Chapter One
Present Day…
The world was about to go pear-shaped.
Normally, Brooke Chapman-Powell tried to be a pint-half-full kind of person—not in a cheery, obnoxious git kind of way but in a please-God-don’t-let-this-be-the-end way. She was a realist with hope. That latter bit was in short supply, though, as she stood in the Earl of Englefield’s private study.
She’d been the stern septuagenarian’s private secretary for less than two months and her employment record was a bit shoddy, so she’d been lucky to get the job even if the pay was paltry. However, considering she’d chucked her life in Manchester into the bin after discovering her boyfriend had been cheating on her, she was happy to have that. Of course, hiding out in Bowhaven—the village she’d grown up in and which was populated by people who refused to modernize or try anything new, ever—wasn’t her proudest achievement. However, she still had that wafer of hope that everything would turn out all right as long as one followed proper protocol.
Well, usually she did. Right now? She was a solid shrug emoji because the earl was staring at her like she was a bit of muck he’d found on his shoe. This was a pint-all-gone kind of moment, and she wasn’t prepared for the sacking she was surely about to get.
She certainly had no experience in being sacked. The strong possibility of it had thrown her off-kilter. She didn’t like it. Not at all. A little buzzing sound started in her ears and her lungs were burning, but she couldn’t let anything in or out.
Still, she tried to keep her impassive mask in place—her ability to keep an ice-queen expression no matter the chaos around her was exactly what had gotten her this job. However, her mask must have slipped because the earl let out a put-upon sigh.
“Ms. Chapman-Powell,” he said, standing behind his desk, his eyes narrowing as he looked her over, not in concern but in annoyance. “We do not have time for excessive behavior.”
That “we” didn’t really include her. It was the royal we and a reminder that she was here not as anything close to an equal but because she, the local publican’s daughter, was the earl’s secretary.
Something in his tone rattled her out of her lung-locked misery, and the breath she’d been holding whooshed from her lungs.
“No, sir, of course not.” She clasped her hands tight in front of her, not allowing any other outward appearance of uncertainty or nerves to show through.
It must have been enough, because the earl dropped his gaze down to the sheet of paper in his hand. “Your actions are governed by the nondisclosure agreement you signed upon employment. Discretion is required.”
She nodded. “Yes, sir.”
“What I am about to tell you cannot go beyond this room.”
Perhaps she wasn’t about to get the boot. If she was, would he be telling her anything that was covered by the NDA? Doubtful.
“I understand, sir.”
The earl didn’t say anything for a moment. Instead, he turned and gazed out the window toward the North York Moors, the purple heather adding color to its normal green.
“I’ve received a diagnosis—early-stage dementia,” he said, his words clipped.
Brooke had only been at Dallinger Park for a short time, but she’d noticed that the earl seemed to grow more agitated as the day wore on, often repeated stories, and became frustrated when he couldn’t remember details. She opened her mouth to offer her sympathies, but the earl waved off her attempt with a brusque flick of his hand.
“I only tell you this to impart the importance of what I shall tell you next, and not because I want to discuss my condition with you or have it discussed by you,” he said. “My solicitor is drawing up the papers for my heir to take over.”
“Your heir?” There hadn’t been another Vane at Dallinger Park since the earl’s son had died, leaving the earl as the last of his family.
There hadn’t even been whispers in Bowhaven of anyone else—and since she’d grown up above the pub, the central gathering place in the village, she would have heard something.
“He’s utterly unsuitable, but there is no choice.” The earl continued as if they were discussing the weather. “Still, one must submit to one’s duty. In my case, that means making this man my heir. In your case, it means ensuring he fulfills his duty.”
In a conversation filled with brain stoppers, that one jolted her. “Me?”
“Yes, Ms. Chapman-Powell,” the earl said, turning his full attention to her, narrowing his gaze so that she was all but pinned to the spot like one of the butterflies in the display cases on the wall behind him. “And if you fail, the results will be dire. Without an heir, the title Earl of Englefield dies with me, the estate will be auctioned off to the highest bidder, and the McVie University for the Deaf will lose its sole benefactor, as will the village of Bowhaven. I presume you are up to the task at hand?”
Her stomach twisted and her shoulders bent down as if a three-stone yoke had been placed around her neck. The last thing Bowhaven could take was another blow to the local economy. And McVie? Without the funding from the estate, her sister’s school wouldn’t be able to continue. “I’ll try my best, sir.”
“That will only be acceptable if you are successful. There is no margin for error. This is my grandson we’re speaking of and I want…”
The words died off as something that looked akin to hope and fear and maybe-this-could-work gleamed in his eyes for a heartbeat before disappearing. He slid the piece of paper he’d been holding into a folder and handed it to her. “The investigator’s initial report.”
Brooke flipped it open and scanned the paper on top, one detail jumping out and making her pulse tick up. “He’s American?”
The earl looked back out at the moors. “One of many unfortunate realities about Nicholas Vane. He’s legitimate but only just. He has refused to speak to the investigator. He earns his living as an inventor, but according to that report, he spends most of his days lounging about. He has no sense of propriety.”
Her stomach sank. “And how would you like me to approach him?”
“The how is not my concern,” the earl said, somehow managing to make his upper-crust accent sound both dismissive and threatening. “The only thing that matters is that you ensure my heir is at Dallinger Park and prepared to be the next Earl of Englefield within a month. According to the solicitor, we need to have this entire unsavory process completed as quickly as possible in order to ensure I’m able to testify in court about the validity of his parentage, if it is challenged in court. Should that happen after I have…” The earl paused, his gaze turning back to the moors as if there was a better future out there than the one he faced inside Dallinger Park. “Progressed by then, there’s no way to guarantee the outcome for Dallinger Park, Bowhaven, or McVie.” He turned back to her, his eyes as clear as his intentions. “But absolutely nothing about my condition is to be shared outside of this conversation with anyone—including my grandson. Do you understand, Ms. Chapman-Powell?”
She nodded. Of course he wouldn’t want anyone to know about his health. In addition, she worried that if anyone found out, his fortune and the town’s health could be in jeopardy, so this was an easy secret to keep. “Yes, sir.”
“Good.” He sat down behind his desk. “You are dismissed.”
Gripping the folder in her clammy hands, Brooke walked out of the study, unable to shake her suspicion that getting sacked may have been the easier way out.
…
Sitting out on his front porch outside the small town of Salvation, the lake on his left and some Virginia woods on his right, Nick Vane hit the trash-can icon on his phone a little harder than necessary. The electronic crumpling was loud enough to drown out the leaves waving in the breeze and the birds chirping at the squirrels, but it wasn’t enough to sweeten the bitterness burning in his gut.
Turning his gaze, if not all his attention, back to the chessboard sitting on a buffed and varnished stump next to his chair on the porch, he shook his head at the mess he’d made of things. If he didn’t start focusing, Mason was going to hand him his ass—and that couldn’t happen since it would be months before he could earn back bragging rights. Nick nudged a pawn forward, not noticing until it was too late that it had been suicide for the defenseless piece.
Mace picked up Nick’s pawn and set it down on the floor near his beer. “Don’t tell me your latest girl canceled via email and threw you off your game.”
Nick snorted. “We both know that’s not likely.”
“I know,” his friend said, rolling his eyes. “It’s not your fault you’re so pretty.”
“You forgot rich and relaxed,” Nick shot back, making his move and then sat back relaxing in his chair as he pushed all thoughts of his asshole grandpa to a dark corner of his mind.
“You left out ‘pain in the butt,’ too.” Mace picked up one of his bishops and slid it right into one of Nick’s rooks, a shit-eating grin on his face. “But I thought we were trying to be nice to each other.”
Fuck. He was off his game if he hadn’t seen that move coming. “Why would we ever do that?”
“Exactly. So you keep being distracted by whatever has your panties in a twist and I’ll keep beating you per usual.”
There wasn’t any point in trying to deny the question Mace was asking without asking. The man was as nosy as a gossipy old woman. Also, he was the closest thing Nick had to a brother. They’d arrived at the group home as teens within months of each other. At first, being friends had just been survival. By the time they both left at eighteen, though, they were brothers in all but DNA. So, keeping a secret? Yeah, not gonna happen.
“It was another message from my grandfather—really, his secretary.”
Mace picked up his beer and grabbed an unopened one out of the small cooler next to the stump and handed it to Nick. “The old man still hasn’t reached out himself?”
“Better things to do with his life, I guess—not that I give a shit.” Nick twisted off the cap and took a drink. “After what that asshole did to my mom, there’s no way on God’s green earth I’ll ever answer to a damn thing that man asks.”
“Why now?” His friend moved his knight forward one and over two. “He’s the dickhead who refused to acknowledge you or let you live with him so you wouldn’t have to go into foster care.”
Nick shook his head. Maybe if Mace hadn’t been so distracted by trying to get Nick to talk about his feelings (as if that was going to happen), he wouldn’t have left his king vulnerable to attack.
“He wants me to be his heir,” Nick said, concentrating on moving his knight and giving his bishop a clear shot. “Check.”
“Fuck,” Mace grumbled. “What is the old man, some kind of oil baron?”
“English earl.”
Mace’s head jerked up, his eyes wide with surprise. “Are you shitting me?” To the surprise of absolutely no one who’d ever met Mason Thomas Pell—nicknamed The Bulldog for his tendency to be stubborn—he kept pushing. “So what are you going to do?”
“Not a damn thing. Eventually the old man and his pain-in-my-neck secretary will take the hint and leave me alone.”
Mace squinted at Nick and then shook his head. “Yeah, good luck with that.”
“Don’t talk to me about luck. I make my own; I’ve always had to.”
Thanks in no small part to the stick-up-his-ass English earl who had tried his best to ruin Nick’s life before he was even born and then watched from across the ocean and done nothing as his mom died slowly and painfully, leaving him an orphan. Now that bastard wanted Nick to take over as his heir? Yeah, fuck that shit.
One chess loss, two more beers, and several hours later, Mace left and Nick tried to sleep. Insomnia was always the one thing he could never conquer. He’d memorized every mark on the ceiling, every croak in the night from the frogs looking to hook up that sounded between midnight and three in the morning. The quiet buzz of his phone vibrating on the kitchen counter stood out like a bunch of drunken frat boys singing a college football fight song in a library.
He didn’t have to guess who it was. He just knew. It was that woman again: Brooke Chapman-Powell. He was out of bed before he’d thought about it and marching toward the kitchen.
That was a mistake.
He hit his pinkie toe on the iron frame of his bed in his rush. Pain shot up from his foot like hot rocket fuel commensurate with the volume of his yelp of agony as he hopped toward the door. He was almost there when the foot that wasn’t throbbing landed on an abandoned sock on the floor that slid forward on the smooth hardwood. He skidded and almost rammed his nose against the bedroom doorframe. Catching himself just in time, he did a spin move through the door. Heart beating wildly, his toe still aching, and the fear of a vengeful God put into him, he was breathing hard when he took an unsteady step toward the kitchen, reached for the phone, and ended up whacking his elbow on the metal spice rack on the counter. He was cursing out loud by the time he snatched his phone off the granite counter and clicked on the new email message.
He was punching in numbers on his keypad before his brain caught up with his actions. She picked up on the fourth ring.
“Brooke Chapman-Powell.”
The woman’s English accent came through loud and clear, jabbing into his ear like a drill bit. It spun and pushed against the sensitive spot in his brain that decided around the time that his mother died that there wasn’t anything worthwhile or good about that damp, foggy, snooty island across the Atlantic.
“Leave me alone,” he said, putting all his years of accumulated resentment into those three little words.
She gasped, the quick intake of breath audible over the phone. “Who is this?”
Nice try. “You know damn well who this is.”
“I’m sure I don’t.”
The line went dead.
Nick stared at his phone, blinking in surprise. She’d hung up on him. After a two-week-long barrage of letters and emails, the woman who talked in that snobby English accent had hung up on him!
Not that he needed another reason why he was never going to England, but the disdain dripping from Brooke Chapman-Powell’s words sure sealed the deal. That whole country could sink into the Atlantic. Still, as he made his way back to his bedroom, he couldn’t quite get that woman’s voice out of his head—and not because of her accent. There was something in that not-quite-awake-but-already-emailing way she’d said her name that stuck with him, turned the curiosity spokes in his brain—sort of like when he got the nugget of an idea for an invention. He knew it wouldn’t go away until he knew more. Turning, he made his way back to the kitchen and picked up his phone ready to do a little Google investigating himself.
He had no more than pressed the home button before the damn thing rang in his hand. He recognized the number immediately—Brooke Chapman-Powell was calling him back. The question was, should he answer?
…
Brooke had never wanted someone to answer and not answer the phone so much in her entire bloody life. No matter what happened, the outcome would be horrid. Blast her inability to function in the mornings.
She’d read the email no less than sixteen times before sending it because she knew exactly how faulty her brain was at six in the morning. An almost immediate phone call from the earl’s heir was the last thing she’d been expecting. After weeks of his silence, an actual response, let alone a voice on the other end of the line, was not what she’d imagined would happen. And she’d cocked it all up.
Hands clammy, she gripped her phone tighter as the trans-Atlantic ringing continued. Then he answered. Not that he said anything—but he was there. She just knew it.
She held her breath, trying to figure out what to say—something she really should have figured out before she’d hit call back. Really, it was most unlike her.
“Figured it out, huh?” The sleepy rumble of Nick Vane’s voice managed, somehow, to be soothing despite the fact that he was using it to torment her for her mistake.
“Mr. Vane,” she said, pacing her small bedroom. “I do apologize.”
A million times. Maybe even a billion. Too much was riding on this to have her morning muffle head make a mess of it all.
“What time is it there?”
That wasn’t a “you’re forgiven,” but he hadn’t hung up on her, so that was a tick in the plus column. “Ten past six.”
“That’s early,” he said, almost sounding sympathetic.
She was nodding in agreement when her brain caught up with what he was obviously getting at. It had to be around midnight there. That wasn’t sympathy in his voice; it was subtle sarcasm—her country’s native tongue.
Of course, he was the one who had called her when she had simply emailed like a civilized person. Being in the right didn’t mean she didn’t have to apologize, though. Nicholas Vane was the earl’s grandson and heir, and that meant she’d probably be apologizing for the next twenty years if she didn’t get sacked first. Oh joy.
“I look forward to being able to offer my apologies in person,” she said, not realizing until she glanced in the mirror above the dresser that she’d lifted her chin in defiance. “Do you have a preference on flights?”
“I’m not coming.”
Shit. Shit. Shit. Panic and dread did some sickening tango in her stomach as she glanced out her window and saw Bowhaven starting to come to life even at this early hour. The flower committee members were hanging baskets of floral arrangements from the posts dotting the sidewalk on the high street. Abigail Posten was opening the door to the bakery a few doors down. It would only be a matter of time before the smell of fresh bread wafted up to Brooke’s room above her family’s pub.
“Sir,” she said, making every effort to keep the worry out of her voice. Never let them see you crack, Brooke, not even for a minute, or it will be Manchester all over again. Utter public humiliation. Willing her panic into remission, she set her shoulders and steeled her spine. “I respectfully request that you provide another answer.”
“Ask all you like, but my answer isn’t changing.” He paused before letting out an annoyed grunt. “And stop calling me ‘sir.’”
She shut her mouth tight a half second before the word “sir” was about to come out, took a breath, and said, “I understand this all comes as a shock, since you were born and raised away from your family estate, but you are needed here, sir.”
Ugh. That one had slipped out.
“You make it sound like it was my mom’s choice to be a single parent and mine to be a bastard in all but legal terms,” he said, each word tearing through the phone. “And cut the ‘sir’ shit. I’m Nick. That’s it. Nothing more.”
Outside, Robert McClung was strolling toward the charity shop he managed that was, unfortunately, one of the busiest shops in the village. Bowhaven had been hit with one economic calamity after another since the Pepson Factory had closed down and unemployment went through the roof. Nick Vane staying away wasn’t an option. Every one of the people living in and around the village needed him here even if they—and he himself—didn’t know it.
“But you are more than just Mr. Vane, and if you’d accept the earl’s invitation, you’d understand.”
A derisive snort came through loud and clear all the way from America. “I don’t care why he forced my parents to annul their marriage or why he now has decided to acknowledge me. I don’t need him. I certainly don’t want to talk to him. And there’s about a million things I’d rather do—including walking down Main Street buck naked while singing ‘Jingle Bells’—than fly across the ocean to see him.”
Brooke sank down on her bed, her legs not steady enough to stay upright.
“Please, sir,” she said, trying not to sound like she was begging when that was exactly what she was doing. “Think of it as just a short holiday. You really are needed, and not just by the earl, who is…” She stopped just in time. “Who is the earl.”
Yes, six in the morning—the time where competency went to die.
The fact that she couldn’t tell him more than that without breaking the earl’s confidence or his direct order ate away at her. Even estranged, the heir should know what was going on with his grandfather’s health. No matter what, family was at the heart of us all.
“Sir, the village is of some consequence. There are many here who, if you refuse, well, we—they—could be out of a job should you continue to refuse.”
“And I should care why, exactly?”
Letting out a quiet sigh, she rubbed her stomach. “Sir—”
“My name is Nick,” he cut her off, his low voice unyielding. “Say it.”
What in the hell did protocol matter in these circumstances? She’d call him the fastest racing pigeon in her dad’s coop if that’s what he wanted. “Nick.”
She didn’t know what else to say, so they both just listened to the other breathe for what felt like forever.
“I’ll think about it.” Without waiting for a response, he hung up.
Brooke let out the world’s quietest squeal of joy and did a little spinning dance in her room. Whatever it took, she’d get him on the next flight possible. Everything was going to work out. It had to.
All she had to do was convince him to accept his duty. How hard could that be?