Royal Bastard

by Avery Flynn

  The man was in a T-shirt and jeans, a press badge clipped to his shirt. “Never thought I’d catch Reggie’s uptight ex like this,” the man said. “Who’s the chap, Brooke? Is this to get back at Reggie? Still holding out hope he’ll come back now that he broke it off with the prime minister’s daughter?”

  He took another couple of shots as Nick’s brain tried to catch up. As soon as it did, he leaped back from Brooke and reached for the photographer, but the other man slipped away, disappearing into a second wave of zombies milling around waiting for their time on camera.

  “Oh no,” Brooke said, seeming to shrink into herself as he watched. “Please not again.”

  …

  Whoever was answering pleas that week wasn’t taking calls, though. The first photos had appeared online on soccer gossip sites that night and rehashed Brooke’s experience with that dickhead Reggie as if she hadn’t been hot enough to hold on to what they called a footballer. Nick had never read something so ridiculous in his entire life.

  “They’re jerks,” he said, snapping closed her laptop that sat on the kitchen table in the stable house the next morning.

  She took a drink of tea from her mug, then let out a long, weary sigh. “Why did this have to happen just when everyone was starting to look at me as if I had something to offer Bowhaven, as if I could be taken seriously?”

  “I take you seriously.”

  She snorted in a very un-Lady-Lemons-like way. “You just want to get in my knickers.”

  “True.” He grinned. “But don’t worry, this will blow over and it’ll only be a blip compared to all you bring to this place. The people in Bowhaven know that.”

  If only that had been the case. By the time Mace and the last movie people were packing up two days later, there were scummy little reporters and photographers everywhere in Bowhaven. Someone on the crew—Mace didn’t know who—had let it slip exactly who Brooke had been caught kissing. And that’s all it had taken for the photos and the speculation to move from the obscure soccer gossip sites to national news. Everyone wanted to get a piece of the American who was a rich inventor and would be the Earl of Englefield. The one he’d given to Mr. Darcy to shred in his doggie way had the headline “From American Love Child to English Earl.”

  “Oh, not this twat again,” Riley muttered when a blowhard appeared on the TV in the fish and chip shop where the two were having lunch.

  Just as the man started in on the absolute mockery having a child borne from a marriage that had been annulled as a legitimate member of the peerage, the forest ranger hit the mute button.

  “Thanks,” Nick said.

  Riley made a sort of grunting sound that he took as a “no problem,” and they went back to shoveling fish and vinegar-soaked french fries into their mouths. The fact that his mouth was filled with food was probably the only reason why his jaw didn’t drop when the earl walked in in full-on tweed outfit with a carved walking stick and a proud, disapproving upturn to his nose.

  The earl looked around the mostly empty restaurant and finally settled on Nick. “I need a moment.”

  “What is it?” he asked, sopping up some salt from the brown paper wrapper his fish and fries had come in.

  “Can we go somewhere more private?” The earl fiddled with an eight-by-ten manila envelope tucked under one arm. “This information is of a delicate nature.”

  Nick watched the closed captioning on the silent television. The douche nozzle in the bad suit had moved on to calling Nick’s mom a money-grubbing American hussy. “I’m not sure I have any delicate sensitivity left anymore.”

  “It involves Ms. Chapman-Powell.”

  That dragged his attention from the TV. “Go on.”

  The earl pulled the envelope from under his arm. “And some pictures.”

  “Have you been watching the news?” Nerves started to eat away at his stomach lining despite the bravado. “That kiss is already splashed all over the place.”

  “There are…” The earl paused as if, for once, at a loss for words. “Other photos.”

  When Nick didn’t say anything, Gramps gave Riley a look that would freeze lava and the forest ranger shrugged and moved to another table. The earl sat down and placed the envelope on the small circular table. Nick’s stomach developed six new ulcers in the span of a heartbeat. He didn’t want to open that envelope. Whatever was in there, it was bad. He picked up the envelope anyway and pulled out the contents.

  …

  Just when Brooke thought it couldn’t get worse, Nick had walked into the Fox, asked her out into the garden, and shown her naked photos of the two of them making love at the stable house taken the night before. She knew because her hair was up in the photos just like it had been last night. He’d fisted her ponytail and she’d almost come on the spot. Now someone else out there knew that moment that had belonged just to them.

  The contents of her stomach curdled.

  “How did he get these?” she asked, crumpling onto the wooden bench farthest away from the door leading into the pub and trying not to remember that the man who handed over the copies of the photos was her boss.

  The earl had received the low-resolution copies as a courtesy from a media mogul who’d turned down the opportunity to publish the photos in the national newspaper he owned as a favor to the earl. Of course, there wasn’t a guarantee the other papers wouldn’t print them. If they made it past next week without her arse on the front page, she’d go into shock.

  “Well, it was nice while it lasted,” she said, imagining all her grand ideas for Bowhaven flying away with the fast-moving clouds overhead. They’d never happen now. Not once people got an eyeful of these pictures.

  The disaster that was her life post-Reggie was one thing. She’d been the victim. But this? She doubted they’d see it that way.

  “What was nice?” Nick asked as he tore the printouts into tiny confetti pieces and swept them into the manila envelope.

  “Being respected by the villagers.” Getting the opportunity to see some of her ideas for the village come to fruition. Meeting her parents’ eyes. Not having everyone in Yorkshire knowing what her O face looked like. He could take his pick. “Now I’ll just be the girl who shagged the earl’s heir.”

  The envelope crumpled in his grip. “That’s not fair.”

  “And we both know that life isn’t fair, so why fight it?” She knew better. The man got backslaps. The woman? She was just a slag. It wasn’t fair, and that just gutted her.

  Nick paced the pub’s back garden like a caged animal, all angry intensity and pent-up energy. The air rippled around him, and for a second she couldn’t do more than stare at the man she’d fallen for. Hard. Before she knew it. Seeing him riled up like this on her behalf shoved away the last bit of the self-protective barrier around her heart because it was his. And with Nick by her side, she’d win over the town again. She wasn’t going to give up on it now.

  Oblivious to the thoughts swirling around inside her head, Nick raked his fingers through his hair as he paced. “Why don’t you get out of Dodge? Go somewhere else for a while, ditch everything and everyone.”

  Away. From everyone. The words stuck on repeat in her head. “You think I should run away. Again?”

  He stopped in front of her and nodded with the conviction of a saint in church. “Just leave. Start over. Everyone does.”

  “Even you?” The words scraped her throat as she said them.

  It wasn’t like she hadn’t known he was going in a few months, but knowing and believing were two different things. Six months. That’s all he could give Bowhaven each year. Nothing more. No full-time commitment. She was a world-class git.

  Nick didn’t say anything—he didn’t have to—and something inside her broke with such a clear finality, she swore she could hear the snap echoing in her ears.

  …

  Why wouldn’t she list
en to him? All he wanted to do was protect her, minimize the eventual agony. People left. Friends moved away. His dad abandoned his family. His mom died, and if someone thought that wasn’t leaving, then they’d never been lost and alone and at the mercy of an overburdened governmental system. He couldn’t stop that loss from hitting Brooke square in the face, but he could help her get out in front of it. If you moved fast and kept moving, then no one could leave you first.

  “I asked you a question, Nick,” she said, her voice strained and shaking. “Please offer me the common curtesy of an answer.”

  God, he didn’t want to do this, but he didn’t have a choice. He had to be cruel to be kind. She’d hate him, but she’d be better off. He could live with that.

  He forced his shoulders to relax, took on the lazy, bored posture he’d worn as armor for as long as he could remember. “Look, Brooke, I’m not the kind of guy you need. It’s not in my DNA to stick around. Just look at the people I come from. Everybody leaves, even me—especially me.”

  The words were knives and they landed perfectly. Her blue eyes grew wide, then watery, and it took everything he had not to fall to his knees before her and lie—tell her he’d stay, that he’d never leave. But he would. That’s what the Vanes did, and no matter how much he wanted to deny it, he was a Vane through and through. So he forced himself to stay, not to give in an inch.

  Then Brooke transformed in front of him. Her spine straightened. Her chin lifted. She blinked away the unshed tears. Taking in a deep breath, she raised a hand and smoothed her blond hair back. By the time she rose from her chair, Brooke had disappeared and Lady Lemons had taken her place.

  “I’m not going anywhere,” she said. “This is my home and I’ll win them back over. One can’t just give up and leave every time something gets hard.”

  “Leaving isn’t giving in; it’s playing it smart. It’s self-preservation. It’s survival.” Alone was better than abandoned and unwanted. Always. “You can’t fool yourself thinking that the whole I’ll-walk-five-hundred-miles thing is real. It’s not. Everyone leaves, and they don’t come back, so why not get out of there first?”

  She looked him dead in the eyes. “Because not all of us are thirty-two-year-old man children.”

  “Is that what you think I am?”

  One blond eyebrow went up. “That’s what you’re acting like.”

  And that’s what he got for trying to help. Insults. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.” The manila envelope a crumpled mess in his fist, he turned and started for the door leading into the pub so he could get away from this woman.

  “Leaving so soon?” she asked, a mocking derision giving her words a sharp edge. “What a shock.”

  He yanked the door open but paused before he walked through, pivoting so he could get a good look at the woman who’d actually made him want to stay even when he knew he couldn’t. “Ever think that this place isn’t worth fighting for?”

  “No,” she said without the slightest hesitation. “That’s the thing about Bowhaven. It demands fighters, and if you’re not one, then maybe you should go.”

  “That’s exactly what I’ve been telling you people since you first contacted me. I don’t belong here.”

  He’d known it all along. This place. These people. They didn’t want him and he didn’t want to be here. Now it was time he took his own advice and got the hell out of here for good.

  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.

  You wouldn’t believe how much he’s grown. I no more than walk into the house with groceries and he’s searching through the bags, wondering what kind of snacks I got.

  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.

  And his laugh? Good Lord, it sounds like yours. I can’t hear him without thinking
of the time we went canoeing and I accidentally flipped the damn thing. Thank God the water had only been waist-high. You came up looking like a drowned rat with a fish in your hands. I’ll never understand how you did that. The days when I’m missing you most, I think back to that day and it always makes me smile.

  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.

  I worry sometimes. Nick gets so angry, and I know why. He holds on to every scrap of everything, never throws a thing out. I swear he hordes out of reflex. It’s like he’s afraid he’ll wake up and it’ll all be gone. I know I did this to him. We did this to him. I wish I could tell him the rest. Explain how we didn’t have a choice. How we had to keep everything secret. Love. Family. Loyalty. They’re all things I’m trying to raise him to understand are the most important things, the things that matter. You had reasons for what you did. Someday I’ll figure out how to explain that to him.

  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.