Page 15 of Valentine Nook
“I saw Agatha yesterday, you know . . .”
My molars grind as my jaw clenches. I open my desk drawer and rummage around for no other reason than to show Clementine I’m ignoring her.
“I was with Holiday . . .”
I stop what I’m doing and take a deep breath.Holiday.What a stupid name.
Really, I should feel sorry for the woman who’s become an unwitting pawn in my mother’s attempt to get me into arelationship, but all it’s done is solidify an idea I’ve been toying with for a while.
Renting outmycottage was the final straw.
I’ve asked my mother a thousand times to stop setting me up on dates, yet each request has fallen on deaf ears. The time for politeness is over.
Hence, the paperwork. Pulling out a tissue from the box on my desk, I wipe as much of the snail goop up as I can, but it’s already dried. No matter, everything will still be legal.
Picking up my fountain pen, which had once belonged to my father, I’m ready to scrawl my name along the dotted line at the bottom of the page, except I remember I need a witness.
I’m not going to waste my breath by asking my sister.
She wouldn’t do it anyway.
Clementine hasn’t moved when I glance up.
“We’re not ganging up on you, Lando. We just want you to be happy.”
“I’ll be happy if you stop trying to push me into a new relationship.”
“We’re not?—”
“Clem—”
“I’mnot, at least. Holiday Simpson moving into Bluebell has nothing to do with you. Mum didn’t want it sitting empty with bad memories for you, and as you weren’t going to do anything about it, she did. Holiday was the perfect candidate.”
My eye roll is thick and heavy, just like my scoff. The manure in the cow pasture smells less like bullshit.
“Fine. As long as we’re all clear I am not interested in anyone. Including the American you’re such a huge fan of.”
“We’re clear,” she snaps. “Can I go now?”
“I was never stopping you.”
Her hair flicks behind her as she turns and marches away without another word. I hear her yelling for Max to hurry upand slump back in my chair. It’s not even nine o’clock, and I’ve already had a day of it.
Sometimes I wonder how my father managed.
I pick up the phone and hit the button that takes me straight through to James Winters’s desk—the only person I do want to speak to this morning.
After my father died when I was fourteen and I inherited the dukedom, James and my father’s other advisers took me under their wings and taught me everything I needed to know about running a multibillion-pound company. That was twenty years ago, and I could never have done it without him.
The Burlington Estate Group was established in 1511 by the first Duke of Oxfordshire, and over five hundred years later, it owns approximately six hundred thousand acres of land across the United Kingdom, Europe, Asia Pacific, and North America, as well as business holdings in property, technology, and sustainability.
As the current—and eleventh—Duke of Oxfordshire, I am the head.
At thirty-four years old, I’m responsible for the salaries of close to twenty thousand people globally. While there’s a CEO for the Burlington Estate Group, along with CEOs for each of the subsidiaries within the business, I prefer to stay closer to home.
I have the legacy of Burlington to keep intact, which includes fifteen thousand acres of Oxfordshire countryside and Valentine Nook.
It keeps me immensely busy, and I want to be able to concentrate on that instead of who I’m going to marry. Or not marry.
