Royal Bastard

by Avery Flynn

  “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.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Nick was asses to elbows with humanity in Manchester waiting to get into a metal tube so he could finally fly back over the Atlantic. His seat was cramped, the old lady next to him wouldn’t stop talking, and he’d forgotten to put his headache medication in his carry-on. That meant no sweet oblivion called sleep while he waited for his flight to be called—especially not with Mrs. Damerschmidt of Rahway, New Jersey, telling him every little detail of her grandson’s mastery of the alphabet at only eleven months.

  “The boy is a prodigy. You say A and he picks up the block and stuffs it straight in his mouth. It’s too big for him to swallow so you don’t have to worry about that, but it does get a little messy. Our little booger doesn’t like to give back those wood blocks once they’re in his mouth. You don’t think he could be harmed by the paint chips on the block, do you?”

  She looked at him expectantly.

  “I don’t think they use lead-based paint on kids’ toys anymore,” he said, more on autopilot than any actual frame of reference beyond who in the hell would still use poisoned paint.

  “Oh good, that makes me feel so much better,” she said, heaving a relieved sigh. “You really are the nicest. I can’t tell you how nice it was to sit down in my seat and realize that you were American. I’ve missed hearing home, you know what I mean?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Home. The word didn’t come with an automatic image of his Virginia lake house anymore, and that was a problem.

  “And the manners, your mama must be so proud. Listen to me prattling on like you’re a boy when you probably have a boy of your own.”

  A towheaded baby with big blue eyes flashed in his mind. “No, ma’am.”

  “Well, you need to get working on that. I’m sure your mother tells you that all the time.” She pivoted in her seat to better face him, glancing down at the dog collar he’d placed on the small table between their chairs. “Now, what is that thing you keep messing with? It looks like a dog collar, but there’s more to it.”

  “It’s a little something I’ve been working on.” And he’d finally be able to give it his full attention now that he wouldn’t be distracted by Brooke or Bowhaven or the earl.

  “Come now, you can’t keep a secret from me. I’m a stranger; you’ll never see me again, so there’s no harm in telling me everything.”

  “It’s nothing that deep, just a voice-activated dog collar. It measures a dog’s anxiety level via their pulse and, when needed, plays back a prerecorded message that’s supposed to calm the dog down.”

  Mrs. Damerschmidt nodded. “But it makes the pooch go wild.”

  “Afraid so.”

  “They seem like such simple creatures, but they always know, don’t they?”

  “Ma’am?”

  Her face got a soft, faraway look to it. “Well, I had a french bulldog named Rufus a few years ago before he got hit by a bus.” She made the sign of the cross. “Poor guy was always more curious than smart. Well, he knew my husband’s car, his footsteps, even his breathing pattern for when he finally fell asleep and it was safe for Rufus to jump on the bed and snuggle in without fear of getting told to get down and go to his own doggie bed. He wouldn’t have been fooled with a fake. Even silly dogs know the real thing when they feel it. It’s love. Human or canine, we know it when we know it, know what I mean?”

  Did he? His gut clenched at an image of Brooke smiling at him at the Fox. The sound of her unexpected laugh. The way that even as she was acting like Lady Lemons, some of her natural spit and vinegar came through. Her determination to make Bowhaven a better place whether it wanted to be or not. Did he know love? His chest ached. He did. And he’d walked away. Not that he had a choice. She’d told him to go, and he had.

  Something must have shown on his face because she patted his arm. “What’s her name and what did you do to mess it all up?”

  “What makes you think it was me?” Him? Defensive? Never.

  “I know I look every one of my sixty-six years, buddy. Don’t even try to pee on my leg and tell me it’s raining. I stole that from the TV judge. I love that line. Use it on my Jerry all the time. Now, fess up.”

  And because they were about to get on a plane and go thirty thousand feet in the air over the Atlantic Ocean with hours to go in a cabin where the lights were dimmed and the sound of soft snoring the only noise, he did. He started with the emails and the texts to meeting Lady Lemons at the airport to the zombie wedding ball and everything in between. By the time he ended, Mrs. Damerschmidt was shaking her head.

  “You need serious help,” she said, flinging the insult while managing to not make it sound like one. “My Jerry does, too. I think it has something to do with that Y chromosome you’ve got in common.”

  “How is this my fault?” Nick asked.

  She gave him a sympathetic smile. “Don’t get caught up on fault. Think about outcomes. Is this the one you wanted?”

  “Absolutely. I never wanted to be on that dreary island in the first place.”

  “Funny way of showing it by getting on an airplane and going there,” Mrs. Damerschmidt said, sarcasm dripping off each word.

  “She wore me down.” All those texts. The emails. The sheer determination to get her way.

  The older woman nodded knowingly. “A good woman will do that until you see the truth.”

  “And what truth is that?” This was getting ridiculous.

  “You tell me.”

  The truth? All he knew now was that everyone had secrets. His grandfather had kept his locked away in a room with old letters and photos of a family he’d torn apart. Brooke? She’d had hers, too. She wanted to repay Bowhaven for coming to her rescue when she’d been at her lowest by doing whatever it took to save the village—even if that meant convincing a stubborn American to get on a plane to England. Discovering his mom’s secret had left him raw. The woman in the letters loved him, he never doubted that, but she’d hid the truth about his father, about what happened. He was the only one without any secrets. He was who he was. A man alone and who was absolutely 100 percent okay with that. He didn’t need a family. Or a village. Or Brooke. He would be just fine on his own as always.

  He opened his mouth to tell Mrs. Damerschmidt exactly that, but it wasn’t what came out. Instead, it was his own secret that he’d kept from himself.

  “That I was looking for home,” he said, the words coming out like a revelation he’d known in his gut all along. “That I was looking for people who would love me. That I was looking for a place where I’d be wanted.”

  “Sounds to me like you found it, too. And on top of that, you found someone who loves you like my Jerry loves me…like I love him.” She held up her left hand and the tiny sliver of a diamond shone in the light from the small overhead bulb. “Forty years.” She patted him on the shoulder. “Falling in love is a horrible thing to have happen to a person. It’s ugly and scary and it makes you want to run a
s fast as your feet will take you some days. But it’s worth it—if you have the balls to go out and claim it.” She tapped a finger on the dog collar spread out on his tray table. “Even Rufus knew that.”

  He swiped the collar off his table and stuffed it into his pocket. “You’re wrong.”

  She had to be. Otherwise he’d made one of those I’ve-wrecked-everything mistakes his grandfather had told him about. The old man couldn’t be right. Not about this.

  Mrs. Damerschmidt turned in her seat to face front. “Keep telling yourself that fairy tale and maybe you’ll start to believe it.”

  Nick kept his mouth shut. A voice over the intercom announced his flight back to America was about to board. He should be standing up, getting his carry-on bag, and prepping for boarding. Instead, he was sitting there feeling a little like a man who’d just been sucker punched by the sinking realization that the older woman was right. The dog collar poked him in the thigh. It didn’t really fit in his pocket, but he couldn’t stand to look at it another second. Stupid thing would probably never work anyway. Mrs. Damerschmidt was probably right—even pooches knew when love was right in front of their snouts. He tried to imagine how the sound of Brooke’s voice could be even half as good as having her with him. It didn’t even come close. Realization sank into him, making his bones heavy with certainty.

  Canine or human, we know love when we know it. Even jerks like Nick Vane.

  Nick started in his seat. “I’ve gotta get back to Bowhaven.”

  Mrs. Damerschmidt cracked her eyes open and grinned at him. “That’s my boy. Go get her back.”

  …

  Turned out Brooke’s naked bum didn’t have to wait until the next week for national exposure. Thanks to the beauty of the internet, her arse was available in 300-dpi online by teatime two days later. Some twat had even giffed it so that all the photos flowed together in one twenty-second video.

  “Brilliant,” she muttered to herself as she placed her mobile down on the pub’s bar so she didn’t fling it across the room. “Just bloody brilliant.”