“Thanks,” I say to the stable guy, and he just nods as he takes the reins from me. Probably affirming he’s heard me, I don’t know. The more time I spend here, I swear to God the less I understand what I’ve gotten myself into.

Like today, for example. I was told at ten in the morning that I should get my riding gear on, since Lady Elizabeth, my future sister-in-law, had graciously invited me along on her outing with several of her friends.

Do I have riding gear? No, I don’t have riding gear. I’ve only got the vaguest idea of what riding gear even looks like, and for the record, it’s a tall, whip-thin blonde woman wearing tight white pants and boots, not a short, curvy, Jewish girl in jeans and sneakers.

Yeah. Guess how that outing went. My entire right leg is muddy right now, and the mud is probably half horse shit, because I fell trying to get back into the saddle.

Elizabeth laughed, by the way. She laughed, then she waited a good thirty seconds while I flailed around, and then she finally offered to help me up, all while very obviously trying not to laugh. I’ve never wanted an activity to be over faster in my entire life.

Instead of heading back to the manor house straight away, because I don’t really feel like facing Elizabeth and her friends again right now, nor do I really feel like explaining to the rest of Alistair’s family and his household staff what happened, I take a stroll through the garden.

It’s lovely, even though it’s late fall and nothing is blooming. But there’s still plenty of green, and I can get lost there for a few minutes, at least.

I take a seat in a small grove of I-don’t-know-what, but they smell like Christmas trees, so it’s nice. Even though I’m cold, my leg is muddy, and to be honest I really just want to go home, this is nice.

I get about three minutes to myself before footsteps approach down the path, and I sit up straight.

Please be a gardener, I think. Please.

No such luck, because in another moment, Alistair’s face appears.

“There you are!” he says brightly. “Elizabeth said you’d probably be moping about somewhere in the garden, though you ought to come in and let Eunice take care of your trousers, and Gloria makes a smashing hot toddy.”

“She said I’d be moping about in the garden?”

Alistair just laughs and sits down next to me on the bench, puts his hand on my back.

“Something about licking your wounds after being quite embarrassed to fall off a horse. No worries, everyone does it their first time. Perfectly normal.”

It doesn’t make me feel better, because it’s obvious that one’s first time on a horse is not supposed to be in one’s mid-twenties. Besides, it’s not that I fell.

It’s that his sister was a bitch about it.

“She said I was licking my wounds because I fell?”

“Darling, there’s nothing to be embarrassed about, horses are tricky creatures.”

“I’m not licking my wounds, I’m pissed because she and all her stupid posh friends laughed at me.”

Alistair frowns.

“That doesn’t sound like Lizzie.”

“Well, it happened.”

“It was probably a misunderstanding,” he says, rubbing my back absentmindedly with his hand. I lean forward onto my knees, feeling some of the tension go out of my muscles. “I know better than anyone that Lizzie can be a bit odd at times. Honestly, I imagine she’s a little bit jealous of you.”

I sigh hard, looking at my hands between my knees. Unable to imagine why a tall, blonde, rich-as-hell socialite would be jealous of me.

“I don’t think that’s it,” I tell Alistair, looking over at his face.

He grins, his light hair flopping out of his face.

“You get me,” he points out. “Once we’re married, you’ll be the next Lady Winstead, and you’ll quite crush that particular dream for her. Between you and me, Lizzie couldn’t find so much as a minor baron to date her.”

“How awful,” I deadpan.

“At this rate she’ll either have to marry a commoner or live out her days as a spinster,” Alistair deadpans right back. “Can you imagine Lizzie as a fishwife, waking every day at dawn and taking down the laundry? Screaming at her five ill-behaved children while she slops gruel into their bowls?”

I narrow my eyes at him, about ninety percent sure he’s kidding about this. But given the last few days, I can’t quite tell.

“Marrying a commoner would require her to time travel back to a Dickens novel?”

“According to her, I’m sure.”

He rubs my back a bit more, heaving a sigh.

“Listen, day after tomorrow we’ll take the car into Brougham where there’s a riding boutique that Lizzie and my mother quite like, and I’ll see that you’re outfitted correctly. Maybe even give you some private lessons before you join them again, yeah?”

I have to join them again?

I stare ahead at the evergreen bush. It’s got some little red berries on it, and I briefly wonder if they’re poisonous. If I were stuck in bed with some mystery illness, I’d probably get out of riding with Elizabeth again.

“I definitely can’t afford a riding boutique,” I remind him. “I know you know that.”

“Don’t be silly, of course we’ll pay for it,” he says. “Honestly, Françoise, I don’t know why you won’t let me pay for anything—”

My shoulders tense right back up.

“Frankie,” I say.

His hand on my back stops for a moment, starts again.

“Sorry,” he says, in that tone of voice that suggests that maybe he’s not all that sorry, that maybe he’s apologizing so that I stop arguing, not because he actually thinks he’s wrong.

“Don’t call me Françoise, I hate it,” I say, tears welling in my eyes for some stupid reason.

Getting called the wrong name might be worse than falling off horses. It’s like they all want me to be Françoise, whoever the fuck she is, instead of Frankie, the person I actually feel like.

Alistair doesn’t answer right away, just crosses one ankle over the opposite knee and leans back on the bench, his hand still lightly rubbing my back.

It’s a total Lord-of-the-Manor pose, and I’ve got a bad feeling about it.

“Don’t you think Frankie is a bit... I don’t know. Unbecoming?” he asks.

“Unbecoming.”

“You don’t think it sounds like something you’d call a favorite pet?”

I stare at him, mouth open. His expression doesn’t change, but he’s swimming in my vision now.

“A favorite pet?” I whisper, my voice shaking.

He traces shapes on my back with one finger, and through my unshed tears, I can see him give me that grin again.

“Not that you aren’t my favorite pet,” he teases.

I don’t respond.

“But doesn’t Françoise Winstead sound a bit better than Frankie Winstead? That’s a name on a mailbox in a part of London that used to be quite nice but has deteriorated lately.”

He thinks it’s funny. He thinks that everything here, his sister being a bitch and everyone calling me whatever the hell they want, is funny.

“Frankie Winstead sounds fine!” I hiss, still doing my damnedest not to cry. “You don’t get to decide what it is! I do! It’s my name! And I don’t even know if I’m changing it!”

Alistair’s grin doesn’t budge.

“Oh, come on,” he says, still rubbing my back, perfectly genial. “We both know you’re going to take my name, don’t we?”

I don’t say anything. I can’t. I thought he’d be on my side, but now he’s telling me that my name is better suited to a dog than a person and that I’m going to change it anyway, and I feel like I’m stuck in a hedge maze with a stranger.

I stare at him. A tear finally spills over and I sit up straight, looking away, frustrated and angry, at a total loss for words. When we talked about it I knew he wasn’t a huge fan of me keeping my name, but I didn’t think it was all that big a deal.

“Darling, I’m sorry,” he says instantly, his hand sliding to my shoulder. “Don’t cry, please, I’m just teasing. Of course you can keep your name and I’ll call you whatever you like.”

Great. Now I feel like an idiot as well as frustrated and muddy.

“I know,” I whisper.

“I was just having a go about the mailbox,” he says. “I didn’t realize you’d take it so hard.”

I take a deep breath, trying to control myself. I can’t believe I’m crying about something this dumb, because of course he was kidding about the mailbox, he was kidding about me being a favorite pet, he was kidding about all of it.

Right?

“It’s okay,” I say. “I’m just... tired, and I’m covered in mud, and...”

“...And Lizzie’s been a haughty bitch all day?”

I smile, then sniffle.

“You said it, not me.”

“Believe me, I know better than near anyone what a massive pain in the arse my sister can be. Let me guess, when you fell in the mud she looked right down her pointy nose at you like she was trying not to laugh instead of asking if you were all right?”

I rub my eyes with my fingers, probably smearing mud on my face.

“How’d you know?” I ask.

“Long experience,” he says. “Listen, you’re doing fabulously. They’ll all come around, I promise. Let’s go inside, get you showered, have a cocktail and you’ll be right as rain in no time.”

He stands, offering me his hand, and I wipe my face with my shirt sleeve before I take it.

For the tiniest fraction of a moment, I swear I see something flicker across his face. Irritation, annoyance, impatience, something that I can’t quite put my finger on before it’s gone and he’s all gentlemanly smiles again.

He guides me to the back stairs so I don’t have to see anyone else, and up to my room, where I strip off my muddy clothes and stand under a hot shower, hoping it washes off more than just mud.

It would be nice if it washed away the awkward, ungainly parts of me. If it washed away all the social clumsiness I’ve got, the not quite understanding what’s appropriate here.

I wish it would wash away my emotional overreacting to something as silly as Alistair calling me Françoise instead of Frankie. It’s my name, isn’t it? Even if I’d rather be Frankie, does it really matter than much?

It shouldn’t. The water beats down on me as I scrub myself clean, and I tell myself that what Alistair calls me shouldn’t matter that much.

But I can’t quite help it. The hottest, longest shower in the world combined with all the calm self-talk doesn’t completely erase the tiny, nagging suspicion I have that his apology wasn’t the sincere part of our conversation. I worry that when he smiles and tells me things like Frankie is a name for pets, he means it.

Stop it, I tell myself. It’s Alistair. That’s just his sense of humor. He’s been this way since you’ve known him.

I get out of the shower after using most of the water in England. I dry my hair, and for once, it actually looks all right. With all the perfectly straight blonde hair around here I’ll still look like a zebra in a herd of horses, but at least we’re close to the same species. Zebras and horses can interbreed, after all.

Then I dress for dinner in the loudest thing I brought: a drapey, long-sleeve, gold lamé dress circa 1975 and the peep-toe shoes.

It’s fabulous as hell.

The Ladies Winstead are going to hate it.

* * *

They do. So do tonight’s guests, some man who’s the heir to a Greek shipping fortune and his social-climbing wife. None of them say it out loud, of course, but I’m not stupid.

To make matters worse, I’m finally realizing the reason that Elizabeth’s friends seem to hate me.

One of them wants Alistair. I think her name is Bridget, though I can barely tell her apart from the rest: long, stick-straight blondish hair, thin as a rail, flawless pale skin, and the air and demeanor of someone who’s used to dressing for dinner and going riding and probably doesn’t even know what a resumé is.

She connives to sit next to him at dinner, which means that as I sit on his other side I have to hear her stupid laugh and her stupid posh accent and the breathless way she takes in everything he tells her.

I’m not jealous, because that would be dumb. Alistair is engaged to me and is just being polite to this other woman, but something about it still grates on my nerves, dumb or not. We just had a fight and I think we made up from the fight, but I’ve still got that post-fight unease sloshing around inside me.

Would it kill him to talk to me a little more than he’s talking to her? I think, stabbing at a bite of salad so hard that my fork squeaks against my plate.

The elder Lady Winstead looks over at the noise, and though a heroic effort at self-control, I don’t stick my tongue out at her. Alistair glances at me, smiles, pats my leg, and resumes his conversation with Bridget.

I get through dinner, dessert, and after-dinner chitchat by reminding myself that I’m overreacting and Alistair is allowed to talk to other women. It’s probably even encouraged and polite, because it’s not like he could just ignore her.

But I still get away the moment I can. It’s been a long, exhausting, weird day and once more I’m actually grateful that Lady Catherine thinks it’s inappropriate for an unmarried couple to share a bed, because being alone right now is glorious.

I flop onto a chair, the lights off. I look out the window at the moonlit gardens, take a deep breath, and try not to think about Bridget blatantly flirting with my fiancé, or about my fiancé cluelessly chatting her up the whole evening, or about his stupid sister telling everyone at dinner the hilarious story about how I fell into a mud puddle, or the look his stupid mother gave me when she saw my dress.

I half-sit, half-lay in the chair for a long time. Until I start to feel guilty that I’m on vacation, in the beautiful, half-wild north of England, staying in a ridiculous manor house with actual servants, and I’m having a bad time.

And I think about the pub I went to last night, the one where the guy tending bar really looked like the guy who was trying to jump off a bridge when Alistair and I went to the northeast coast and Scotland last year.

It’s not the same guy — the bartender is pretty hot, the other guy’s probably dead, let’s be honest — but they look enough alike that I thought about that night on the bridge for the first time in a while.

God, that was weird. I still wonder why I stopped, even though I’m glad I did. It was late, and I was tired, and in one of my nothing bad will happen on my watch! moods.

Even though everyone knows those moods don’t help. He slunk off that night, sure, but I know all too well that he was probably back there the next night and the next until he finally got slashed to smithereens on those tracks, because that’s what happens. People don’t change, no matter how you try to help them.

I sigh, glance out the window. I’m not even a little bit tired, and honestly, I could use a drink. It could even come from a cute bartender, and after watching Alistair smile at Bridget for an hour, I don’t even have to feel bad about some harmless flirting.

Before I know it, I’ve got my dress off and I’m pulling my jeans and a shirt on. Grabbing my jacket and my purse, taking the pins out of my hair and running my hands through it so it’s a little livelier.

Then I’m down the back stairs, outside, to the garage again. Rupert’s there — I did find out his name — and he looks amused again as he hands me the keys to the Toyota.

Twenty minutes later, I’m opening the door of the Hound’s Ears for the second time this week.