The billionaire’s Lavender Wife

Chapter Four — The Estate

Nobody told me the estate had a gate that opened by itself.

I know that sounds like a small thing. And it was, in the context of everything else that had happened in the past forty-eight hours, a self-opening gate was genuinely minor. I was sitting in the back of Luke's car with my one bag on my lap, watching the iron gates swing inward as we approached without Luke touching anything, and something about that automatic, silent, effortless opening felt like a metaphor I wasn't ready to unpack.

Welcome to your new life, Rose Carter, I muttered myself.

I pressed my lips together and looked out the window.

The estate was enormous in the way that completely defied preparation. I'd googled it, of course I'd googled it. I'm a twenty-five year old woman who had just agreed to move in with a man she'd met on a wet pavement outside a hospital. Naturally I'd googled it and I'd seen photographs. The photographs had not prepared me.

Old stone, pale in the Saturday morning light. Gardens stretching out on both sides, immaculate, ordered, the specific discipline of something that had been tended for generations. The windows were tall and caught the light in a way that made the interior look warm even from out here, which felt like either a promise or a very good marketing strategy.

Luke stopped the car but I was too distracted to move.

“Miss Carter,” Luke said, with the patient tone of a man who had been waiting for me to get out of the car for approximately thirty seconds and had decided to be polite about it.

“Right,” I said, snapping myself out of my daze, as I got out of the car.

I stood on the gravel, looking at the front of the Blackwood estate. The thought of my flat, the radiator that only worked on the left side, the window that let in a draft I'd been meaning to fix for eight months, the third stair that creaked and that I'd learned to step over so I didn't wake Kevin when I came home late, came rushing.

I thought about Kevin,he was the only reason any of this made sense.

I picked up my bag and walked to the front door.

Inside, the ceilings were high enough that I actually looked up.

I couldn't help it. The entrance hall had the kind of proportions that made you immediately aware of your own physical smallness not in an oppressive way, just in the way that very old, very large spaces did, like the building had been built by people who thought in a different scale.

Light came through tall windows and fell in long rectangles across the stone floor. Art on the walls, real art, the kind that had been chosen because someone had stood in front of it and felt something, not the kind that had been purchased because it matched the furniture.

Then I stopped at a vase on the console table near the wall. Ceramic,pale blue not a solid, uniform blue, but the shifting, uneven blue of something made by hand, the glaze settling differently in different areas, the surface textured where a thumb or a tool had pressed.

The lip wasn't perfectly level. The base was slightly off-round.

Someone had made this with their hands. And whoever had chosen to put it here had seen the imperfections and put it here anyway.

I stood in front of it longer than I meant to.

“Miss Carter.” Luke appeared at my elbow with the specific skill of a man who had been trained to materialize at exactly the right moment. “Your rooms are in the east wing. Mr. Blackwood is at the office and will return this evening.”

“Right,” I said. I made myself stop looking at the vase. “Of course. Lead the way.”

My room was, I didn't have a word for it that wasn't embarrassing.

It was incredibly large.The kind of space that had been designed by someone who understood the difference between scale that served the person in it and scale that was purely performative. The bed was enormous,the windows faced the gardens. There was a desk and a reading chair and a bathroom that I pushed open and immediately wished I hadn't because it made everything feel more surreal than it already was.

I set my bag on the floor.One bag in a room this size, looked like a lost item in a very large lost and found.

I went to the window and pressed one hand against the glass. The gardens below were grey-green in the morning light, immaculate and slightly melancholy the way large gardens were when no one was in them.

My phone buzzed.I looked at the message from an unknown number.

‘You should ask him why he really chose you, Rose. Out of all the women in London, why you?’

I stared at the screen recalling the night in the hospital corridor. After Kevin's episode, a different number had sent me a message.

‘Does he know what happened to your parents?’

Two messages from unknown numbers. Both sending me questions I didn't have answers to.

I looked around the room, at the high ceilings and the tall windows, the enormous bed and the one bag sitting on the floor like it had gotten lost on the way to somewhere else.

I should tell Arthur, Luke or rather show someone these messages and ask what they meant.

Instead I locked my phone and put it face-down on the desk.

I was tired, overwhelmed and I had just agreed to spend a year in this house with a man I didn't know, based on a contract that solved the immediate problem but raised approximately forty new ones.

“One thing at a time” I said as I lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling.But ceiling didn't offer an opinion either way.

I woke at 2am not gradually, the way you woke from dreams, but sharply, completely, the way you woke when something had changed in a space around you. I had heard footsteps but the estate was silent. That specific silence of a very large house at night, thick, full, the absence of the city sounds I was used to.

I lay still and listened, still nothing. Just then,my phone lit up on the bedside table. An unknown number was calling.

I stared at the screen as it rang, once, twice, three times, then it stopped.

A message arrived immediately after, ‘Sleep well, Rose Carter. Tomorrow everything changes and you still don't know half of it.’

I sat up in the dark with my heart hammering against my ribs.The estate was silent around me.But for the first time since I'd walked through the front door, it didn't feel empty.

It felt like something was watching.