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Now that they’ve brought it up, however, I can’t help being a little curious about their friendship with Nate.
Or…okay, fine. Maybe I’m more than a “little” curious. The memory of his dark, mysterious eyes is haunting me.
“How do you all know Nate?” I ask lightly. “School or…?”
“Met him through Yvonne,” Lee says. He doesn’t elaborate, which impedes my fact-finding mission.
“Okay. So how do you know Yvonne then?”
Jamie glances over at Lee. “Yvonne was your friend first, wasn’t it?”
“We hung out my first year at uni, yeah, but eventually she became more Celeste’s friend.”
“How long has she been with Nate?”
Trying to put together a picture of him in my head, it’s hard to reconcile the guy I met with someone who would date her. Those two seem so entirely incompatible. Nate is very chill, albeit broody. There was something equally enigmatic and lustful about him, a hint that beneath his hard-to-read exterior lies something wilder, raw. Yvonne was elegant, posh, and outgoing, with a hint of drama beneath the surface. She also came off a bit snooty.
“I don’t know,” Lee answers. “Like six months, maybe.”
Jamie, proving to be more perceptive than I gave him credit for, meets my gaze in the mirror and smirks slightly. “All academic there, right, Abbs? Just being thorough.”
I narrow my eyes at him.
Lee turns in his seat to stare at me. “Oh dear. Does someone have a crush?”
“Absolutely not.”
Even if Yvonne wasn’t in the picture, how could I go home telling my dad I’d fallen for a bassist? He’d disown me.
“I knew this one would be trouble from the out,” Jamie says with a chuckle. “Yvonne had better be wary.”
“I don’t have a crush,” I mutter, scowling at them both. “Just catching up on the histories.”
It isn’t long before the concrete buildings and city streets giveway to small villages, trees, and sprawling green hills. Estates delineated by wooden fences and hedgerows. It’s not so different from the secluded suburbs outside Nashville. The roads become narrow and winding as the homes grow larger and farther from the road until they disappear entirely behind iron gates and tall foliage.
“That’s the Allenbury estate,” Lee tells me as we pass a narrow driveway. “Their eldest son had to be plucked from the Ligurian Sea by the Monaco coast guard after he was tossed off the yacht of a Genoese billionaire. Rumor has it the husband flew out on his helicopter to find the lad sunbathing naked on the bunny pad with the missus.”
“What, seriously?” I ask in disbelief.
“That’s the story,” Jamie confirms. “He floated east for three hours on a life ring the crew tossed him after the husband ordered them to cut it loose from the boat.”
“Wow. That’s terrible but, like, also sort of gangster.”
Coming around a bend, we see a sign for an estate sale.
“I can’t imagine what a garage sale out here looks like,” I remark. “Whose estate is that?”
“The Tulleys,” Lee supplies with a graveness in his voice. “Few have fallen further.”
“What does that mean?”
“Was a time they were quite chummy with the royal family, but they fell out of favor with the Crown over the years. Those poor Tulleys have been in a slow-motion free fall for the better part of a decade.”
“Money troubles?” I guess. When rich people let strangers pick over their life’s possessions, it usually means one thing.
“That’s part of it,” Jamie says. “More a symptom than the illness, perhaps. That whole clan’s rife with black sheep. Drug addicts, adulterers.”
“That doesn’t seem so bad.” There are worse sins, after all.
