by Lucy Farago
He stepped into the steamy shower and grabbed the shampoo. He squirted a blob into his hand and scrubbed his head, hard. The suds ran down his face and into his eyes. “Bloody hell.” It felt like a thousand midges stung his eyeballs. Rinsing the soap off, he stood there with his eyes slammed shut until the pain subsided and it was safe to pry his lids apart. This was going to be one of those days. And holy shit, he was going to be a father. How exactly did he feel about that? Fucked if he knew. Shouldn’t he know?
He liked Rhonda. Of course he did. He more than liked her. He might even love her, but right now his head was too busy processing this baby thing to consider his feeling for her. She would make a great mother. He didn’t doubt that for a second. What about him? What kind of father would he be? He’d been so focused on making sure Colin beat him to it, he never considered what it would be like to have children of his own.
That wasn’t true. He had. He just never thought it would happen. And now that it did … it was actually happening … damn. He was so confused.
He finished showering and toweled off. He didn’t bother shaving. One, it pissed his grandmother off. Two, he was afraid the way things were going he’d nick an artery. He dressed in jeans and a gray polo, left his room, and headed straight for hers. He didn’t know what he was going to say or how he’d approach it, but he had to see her, had to tell her they were going to be parents.
After knocking twice, he concluded she was either already downstairs or ignoring him, which took courage considering she was carrying his child. He tamped down his growing frustration. Maybe she’d been planning on telling him and hadn’t found the right moment. She might be afraid of his reaction. Even he still wasn’t sure what that would be.
On his way downstairs he bumped into the one person he most did not want to see. Sarah.
“Blake, how are you this morning?”
He didn’t believe in hitting women. So why did he want to strangle her every time he saw her? “Sarah.” In no mood for a bullshit conversation, he began to step around her when she snagged his arm.
“Are you going to be civil, or what?”
“Or what.” That sounded like a good plan. “Let go of me, Sarah.”
“We need to talk,” she said, unwisely hanging to his arm.
“And you need to get your claws off me.” And off his brother, if she could do it without hurting him.
She huffed and removed her talons. “I would think you’d have more regard for your brother.”
“My wanting to push his wife down these stairs has nothing to do with my regard for him.” He smiled, wanting her to believe he was only half kidding.
She glanced back at the long staircase, then at him. “So unbecoming of you. I’d have thought you’d outgrown your malicious streak by now.”
Not where she was concerned. “What do you want, Sarah?” He was losing his patience.
“I want to know what you meant by bringing that woman here.”
He was wondering when she’d get around to it. “I was trying to piss you off. Did it work?”
Now it was her turn to smile. Hard to believe he once loved that face.
“You succeeded in upsetting your brother. Does that suffice?”
“Funny, he didn’t seem upset last night. In fact, he seemed confident and sure of himself. More like the brother I knew before the accident.” She was lying and they both knew it. He continued down the stairs.
“He wants to come into his inheritance, Blake. Don’t take that away from him,” she said to his back. “He loves this house.”
Blake said nothing.
“He loves me.”
“Who is it you’re trying to convince?” He kept walking.
He found Rhonda in the breakfast room with his mother, a map of some kind between them.
“Hello, darling. Sleep well?”
He glanced at Rhonda who pretended to be too busy studying the map to greet him.
“Fine. You?”
“Splendid. I was just showing Rhonda places she might like to visit. After you eat, you should take a car and drive to one of the ruins.”
“If that’s what Rhonda wants.”
She looked up and he was surprised to see a soft blue under her eyes. Damn, she hadn’t slept and must be exhausted.
“Sure.” She stared at him a long while before returning to the map. “How far did you say Inverness is?”
“Two hours, give or take. I suggest you dress in layers. September can be cool in the highlands and it looks like it might rain. Blake, breakfast?”
“I’m fine with just coffee.”
“I’ll have Giles bring you toast. Sit. I have a matter to attend to. Rhonda, if he takes you to the pub, make certain you are comfortable with driving on the left side of the road.”
“Mother, I don’t drink and drive.”
“Anymore,” she added.
“I was barely twenty and stupid. Can we not let it go?”
“You got caught drinking and driving?”
So now Rhonda decided to pay attention to him?
“Yes,” his mother answered. “And he was in a fatal accident.”
“You killed someone?” Rhonda looked horrified.
“Not someone. A cow. I made full restitution to the farmer and I shoveled shit all summer to show him how sorry I was.” He’d smelled like an old barn his entire summer holiday.
“You’re lucky that’s all you had to do,” his mother said. “Blake, Lady Margaret called this morning. Her daughter is home from her trip abroad. She thought the two of you might like to catch up. I doubt you’ve seen each other since Oxford.”
“Lady Margaret is match-making again. I haven’t talked to Lady Beatrice since Oxford because she’s a silly twit who thought Ground Zero was a rock band. Thank her, but tell her I’m busy.”
“Are you sure?” his mother asked.
He glanced over at Rhonda, who obviously realized Lady Margaret wasn’t the only one match-making. “Mother,” he warned.
“Fine. Now, if you’ll excuse me, this house doesn’t run itself. Have a lovely day, Rhonda.”
“Thank you, Lady Helen.”
With his mother gone, Rhonda glowered at him. “You hit a cow?”
“Matilda, yes. I felt terrible.” He poured himself coffee from the decanter on the table. “So, do you really want to see Scotland?”
“It would be kind of a waste to come all this way and not see it.”
“There,” he said. “You did it again.”
“Did what?” she asked, as if he’d lost his mind.
“Did that dickhead, roll-your-eyes thing you do. Are you mad at me?” And he wasn’t the one keeping secrets.
“Why would I be mad at you? Did you do something wrong?”
“No.” He wisely refrained from saying a woman wouldn’t let a little thing like him doing nothing wrong stop her from being mad.
She folded the map and set it down.
He pulled out a chair and sat beside her.
She stared at him a long while. Was this it? Was she going to tell him she was pregnant?
Instead she said, “When were you going to tell me about Sarah?”
Shit. He hadn’t planned on keeping his relationship with her a secret, but nor had he wanted to make Rhonda uncomfortable. But he’d been stupid to think Sarah would play nice. “What was I supposed to tell you?”
“The truth. Did you see how she looked at me last night?”
“No … not really.” Sarah was nasty to anyone she didn’t perceive as her equal. “For the record, she doesn’t like many people.” That much was true.
“Especially those she thinks are a threat. So tell me, was she mad because she got it in her head that you and I were going to beat her in the baby game … or was she jealous you showed up with a woman?”
Rhonda was observant. He should’ve known she’d see right through Sarah’s bullshit. He pushed his coffee cup aside and poured himself a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice from the pitc
her on the table. “Truthfully, I think it’s a little of one, a lot of the other.”
“She still has a thing for you, but wants the money more?”
“Sort of.” He took a sip of orange juice and set the glass down. “She wants the money. There’s no getting around that.” Blake took a chance and trusted Rhonda with one more thing. He had to believe she’d eventually let him know about the baby, that his family drama had made her reluctant to discuss it. Even if she didn’t want kids, surely she’d still tell him. He didn’t want to think his faith in her was misguided.
“Sarah and I met at university. She invited me to her uncle’s yearly foxhunt. You saw how much she appreciates hunting last night.”
“Yeah, and wasn’t that nice. You hunt too?”
“Don’t look so disgusted. I don’t much care for killing defenseless animals, but I am a guy and she was a knockout.”
“And you were hunting for something else.”
“Pretty much,” he agreed. Like he said, he was a guy. “I knew my brother had a thing for her, but so did every man at university. At the time, Colin was in a wheelchair. And Sarah was too far into the social scene to bother with a man who couldn’t keep up, not even one with a title. Even I didn’t understand how much being the grandson of a duke meant to people until after I left Scotland.”
“You were so used to people kissing your ass, you didn’t see it for what it was until you moved?”
He laughed. “Sadly, yes. Sarah’s father was a peer and a member of the House of Lords until he died her first year of school. There were rumors of a scandal, although I’m not sure about the true story. Sarah was tight-lipped, but apparently he took his own life. After that the family was ruined. They lost everything.”
“Oh, that’s sad.”
“Yes. She adored him. Her great uncle, a close friend of the Queen, paid for the remainder of Sarah’s education. I can’t say for certain, but I’m betting they were hoping she’d graduate an MRS with money.”
“MRS? Oh, you mean Mrs., like married.”
He smiled. “Exactly.”
“And you were supposed to be the mister?”
“Me, or one of two other candidates.” He finished off his orange juice and accepted the toast Giles brought him.
Rhonda waited for Giles to leave before continuing their discussion.
“She was cheating on you? Is that why you broke it off?”
“Yes, but I made the mistake of allowing wounded pride to get the best of me. I didn’t tell anyone what she’d done. Perhaps if I had, Colin would have stayed away from her. As I said, I always knew he had a thing for her. I didn’t know he was in love with her. She’d gone crying to him, thinking he might be able to talk me into taking her back. Whatever excuse she gave him for our breakup, it made her look like the wounded party. Later, I was too busy licking my wounds to notice Colin’s mood had changed.”
“In a good way, you mean? Happier?”
“Something like that. Of course, after you break up with someone, all your friends decide to tell you she was on the prowl for a rich husband. No one thought to warn you beforehand. She and Colin kept their relationship secret. Colin thinking he’d upset me, and Sarah wanting to get her claws in so deep that by the time I found out they were ‘in love’ they were headed for the altar.”
“You still could have told him.”
“No. I couldn’t. Look, why don’t you run back to the room and grab a coat? I’ll meet you around the front with a car. If you’re up for it, we’ll drive to Inverness and I’ll finish the story.”
She gave him a wary look but stood anyway. “Promise?”
“Cross my heart.” Which he then did.
“Okay, but eat your toast or I’ll tell your mother.” She pushed her seat back from the table and left.
He took four large bites of his breakfast and left the rest in search of the right car for their excursion. He hoped to get her to open up, to confess she was pregnant, and what better way than a romantic drive in the highland mountains.
*
Blake pilfered his father’s 1957 Jaguar XKSS. He and his dad had a deal. He wouldn’t tell his mother how much Dad’s toys cost and Dad would let him drive them.
He was waiting for Rhonda in the driveway when he received the call. Sorrentino still hadn’t shown up, but the present issue was Krupin himself. If Krupin accused Madison Scott of duplicity, then it stood to reason that maybe the person they suspected her of having an affair with, the one whose apartment she’d been seen coming out of, was that person.
So the team dug deeper but came up empty. He was going over what he knew in his head when Rhonda came out. He decided to share, to get her take on things.
“Krupin said his colleagues were in need of him. That means it’s someone within the syndicate.” He opened the car door for her, waited until she was inside then shut it.
“Yeah, I remember thinking that,” she agreed, after he took the driver’s side. “But if he has a problem within, if he knows someone is going against him, why wouldn’t he be allowed to deal with it? Isn’t his problem their problem?”
“You’d think.” He started the engine, smiling at the awesome rumble as it came to life. From the corner of his eye he caught Rhonda shaking her head. “It’s a guy thing,” he explained, caressing the polished wood steering wheel. His dad had great taste in cars.
“Can you focus on the problem at hand, or would you like me to give you some alone time with the Jag?”
He bit back a laugh, stuck his nose in the air and put the car in first gear. She was such a smart ass. And he loved it.
“Okay,” she said, putting them back on track. “Wouldn’t the bigger issue be dealing with that guy? Missing diamonds are one thing. I mean, how much money are we talking about?”
“The take from the heist was a hundred and seventeen million.”
“Then, does he want you to find a handful of diamonds, or the bad apple in his pie?”
“He knows who it is.”
“But he can’t touch him. Maybe he wants you to. Maybe he thinks if you find the missing diamonds, you deal with this guy. Two birds, one stone. Maybe the person you think Madison was having the affair with has the diamonds. Or,” she said, her face lighting up with excitement, “maybe it’s not about the missing diamonds but the guy himself.”
“I think we need to find who she was meeting at that apartment.”
“I’m so smart,” she said smugly.
He didn’t have the heart to say he’d been thinking along the same lines, but having them work it out together did make it clearer in his head. He called Monty and told him to search deeper.
“Are you cold?” he asked, reaching to turn the heat up. His mother had been right. The dull sky spoke of rain.
“I’m fine.”
“Well, let me know if you get cold—or hot?” He wanted the mother of his child to feel comfortable.
“Stop fussing over me.” She ran her hands over the fine Italian leather seat. “This really is a nice car. Maggie has an Alfa Romeo Duetto. She’s crazy enough to let us drive it.”
“Do you like cars?” he asked, as rain began peppering the windshield.
“It’s more about appreciating the car. About appreciating anything,” she said. “Maggie’s car, this one, they’re old and yet someone took the time to take care of it, to keep or restore its beauty. Like Ryan’s plantation or the antique furniture in your house. Some of those pieces are centuries old, and not just the furniture. The Jacobean paneling in your father’s den is awesome. It’s better and older than what’s in the foyer. The detail … it begs to be touched.”
Speechless, Blake kept his eye on the road as they drove the hairpin turn. What he really wanted to do was make sure the woman in the seat next to him was Rhonda. “Not to sound like my grandmother, but what does a Yank from Las Vegas know about Jacobean paneling?”
“Finish the story about Colin and Sarah and I’ll tell you.”
It started to
rain. Water pelted the car’s soft-top roof and he had to raise his voice to be heard. “Fair enough. Let’s start with Colin’s accident. The two of us had played polo since we were fourteen. I didn’t much care for the sport, but Colin took to it like he’d been born on a horse. Our coach said he was a natural and there was hope he’d make the national team one day.”
Blake drove into the pullout lane and allowed the truck following them to pass. Then he pulled back onto the road.
“When we got our driver’s permits at seventeen, my brother and I would normally drive to our matches. On one particular game day, we’d learned there’d be a scout in attendance. It was raining hard that day, so my father drove. We normally took turns. The drive to the field was supposed to be Colin’s, the drive back, mine.”
“But your father drove there. So he lost his turn.”
“Yes. We also lost the match and Colin was behaving badly and sulking. To shut him up, I let him have the return drive. The rain had stopped, but the roads were still wet. He … uh … he hit a patch, spun out, and slammed into a rock wall.”
“Oh my god,” Rhonda said, shrinking in her seat as they passed a rocky embankment.
“Yeah,” Blake agreed. “My dad and I walked away with bruises. Colin didn’t. His knee was badly damaged, his other leg crushed and later amputated. It took him a long time to want to try the prosthetic. As much as I hate her, we can thank Sarah for that.”
“So,” she said, “are you dumb enough to blame yourself for the accident? You know, the whole I should have been driving thing?”
Sometimes he hated how perceptive she was. If he said yes, he could tell by her no-nonsense expression, she’d take him to task on it. But he had felt guilty. Still felt guilty. “I just wanted to shut him up. I didn’t give a shit if we won or lost. Honestly, I only played because girls liked polo players. And before you say anything, I was seventeen.”
“Right … and not responsible for his inexperienced driving—or bad luck.”