‘Liam. Right. Thank you.’ The pink started to fade, which was a shame. Without it, she looked pale and cautious, her honey-blonde hair made dull by the grey light and shadows of the castle. But for that brief moment she’d looked...alive. Vibrant, in a way Liam hadn’t expected to find at Thornwood.
Which still told him nothing about who she was or why she was in his castle. ‘And you are...?’
‘Oh! I’m Alice Walters. Your great-aunt hired me to, well, to make Thornwood Castle useful again.’
‘Useful?’ Liam frowned. ‘It’s a medieval castle in the twenty-first century. How useful can it really be?’ Interesting, he could understand. Profitable, even more so. He’d half expected to find a guided tour in progress when he arrived—all the people who’d been kept out for so long coming to gawk at everything Rose had left behind. Nothing compared to what he had planned for the place. He had so many ideas for what to do to Thornwood—things he knew Great-Aunt Rose never would have even considered—to make the place into a proper tourist attraction. One he didn’t have to visit, but still paid him handsomely.
He’d considered all sorts of options since he’d first got the phone call telling him that Thornwood Castle was his.
He just hadn’t considered useful, beyond his own financial purposes.
‘Rose wanted to make sure that the castle fulfilled its traditional role in the community,’ Alice said vaguely. ‘She hired me to make that happen.’
‘Its traditional role?’ He was starting to sound like a bad echo. But really, Alice’s explanations weren’t explaining anything at all.
Perhaps it was time for some non-English bluntness. After all, he was more Aussie than English when it came down to it—whatever Rose’s will said.
‘Look,’ he said, taking care to sound more bored than annoyed, ‘I’ll make this really easy for you. Just a simple answer to a very simple question. What the hell are you all doing in my home?’