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“You should have.” I bobbed my head in agreement. “I was rather enjoying picking your grandfather’s brain.”
“I’m sure he’ll happily let you do it again before you leave.”
“I hope so. I’m still not sure I can take his books, though.”
“You have to,” he replied, retrieving the ball from the ground again. “He’ll be deeply offended if you don’t.”
“Yes, but if I win the bingo, it means I’ll have to speak to you again to return them.”
“Oh, no. How terrible,” he deadpanned.
I nudged him with my elbow, dipping my chin to hide my laugh. “Stop it. Although I am intrigued in how we’re going to weasel our way out of this relationship.”
“We can’t. We’ll have to get married now.”
“I might go to jail for murder if I had to marry you.”
“It would be an honour to be murdered by you.”
I laughed, shaking my head at him. “You’re insane. I mean it, though, we need to think about how we’re going to get out of this.”
“We’ll figure it out when we’re home,” he replied. “How did you get to the point of my grandparents knowing who you are? I know you mentioned something about your grandma. I’m sorry I wasn’t there.”
“It’s fine. It’s exactly like I said earlier. I was talking to your grandma and told her, and she explained that she knew. Apparently, Granny, for all her blustering, likes to brag about me, and she regularly shares photos of me with your grandma when they meet. Naturally, she recognised me right away, and mentioned it to your grandpa.” I shrugged. “They thought there had to be a reason you hadn’t introduced me by my title.”
“There was. I didn’t know it existed.”
“Well, yes.” I fought back a bubble of laughter. “But they were quite happy with my explanation that our relationship is relatively new, and you chose to introduce me that way.”
“I thought you weren’t going to lie and blame me.”
“I wasn’t, but then I was there, and they looked so happy I didn’t want to break their hearts.”
“You’re just feeding the beast.”
“Well, if you’d led with your title, we wouldn’t be here now.”
“I have to admit, I’m not mad that we are,” he said, looking over at me. “I was looking at some photos earlier.”
I scrunched up my nose. “You didn’t find my Bebo account, did you?”
“Your what—no.” He shook his head, laughing. “God, does that website still exist?”
“I don’t know, and I don’t want to know, honestly. What were you looking at?”
“Believe it or not, photos of us as children.”
I stopped in the middle of the path and stared at him. He turned to look back at me with his eyebrows raised, and I blinked several times in quick succession.
“You have pictures of us askids?” I asked.
He picked up the ball and threw it again for Bruce who shot off after it. “Apparently so. Dad scanned all our physical photos onto a big family drive a few years ago. I woke up early and didn’t want to disturb you, so I went downstairs and thought I’d see if there were any of us. I wasn’t expecting there to be any, honestly.”
“But there is?”
“Can you walk and talk at the same time?” He motioned for me to follow him. “I found a few from what I think might have been your eighth birthday party.”
“That’s… weird,” I said, hurrying to fall back into step alongside him. “I’m not sure even I have those. Dad took a lot of the family photos after Mum died and I never asked to see them.”
