The Chateau of Happily-Ever-Afters: a laugh-out-loud romcom!. Jaimie Admans

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      ‘A Lotto win, a milky latte with just a hint of macadamia nut, and one of those human-sized hamster wheels!’

      ‘Well, the only thing you’re going to find here are dust bunnies the size of bowling balls, so you may as well leave.’

      He laughs. ‘Okay, we’ll start with the basics. How about access to my own property?’

      ‘This isn’t your property,’ I shout out. ‘It’s Eulalie’s, and she wouldn’t want you here.’

      ‘We both signed documents that say otherwise.’

      I stand up, suddenly seething at his nerve. ‘I don’t care. You’re obviously only here because—’

      ‘Nice dust.’ He nods towards me.

      I glance down at myself. Great. I’m wearing more dust than a sock that’s been lost behind the washing machine for two years, and when I look behind me, there’s a body-width trail where I’ve unintentionally cleaned the carpet with my clothing.

      ‘Anyone would think you’d been hunting for treasure,’ he says from the courtyard.

      I look down and glare at him. ‘Well, I haven’t. Some of us are interested in more than money.’

      ‘Yeah. You’re here because you loved my great-aunt so much, and you—’

      ‘She wasn’t your great-aunt. You didn’t even know her.’

      ‘You weren’t even related to her!’

      ‘Family is about more than blood. She chose who to leave this place to, and it wasn’t you.’

      ‘Maybe she would’ve if she’d known I existed.’

      I huff, trying to ignore the niggling voice in my head. Eulalie and I were the closest thing each other had to family, but if she’d have known she had real family, would I really be the sole inheritor of this place? Probably not. ‘Well, you’re obviously only after one thing and you’re wasting your time. There’s no treasure here.’

      He nods towards me again. ‘And you know that because you’ve been rolling around on the floor trying to find it?’

      ‘No, I haven’t. But I knew Eulalie. She had a vivid imagination and she liked to tell stories. This treasure is her idea of a laugh. It doesn’t exist.’

      ‘From what I gathered at the solicitor’s office, you said that about the château too, and yet…’ He gestures at the building in front of him.

      All right, he’s got a point about that, but this is different. I can kind of understand that Eulalie would have kept quiet about owning a castle in France. I know she loved it too much to sell it, and any form of renting it out would’ve been too much work at her age, but if she’d had a treasure chest full of gold sitting in the basement, she wouldn’t have struggled to make ends meet.

      He’s still looking up at me expectantly. ‘Yeah, well, I have the key and I’m not letting you in.’

      He laughs again, like I’m too pathetic to be taken seriously. I ignore the voice in my head that says I am being utterly pathetic here.

      The laugh turns into a falsely sweet smile as he looks up at me. ‘You might have the key, but do you know what I’ve got?’

      ‘Your ticket home, with a bit of luck.’

      He grins. ‘I’ve got all the patience in the world. I’ve got no job to get back to. I’ve got no reason to leave this courtyard. So I hope you stopped for food supplies in your rush to beat me here, because I did. I’m set for weeks, me. I’m going to stay right here. So, if I can’t get in, you can’t get out. Think about that when you’ve eaten the packed lunch your mummy made for your trip back to the school playground.’

      I go to respond but nothing comes out. Bollocks. He’s right, of course. I haven’t eaten since the train switch in Calais this morning. Food didn’t even cross my mind. Somewhere downstairs, there’s my handbag with a half-eaten packet of chocolate digestives in it… No, actually, I ate those in the taxi. No one in their right mind would leave half a packet of chocolate digestives.

      ‘Oh, sod off,’ I say, pulling the window shut hard enough that the glass threatens to make an escape.

      Great. My stomach has already started rumbling, I’ve got no ingredients to make anything with, ordering a takeaway would involve having to open the door, if I could get one ordered in French anyway, and I can’t get out without him getting in.

      The sun is dropping in the sky, casting shadows across the courtyard from the trees, and I hide at the corner of the window and watch as Nephew-git McLoophole saunters back to his car. He does something to make his seat tilt back, then he sprawls into it, putting his feet up on the dashboard. He lifts his sunglasses out of his shirt, slides them on and settles back with his arms behind his head. He looks like he’s going to bed in a luxurious hotel, not a small-willy-syndrome car.

      Well, of all the things that have gone wrong in my life lately, this is definitely at the top of the list. My grand plan was to refuse him entry and send him packing with his tail between his legs. How did I end up getting myself trapped in here with no way out other than surrendering? And why didn’t it even cross my mind that, in a house that’s been unoccupied for twenty years, any food left in the cupboards would be likely to have sell-by dates so old they’d be written in roman numerals?

      As I stand there trying to brush muck off my once-lemon T-shirt, ignoring the rumbling in my stomach, which has got more insistent since his smug display outside, my mind wanders to treasure.

      What if he has a point? All the times I sat and listened to Eulalie talking about an English girl falling in love with a French duke, the lavish château they shared… I always thought they were embellished versions of reality. I knew her husband had been French and they’d spent their married life in Normandy, but there was so much glamour and luxury in her stories, and she was such a fan of unrealistic romance books, and she had been alone for so long. I always assumed she was rewriting her own memories into a love story, that there was some truth, but mostly she was just a lonely old lady who wanted to remember an ordinary life as extraordinary.

      And now I’m standing in the middle of her stories. Her husband really was a duke. There really was a château. The moat with a bridge across it. The grand ballroom I peeked into downstairs. It was all real. Is it really that far-fetched to think there might be some truth in Eulalie’s treasure riddle?

      All Loophole-git out there wants to do is squeeze as much money as he can from this place. He’s already said he wants to sell. He doesn’t care about the personal meaning. Eulalie could have sold this place years ago and made herself rich. But she chose not to. Just as she chose to leave it to me because she knew I wouldn’t. She didn’t have children, but if she had, she would have left it to them as a family legacy. I’m not family by blood, but I know this place is worth more than money. But money is my only chance of getting Nephew-git McLoophole out of my life. And it’s the one thing I don’t have.

      Unless there’s treasure.

      And I find it first.

      If there is some kind of treasure hidden here, I can use it to buy his СКАЧАТЬ