Page 14 of And Then There Was the One
“Well,” Fletcher-Ford said, his tone still pleasant, “he sounds like a right wanker, so I don’t think we need worry much about what he thinks.” He inclined his head and added, “Shall we?” and Georgie, who was mildly flabbergasted, allowed him to lead her down the road.
They continued to make steady progress down the high street. It became more crowded as they approached the heart of the village, which boasted a post office, the Shorn Sheep and its rival pub, the Fleecy Lamb (there was a decades-long dispute over which pub had been inspired by the other’s name), the stationer, the butcher, and a few other shops. The village school must have just let out, for a gaggle of children of various ages came careening toward them, shouting like banshees. Georgie suppressed the urge to shudder; she greatly preferred children when they didn’t travel in packs.
“You’ve lived here all your life?” Fletcher-Ford asked as they hopped to the side to avoid being trampled by eight-year-olds.
Georgie nodded. “I was sent to Bath to a girls’ school for a few years—my sister was, too—but then I came home again as soon as I’d finished.”
“And you never wanted to leave? Other than for school, I mean?”
There was nothing in his tone beyond faint curiosity, but Georgie stiffened all the same. “It’s very nice here,” she said a bit haughtily.
“Undoubtedly,” he agreed. “So many cottages. So many lovely young wives. Dare I ask if there’s some special treatment in the water here, to produce such fine female specimens?”
Georgie stopped in her tracks. “Mr. Fletcher-Ford—”
“I think you ought to call me Sebastian,” he said. “If we’re to be giving the impression that I’m an old family friend.”
“I’ve no intention of doing any such thing,” she said, sounding a bit like a Regency damsel making her debut on the marriage mart. Which was ridiculous—they were in the middle of Gloucestershire. Buncombe-upon-Woolly was hardly a village that was rigorous in terms of its forms of social address—it would be hard to be when the patriarch of the local landed gentry was commonly spotted wandering around in his Wellington boots with a newspaper held before his face, receiving alarmed shouts of warning from his fellow villagers if he came close to stepping in front of a bicycle or the occasional motorcar.
(Georgie had had a stern conversation with her father on this matter on multiple occasions, but that had not preventedthings from progressing to the point that he had walked directly into a postbox a month earlier.)
“All right,” he said easily. “I shall be calling you Georgiana, then.”
“No onecalls me Georgiana.” At least not if they wanted to escape without bodily injury. She’d been named after her aunt, who was endlessly elegant and had been married three times, to increasingly wealthy (though decreasingly handsome) men.Shewas Georgiana.
Georgie was… Georgie.
“No one but me.” He offered her what he clearly considered to be a winning smile.
“If I call you Sebastian, will you call me Georgie?” she asked reluctantly.
“Or Miss Radcliffe,” he offered, all innocence. “Whichever you prefer, really—though the former is probably best for the purposes of our ruse.”
“I wouldpreferto push you into the river,” she said through gritted teeth.
“Then shall we continue our tour, so that we might approach the mighty Woolly and give you just the opportunity your heart desires?”
“My aunt has been married three times and never committed homicide,” Georgie informed him as they resumed their meandering pace down the high street. “I never appreciated what a remarkable feat that was until this moment.”
“That’s the spirit, Georgie! That’s the spirit!”
By the time Georgie had shown Mr. Fletcher-Ford—Sebastian—the school, the chocolate shop, the post office, the butcher’s, the grocer’s, and the Dozing Dragonfly, the village’s only other inn, he professed to have worked up a powerful thirst.
“You drank an entire pot of tea three hours ago,” she informed him stonily as they made their way toward the Shorn Sheep, which was beckoning them invitingly as the afternoon turned chilly, gray clouds scuttling across the sky on a cold breeze. June in England could be annoyingly tempestuous.
“Precisely,” he said, holding the door to the pub open for her. “That’s far too long to go without a drink.”
Georgie considered a retort, but in this case, she, too, had worked up a thirst, and so swept past him into the pub and seated herself in a cozy corner booth. “You may buy me a cider,” she informed Sebastian, like a queen granting a favor to a subject, and he looked precisely as delighted as she might have expected.
“Usually I have to work a bit harder than that to get a pretty girl to let me buy her a drink,” he said, and bounded off toward the bar, Georgie glaring daggers at his retreating back. She thought back to just the week before when she had sat in this very pub, thinking hopefully of the promise of a famous detective coming to help her investigation. She had expected someone who could leap in and take matters in hand, full of brilliant theories, a keen investigator. Instead, she was faced with a dreadful flirt who had not offered a single idea on how to solve this mystery, and who seemed more interested in eating baked goods and winking at pretty women than he did in solving a murder.
It was dispiriting.
He materialized before her, bearing two pints of cider, and proceeded to settle himself opposite her. He looked irritatingly pleased with the state of the world and his place in it.
“So?” Georgie prompted.
He looked at her inquiringly.
