I also wouldn’t have ever worn pink Hunter boots and a pink plaid coat, so there was a lot Dusty did that I didn’t understand.
“Who are you supposed to be, Foxhunt Barbie?” I asked as she and Ronan joined us.
“Dressin’ for the hunt is tradition!” she chirped in a baby voice, widening her eyes. “Which you would know if you ever bothered to get outta that damn hoodie!” Playfully she pulled my hood up, leaning in close as I tried to swat her away. “I’m playin’ nice, Dylan,” she whispered, little louder than a breath. “Givin’ ’em exactly what they want. The dumber I look, the less reasons Pamela’ll have to go sniffin’ around for more plotlines. Dumb makes for good television.”
I was sort of impressed, in spite of myself. The idea of giving Pamela what she wanted was anathema to my very being, but even I could understand that there were more important things at play here than foiling TRC. Or trying not to look like an idiot on TV.
“All right, baby sister,” Dusty said loudly. “What am I winning this time?”
“Shooting contest. I bet Jamie that you could outshoot Ronan.”
“Is that all? Easy pickin’s!” she crowed. “You ready to lose, baby?”
“Are you sure you should be doing this?” Ronan asked carefully, placing a comforting hand on her back.
“I’m fine, sweets.” Dusty laughed it off. “I’m not made of glass. I’m not gonna break, I swear.”
I froze—was shooting a gun bad for the baby? In areas unrelated to alcohol, I had no idea what a pregnant lady could or couldn’t do. But Dusty didn’t seem in the least bit concerned, and presumably, she knew what she was doing.
“I think you’re just scared.” Dusty poked Ronan in the chest. “Scared that you’re gonna get your ass whooped by a girl.”
“Ronan’s not scared of anything!” Kit said loyally. “He once wrestled an earless seal!”
“Why would you wrestle a seal?” I asked.
“It wasna a wrestle so much as a cuddle,” Ronan clarified.
“An earless seal?” Heaven asked.
“They lack external ears, but they can still hear,” Jamie said.
“Why do you know that?” I shook my head in disbelief.
“This is not the first time I’ve heard the tale of Ronan and the Earless Seal,” he replied.
“Well now, seems like I’m hearin’ a lot of chattin’, and not a lot of shootin’.” Dusty tapped her foot impatiently. “Why don’t you quit stallin’ and march that cute butt right on up here to the pigeon-launchin’ shooter thing.”
“Ooo, she knows the technical terms, Ronan,” Kit said sarcastically. “Perhaps you should be scairt.”
“Oh man, this is going to be so great.” I rubbed my hands together gleefully as Dusty stepped forward, raising the gun to her shoulder and checking the sights. “He has no idea what he’s in for. No idea.”
“Much to my surprise, she does look somewhat…lethal,” Jamie said.
“Can’t back out now, snack boy,” I cackled. “You agreed to that bet.”
“I would never renege on a gentleman’s agreement,” he said, horrified.
“You boys may be gentlemen,” Dusty said, “but I’m about to shoot like a lady. You ready, baby?”
“I willna take it easy on ye, Dusty,” Ronan said seriously.
“If you dare take it easy on me, I’ll shoot you,” she threatened. “I wanna know I whooped your ass fair and square.”
“We shall see whose ass is whooped, madam!” Kit proclaimed. “Shooters, don your earmuffs!”
Dusty put on Heaven’s ear-protection things, careful not to smush her hair, while Ronan, much less carefully, grabbed Kit’s and jammed them on his head.
“Pull!” Dusty shouted suddenly, and the first clay flew into the air. Seconds later, it exploded. As did the next. And the next. And the one after that. Dusty eviscerated five clays; then Ronan shot, then Dusty again. To be honest, it was pretty boring—just yelling and explosions. But what was not boring at all was watching Jamie’s and Kit’s expressions of shock as Dusty shot. Round after round, as each clay exploded, Kit’s jaw dropped lower and lower.
“Bloody unbelievable.” Kit shook his head in disbelief. “This is bloody unbelievable! How is—How can she—She’s wearing far too much makeup to be good at sports.”
“Sexist!” Heaven scolded.
“I’ll never understand American girls. I swear,” he muttered. “They dinna make any sense. Supermodels with shotguns.”
Ronan was good, but he was no match for Dusty. He got nearly all of his, but not quite. Of the twenty-five clays that were launched, Dusty didn’t miss a single shot.
“Wooo-eeee!” From underneath the tree, Cash emitted an earsplitting whistle. “Helluva shot, baby girl! That’s my baby girl, y’all! She’s a killer!”
“Thanks, Daddy!” Dusty chirped.
Barf. I couldn’t decide which was worse—if Dusty was completely fine with the reappearance of Cash Keller, or if she was just pretending for the cameras. Either way, from looking at them, you’d never know they hadn’t seen each other in sixteen years.
“Brilliant shooting, darling.” Ronan folded Dusty up in his arms and kissed the top of her head. “You canna let me win just once?”
“Never.” She grinned.
“Not even wi’ my masculine pride at stake?”
“Especially not then.”
“And that’s why I love you.”
They started making out again, and the rest of us discreetly turned away.
“Well, Dylan,” Jamie said, “I honestly must say I did not see that one coming. That was…not what I expected from Dusty.”
“Don’t judge a book by its pink cover,” I said smugly. “Now pony up.”
“What, now?” he asked, bewildered. “I don’t happen to have a delicious snack on my person.”
“Who’s got a snack?” Heaven asked.
“Those are the terms of the bet. Since Dusty won, Jamie has to make me a delicious snack,” I explained.
“Way to aim low, dude.” Heaven shook her head. “You should have bet him a car or something.”
“He doesn’t have a car. And neither do I.”
“Wouldn’t have been your problem.” She shrugged. “He just would have had to come up with one. Somehow.”
“Not everyone shares your cavalier attitude toward grand theft auto,” I said.
“I borrowed Kit’s car.” Heaven glared at me. “Borrowed it. With every intention of returning it.”
“Only in the face of forcible coercion,” Kit said grumpily. “I wouldna been surprised if ye’d been halfway back to the States if I hadna arrived in time, ye wee besom.”
“Anyway,” I said to Jamie, interrupting them. “Is there somewhere in the castle we can make a snack?”
“The kitchens shouldn’t be too busy at the moment,” Jamie mused. “It’s ages until dinner. Hopefully, they shan’t be bothered if we mess around a bit in there.”
“Time for a snack now, is it? Och, I wouldna say nay to a bite of summat.” Kit patted his belly genially. “Feeling a wee bit peckish, myself.”
“No,” Heaven said firmly. “We’ve got stuff to do. And I need you at fighting weight.”
She poked his tummy, and he squealed like the Pillsbury Doughboy. Weird. What “stuff” could Heaven and Kit possibly be doing? And I didn’t even want to think about how Kit’s weight could possibly factor into it.
“Oi, away from there!” he commanded. “I’ve got a decent manly shape, thank you very much! And no matter what I eat, it willna make much of a difference to my shape in three days’ time. So I dinna see any reason why I canna have a wee sweetie.”
“No sweeties!” Heaven barked. “We’ve gotta practice and you know it.”
“She’s verra cruel, this one.” Kit jerked his thumb at Heaven, then turned to face her. “Your mum got it all wrong when she named you Heaven. Beelzebub would have been much more appropriate.”
“Hilarious. March. Back
to the castle. Now. Go.”
Heaven gave him a decided shove in the back, and he started slowly moving toward Dunyvaig, sighing heavily.
“Hey, Heaven.” I grabbed her arm. “What exactly are you doing with Kit?”
“Can’t tell you.”
“Can’t or won’t?” I narrowed my eyes.
“It’s a secret, Dylan,” she said, like she was talking to a child.
“You’re not, um…I mean you’re not…uh…are you?”
“Am I what? Oh, ew!” Suddenly, realization dawned. “God, Dylan, ew, no! He’s old! Like super old!”
“I’m sorry!” I said desperately. “I just had to ask!”
“Well, you asked, and now you know, so we never have to contemplate that horrific possibility again.” She made a barf face. “Ugh, you’ve blinded my mind’s eye. Thanks for that.” She shook her head, and followed Kit up to the castle.
“To the kitchens, then?” Jamie held out his arm, and I took it.
As we started to walk, I heard Mom’s on-camera laugh—it was totally fake—the kind she did when a guest on the show attempted a joke. A frown creased my brow.
“I’m worried about Mom,” I said quietly. “The whole Cash Keller thing. It’s weird for me; I can’t even imagine how weird it is for her. And I have no problem ignoring him and being rude, but she’s so I-am-an-adult-and-a-polite-Southern-lady-and-I-would-rather-die-than-be-rude-even-to-the-asshole-who-abandoned-me-and-my-daughters.”
“Southern women and British citizens have a lot more in common than I’d known,” Jamie said thoughtfully. “Death before rudeness. And also shockingly lethal hunting skills, apparently.”
“Yeah.” I laughed, but I ended up chewing my lip with worry. Oh. Crap. Cameraman Mike’s footfalls in the snow were so quiet that I hadn’t realized he’d been following us. I probably shouldn’t have aired Mom’s dirty laundry like that. Oh well. It was too late now. All the Leigh family laundry was swinging out in the open for anyone to see. A little colorful commentary from me wasn’t going to change anything about that.
“She’s strong, your mum,” Jamie said softly. “She’ll be fine. She handled Ronan’s mum without flinching, and Florence is the most terrifying human of my acquaintance.”
“That’s true. She’s tough. And you didn’t even see her take down the basketball coach.”
“Sorry?”
“On Mom’s show. She interviewed this Ole Miss basketball coach who’d come under fire for questionable coaching methods, and she took him out. Her show’s supposed to be, like, fluffy morning stuff—you know, like, how to make an egg-white frittata, or cost-saving tips for holiday shopping, or whatever. But then this guy made her mad. The clip went viral for, like, a hot second.”
“So your entire family’s famous, then.”
“Except for me.”
“Thank goodness,” he said warmly, and grabbed my hand.
We walked back to the castle in companionable silence, our clasped hands swinging between us. Well, silence except for anytime Cameraman Mike hit a particularly squeaky patch of snow. It really was a lot easier to pretend the camera wasn’t there when I couldn’t see it. And at least I was providing some romance for Pamela and her stupid B story.
“So what should I be expecting, snack-wise?” I asked as we entered the relative warmth of Dunyvaig’s front hall. “Are you a good cook?”
“My cooking expertise falls quite squarely under the domain of toast,” Jamie answered, and led me down the hall and into the formal dining room.
“I said a delicious snack. No way am I settling for dry toast.”
“I may have a few tricks up my sleeve.” Jamie paused in front of one of Dunyvaig’s infinite bookshelves. “Good God,” he exclaimed with shock, “is that Florence in her knickers?”
“What the—”
I turned to look. Jamie grabbed my arm, and we disappeared into the wall.
We were plunged into darkness. I reached my arm out but felt nothing. What had just happened?
“Secret door in the bookshelf,” Jamie explained as he flicked on the lights, illuminating a sparse yellow room with a leather chair and a small side table covered in, of all improbable things, an assortment of Archie Comics. “There’s a lever in one of the volumes.”
“Now that just seems excessive.” Who needed a bookshelf door that led to a tiny Archie Comics reading room? This space was the size of a good closet.
“I thought it was a rather clever way to evade the cameras.”
“Seriously? The point-and-look? Are we in a cartoon?”
“It worked, didn’t it?” he said proudly. “I pointed. He looked. And we disappeared.”
“Yeah. We shouldn’t—We’re not supposed to run away from the cameras.”
“You’re unhappy?” He seemed surprised. Understandable. “I thought you’d prefer to have a moment unrecorded.”
“I would. I definitely would. Pamela just had a, uh, chat with me about not running away from the cameras anymore. And you know that she’s—”
“Somewhat terrifying,” he finished for me. “You didn’t run away from the cameras; I abducted you. And neither of us ran at all; we merely took a shortcut the camera crew was, unfortunately for them, not privy to. And I will happily explain all of this to Pamela during our next encounter. Or perhaps Cameraman Mike will be so embarrassed he lost us that he shan’t mention it at all.”
“Perhaps,” I agreed, but I was still worried. Of course I didn’t want Pamela to sue my mom for contract violation, but selfishly, I wanted to be alone with Jamie, without the cameras. Well, at this point, the damage had been done. There probably wasn’t much to be gained by popping back out of the bookcase, I reasoned. Selfishly.
“Shall we?” As I’d been thinking, Jamie had pulled up a trapdoor in the floor.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I muttered. “It’s a secret door that leads to a trapdoor? Like I said. Excessive. Did the Murrays get a two-for-one discount on weird castle architecture or something?”
“When you’ve got a castle, you might as well lean into it, Dylan.”
I followed Jamie down the trapdoor, waiting for him at the bottom of the stairs as he shut the door over our heads and grabbed another flashlight. Was it part of the staff’s duties to leave flashlights at every trapdoor in this castle? Replace the batteries, too?
Jamie, flashlight in hand, led the way down the tunnel, turned decisively right at a fork, and only a few minutes later, we arrived at a set of stairs where yet another flashlight was waiting.
At the top of the stairs, Jamie pushed, and the trapdoor easily swung open above his head. He stepped up, and I joined him, looking around as he closed the door and replaced the small woven rug that covered it. We’d arrived in the kitchen, but it was unlike any kitchen I’d ever seen before. For one thing, it was nearly as big as the ballroom. Gleaming copper pots and pans hung along every available wall space, glinting in the light that shone down from windows in the lofty arched ceiling. In the center of the room there were six enormous tables with gleaming stainless-steel surfaces and wooden legs. Built into cavernous alcoves along the side of the room were shelving units displaying every kind of bowl and cooking utensil imaginable, and several restaurant-style ovens and stovetops, like a larger, shinier, cleaner version of the diner back home. And then I saw the fridges. So many fridges. Like a whole wall of fridges, all taller than Jamie and such brilliant stainless steel I could see the rest of the room reflected in them.
“Impressive, isn’t it?”
“I think it’s bigger than my house,” I marveled.
“Here, please. Take a seat.”
He pulled a stool out from under one of the tables, and I clambered onto it.
“Do you have a plan?” I asked as he walked purposefully over to a squat stand-alone freezer. “It seems like you know where you’re going.”
“There was something,” he said as he began rummaging through the freezer, “that I thought—I’d hoped—at one poin
t to be able to—aha!” He triumphantly pulled a Ziploc bag containing weird brown lumps out of the freezer and laid it on the table in front of me like a cat presenting a dead mouse to its owner.
“What’s that?” I asked. “They look like frozen poop logs.”
“It’s chocolate, Dylan!” he exclaimed. “Honestly, you’re insane. They’re Mars bars. I couldn’t find Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups in Dunkeld, but I think these will be better for frying. The original, isn’t that what you said?”
“Wait, what? You mean the deep-fried candy bars? Like we talked about the first day we met? I can’t believe you even remember that.”
“Of course I remember.” He seemed surprised that I was surprised. “I’ve been memorizing you from the instant I saw you, Dylan. I don’t want to forget a thing. Not a word, not a look, not a moment. I want to remember all of you.”
I felt like I’d never really understood the word “bittersweet” before, except for when it applied to chocolate. But that was all I could think of now. Hearing Jamie say that he was memorizing me caused this swell of happiness, but it was poisoned by the knowledge that he was memorizing me because we had to say good-bye. I didn’t want to just be one of Jamie’s memories, but I knew that was the best I could get. I was resigned to never seeing him again, but I couldn’t bear the idea of him never even thinking of me again—because I knew I’d never be able to stop thinking about him.
“Don’t forget me,” I whispered, horrified to feel the prickle of tears in my eyes. “Promise. Promise you won’t forget.”
“I couldn’t. I swear it. I couldn’t.”
He leaned down to kiss me where I sat, and we collided so forcefully our teeth knocked together. I clung to his back like I was drowning, and we stayed there in one long, slow kiss, until I broke away, embarrassed by the taste of salt that had trickled down with my tears.
“So, what?” I swiped my eyes with my sleeves. “You’ve just been holding on to these candy bars in hopes you’d have a chance to lure me down here and deep-fry them?”
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