The Prince I Love to Hate: A Steamy Romantic Comedy (The Heir Affair Book 1), Iris Morland [best reads of all time TXT] 📗

very least, if someone jumped out of the shadows to attack me, there were still employees around to (hopefully) hear me scream.

On my way back to my room, I ran into Cara. “Oh, I can take that,” she said, taking my cold mug of coffee. “Do you want another cup? Or I could warm this one up for you.”

I had to restrain myself from cringing. It felt way too weird to have this girl, who was probably around my age, treat me like I was her mistress. Even though I guess for all intents and purposes, I would be inheriting the money to pay these people’s salaries. That alone made me feel like I’d been doused in cold water.

“No, I’m okay, thanks.” As Cara was about to continue on her way, I said, “Wait. I have a question.”

“Yes?”

“Who all works here at night?”

She raised a ginger eyebrow. “At night? It’s mostly a skeleton staff until after dinner is served. Mostly everyone goes home around nine PM, except for the security guard.”

“So there’s no one here at, say, three in the morning?”

Cara gave me a strange look. “Not that I know of. Why do you ask?”

I didn’t know why I didn’t tell her about my library encounter right then and there, but something made me keep my mouth shut. Maybe I just didn’t want to deal with a bunch of people questioning me.

Or maybe I wanted to confront this person myself, instead of he or she scampering off when they caught wind of an investigation.

Yeah, that’ll end well, Niamh. You’re totally Sherlock Holmes and know exactly what you’re doing.

“I was just curious,” I said, trying to sound casual. “I was hungry in the middle of the night, but I didn’t want to scare anyone going down to the kitchen.”

If Cara wasn’t convinced, she was too polite to say it out loud. “May I give you some advice?” she said instead.

“Of course.”

Her eyes sparkled now. “If you go into the kitchen at night, don’t leave anything for Mrs. Walsh to find in the morning. She’s a tad territorial.”

“Now I’m imagining her transforming into the Hulk if she finds a dirty plate on the counter.”

“You’re not far off.”

For the rest of the day, I spent it in the library. I brought the letters and documents Mr. McDonnell had already given me, going over them with a fine-tooth comb. I also brought the book of poetry I’d found inscribed to my grandmother and the note enclosed inside.

The documents about the purchase of the clock listed the clock, signed by Jean-Louis Lambert. After some Googling, I discovered that the clockmaker had been a fairly illustrious one in late eighteenth-century France. Lambert had made clocks for a number of aristocrats, and one had even been commissioned by King Louis XVI for Queen Marie Antoinette.

But when the Terror swept through the country, Lambert was, unfortunately, decried as a traitor, and he barely escaped with his life. As far as anyone knew, he’d spent the last few years of his life in England before dying penniless.

So this clock was French and definitely had a lot of history attached to it. But why would my da want it? No one in my family was French, as far as I knew. On my father’s side, everyone was Irish, at least as far as I knew.

I opened the page in the poetry book to the inscription to my grandmother. Considering I knew nothing about her, my grandmother Mary could’ve been French. She could’ve been Russian, or from the moon, for all I knew about her.

I touched the lines of ink. It was strange to think of my grandda, always a terrifying figure in my imagination, as a man who’d been in love with his wife.

Sean Gallagher had been a controlling force in my life and Liam’s even though I’d never met the man. When Liam had married his wife, Mari, on a drunken night in Las Vegas, Liam had tried to make everyone think the marriage was real so as not to invoke the wrath of our grandda. Because if Grandda had found out, he would’ve taken away my inheritance out of a fit of pique—or so Liam thought.

Please know that I knew nothing about this, and when Liam finally spilled his guts to me, I told him he was a complete idiot. Fortunately for me, I still got the money, and now I was getting this estate. So I guess Liam had been right—not that I’d ever tell my brother that.

I began to look for more information about Lambert, but despite looking through what felt like hundreds of books, there wasn’t any reference to him or to this clock that I could find in my grandda’s collection.

I changed course. I input the letter written in Irish into Google Translate. It was slow work, as the handwriting was difficult to decipher and a number of the letters had accents above them. I decided to do the translation one sentence at a time, in case I hadn’t transcribed a word accurately and needed to correct it.

When the entire letter had been translated, my heart was almost pounding out of my chest with excitement. The letter itself wasn’t particularly interesting, except for the last line that included the word clock.

My grandmother had owned a clock that apparently my grandda had given her. There was nothing else about it contained in the letter, but it had to be the clock that my da now had. I mean, what were the odds that there were two different ones?

I must’ve been a family heirloom of some sort. “Grandma, who were you?” I whispered under my breath as I scribbled notes. “Because I’m pretty sure you’re the key to everything.”

But when my stomach growled, I realized that the sun had already set and I hadn’t eaten in almost ten hours. I glanced at my phone: it was a quarter till nine o’clock. I could either wait for the staff to leave for the day or venture downstairs