‘Yes. My sister thinks it’s so romantic.’
‘Really? Why?’ Benoit seemed to be smiling at her now. With her perhaps? She wasn’t quite sure.
‘Because they were lovers.’ She whispered the word as if it were naughty somehow.
Benoit was trying very hard not to laugh. He pressed his fist against his lips to stop himself from making the situation worse because Skye Soames was going to feel all kinds of bad in the morning. But then he was caught by the idea that his ancestor knew hers. Loved hers.
‘Catherine’s father asked Benoit to review the structural damage at the estate. He believed that a French tradesman would be “of little consequence” to his seventeen-year-old daughter. But he was wrong. Fathers usually are,’ she confided.
But, rather than the conspiratorial tone he’d expected, there was more than a hint of sadness and Benoit remembered how she’d circumnavigated his question earlier.
‘So Catherine fell in love with Benoit and he her.’
‘Skye, he came home and married Adrienne.’
‘Because he had to!’ she cried. ‘Catherine’s father wouldn’t allow the match and he sent Benoit away without paying him for the work he’d done on the estate. And then, after Catherine returned from the Middle East—’
‘The Middle East?’
‘She was forced to marry her cousin Anthony, who was horrible. Like, really horrible.’
She shivered dramatically and he decided that the unbuttoned Skye was very different to the buttoned-up one and couldn’t help but wonder what had caused such a decisive split into the two parts of her character.
‘And that’s when she hid the jewels. And wrote the coded messages in the journals.’
‘There are coded messages?’
‘Oh, Benoit, do keep up,’ she chided.
‘And you think they’re still there?’
‘They have to be. We need them.’
‘Why?’
Of all the questions he’d asked, that seemed to sober her instantly. ‘I... That’s not your concern. But we do need the map. We need you. Is it ringing any bells? Please?’
Alarm bells maybe, Benoit thought. But...actually, somewhere in the distant past there might have been something his Great-Aunt Anaïs had said. The thought remained intangible.
‘And if I help you find this map, what do I get out of it?’ he asked.
‘I...’ She seemed stuck on the thought. ‘I have nothing to offer,’ she said quietly.
Maybe. Maybe not.
‘You should try and get some sleep,’ he told her, fishing out some painkillers from the first aid kit and putting them close to the water bottle he’
d been trying to get her to drink from. ‘We’ve got a long walk ahead of us in the morning.’ And doing it on a hangover would not be pleasant, Benoit thought.
Was Skye Soames really on a one-hundred-and-fifty-year-old treasure hunt? Had Benoit been in love with Catherine enough to keep the designs of the secret passageways of an estate in England for her? There was only one person who’d know. And the moment he got back to France in five days’ time he’d find out. Because if he did have access to the map Skye so desperately wanted, then maybe there was a way to solve the problem of the damn by-law.
CHAPTER FOUR
SKYE SOAMES WAS never drinking again.
She told herself this every single time her stomach rolled or the pounding in her head became particularly acute. What was so great about it anyway? Snippets of her revealing everything to Benoit last night crashed through her mind. But, thankfully, she hadn’t spoken of her mother’s illness. She just couldn’t shake the belief that it would put her completely at his mercy.
She was exhausted. She’d always thought that drunk people just passed out, but she couldn’t even do that right. Oh, no. Instead of slamming into complete oblivion, her mind had kept racing with Technicolor fantasies of Benoit without his shirt on. In fact, he might not have had anything on in some of the more explicit moments where he’d—