Chapter Twenty-Two
Dallinger Park loomed ahead of Nick after the long trudge from the village, dark and craggy against the fading purple of the heather-covered hills. For once, he was glad to see the place and all it represented, because he was finally getting to do what he’d promised himself he would on the plane to England—tell the old earl to fuck straight off. Then he’d head home in the morning. The two-mile walk from the village had given him enough time to make the travel arrangements he’d been putting off in favor of spending his time feeling Brooke come apart in his arms.
Striding up toward the front doors, too preoccupied to be paying attention, he stepped ankle-deep right into a puddle left over from the afternoon rain. It soaked straight through his sock before he pulled his foot free with a loud squelch.
What a perfect end to a delightfully shitty day.
If he hadn’t been so distracted, he would have noticed the rain-filled pothole. But he had been. Hell, he’d been distracted since he got that first email from Brooke in all her Lady Lemons glory ordering him to England as if she actually wanted him. But she didn’t. All she wanted was for Bowhaven to want her. Now, that was a foolhardy endeavor. Places or people, it didn’t matter. They never really wanted you beyond what you could get them at that moment. After that? You were back out there on your own again feeling like a sucker. He’d learned all that early in life, and yet here he was like an asshole, half hoping he’d found a place where he actually belonged.
Brooke had been right about one thing—it was best for him to leave.
He stripped the mud off the bottom of his shoes on the boot scrapper and slipped the shoes off anyway when he walked inside Dallinger Park. The rug was old and worn, but his mama had taught him better than to track dirt inside.
The place was quiet, since the small number of people on staff had the day off to recover from cleaning up after the chaos of the movie shoot.
“Hello,” he hollered out.
No one responded. Of course not. Why should anything in this godforsaken country go as planned? All he wanted to do was tell good old Gramps to stick his earldom where the sun didn’t shine, and then he could go home. It’s what he should have done in the first place.
Nick’s footsteps echoed up the portrait-lined walls of the great hall as he continued through to the staircase that would take him to his room. It went right past a door that had always been locked before. It wasn’t now.
His damn curiosity getting the best of him, he walked inside, still holding his shoes. It was a study. One that wasn’t used very often, judging by the amount of dust on top of the sheets covering the furniture—well, most of the furniture. A desk sat near a set of double windows on the far side of the room. Papers were scattered on its polished oak surface. There was no way he could walk out without knowing. That’s not how he worked.
He set his shoes down in the empty fireplace hearth near the door and strode over to the desk. He recognized the loopy handwriting as soon as he glanced down at the scattered papers and froze. The same handwriting had been on notes to his school to excuse an absence for the flu or a quick good luck written on a napkin snuck into his lunch box on a test day. The last time he’d seen his mother’s handwriting on something new had been the letter she’d left for him to read after she’d died. He’d taken it with him to the first group home, where some asshole riffling through his shit and stealing anything he could sell had shredded the letter in some juvenile show of dominance—one that had cost him a broken nose and a cracked tooth. Of course, that didn’t bring back his mom or the destroyed unread letter.
These letters, though, he’d never seen them before. They were yellowed with age and creased with multiple foldings. He picked up the first one off the pile, reading a passage at random.
He could hear his mama chuckling at him, the sound muffled by the crinkling of the plastic bags as he checked out what she’d brought home, supposedly while helping her put the groceries away. Most of it would be healthy, lots of fruits and veggies, but she always got him something—Doritos, pizza rolls, extra spicy nacho cheese in the supersize jar. That was his mama.
Dropping the letter, he grabbed another from the pile, a paragraph halfway down the page catching his eye.
He dropped the page as if it were on fire. It didn’t make sense. She had to be writing to the DNA donor, but they were almost like love letters. That wasn’t right. He’d left them. Never looked back. There were checks and nothing else. His mama would have told him if there was more. He tipped over the rest of the short pile of letters and grabbed the one at the bottom, dated only a few months before she’d died.
She didn’t have a choice? His father didn’t have a choice? The world tilted and the letter fell from his fingers, landed on the edge of the desk, and then fluttered down to the floor. Looking around, he took in the room. There were photos on the desk. Of his mother. Of him as a boy. Of the man who had to be his father holding a baby wrapped in that thin pink-and-blue-striped blanket every baby born in America seemed to get wrapped up in at the hospital. Him. That baby had to be him.
“I don’t suppose she ever got the chance to explain it all to you.” The earl stood in the doorway wearing a tweed blazer and an unreadable expression.
Nick didn’t startle, didn’t flinch. Of course the old man would pick this moment to show. Obviously, the open door had been a trap and he’d walked right in.
“Explain?” he asked, his voice sounding stronger than he felt at the moment. “No. She died.”
The earl nodded. “And you went into care.”
“Is that what you want to call it?” The cruel laugh burst from his chest as he pictured the dingy group home with the broken porch boards and creaking stairs. “Care? It has a nice ring to it, but that’s not exactly what it was.”
The old man rubbed his palm across the back of his neck and strolled to a sheet draped over a rectangle. He slid the sheet off and revealed a small bar with decanters filled with amber liquid and a few crystal glasses. After uncorking one of the decanters and sniffing the contents, he poured some into a glass, seemed to think better of the proportion, and poured more into it.
Nick watched, an icy fury burning inside him, as the earl downed the whiskey in one long drink and then poured another.
“Are you old enough yet to have regrets?” the earl asked as he crossed the room to a covered chair. He flipped the sheet off and sat down. “Not the oh-I-wish-I-had-done-this-differently thing but the absolute certainty that you’ve made a proper wreck of everything you thought you were trying to fix?”
“Is this where you tell me that my DNA donor had a change of heart?” Good fucking luck with that.
“Your father? No, he never did.” The earl took a sip of whiskey. “He never wanted to leave in the first place.”
If it wasn’t such a ridiculous lie, Nick would have laughed in the old man’s face. Instead, he strode over to the bar and poured two fingers of whiskey. It burned its way down his throat and he welcomed the pain. “Don’t give me that bullshit. I know he was weak. He left with you the first chance he got and never looked back.”
“Really? Is that what you deduce from going through those letters your mother wrote to your father?”
“It’s what I know.” He did. He’d always known it.
“How? Did your mother tell you this?”
“She didn’t have to.” He set the empty glass down on the bar before it broke in his white-knuckled grip, and the words poured out hot and angry. “I knew it from the first time I asked her about him and she told me that I’d understand someday, that she’d explain why he left the way he did. And the checks always came. Guilt money or hush money, it didn’t matter because it turned out to be blood money.”
Cool, unflappable British aristocrat to the end, the earl maintained eye contact throughout, his chin high, his posture rigid. Only a flicker of something—pain? guilt?—flashed at the mention of money. No doubt, the old man was wishing he could have some of that back.
“I gather you just made up a fairy tale about what happened between your parents, casting your father as the evil villain.”
“That’s what he was.”
“No.” The earl shook his head, something that looked a lot like regret pinching the corners of his mouth. “That’s what I was.”
Gone was the man who’d met Nick the day he arrived at Dallinger Park, the one who argued about fireplace mantels and our kind of people. He’d been replaced by someone with a grayish tint to his skin, weary lines suddenly appearing around his eyes. The man aged at least ten years before Nick’s eyes.
“I’ve never liked change,” the earl went on. “I like the old ways. The sure ways. The ways that make sense.” He swirled the last dregs of whiskey in his glass, the amber liquid sloshing from side to side; then he downed it. “That’s not an excuse, just an explanation. So when my son and heir ran off to America and got married, I was incensed. That wasn’t done. It. Just. Wasn’t. Done. But he had done it. I was younger then, more sure that I knew all there was to know about how and why the world worked. There were our kind of people and everyone else. To an extent, I still think that way. I’m too old to go changing completely.”
“Yeah, you’re just a beacon of tolerance and newfangled thinking,” Nick said, finishing off his own drink.
“No one would ever describe me as thus, but your father was. He always had new ideas, plans, options—they seemed never-ending to him. A more curious man I’d never met. Until I read the investigator’s file on you. You’re a lot like him, you know.”
Nick snorted, trying to cover the instant unstoppable feelings of yes and no fighting it out in his chest by aimlessly walking around the room and checking under the dust-covered sheets. “Let me know how and I’ll change it.”
“You both have an innate need to help others.”
“He sure didn’t help Mama and me.”
The earl sighed and glanced over to the desk littered with old letters and framed photos of a family that never existed in Nick’s memory.
“I didn’t give him a choice,” the earl said, his voice weary. “Go and his wife and child would be taken care of financially in perpetuity. Stay and he and his new family would be cut off completely. I made sure to let him know that I had connections everywhere. I could make it so he’d never be gainfully employed, could never provide for his family. Then I reminded him of his duty to Dallinger Park, to the family, and to the people of Bowhaven. He had a simple choice, I explained: return home and everyone got what they needed. Stay and no one would.”
Each word of the earl’s confession pierced Nick like an acid-tipped ice pick. “And people called me the bastard.”
“He was only back for a year when he died in a car crash.” The earl looked at his empty glass like he could will it to be full again. “I kept up the checks to your mother. Never told her of his passing. The letters kept coming until one day, they didn’t anymore. I thought it would be easier for everyone that way.”
“And when my mother died, you figured you’d dodged a bullet.”
The old man gave a noncommittal shrug. “And now, I’ve come to the point in my life when my list of glaring errors and miscalculations are longer than the time I have left to correct them. But I thought with you, if I could just bring you here, explain what had happened between your parents, that—”
“All would be forgiven?” The question came out like ground glass, leaving him bloody on the inside.
“I suppose so, yes. Making you my heir was just an excuse to get you here. The real reason I did it was to make you my grandson. I guess I’m still the selfish bastard I’ve always been.”
Trying to process everything the earl had just unloaded was making his brain swim. Everything he thought—everything he knew—had been suddenly ripped away like one of the dusty sheets covering the furniture in the study that had to have been his father’s. Who hadn’t wanted to leave. Who— It was all too much, so he welcomed the fury that poured over his confusion like lava.
“I’m flying out in the morning.”
The earl nodded, as if this had been expected. “Will you be back?”
“No.”
“I see.” The earl stood and walked over to the desk. “Ms. Chapman-Powell will be disappointed.”
The image of her in the pub’s back courtyard telling him to go flashed in front of him. “I doubt it.”
“Pain and fear make us say horrible things sometimes.”
“That woman’s not afraid of anything.” No matter what, she just kept going, refusing to give even an inch.
“Oh, we all fear something. You know that well.” The earl gathered up the letters from the desk and held them out to Nick. “These rightly belong to you now. You should take them with you.”
“What should I do with them?” The words came out in a snarl even as he took the letters that crinkled in his grip.
“Read them. Understand that whatever dark and dismal fairy tale you created as a hurt and confused boy to explain what happened to your parents, the truth was a different story. Maybe then you’ll understand, William.”
It was the last thing Nick wanted. He knew the truth already and the whys didn’t matter. “I don’t want to understand him.”
“Understand who?” the older man asked as he looked around the room, his moves jerky and unsure.
“William,” he shot back as an angry heat filled him.
“Stop this foolishness,” the earl said, his voice loud enough to fill the room. “You are William.”
That was the very last thing Nick would ever become. “He may have donated half my DNA, but I am not him.”
Confusion darkened the older man’s eyes, and he stood there for a second not moving, his eyes wide. Then he blinked several times and let out a shaky breath. “Of course not.”
Then, without another word or any sort of further explanation, the earl left, his gait a little slower, a little more cautious than usual, leaving Nick to contemplate the bomb that had just gone off in his own head. The story the old man had just shilled couldn’t be right. He glanced down at the proof in his hand and gave in again to the one thing that had always served him well in these situations—the voice that told him to run.