. “When we were kids, me and my siblings changed our dad’s email sign-off. Now, to really set the scene, you have to picture our huge, serious, bar-owning father, and him sending messages that should’ve ended ‘Thanks, Bull’ but magically changing to ‘Okey dokey pig-in-a-pokey, Bull’.”

We laughed harder.

Valentine continued. “The best part is, he didn’t notice for at least a week. We forgot all about it until he came home and lined us up to get the culprit. One of his beer suppliers had pointed it out, and he realised all week he’d been sending that out. To his bank, to the doctor, everywhere.”

Daisy sighed, still crestfallen but at least slightly entertained. “Thank you all for trying to make me feel better. It looked like such an interesting cleaning job, too. A big house owned by the client’s aunt who’s gone into a care home. She was a bit of a recluse and a hoarder, according to him, and she’s given permission for the place to be cleaned out but said there’s an item of treasure hidden in the mess. He didn’t know what it was, only that it has to be found and not thrown away with the rest of the rubbish. Isn’t that enticing? Now we’ll never find out what the treasure is.”

Mia gave her a one-arm hug. “Maybe he’ll like the boob reference and book us anyway?”

The two lasses disappeared back into the house, and Valentine and Jackson enlisted me to help with the next step of their plan—a bookshelf that needed building and installing. We spent a couple of hours over it, moving a freestanding one to the place next door.

It gave me a chance to poke around and to consider Mia’s suggestion. One of the bedrooms had a wide bed in it already plus a bedside table that begged for a lamp. The comfortable sofa sat in the living room opposite a stand for a TV, the bookshelf climbing the wall to the right.

Alone for a moment, I tried to imagine living here.

If I wanted to, Gordain, who owned it and much of the land for miles around, wouldn’t mind me moving out of Braithar. But nothing felt simple right now. My mind was only half here, the other half following a certain princess around London.

Committing to a rental agreement came with a reality I didn’t like. This wasn’t a home for one man on his own.

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