She wasn’t sure what that meant—it’s only right—but it was something. All she had to do was find a perfect name between here and the inn, then do everything else without a flaw. She owed him no less.
“Thank you, Ah Ba.”
He just looked at her in confusion. “For what? For letting you talk to that man?”
“For breakfast,” she said diplomatically. “I don’t care about him at all.”
He raised an eyebrow, and she tried not to flush. He probably saw through her even faster than she saw through herself.
There. She’d seen Jeremy this morning; she’d floundered in confusion. Now that she’d had the chance to consider what he was offering in cold, hard daylight, she could recognize the facts.
For all he talked about marrying someone else, the truth of his list was obvious. He was going to heap her with compliments. He always did. And she was—no matter how she steeled herself for this eventuality—going to like it when he did so. She always did.
She didn’t think Jeremy had thought hard enough to have formed a deliberate plan to seduce her. He was many things, but she could not think him so calculating. But he was definitely charismatic enough to succeed at it without trying too hard. And he would certainly do nothing to prevent its fruition.
This realization should have been unnerving. But her horror at the thought was sadly lacking. Even though she knew it would make his inevitable departure all the more painful…some part of her wanted him to succeed.
“Have it your way,” he said. “Bring him by. I won’t even hurt him.”
“Ah Ba.”
“Or threaten him.”
“Ah Ba.”
Her father cracked his knuckles and looked up at the ceiling. “Much.”
Perhaps that was exactly what she needed to hear in the moment. Jeremy was going to seduce her…but he needn’t seduce her much. Accepting that inevitability left her in full control.
Everyone thought her so intimidating, but Chloe knew better. She’d always had feelings, too many of them to let any of them come out. She was vulnerable. She had regrets. She had wants. She was fallible, no matter how often she put on her list that she should not be so. But if she ran from the truth of herself, from the depths of her wants, he would win. She couldn’t let that happen.
No. Chloe was going to do what she did best: She was going to take charge.
3
The village of Wedgeford Down was not quiet, especially not an hour and a half after daybreak two days before the Trials. Roosters crowed. Sheep, somewhere on a nearby hill, bleated. Birds sang. Smoke rose from chimneys; laughter and voices drifted out of windows opened to the late spring sunshine.
Jeremy had returned to the center of Wedgeford after a long ramble around the perimeter. He’d taken his unfortunately named mare out for a bit of exercise, made sure she had the best of care in the stables. After she was settled in and groomed, he walked slowly across the village green, where tricolored bunting was being hung. Near him were the trees that lined the banks of the Wedge. On the far side of the green, where he could make out the silhouette of the inn across the distance, three men were unloading kegs from a wagon. A pair of geese crossed the road near them.
Likely, he knew those men. He had probably made jokes with them over a pint of ale in the past. He no doubt knew their families, their friends—and they didn’t know him at all. Just his lies of omission.
He exhaled in frustration.
“Jim? Jim!”
Jeremy turned around and was hit by the rays of the blinding morning sun, beaming directly through a gap in the trees.
“Posh Jim,” said a man standing ten feet from him, nothing more than a dark outline. “It is you! My mother said you’d arrived late last night, and I could scarcely believe it.”
Jeremy blinked, then squinted, then—“Andrew?” He asked. “It’s been years; I suppose I should call you Mr. Uchida now.”
“Mr. Uchida? You big flat bean; it’s Andy, as always. Where have you been?” The man reached out and took him by the arms, giving him a firm shake. “Daft, that’s what you are. Utterly daft. You disappeared for three years. I thought you’d forgot about us.”
“Forgot?” Jeremy blinked. He’d held all of Wedgeford in his heart these past years, Chloe most of all. Andy, having grown up here, could not possibly imagine what it was like to come to this place at the age of twelve. But Jeremy had been living…not in Wedgeford. Where people looked at him askance and whispered about his eyes and his nose when he was present, and asked ridiculous questions—such as whether his blood was red or yellow—when they became comfortable.
He could feel eyes watching him everywhere he went. Not from here, the watchers all seemed to think, although Jeremy had been born in England. Doesn’t belong, people said, and those suspicions had chafed until he’d come to Wedgeford for the first time and discovered that there was somewhere he did belong. Somewhere people looked like him—not just one or two, but an entire community. Wedgeford spanned the spectrum from pale to dark brown in skin color, and Andrew—with his light brown skin and wide nose and dark eyes—fit right in the middle.
He looked around the green. “How could I forget Wedgeford?”
“You need to explain that to me. Where have you been?”
The answer to that question was awkward, and the question sounded mostly rhetorical in any event. It was considered bad manners here to pry too much into affairs, and he could put off even a friend he’d known as long as Andy with little effort.
“Oh, I’ve been getting a little exercise this morning,” he said, purposefully misunderstanding the question. “Wedgeford has altered a bit. The inn… The roof’s been changed, hasn’t it? And the old well is gone. And—that building, there? What’s that? It’s new.”
“That’s the seed exchange,” Andrew said. “One of my projects, which I run in my spare time.” He gave Jeremy a little glance, and then smirked. “If you’ve the time while you’re here, I’ll tell you about it.”
“What used to be there, then?”
“An old stable, unused and dilapidated. We performed a little liberation.”
“Liberation?”
“It’s the fucking duke’s land,” Andrew said nonchalantly, as if it were no small matter to tear down a building belonging to the Duke of Lansing in order to make space for his own enterprise. “But since he doesn’t seem to care what we do around here, it was either let the ruins molder in the middle of the village for no reason, or…liberation.”
Liberation. This was the other reason Jeremy had never told anyone who he was.
Wedgeford was largely built on property that belonged to one man: The Duke of Lansing. Unfortunately, this happened to be Jeremy. The dukes of Lansing had collectively practiced benign neglect for over half a century. They hadn’t made any of the necessary modernizations, but they also hadn’t collected any rents. If anyone in Jeremy’s family had remembered that they owned this land, once on a minor stage route, with its only present claim to popularity being an ancient yearly festival, they hadn’t bothered to care.
Jeremy had been twelve when he first arrived, scarcely old enough to begin to comprehend his duties—just old enough to want to avoid them, in fact. He’d been absconding from a painful visit with a not-distant-enough relative who scarcely tolerated him. He had wanted to have fun and enjoy the Trials. It had seemed boorish to start conversations with, Nice to meet you, and by the by, I own your house and you owe me fifty-three years of rents.