Total pages in book: 120
Estimated words: 117740 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 589(@200wpm)___ 471(@250wpm)___ 392(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 117740 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 589(@200wpm)___ 471(@250wpm)___ 392(@300wpm)
“Don’t be so mean to Bongo. He’s just a little ditzy.”
“He doesn’t even have the one brain cell orange cats are rumoured to have. ‘A little ditzy’ is somewhat of an understatement,” I said dryly. “Call Isa. Now.”
“Yes, yes. I’m hanging up.”
He wasn’t going to call her.
He was never going to call her.
He was an idiot.
I could swear I wasn’t that much of a scatterbrained prat when I was nineteen.
I huffed as the radio came back to life. It was a shitty rap song that made me want to stab myself in the ears, but it was still somehow better than listening to my brother.
The Hanbury estate.
Hmm.
That call had been bound to come sooner or later. I was the head of the allotment committee, and the sitting Duke of Hanbury owned the land the allotments were situated on. Since the previous duke had died six months ago, I’d been waiting for his grandson—the new holder of the title—to contact me.
I hadn’t expected it to take this long, though.
I couldn’t believe he’d only just set foot in Hanbury. Although from what little I knew of him, I didn’t know if it was right for me to be surprised it’d taken this long. Everyone knew the late duke hadn’t been on the best terms with his grandson. He hadn’t even come for the old man’s funeral, and there was no doubt he didn’t want to uproot his entire life just to manage the family estate.
Would he even stay here? Or was he going to go right back to London when he’d seen to business here?
Ugh. I didn’t want to meet with him. The late duke had complained enough about his ‘disobedient’ grandson for me to have an unfortunate idea of what kind of a person he was, and it had nothing to do with the fact they didn’t get along.
The late duke had barely gotten on with anyone—me included. We’d only ever spoken because we had to where the allotments were concerned.
Then again, he’d just been salty that my dearly departed grandmother had rejected him back in the day for his best friend.
After sleeping with them both.
In the same week.
Granny had known how to have a good time.
I also didn’t want to think about why she’d chosen my grandpa over the duke. I could appreciate her decision-making capabilities without thinking into them too much, lest I end up giving myself nightmares.
But the new duke… Ugh. It sounded like he’d been here for all of ten minutes, and I had a bad feeling about it. I’d lived in Hanbury my whole life, and I’d never met him. If we’d crossed paths as children, it wasn’t anything I had any recollection of. All I knew about him was that his grandfather and father had fallen out when I was a child, and so they’d stopped coming.
The ins and outs weren’t my business, so I knew nothing about it.
Not that it mattered. Someone here would know why they fell out, what the late duke ate for breakfast, and what he did at nine-twenty-two a.m. on the thirteenth of June, nineteen-eighty-two.
Such was life in a tight-knit community.
Well, it didn’t affect me either way what the new duke did or where he lived. You couldn’t pay me to work at Hanbury House, so aside from dealing with allotment matters, there was little to no chance of our paths ever crossing.
That was perfectly fine by me. I could live more than happily if I never had to speak with a de Havilland ever again in my life, and the new duke would be no exception.
There was a time and a place to mingle with the aristocracy. I had no time for it, nor did I ever wish to be in a place where such a thing might occur.
Which meant the past six months had been very, very peaceful for me.
I doubted I would get that kind of peace again.
Which was somewhat ironic, given that I was a harbinger of chaos—at least according to my mother. I usually tried not to listen to her, but sometimes, some things were just undeniable.
I could do without the ‘harbinger of chaos’ being a comparison to a cat, though.
I pulled up outside the Hoopers’ cottage and grabbed my phone, quickly disconnecting it from the van’s Bluetooth. I dialled the number I had for Old Man Bruce at Hanbury House and tapped my fingers against the steering wheel.
“Good afternoon, you’ve reached the butler’s office at Hanbury House,” Bruce said smoothly. “How may I help you?”
“Bruce, it’s Rose.”
“Oh, Rosie. Your mum passed on the message, I presume?”
Ugh. “My name is still Rose, old man. Not Rosie. Rose,” I replied. “And no, Jake did, so assume I know absolutely nothing other than the fact that you called.”
Bruce chuckled. “You never used to mind being called Rosie as a child.”