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I set my books down on the desk and walked into the sunroom. The furniture was thick and comfy, and I could imagine sitting on the sofa and sketching or standing next to the yucca tree in the corner, painting something that just had to get out of my head.
“It’s perfect,” I said softly. “Thank you.”
Matthew said nothing. He simply smiled at me, and I drew in a deep breath as I looked around.
“You really don’t use this room?”
He shook his head. “Nan might sometimes if she’s knitting in the summer, but it’s not heated, so it can get quite cold. I’ve been meaning to have a radiator plumbed in, so I’ll contact someone next week and make that happen. Even if she does join you, she won’t bother you. She’ll just put in earphones and listen to an audiobook that she insists is a thriller, but we all know is dirty romance.”
His grandma listened to dirty romance audiobooks?
Sign me up.
“She won’t need the earphones. She can play it out loud for all I care.”
“Please, no.”
I laughed. “Can we build the easel?”
“Let me get a knife to open the box.” He disappeared into the library, then returned with a small penknife that he flicked open and sliced along the box. “I’ve never built one of these before, so you might have to bear with me.”
“They’re pretty simple.” I slipped off my ballet flats and pushed the coffee table out of the way so we could build it on the rug. “You’ll need a screwdriver.”
“Library,” he said, disappearing yet again.
I shook my head and started unpacking. Thankfully, a screwdriver was all he needed, and I’d taken everything out by the time he returned. “Ready? This is the first real test of our marriage.”
“At least it’s not Ikea,” Matthew replied, sitting down. “The last time I built something from Ikea I wanted to lock myself in my bedroom for a week.”
“Really? You have Ikea in this place? It’s not exactly heritage furniture, is it?”
He shrugged. “They have good storage options.”
I wasn’t going to argue on that.
“Also, Nan refused to get out of one of their recliners in the showroom unless we bought it for her, so there are a few of those around the place.”
“Including my bedroom.”
He slowly nodded. “Including your bedroom. I really don’t know how we ended up with six, but at least they didn’t take much putting together.”
That was a good point. I’d seen my parents fight over Ikea furniture more than once over my lifetime. Hell, even me and Adelaide had almost murdered one another on more than one occasion, and the one time I helped my best friend, Gabriella, put together a bookcase for Arrowwood Hall’s shop, we didn’t speak to each other for two days.
That was not a test this fake marriage needed, thank you very much.
“Can I ask you something?”
Matthew glanced over at me. “Anything?”
“Why don’t you have a Welsh accent?”
He chuckled, tightening a bolt that would allow me to adjust the angle of the easel. “I didn’t grow up in Wales.”
“Why not?”
“My dad was Welsh, and obviously my mum is English.”
I knew that.
“Dad went to university in London. That’s where he met Mum. After he graduated, he was offered a job in the city in finance, so he decided to stay. They moved in together, got married, had me, and moved a little further out into the countryside. My grandpa died in his early seventies, and when the title passed down, they moved back here for good. I was almost twenty at that point and at university myself, so I stayed in London for school and only came up when I had a break.” He flipped the easel over. “Dad was only the earl for eight years before he had a heart attack followed by a stroke and passed away.”
“I’m sorry,” I said softly.
He gave me a small smile. “I was not ready for this, let me tell you. I thought I had another twenty, maybe thirty, years before I’d have to worry about it. I was only glad that I got his head for numbers and business. It made taking over everything much easier.”
“That must have been tough.”
Matthew nodded. “As sad as I was for Alexander, I was grateful that he took over his title around the same time I did. We were able to traverse the waters both of losing our father and of running the estates together. As far as London… I had a job I liked, and I don’t need to tell you that it wasn’t exactly hard to move in the right circles down there, but I dropped it all as soon as Dad was admitted to hospital.”
“Did you get to see him? Before he died?”
“I did. He was in hospital for a week before his stroke, so we had a few days with him before he went into a coma.” He sighed and set the easel down. “He told me where to find the codes for everything, so I think he knew he was going to die, as morbid as that is. Mum didn’t even know the codes for the safe or anything where his will was kept, but he told me he kept it in the biscuit tin in his office.”
