She shook her head. This couldn’t be happening. She’d lived a charmed life in a lot of ways, and she’d been schooled in a myriad of social graces, but nothing had prepared her for such a brazen push into her personal spaces.

“Come on, Vic,” Sophia called up. “You told me you were a gin woman. Let me inside and prove it.”

She braced her hands on the windowsill so tightly her knuckles went white. She should call security. Sophia had broken in and thrown rocks at a three-hundred-year-old window, and yet she’d done so because she’d remembered a small and trivial detail about what Vic liked. “Things like this don’t happen in my life.”

“They do now.”

She shook her head. She shouldn’t let that be true, but her brain couldn’t formulate the words to send her away when she had so many other questions. “How did you even get in here?”

“I never left when everyone else did. I’ve been lying in wait all evening, watching from the staging area for a light to come on and stay on in that castle of yours.”

“Then where did you get the gin?”

Sophia laughed. “I actually got the idea from you. Remember how you said you had to keep the liquor out of the tourist areas because people liked to nick bottles from the duke? Well, we weren’t filming in the tourist areas today, were we?”

“You didn’t.”

She shrugged in a way that made it quite clear that’s exactly what she’d done.

This couldn’t be real. None of this could be real. “Things like this happen only in movies.”

Sophia laughed. “Lucky for you, I’m in the movies. Now are you going to let me in the front door, or would you rather lower your hair and have me climb up?”

She couldn’t help but give her hair a playful little shake, but it only fell just past her shoulders.

“Okay, the front door it is,” Sophia called, then jogged off toward the Norman gateway, and without thinking Vic ran off to meet her.

“This isn’t the best idea,” she said as she pulled open the heavy wooden door.

“Of course it isn’t, darling.” Sophia shed her jacket and tossed it over Hank’s arm. “That’s what makes it so tempting.”

She couldn’t argue. If Sophia had merely tried to schedule an official appointment via their assistants, Vic wouldn’t have spent more than a minute wiggling her way out of it. The fact that Sophia’s approach was so very improper and ill-advised was exactly what prevented her from saying no. Well, that, and her thin maroon shirt with the deep V-neck that showed off Sophia’s throat, and chest, and . . . eyes up, Vic.

Sophia caught her staring, again. She smirked. “Thirsty?”

She shook her head.