Page 2 of Carbon

Ten rather sweaty minutes later, as I stood with my mother and sister pretending to listen to their conversation, the mystery man replied.

Unknown

Only one way to find out...

No, I couldn’t. I mean, the idea was preposterous. Yes, Lady Anne had gone, but Anne was a fictional character, not to mention a lot braver than me. Back in her day, the world wasn’t full of serial killers and murderers like England nowadays. Okay, so Jack the Ripper lived in the nineteenth century. And Burke and Hare. But that was completely different.

I poured myself another glass of garish yellow fruit punch from a daffodil-patterned jug and sighed. Angelica would go, but Angelica had more courage than I did. People always expressed surprise when they found out we were twins, seeing as we weren’t identical, and I quite understood why—I was the mouse to her lioness, the water to her fire.

The “other” daughter. The one without fame and all the trappings that went with it.

The one who’d never stepped out of the box I’d carefully constructed around myself as a schoolgirl.

“Angelica,” my mother bleated, interrupting my thoughts. “You simply must tell Petronella about your new book. And, Augusta, be a dear and bring us another bottle of rosé.”

Fine, so I was the waitress to Angelica’s lioness.

Why did Mother make me go to her flipping parties? I hated every second of them. And at a quarter to midnight, while Angelica dissected the plot of Sapphire Duvall’s debut novel and got several key points wrong, I was sent to the wine cellar for my sixth trip that evening. And that time I kept walking. Right out of the house, across the lawn, past the swimming pool and the tennis court, through the rose garden, and as far as the pond.

I hadn’t planned to go there. I hadn’t even thought about it. Okay, so I hadthoughtabout it, but not seriously. I mean, the whole idea was crazy, right?

But my feet walked me across the estate until the summerhouse I’d played in for hours as a child stood in front of me. Of course, since my mother had a hand in the design, it wasn’t simply a wooden hut. No, its hand-finished oak walls had been built by a master carpenter, and a sought-after designer had furnished the roomy interior. Three or four times a year, Mother would sit there and read a book for a morning before she got bored. Not one of Sapphire’s—Mother preferred memoirs.

The rest of the year it lay empty, except when I borrowed it in the warmer months. Or possibly this evening. Did Mr. Midnight really exist?

Before I could slap myself over how insanely stupid the whole idea was, I tapped in the combination to open the door, and the creaking hinges reminded me how little use the place got.

Now what?

A minute ticked past, and my toes began to get a little chilly. I still had time to leave. But the part of me that actually believed in Sapphire’s stories kept my feet planted next to the floral chaise longue, my whole body trembling in the dark.

At least, until the nearby screech of an owl brought me back to reality. Had I lost my mind?

Lady Anne might have found love on her foolhardy jaunts, but that was hardly realistic, was it? In my twenty-seven years, I’d been touched by love twice—the childhood crush I’d never quite grown out of and my husband. And look how both of those episodes ended. The boy I used to sit next to at school moved to a different county, and my husband died.

I desperately wanted to believe it would be third time lucky, but the realist in me came to the fore, and my feet finally came unstuck. What was I thinking? I should have been heading for bed with a mug of hot chocolate, not hanging around wishing for fantasy sex with a stranger.

Oh, but it had been a really, really long dry spell. Seven years. Seven long, long years.

Halfway to the door, the soft crunch of footsteps on the gravel path outside stopped me dead in my tracks. Was it him?

Lady Anne grabbed the back of the chaise longue, and her knuckles turned white as her heart beat so hard it threatened to burst from her corset.

“Identify yourself,” she said. “Who goes there?”

Me? My knuckles turned white, all right, but I choked on my words, and when I did force them out, the high-pitched squeak was plain embarrassing. “Hello? Is someone there?”

A silhouette appeared in the doorway, lit from behind by a sliver of crescent moon. I squinted in a bid to identify the man, but the darkness veiling his face gave me nothing.

“You know who it is,” he said, voice low.

“I’m quite sure I don’t.”

He stepped forward, closer, closer, until I felt the puff of breath on my cheek. “Turn around.”

“Why? What are you going to do?”

“You know that too.”

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