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Perhaps she was wrong. Perhaps there was some hope that she had not inadvertently run off into the wilderness of a remote colony with her stepbrother’s old school chum.
“Is that a regular occurrence?” she asked weakly. “Strapping an emu to the spires of the chapel?”
Bates frowned.
“Well, it’s something of a gag to stick stuff up there…” he admitted.
Ellie felt the tension in her stomach start to relax.
“...though there was only the one bird,” he finished.
“Oh dear,” Ellie said.
She leaned forward to rest her head against her knees and hoped the boat would stop spinning.
“You don’t need to worry about the emu,” Bates quickly cut in, mistaking the cause of her abrupt anxiety. “We didn’t hurt it. It was kinda beyond that. Somebody had stuffed it. Badly. Thing looked like an overlarge turkey on stilts.”
Neil was going to kill her. Neil was going to kill both of them.
If he ever finds out, Ellie corrected herself silently. As far as Adam Bates knew, she was Eleanora Nitherscott-Watby, a widow from London with no connection to anyone he knew.
There was absolutely no reason it shouldn’t stay that way.
Bates was still talking.
“Anyway, I don’t think the Colonial Office was exactly overwhelmed with applicants. They couldn’t have been, or I can’t imagine they’d have given the post to an American who dropped out before graduating.”
“Dropped out?” Ellie echoed. Surprise momentarily overwhelmed her horror at discovering that Bates was not, in fact, a total stranger but a dangerously close connection. “Why on earth would you do that?”
“Spite, mostly,” Bates replied.
“Spite?” Ellie rose to her feet, unable to keep a note of dismay from her voice. “You dropped out of university out ofspite? Spite for what?”
“Spite for whom,” Bates corrected her. “And the answer is—my father.”
“I see,” Ellie replied—but she didn’t, really. Not at all.
She paced away from him toward the bow of the boat.
“You don’t approve,” Bates noted with a deceptively lazy ease.
Ellie took a breath, trying to be reasonable.
“I can’t say that I do,” she admitted flatly. “I don’t know your situation. It’s probably not particularly fair of me to judge, but…” Her hands reflexively clenched into fists. “You must not have had to fight very hard for your education if you could walk away from it for the sake of a grudge.”
There was a bitter snap to her words. Ellie closed her mouth and turned away, directing her attention out to the chirping, rustling wilderness around them.
She had to bite her tongue. She needed Bates. She couldn’t afford to alienate him… but his casual explanation for leaving university had quietly, thoroughly infuriated her.
“Where did you go?” he asked.
The question startled her.
“Go where?” she returned in a clipped tone.
“University,” Bates elaborated.
Ellie blinked at him in surprise.
