I didn’t say that, though. What I did say was, “Oooh, is that the pub?”

My stomach grumbled, as if seconding my question.

“The very one,” said Colin, swinging around the side of the building.

Twisting in my seat to stare through the back window, I squinted at the sign hanging from a long pole stuck in the ground in proper ye olde pub fashion. It featured a decidedly potbellied deer. Picture Homer Simpson as Bambi’s fat old uncle (the one who likes to drink and smoke and refuses to go running with the rest of the herd) and you get the idea. The name of the pub was the Heavy Hart.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said, pointing at the sign through the car window. “That can’t be the real name.”

“I think the real name was the Hart and Hare.” Colin brought the Range Rover to an expert halt in the anachronistic but very convenient car park that had been laid to one side of the building. “Something nondescript, at any rate.”

“I like it,” I said. “Nice little in-joke there. So is this your local watering hole?”

Aside from the name and the beer signs in the window, it was the very image of an Old World pub, a two-story building of white stucco with a roof that slanted down over chimneys on both sides. White lettering on the bottom of the sign proudly declared, EST. 1682. A chalkboard stuck beneath the inn sign advertised that Tuesday was Quiz Night. Despite living in London for three months, I’d never actually been to a pub quiz. Perhaps Colin would be up for going on Tuesday.

This, I thought smugly as I climbed out of the Range Rover, was the stuff of which real relationships were made. We wouldn’t be one of those couples who had to spend all their time in each other’s pockets. No, we could spend the day happily immersed in our own pursuits and then rejoice at coming together again for a pub quiz or a romantic tête-à-tête over bangers and mash. Because nothing says romance quite like a large pile of sausages.

Trip-trapping merrily along in the three-inch stacked loafers that were the closest thing I owned to sensible shoes, I followed Colin in through the suitably battered door of the pub, into a long room with all the dark wood and exposed beams my little heart could desire. And came to an abrupt halt as vague shapes formed into people, and recognizable people, at that.

What I hadn’t stopped to consider was that if this was the local watering hole, there would probably be locals in it.

“Sorry,” Colin muttered out of the side of his mouth, pasting on a big, friendly smile. “I didn’t know they’d be here.”

“S’okay,” I whispered back, pasting on a fake smile of my own.

I had met a smattering of the locals at a cocktail party my last time there, back in the days when I was still a tagalong American researcher rather than rehearsing for the role of mistress of the house. For the most part, I had found them incredibly friendly and welcoming.

For the most part.

The exception to that was sitting at a round wooden table set into the curve of the bow window. She had angled her chair out, to provide the best possible view of a pair of unfairly long legs tucked into a pair of trim tan slacks designed to put one in mind of riding gear without actually being riding gear. She had had a haircut since I’d last seen her; her straight blond hair was now jaw-length, with a curve at the end. In fact, she had my haircut.

From the nonplussed expression on her face, I could tell that Joan Plowden-Plugge was about as happy to see me as I was to see her.

If you’re wondering how I managed to alienate someone on such short notice, allow me to assure you, quite sincerely, that it wasn’t so much me as it was me-with-Colin. Quite simply, Joan would have hated any reasonably nubile female who appeared in public with the man for whom she harbored a decade-long crush that made Petrarch’s thing for Laura look like chump change. As you can imagine, I felt much the same way about her. It didn’t help that she was fashion-model thin and Revlon-commercial blond to boot.

To add to the fun, the first — and only other — time I had been at Selwick Hall, before we were dating, Colin had employed me as a sort of human shield to keep Joan at bay. Manlike, he hadn’t bothered to warn me beforehand, perhaps because he feared I’d refuse to cooperate and throw him right into the lion’s jaws. This had not endeared me to Joan.

We stared at each other for a long moment in complete mutual loathing before the silence was broken by the man beside her scraping back his chair.

“Selwick!” exclaimed the Vicar with the sort of forced cheerfulness you use when social bombs are going off around you. “When did you get back?”

“Just this afternoon,” said Colin. It had really been more like late morning, but who was being picky?

“Well, we’re glad to have you back,” said Joan’s sister Sally, doing her part to counteract the chilling effect of the human icicle sitting next to her.

Sally was what my Dresden doll-size grandmother would call a “big girl,” tall, big-boned, with a broad forehead, broad cheekbones, and an even broader smile, framed by a profusion of exuberant brown hair. Sally was about twice Joan’s width and, to my mind, twice as attractive.

Of course, that might also be because Sally was smiling a genuine smile of welcome while Joan was wearing the sort of expression Cruella de Vil might have bestowed upon a wayward dalmatian. If I were a dog, I would have put my tail between my legs and whimpered.

But I was stronger than that; I was bigger than that. And I had the man. Ha. Take that, Cruella.

I returned her glare with a benign smile.

From the corner of my eye I saw the Vicar wink at me. From what I could recall, he didn’t have much patience for Joan, either.

“You remember Eloise.” Colin slung a casual arm around my shoulders, adding, just as casually, “My girlfriend.”

Joan’s nose twitched as though she had suddenly smelled something very unpleasant. Sally bounced out of her chair and gave me a warm hug.

“Lovely to see you again,” she said, all but smothering me in her hair. It was part genuine nice person-ness, and part, I suspected, an attempt to give her sister time to compose herself. You may not always adore your siblings, but they are yours.

“Lovely to see you, too,” I sneezed, fighting my way through the mass of Pre-Raphaelite curls.

“I can’t say how utterly delighted I am to see you back so soon,” said the Vicar, kissing me on both cheeks in the Continental style. Since I didn’t see the second one coming, he got my nose instead of my other cheek, but he didn’t seem to mind.

“Ditto,” I said, rubbing my nose.

“Don’t you find it terribly dull after London?” asked Joan, the only one who hadn’t bothered to rise, in tones so terrifyingly posh that they couldn’t possibly be real. Especially since Sally didn’t sound like anything of the kind.

“Not at all,” I said cheerfully. “There’s plenty to occupy me at Selwick Hall.”

“I should think so,” said Sally, with a mischievous glance at Colin.

“It’s my ancestors who are the attraction,” he said, in mock woe. “Not me.”

I shot him a glance to make sure that there wasn’t a grain of truth beneath the mockery. It wasn’t that long ago that his little sister had emerged from a disastrous relationship with a man who had used her solely to gain access to the family archives. It was part of why Colin had been so beastly when we’d first met; he had seen me as yet another vulture trying to batten off the family history.

It all seemed to be okay, but I leaned into him a bit just the same, trusting the pressure of body to body to do more than a hundred reassuring words.

Joan’s face closed like a fist. “Anyone for a drink?” she asked in tones you could have used to cut glass.

“Guinness for me,” said Sally, and I saw her sister wince. “Eloise?”

I looked to Colin.

“Sit down, Joan,” he said easily. “I’m buying.”

“I’ll come with you,” I said quickly.

“Gin and it?” he said, nodding to the Vicar.

The Vicar cast his eyes towards heaven. “If only all my parishioners were like you. Who needs a flower rota?”

“Drinks rota, instead?” I suggested.

“That’s heresy around here,” Colin said. “We hold our flower arrangements sacred.”

“But we also like our gin.” The Vicar made little shooing motions at Colin. “Go on, go on. Fetch.”

“You mean you like gin,” I heard Joan saying as I meandered with Colin over to the bar.

“Oh, we’re not going to start all that about gin being the drink of unwed mothers again, are we?” griped the Vicar. “Think of it as a good, imperial drink, the stuff the Raj was built on. That should tickle your fancy.”

From the tone of her response, it was clear that Joan was less than tickled.

I poked Colin in the arm. That’s one of the best bits of being in a relationship: all the legitimate little touches that let you know that you belong to someone and someone belongs to you. You can’t poke just anyone, after all.

I stood on the toes of my boots to whisper in his ear, “Do you think he’s flirting with her?”

Colin made a distinctly skeptical face at me. “Eloise, half the parish has a pool going on whether he’s gay.”

Considering I had wondered the same myself, it wasn’t exactly a surprise. “But if he’s not . . .”

Colin was already giving drink orders to the bartender, with whom, like everyone else, he appeared on extremely familiar terms. It seemed that this pub was the local equivalent of Cheers. “Vodka tonic for you?” he said to me.

“You remembered!” I exclaimed with pleasure. There had been a dreadful Thanksgiving party during which we stood at a bar pretending not to know each other. Well, maybe not so dreadful after all, since he had asked me out at the end of it. It had taken quite some time for me to figure out that I was being asked out, but fortunately my friend Pammy was there to interpret for me and prevent my botching it all too badly.