The Chateau of Happily-Ever-Afters: a laugh-out-loud romcom!. Jaimie Admans

makes such a severe grinding noise that I expect it to come out in two pieces. I lean against the doors with a sigh of relief.

      I don’t even realise what I’m doing until he bangs on the other side. ‘Oi! What are you doing? Let me in!’

      I squeeze my eyes shut and shake my head, hoping he’ll go away.

      Shutting him out was a silly, childish thing to do. I know that. But I also know he doesn’t belong here. Eulalie wouldn’t want a complete stranger turning her house upside down because of some silly riddle about treasure.

      I didn’t come here because of some half-arsed mention of surely non-existent treasure. I came because Eulalie wanted me to come here. Not for money. He doesn’t care about what Eulalie wanted. He doesn’t care about this house and how much she loved it.

      It feels like everything has spiralled out of control since the meeting with the solicitor, and that key is the only solid thing I have. It’s the only power I’ve got over the man outside. I got here first and I locked him out. Winning.

      Er, probably.

      I hear the crunch of his shoes over the gravel again. Good. He can go back to his fancy car and zoom away with his lustrous hair trailing behind him. I wait for the sound of the engine starting up as he leaves in defeat.

      It stays eerily quiet for a few minutes and I try to figure out what he might be doing out there. He’s probably walking around looking for another entrance. I haven’t had a chance to find out if there’s a back door yet, but hopefully it’s still locked. The place would’ve been ransacked by burglars if there were any unlocked doors. He can’t get in. I just have to keep telling myself that.

      I get more antsy as the minutes tick by. He hasn’t left yet. And I can’t see what he’s doing. I wish these doors weren’t solid wood and had a window to peek out of.

      Just as I’m thinking about going back upstairs and peeping out of the open window, his voice filters in from outside.

      ‘Wendy! Come to the window!’

      I can’t. I can’t go up there and talk to him. I’m not good at talking to people. It’s probably why I’m so bad at my job. Pushing samples of food is mostly about engaging with people, talking them into trying something new and then buying it, and my boss is constantly on my case about poor sales figures.

      If I talk to him, he’s going to want an explanation for why I slammed the doors in his face, and the only one I can come up with is that I’ve temporarily forgotten I’m thirty-three and not an immature eight-year-old.

      ‘I know you’re in there!’

      I leave the wooden support of the front doors and creep up the stairs. Not that creeping makes much difference – everything in this house creaks loudly enough that someone in the next village can probably hear it. I get to the landing and do an SAS-style crawl across the grimy floor so he can’t see me from outside, until I’m lying on my belly under the window.

      ‘You’ve got to come to the window eventually,’ he shouts in his Scottish accent. ‘If you don’t close it, I’m going to find a ladder and climb in, so you may as well just show yourself.’

      Bollocks. I’m only on the first floor, he wouldn’t need a very big ladder, and there were a few outbuildings in the grounds. You can be sure there’s a ladder lying around somewhere.

      ‘What do you want?’ I shout back.

      ‘A Lotto win, a milky latte with just a hint of macadamia nut, and one of those human-sized hamster wheels!’

      ‘Well, the only thing you’re going to find here are dust bunnies the size of bowling balls, so you may as well leave.’

      He laughs. ‘Okay, we’ll start with the basics. How about access to my own property?’

      ‘This isn’t your property,’ I shout out. ‘It’s Eulalie’s, and she wouldn’t want you here.’

      ‘We both signed documents that say otherwise.’

      I stand up, suddenly seething at his nerve. ‘I don’t care. You’re obviously only here because—’

      ‘Nice dust.’ He nods towards me.

      I glance down at myself. Great. I’m wearing more dust than a sock that’s been lost behind the washing machine for two years, and when I look behind me, there’s a body-width trail where I’ve unintentionally cleaned the carpet with my clothing.

      ‘Anyone would think you’d been hunting for treasure,’ he says from the courtyard.

      I look down and glare at him. ‘Well, I haven’t. Some of us are interested in more than money.’

      ‘Yeah. You’re here because you loved my great-aunt so much, and you—’

      ‘She wasn’t your great-aunt. You didn’t even know her.’

      ‘You weren’t even related to her!’

      ‘Family is about more than blood. She chose who to leave this place to, and it wasn’t you.’

      ‘Maybe she would’ve if she’d known I existed.’

      I huff, trying to ignore the niggling voice in my head. Eulalie and I were the closest thing each other had to family, but if she’d have known she had real family, would I really be the sole inheritor of this place? Probably not. ‘Well, you’re obviously only after one thing and you’re wasting your time. There’s no treasure here.’

      He nods towards me again. ‘And you know that because you’ve been rolling around on the floor trying to find it?’

      ‘No, I haven’t. But I knew Eulalie. She had a vivid imagination and she liked to tell stories. This treasure is her idea of a laugh. It doesn’t exist.’

      ‘From what I gathered at the solicitor’s office, you said that about the château too, and yet…’ He gestures at the building in front of him.

      All right, he’s got a point about that, but this is different. I can kind of understand that Eulalie would have kept quiet about owning a castle in France. I know she loved it too much to sell it, and any form of renting it out would’ve been too much work at her age, but if she’d had a treasure chest full of gold sitting in the basement, she wouldn’t have struggled to make ends meet.

      He’s still looking up at me expectantly. ‘Yeah, well, I have the key and I’m not letting you in.’

      He laughs again, like I’m too pathetic to be taken seriously. I ignore the voice in my head that says I am being utterly pathetic here.

      The laugh turns into a falsely sweet smile as he looks up at me. ‘You might have the key, but do you know what I’ve got?’

      ‘Your ticket home, with a bit of luck.’

      He grins. ‘I’ve got all the patience in the world. I’ve got no job to get back to. I’ve got no reason to leave this courtyard. So I hope you stopped for food supplies in your rush to beat me here, because I did. I’m set for weeks, me. I’m going to stay right here. So, if I can’t get in, you can’t get out. Think about that when you’ve eaten the packed lunch your mummy made for your trip back to the school playground.’

      I go to respond but nothing comes out. Bollocks. He’s right, of course. I haven’t eaten since the train switch in Calais this morning. Food didn’t even cross my mind. Somewhere downstairs, there’s my handbag with a half-eaten packet of chocolate digestives in it… No, actually, I ate those in the taxi. No one in their right mind would leave half a packet of chocolate digestives.

      ‘Oh, sod off,’ I say, pulling the window shut hard enough that the glass threatens to make an escape.

      Great. My stomach has already started rumbling, I’ve got no ingredients to make anything with, ordering a takeaway would involve having to open the door, if I could get one ordered in French anyway, and I can’t