Playing Dirty(144)

“We’re in a tower?”

“Hence the spiral staircase.”

“Duh,” I said, lightly slapping myself on the forehead. “I totally have that pregnancy brain thing that people always talk about.”

“Oh, I thought you were always this dim…hey, I’m kidding! I’m kidding!” Andrew said as I jabbed him again.

We passed regular arrow slits, casting their narrow illumination, and occasional doors, solid still, even with the passage of time.

“All sorts of crap in these rooms,” Andrew said. “A family like ours never throws anything away, so as fashions change, furniture just sort of migrates its way up here or down to the cellars.”

I didn’t ask why we’d come here or why we continued to climb. I didn’t think I’d even get an answer as Andrew clearly wanted to preserve his surprise, and frankly, I wanted to preserve the surprise as well. My pulse was racing with excitement, although that might also have been because there were an awful lot of stairs.

When we finally reached the top, we were presented with another elderly oaken door, smaller than the rest, seeming like an afterthought at the top of the tower.

“I hope this is the right key,” Andrew muttered to himself as he took out a second, smaller key and inserted it into the lock.

Again the lock grated, but the key turned and produced a succession of unwilling clicks as the rusted mechanism moved.

Andrew looked back at me with a grin on his face, and this time I couldn’t help answering with one of my own. Satisfied that he had my attention, he pushed at the old door with his shoulder. The hinges squealed but moved and the door edged open to reveal a little room beyond.

“After you.”

I peered in, my eyes adjusting to the gloom, alleviated by a hazy light that found its way through the dirty windows.

“Oh my…”

There were paintings stacked by the walls. They were layered with dust, but the darkness of the room had preserved them, and as I carefully wiped away the dust, I saw colors that were as rich and vivid as the day they were painted.

“This is impossible,” I breathed. I knew the artists. I knew their catalogues by heart. But what I was seeing were treasures that had been hidden from the world for centuries. Elsewhere in the royal houses, I’d been privileged to see artworks that had been seen by only a few academics and experts, but now I was seeing pictures that had not been seen by anyone outside of the British royal family. It was a moment of breathtaking wonder, the sort that any serious art-lover would probably kill for.

And yet my thoughts went in a different direction…

I looked at Andrew, who stood by the door, smiling eagerly. “Do you like them?” he asked.

I didn’t reply for a few seconds, and I quickly turned and looked back at the paintings, my mind mired in deep thought about my current situation. Andrew had brought me here for no other reason than to please me; to make me happy and inspire my artistic passions. It was a small gesture on his part, but such a sweet one, and for some reason it was enough to give me the strength and courage I needed for the very near future.

I took a deep breath and finally turned to respond.

“We should speak to your mother and tell her about the baby.”





Chapter 21

Andrew



I gave Keira a bemused smile. “What brought that on?”

She shrugged, smiling. “Maybe I just realized how truly lucky I am.”

I feigned my most arrogant smirk. “You’re only just realizing now?”

“I can be slow on the uptake sometimes.”

I smiled. “I’m pretty lucky too.”

“Well yes, obviously,” she replied with a cheeky wink, returning to the paintings. “We both know that.”

I laughed. I didn’t know what had made her change her mind and step up our plans to announce her pregnancy to my mother, and right now I didn’t care—when Keira was smiling, everything else in the world ceased to matter. It was a curious revelation for me, to be honest. In previous relationships (if that word could even be used to describe my encounters with women) my concern had been almost exclusively for my own pleasure—I wouldn’t have crossed a room to make any of them happy. But now I found that I would move heaven and earth to make Keira happy, and I wanted nothing in return other than to see her smile. She’d made me a better person, and I didn’t miss the one I’d previously been. That other version of me had apparently had more ‘fun’, but he could keep it as far as I was concerned.

I’d found something better.

“That one’s a rarity,” I said as Keira reached a particular portrait. “It’s early Tudor. From the time of Henry the Seventh. Very few portraits survive from back then.”