And thank God I had no interest in Charlotte.
God only knew what resided in the lake on our estate.
It could have been the Devonshire monster for all I knew.
CHAPTER THREE – SOPHIE
Note To Self: Learn To Say No
“Absolutely not.”
“Please,” Cam said down the crackling phone line. “Soph, I’m stuck here. I have no idea when I can leave. Believe me when I say I’ve tried everything.”
“You’re in Norway, not the bloody North Pole. What do you mean there aren’t any flights?”
“There aren’t any flights,” Cam replied. “They’ve all been cancelled. Between a strike—”
I stopped with the fridge door open. “A strike? Where are you? Norway or fucking Spain? Aren’t the Scandinavians all supposed to be happy?”
“—And a storm, I’m totally stuffed. I’ve even looked into getting the train to Sweden to get out, but they’ve cancelled flights, too. Finland and Russia are out of the question. It’d take me forever and a day to hit the borders, and I probably wouldn’t be able to get there anyway.”
Who knew Norway bordered so many countries?
Not me.
“Cam, what you’re asking me is utterly insane. There’s no way I can drive down to Devon and do this party in your place.” I pulled the wine bottle from the fridge and set it down on the counter so I could unscrew the cap one-handed.
It’d been three weeks since I’d answered that call from Fancy Nancy, the point of contact for The Duchess of Devon, if you please. Cam had been in Norway visiting her family for the last week, and now a major winter storm was rolling in.
It was March.
Personally, I thought it was too bloody late for a winter storm, but if you lived that far north, it wasn’t that unusual, apparently.
I was just waiting for the papers to come out with their “Beast from the East” bollocks they usually did.
She’d already delayed her return by three days since her grandma was sick—a delay I didn’t begrudge her at all, but there was no way I’d be able to go to Devon tomorrow and take her place.
I couldn’t organise anything, much less a party for an old aristocratic family who had insane standards.
Camilla didn’t even let me organise the spices, for goodness sake.
“Please, Soph. It’s only forecast for a few days. We’re talking two—three days max—and I’ll be able to get a flight out from either Oslo or Gothenburg. Gothenburg is only three hours away, it’s not that bad.”
“Gothenburg? Are you there with Batman? Are you secretly Catwoman? God, that would make so much sense.”
“Sophie!”
I groaned after filling my wine glass and put the bottle down. “Camilla, I cannot go down there. I can’t organise my hairbrushes. There’s no way that, out of all the people you know, you can send me to Devon to organise a bloody aristocrat’s birthday party and expect me to get it right.”
“Of course I can.” The line crackled, and her next few words came in fits and spurts of broken English.
“Cam? I can’t hear you!”
Oh no, no, no. She was not sticking me with this! I was not capable of organising such a shindig. I was a toddler in an adult’s body.
Did you hear that, God?
A toddler in an adult’s body.