I hate Hampshire! Hugh has hired some awful actress to play our mother and I am supposed to tell anyone who asks that our father froze to death while walking in the Cairngorms! Obviously, out of loyalty to our dear, long-lost papa, I have refused most vociferously to take any part in it …
—from the diary of Miss Venus Merriwell, aged 17
“At least the snow’s slowed.” Gal pointed to the fat, full moon in the oddly ethereal purple sky, stalling for time. He was still in two minds about how much of the truth to tell her as they walked side by side out of the inn and onto the seafront. He hadn’t offered her his arm, because that felt too intimate, especially when the conversation seemed doomed to be more personal than he was comfortable with. Yet something told him that he should have such a conversation with her. Be more of himself for once—for her again—because … And there is another dark path I’m not sure I want to venture into! “Although the sky ahead looks pretty foreboding still.” What had he been thinking even considering telling her any of his truth? When life had repeatedly taught him that if you didn’t keep all your cards hidden, someone would exploit the weakness in your hand. “Maybe we will get snowed in?”
Venus being Venus, she cut him no slack. “You were going to tell me why you bought half The Mermaid.”
“Was I?”
“If you’re not, I shall leave you to your evening constitutional in peace.” She prodded him with her finger as he pondered where to start the tale, reading his reticence entirely correctly. “And if you dare try to make your explanation sound impersonal, when it is clearly intensely personal, I’ve decided I shall instantly cancel our truce and never waste my time trying to converse with you ever again. Either we are going to become the unlikeliest of friends or we remain reluctant acquaintances. The choice is yours, Galahad.”
The quaint English phrase in for a penny, in for a pound sprang to mind. Because knowing Venus and her big ol’ brain, the moment he told her one thing, she’d ask him about everything. To his own surprise, because he very much liked the idea of them being friends, he found himself starting at the beginning.
“I’m guessing you remember my father?”
Her nose wrinkled in disgust, her tone immediately all outrage. “I doubt any of us could ever forget Gervais Sinclair! That man was an evil, vile, malicious…” Gal held up his palms in surrender in case she used every foul adjective in the dictionary—all of which would have been entirely appropriate.
“For what it’s worth, I’m not sorry he’s dead, either.” Neither was he sorry that his odious sire had died in jail where he had always belonged, nor did he harbor any guilt that he had been the one to send him there. After deserting his ailing mother—twice—his malevolent father had deserved nothing less. As Venus had been there the day Gal had turned his own flesh and blood over to the authorities, there was no point going over that old ground when it was the older that had always been the most pertinent. “He abandoned my mother shortly after I was born, so I never knew him growing up. It was my grandpa who helped my mother raise me, and because she wasn’t in the best of health, bless her, he did the lion’s share of the parenting.”
“What was wrong with your mother?”
“She was born with a lung disorder and sometimes struggled to breathe properly. Not all the time—it flared up especially in cold weather—but when it was up it made life hard for her. Running around after an exuberant little boy didn’t help matters, I suppose, so Grandpa did all he could to ease her burdens.” It felt peculiar speaking about it when he never had to another living soul before. Yet the memories were always there, so strong and clear and poignant they might have happened yesterday.
“He owned a tavern on the waterfront—The Four Leafed Clover. On South Street. Right on the busy banks of the East River where all the merchant ships docked.” The mention of it took him right back there. That brief, halcyon time in New York when he had never had a care in the world. “It was in such a prime spot, it was a gold mine. Always crowded. From the minute the doors opened until he had to push the customers out in the small hours.”
All that hubbub was still one of Gal’s favorite noises. The sounds of laughter, chatter, and dice hitting the tables meant money hitting the till. But it also reminded him of the worry-free existence he had enjoyed back then, when food, shelter, and safety had been things he had taken for granted. When he had never had to look over his shoulder or be wary of another’s motives or live hand to mouth: The memories of those struggles were so painfully fresh they plagued him daily. For the most part, he used them to spur him onward. Those hardships were the fuel that powered his ambition and the stone that strengthened his necessary defenses against anything threatening it. But sometimes, like tonight, all that negativity weighed him down.
“From my earliest recollections I was always beside him as he worked, learning at his knee while he entertained his customers—or his only grandson—with stories of his past. Several of them were about that place.” He jerked his thumb back toward The Mermaid. “He grew up there. It belonged to his father and was the place my grandpa first learned his trade. I came to find it almost as soon as I arrived in England, and when I saw it was in disrepair and discovered Nelly was broke and on the cusp of closing it, I felt I owed it to my ancestors, and most especially to my grandpa, to save it.”
“Oh, Galahad.” Venus slipped her arm through his and briefly hugged it tight. It felt wonderful. “I never realized you were a sentimentalist.”
“It’s not an acceptable trait in a ruthless businessman, so it’s not a side of me I advertise.” That he was allowing her to see this side of him was … unprecedented. And perhaps more than a little terrifying when exposing any of his vulnerabilities went completely against the grain.
“So Nelly is family?”
“No.” He shook his head, wondering why he still felt compelled to speak when his instincts warned him that it would be more prudent to shut the hell up. “My great-granddaddy lost the business when my grandpa was still a boy, and the place changed hands many times since. I’m not sure of the exact circumstances but I know that my family fell on hard times and were left with nowhere to live. That, I suppose, was the catalyst that ultimately sent them stateside to new pastures. It was my grandpa who first opened the tavern on the waterfront because that was his dream, and he passed the dream on to me, so I guess innkeeping is in the blood. Growing up, I recall him often reminiscing about this place.” Instantly his head was filled with the sounds of his grandpa’s voice, warming him from inside.
“He always wore a faraway smile when he told me about his childhood and how he used to think about the other side of this ocean from his bedchamber in the attic as he planned his future. Always lamented how much he missed it despite the good life he had built for himself in America. Always planned to return here to see it one last time but…”
“Fate had other plans?”
Gal nodded, wishing he did not possess that awful memory more than any of the others burdening him. Wishing more that the memory still didn’t cut him to the quick each time he remembered it. “He died when I was twelve. So sudden it floored me and my ma.”
“Am I allowed to ask what happened?” He could tell by the pity etched in her lovely face that she wouldn’t pry if he chose not to elaborate, but for some reason he wanted to, which was bizarre when it was a memory he had been avoiding ever since it had happened.
“He was shot.” The bile churned in his gut as the more dreadful images he preferred to suppress assaulted him. “By a customer. Right in front of me while he was trying to break up a fight.”
She stopped dead, halting him in the process, her lovely eyes swimming with tears. “Oh, Galahad—that is awful.” She reached up until her gloved hand cupped his cheek tenderly in comfort. “I am so sorry.”
He found himself leaning into her palm before he realized what he was doing and shrugged to cover his uncustomary display of weakness. “Not as sorry as I am.”
His grandpa’s murder had been the first pivotal moment of his life, and one that had changed everything catastrophically. It had been the decisive end of that halcyon era and the abrupt beginning of the end of his childhood. His first lesson that the world could be cruel and wasn’t as solid or safe as he had been convinced it was. The grief had been … relentless. The loss unbearable. But it had also signaled the end of everything he knew.
Which, he realized with a jolt, probably accounted for his melancholic mood of earlier. His ambition—his drive to be a success—was as much about righting the wrongs of his past as it was about controlling every aspect of his future. About rebuilding his grandpa’s legacy, chasing his dreams, and returning what had been stolen from him as well as about ensuring Gal never had to suffer any of that misery again. He couldn’t bring his ma back, or his grandpa, but he could resurrect something of what had been from the ashes. His victory today was, therefore, bittersweet because the price for it had been too high.
Too damn high.
But he had felt sorry for himself enough for one night. All the self-pity in the world wouldn’t bring back his family, or the life they had once had. He had known that when he came here, determined to make a fresh start away from all that pain—but it had followed him anyway. Shaped him still. “Anyway, I guess you’ve worked out already that I bought this place for him—because it is here that I feel the most connection to him now that I am so far away from home.” A truth he was surprised to admit aloud.
She stared back at the inn, taking it all in before she sighed. “The need to feel that tangible connection to hearth and home is one of the things that makes us human, so it makes perfect sense to me that you bought it. What happened to The Four Leafed Clover?”
Rather than tell her that sorry truth, he sugared it. “Long gone. Demolished now, I believe, to make way for something new.” Watching them tear down his last link to his family back in New York had been another pivotal moment. One that had left him rudderless and anchorless, because he had always planned to buy it back. To run it as his grandpa had always intended. “Hence I decided to make a go of it here when fate dragged me back to the land of all my ancestors—both the good ones and the rotten eggs like my undisputedly evil father.”
“When did he reappear in your life?”
He wasn’t ready to talk about Gervais’s initial reappearance in the dark days after his grandpa had passed, or the way the bastard had tricked his mother, and him, into believing he was a “changed man” keen to make amends for abandoning them and ready to take on all the responsibilities of a husband and father.
Gal had needed a father then so very badly, he’d welcomed the man with open arms. And because his ailing mother had started to smile once more, he’d allowed himself to briefly be a boy again. Except his vulnerability, neediness, and gullibility had quickly turned around and not so much bitten him on the ass as ripped it into shreds. So Gal skipped over almost all of the single most pivotal decade of his life with the most abridged version of the truth he could. “Gervais turned up like a bad penny a few days before I turned twenty-one, keen to profit from my inheritance so he could get himself back here to swindle Giles—and so I let him. But only to stop him.”
Thankfully, he had been a very different Galahad by then. The too-trusting boy was long gone and had been replaced by the cynical, battle-scarred, and wary man that he was now—but angrier. He hadn’t allowed Gervais into the solicitor’s office when he finally collected the mysterious locked box of belongings his grandpa had left him for the day he reached his majority, so his father never knew that the one hundred dollars that Gal had used to pay their passage to England came alongside a more valuable nest egg: the share certificates he had used to buy The Den. He spent the anger on the cathartic pursuit of seeing that Gervais got exactly what he was due, then tried to lock all of the past in a box and move on.
“If it’s any consolation, at least you found Giles and turned out to be nothing like Gervais.” As if she understood he wasn’t ready to let her delve much deeper, she tugged his arm to continue walking despite the thickening snowflakes being tossed around in the frigid sea breeze.
“We were both cursed with awful fathers, weren’t we?” She instinctively hugged his arm tighter against the cold. “At least you know what happened to yours and have been able to bolt the door on that part of your life and put it behind you.” He’d wanted to. Hoped to. But knew those experiences influenced him still and likely always would. “Alfred Merriwell seems to have disappeared into the ether so I cannot turn that page—but then he always excelled in that. My sisters like to think he came to a sticky end and is buried in an unmarked pit somewhere or rotting facedown in a ditch unmourned. But I suspect he’s out there lurking somewhere still, biding his time to bother us again. I hope he is.”
“Why?” Her father was a forger who had abandoned his daughters to poverty then turned up again when Minerva found Hugh, only to blackmail her. “From what I hear, you are better off without him.” Gal’s life would have been so much better if Gervais had remained lost. Everything would be different.
Literally everything. But then he wouldn’t be here, and as much as he wanted to deny the truth of it, right here, right now with her was exactly where he wanted to be.
“That is also undisputable but…” Myriad complex emotions played across her features. “I hate my last memory of him. I hate that I begged him to stay. That I wanted a father in my life so much that I was prepared to turn a blind eye to all his many faults and unconscionable crimes.” A childish sentiment and shameful regret he well understood. “That he left anyway. He got the last word when I realize now that I had more to say. More I wish I could say. It feels like…”
“Unfinished business.” He understood that only too well, too. It had been the bellows that had stoked his ambition for more than half of his life.
“That is exactly what it feels like. I am not a vindictive person, Galahad, and I do not want revenge as I firmly believe that the good life my sisters and I have now is revenge enough, but…” She sighed heavily as she stared out to sea. “For myself, to close the door on his treachery and bolt it shut, for my own foolish pride I would like my final memory of my dealings with him to be different. Not the frightened pleas of an immature girl but the damnation of a grown woman who no longer wears blinkers and who knows, through personal and professional experience, all the pain and suffering a child goes through when a parent abandons them. I want to be able to look him dead in the eye and dispassionately tell him that he and all the other feckless fathers—and mothers—out there are not only going to rot in hell but are going to languish there forgotten when their children succeed in life despite them. Unmissed. Unmourned. But most of all unforgiven.”
There was nothing dispassionate about the fire burning in her lovely eyes. A heat that explained why she worked so tirelessly for those orphans. She was righting the wrongs of her own past through them. “I’d like to spit in his eye.” A naughty smile toyed with the corners of her mouth. “Or perhaps shop him to the authorities like you did Gervais. Or more likely do both. I envy you that.”
“So the prim, proper, and pious Miss Venus actually does want revenge?”
“Perhaps a little bit.” She held her finger and thumb an inch apart, her fine eyes dancing again exactly how he liked them before she looked away. The light in them clouded slightly. “Despite all your opinions to the contrary, Galahad, I’ve never been the prim and pious paragon of virtue any more than you are apparently all bad.”
“Was that a compliment? A concession? Are you unwell, Miss Venus? Do you need to lie down?” He leaned closer to scrutinize her face as if he had never seen it before. “Only I barely recognize you when you’re not looking down your nose at me.”
She offered him a begrudging smile. “Much to my chagrin, and against all my better judgment, it appears that I am finally starting to like you.”
“That feeling is alarmingly mutual, Miss Venus.” He smiled, meaning it, until she wrenched her hand from his elbow to yank him to face her.
“For the record, I’d like you more if you stopped calling me Miss Venus to vex me, you wretch.”
He chuckled as he shook his head. “Not a chance. I enjoy vexing you too much to ever give it up. But as a concession to our truce, and because you are starting to like me and I am starting to like you, I’ll drop the Miss—Venus.”
Then, because her plump lips twitched in mirth while she looked down her nose in feigned disdain.
Because the snowflakes glistened in the moonlight as they attached themselves to her riot of curls.
Because fate had brought them here. Tonight. Together. And here was special.
Because her hand was still in his and his hand was in hers, and because that felt right.
Because this was exactly where he wanted to be and because he suddenly needed to, Gal tugged her closer and, before he thought better of it, softly pressed his mouth to hers.
Her fingers briefly flexed against his as she instinctively stiffened in surprise, but straightaway, like the snow that found his face, she melted against him. Sighing against his lips as she kissed him back. It wasn’t a passionate kiss, yet it filled him with desire. Neither was it hurried. Instead, it was a tentative but lazy exploration as they tasted each other. Just a taste—but still charged with so much emotion and significance that it overwhelmed him.
Knocked him sideways.
Left him so out of control and off kilter, he had to loop his arms around her waist to steady himself. Pull her closer until her lush body was flush with his. Then closer still when she wrapped her arms around his neck.
Gal was dizzy, but in a good way. The sort of way in which all the blood inside his head twirled in happy circles. Beneath his ribs, his heart seemed to be shooting fireworks into his chest as it beat stronger and surer than it ever had before. He became so aware of all his nerve endings that even the gentle but erratic rise and fall of her breathing made them rejoice at the contact. Almost as if his body had been waiting for this precise moment and this precise woman to burst into life, and Lord help him, he had never felt so gloriously alive as he did right now. Like he could sprint across the top of the ocean or fly like a bird.
Who knew a simple kiss could wield so much power? Be so potent? So poignant? So all-consuming he never wanted it to end.
But end it did. At her instigation.
Her mouth stilled against his then kissed him deeply one last time. She stepped back to stare wide-eyed as she worried her bottom lip with her teeth. As if she, too, had been stunned by the intensity of what had transpired between them and couldn’t make head or tail of what it meant.
“That was … um … rather…”
“Unexpected.” Bemused himself by awe and wonder, Gal couldn’t seem to take his eyes off her. “It also suddenly makes things … us … more complicated than ever.” Was he ready for this? Ready to allow someone past his defenses? Ready to relinquish some control over his life to another?
“I suppose it does.” Her golden brows furrowed. “Maybe we should … ignore it?” Her expression was more questioning than appalled. Testing the waters. Testing him. “Forget that it happened?”
“I can assure you, that isn’t going to happen. That was some kiss, Venus.” As much as it scared him, he didn’t have the wherewithal to lie about it. “Pretty … spectacular in fact. For me at least.”
Her slightly awkward, slightly shy smile of acknowledgment rather than horror made his guarded heart swell. “I wonder what it means?”
He found himself grinning as he shrugged, not caring for once that the path ahead wasn’t clear. “I’ve always enjoyed a puzzle and so does that big ol’ brain of yours, so between us we’ll figure it out.”
“I’m not sure my brain will make any sense of this puzzle tonight.” A bubble of laughter escaped as she blushed, and he wanted to catch it in his fist and keep it forever. “Me and you, Galahad? Really?”
“I know…” While his head was horrified at this uncharacteristic and reckless foray into the uncertain and unguarded, his heart was soaring. Flying.
Bursting.
“Best to sleep on it.”
She nodded, and in tacit agreement they put at least two feet of space between them as they slowly sauntered back into the inn, gazing at each other baffled the whole time and not saying a single word. Even when they paused at the foot of the stairs they were both obviously still so confused, they stared at each other for a few moments more.
With a perplexed frown and an utterly beguiling blush she shuffled from foot to foot. “I shall bid you a good night then, Galahad.”
“Good night, Venus. Maybe I’ll see you at breakfast? When hopefully we will have figured this all out.”
“Maybe.” Although she didn’t look convinced.
He sympathized.
He currently did not know which way was up, either, or what the hell to do about it, or even if he should do anything beyond run, so he left her to climb the stairs alone. Partly because he didn’t trust himself not to haul her into his arms again the moment they reached her bedchamber and partly because he needed time to digest his own feelings and their ramifications. If he ignored all of his reservations and fears about letting someone in when he knew it safer to keep them out, and if he put to one side how anxious and afraid being so emotionally vulnerable in front of someone else made him, he and she and right now wasn’t exactly the best timing. Not when he had so much to do and was about to move his business right next to her beloved orphanage.
Tonight, as his first priority, rather than try to analyze what was happening in his hardened heart, he needed to find the right words to explain all those long-laid plans the very second she returned from the solicitor’s tomorrow, because the wrong ones would shoot whatever this was dead in the paddock.
He also needed to rethink things. Rejig all those meticulous plans, because the best plans were always the most adaptable. Maybe factor in how to weave her into them …
What the hell!
As that train of thought made him dizzy again, and because the floor or perhaps the world had suddenly tilted beneath his feet, he grabbed the banister. Hard.
She turned at the thud, quizzical. “Are you all right, Galahad?”
“Never better.” And bizarrely, despite the shifting floor and shifting parameters and his flimsy control over what happened next, that was true. As his grandpa had always said, when opportunity knocked on your front door, only a fool didn’t fling it open in welcome. And this—she—felt like an opportunity.
Or fate.
Or both.
Either way, he already knew he wasn’t strong enough to run away from it tonight. Didn’t even want to.
What the hell!
“Venus, I was wondering…” He stopped himself before he finished that sentence, because frankly he wasn’t entirely sure how he intended ending it but knew, as sure as eggs were eggs, that whatever his suddenly needy heart was proposing changed everything, and that already scared the hell out of him. Instead he scrambled. Hastily regrouped and offered her his most wolfish grin to bring things between them back onto a surer footing, one he understood. “… back there … beneath the moonlight…” He motioned to the door, enjoying how the flush on the apples of her cheeks instantly blossomed into a ferocious blush. “… I can’t help wonderin’ how my kissin’ measured up against Dorchester’s?”
Her beautiful blue eyes narrowed behind her spectacles, but with little enthusiasm.
“A quality gentleman like Lord Dorchester would have the good manners never to ask such a thing, Galahad Sinclair, nor would he try to hide his gross impertinence behind that false drawl you employ whenever you try—and fail—to be charming.” She summoned every bit of the haughty disdain she’d always summoned when he went out of his way to rile her, but it fell widely shy of the mark. “Something my big ol’ brain will be sure to factor in when I consider the fate of our conundrum tomorrow.”