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Eventually, I told Ian about Lou and his father. I didn’t think it was fair, when things remained awkward between Lou, Richard and Jane, that he didn’t understand why.
I also didn’t like keeping things from him.
He, of course, knew. He’d just been doing the same thing I had, and thinking I didn’t know, he was shielding it from me.
If he ever thought less of Lou, I didn’t know.
More importantly, she didn’t either.
Steve Clifton, and Trudy, both did jailtime.
Though, as Ian suspected, not much.
I didn’t keep track of Trudy, but Ian was also correct that the hullabaloo piqued interest in his book, and it sold scads of copies.
His family, however, was terribly embarrassed about what he’d done and wrote Richard and Lady Jane a formal apology on his behalf.
When Clifton was released, emboldened by the sales of the book about his aunt, and buoyed by his infamy, he quickly researched and wrote another one about an unsolved murder mystery at an aristocratic estate.
The reviews of his writing were scathing. Historians and investigators alike were quick to point out the shoddiness of his research, and as such, his findings. His continued bent toward misogyny was called out contemptuously and broadly on all social media platforms, and the book flopped.
None of this played well with publishers, and he couldn’t find another contract.
His personal grand finale came not long after, when he drank himself to death in a drafty, dilapidated cottage on the Isle of Wight.
Just to be thorough, even though Michael and Mary were invited, Chelsea was not, this being to Ian’s birthday party.
However, this was reversed at the Christmas bash.
She never said, but I suspected Lady Jane did that specifically because, by that time, I had an enormous, heirloom diamond-surrounded-by-rubies ring on my left ring finger.
Given to me by Ian.
As planned, Ian showed at my place in London that Sunday evening with a bag in hand.
Then he took one look around my cramped Kensington flat, and, being the arrogant viscount-very-soon-to-be earl he was, he bundled me up and took me to his massive, modern, penthouse apartment with a view of the Thames.
Within a month, I put my flat on the market, because after that night, except to get my things, I never went back.
We started with a dog, a chocolate Labrador puppy I named Charlie.
Ian made threats that we’d never have children, considering how much trouble and oversight a rambunctious puppy brought to our lives. And he still grumbled, even if he took Charlie to his office with him every day, and when we were photographed walking him on the street or in the park, it was Ian who was always holding his lead.
Considering he effectively stole our dog, I came home one day to an adorable ragdoll kitten he presented me.
I named her Moxie.
She liked me.
But she adored her daddy.
I dallied in the vestibule past the allotted time on the invitations, so I walked down the aisle at precisely three minutes after three when Ian and I were wed in a sanctuary stuffed full of friends, family and villagers.
The pews packed, it was standing room only in the pretty church on the knoll in Dunmorton.
I’ll never forget the look on Ian’s handsome face when he first saw me, nor his bark of laughter that shocked everybody as it rang through the space.
But I was about to be a countess.
