Everything I Need, page 11
“Well, best wishes to her.”
“Best wishes to us if this anticipated engagement falls through,” Melody said darkly. “She has a way of making people’s lives miserable if she doesn’t get her way.”
“Noted,” he said, laughing. “I look forward to meeting them all.”
As always, the allusion to their shared future made Melody nervous. She ducked her head and smoothed her hair, pointedly avoiding his gaze.
“Hmm. So why did Baptiste want me to make sure you’re not glum?”
He hesitated, thrown off-kilter both by her noncommittal stance and by this one central wound in his life that never seemed to heal.
“I’m not that keen on Sandringham at this time of year, to be honest. Too many memories.”
“You miss your mother,” she said softly.
A sudden wave of grief slowed down his answer.
“I’ll be fine.” He stared her in the face. “And you’re assuming my mother is the only one I miss.”
Melody let out a long and serrated breath that did nothing to steady his equilibrium.
In the background, he heard the indistinct voices of Baptiste and Samira and the clatter of cutlery.
“I knew a long-distance relationship was going to be challenge,” she said, leaning closer. “As long as I’m busy at work and don’t sit down and start thinking too much, I’m fine. But sometimes—” She broke off. Helplessly shook her head. “This is hard, Anthony.”
“It’s excruciating,” he said, roughly rubbing his forehead with the palm of his free hand. “It’s untenable. As I said—”
Baptiste’s cheery face suddenly popped into the frame next to Melody, startling them both.
“Sorry, lovebirds. It’s time to eat our delicious feast before the food gets cold. I would, of course, still eat it no matter how cold it got, but Samira wants us to come to the table. So send your little kisses and tell each other good-bye.”
He disappeared again, leaving a melancholy silence in his wake.
“I’ll let you go, then, darling.” Anthony said, determined to remain upbeat. He would not allow his self-pity to cast a pall on their dinner. He and Melody had a delightful vacation coming up very soon. The fact that he had to wait a few more days for it did not constitute a tragedy. “Have a wonderful dinner.”
She nodded, eyes lowered and game smile firmly in place. “Will do.”
“Call me later? Before you go to bed?”
Another nod.
“Right, then. Bye, darling.”
More nodding. Her chin quivered.
“Bye,” she said, hastily ending the call.
But not before he caught the shimmer of tears in her eyes.
The sight of them caused that ache in his chest to progress into a throb.
Then a stab.
Put it aside for now, chap, he told himself, but some feelings demanded attention and refused to be ignored. Loneliness was one of them.
He slammed the phone down on the desk. The loud noise made him feel a bit better, so he slammed his hands. That made the photos on the end of the desk jump and the one of his mother, the one he’d been pretending he didn’t see, wobbled.
He slammed his palms again, punctuating it with a particularly heartfelt “Shit!”
“What a nasty word.” His grandmother’s clipped voice, materializing out of nowhere, damn near sent him into cardiac arrest. When she stepped in from the hallway carrying a tumbler of gin and tonic, with her little black handbag hooked over her arm and resplendent in her beaded green dress and enough blazing diamonds around her neck and on her ears to give her face sunburn, he almost wet his pants. “But fuck works much better when one is upset, don’t you think? Fuck. Very satisfying.”
Anthony goggled at her. “Granny.”
“Right, then, AJ. You and I need to have a talk.”
10
Anthony hastily stood and watched his grandmother perch on the edge of the nearest armchair in front of the desk, set her handbag at her feet and sip her drink.
“I’m, ah ... sorry?”
“For which?” She stared up at him, implacable as ever. “Sitting in my chair, abusing my father’s desk or cursing like a sailor?”
“Whichever offends you the most.”
A long moment passed during which she studied him with wizened eyes and he tried to dial back some of his agitation.
No dice.
“You didn’t, ah, hear any of that, did you?” he asked warily. “My phone call?”
“What?” She looked surprised. “Oh, no, just a word or two at the end there.”
Anthony exhaled a huge sigh of relief.
“Just something about your not being keen on Sandringham this time of year on account of your memories.”
Anthony stiffened.
“Then there was something about you missing your Dr. Melody dreadfully, the long-distance situation being excruciating and your wanting her to call you before she goes to bed.” A delicate pause. “I assume that’s when you young people do all your sexting.”
“Granny! You’d better put down your drink. It’s loosened your tongue. What do you know about sexting?”
“One knows everything with a smart phone, dear.” She reached for her purse and pulled out one of the larger models, regarding it fondly. She held it up for him to see, flashing a bejeweled case with her insignia on it. “These things really are amazing, aren’t they?”
“Granny! You can’t slink about the place listening to people’s private conversations! It’s beneath you!”
Her eyes sparkled with amusement. “Who’s going to stop me?”
That caught him up short as he thought it over. “Fair point.”
She pursed her lips. “Do sit down, Anthony. Stop making an old woman crane her neck.”
“Sorry.” He started to sit behind her desk again, caught himself and looked around for another convenient seat. But the next available chair was a bit too far away for a conversation. “I’ll just, ah…”
She heaved a long-suffering sigh. “You’re welcome to sit behind the desk where you were. Perhaps you can help with my papers while you’re at it. I’d be grateful if anyone could tell me what the bloody hell the prime minister is talking about in his latest dispatch on economic policy.”
Anthony repressed a snort, sat and waited.
She crossed her ankles, set her drink on the side table and laced her fingers in her lap.
“Yes, well, first things first. I suppose I’ll need to fire Mrs. Brompton. I’d told her to find you so I could have a word, but evidently that never happened because you never appeared and I had to come looking for you. So she’s out.”
She watched him, brows raised.
There was a pause.
“I hate to throw her under the bus, but it’s probably for the best,” Anthony said with a straight face. “She’s never been very good at her job. And she eats all your little salmon sandwiches when you aren’t looking. Being the gentleman that I am, I’ve taken the blame for it, but it’s really been her.”
“Just as I’d suspected,” his grandmother said with a gleam of amusement in her blue eyes. “Did you have enough to eat at dinner tonight? How did you enjoy the haggis?”
“It was ghastly.”
“Yes, it was, wasn’t it? I wish they’d stop serving it.”
“Someone with your clout could probably arrange that, Granny.”
“Maybe, but I haven’t the heart to tell anyone that I despise it. They’ve been making it since before Stonehenge was built.”
“Ah.”
They dimpled at each other in companionable silence for a moment. Then she went and ruined everything.
“How is your wretched father spending the holidays? Has he got any prospects for a child bride to marry and divorce in the new year?”
Anthony grimaced. “Don’t know when he would manage the time. He’s been far too busy meddling in my affairs.”
“Oh?”
Anthony smoothed the leg of his trousers and seethed in silence for a moment or two, his desire not to whine in a death match with his desire to bash his father with someone who disliked him as much as he did.
Spite won in the end.
“He’s hanging on to my trust for another five years.”
“Oh.” Granny frowned. “And what’s put a bee in his bonnet?”
“Some nonsense about him wanting me to find my own purpose and goals.”
“Ah,” she said icily. “And those purposes and goals would be entirely separate from us, I suppose.”
“Naturally.”
“You haven’t done so badly by me. You’re to be ennobled next year. Finally come into your title and lands.”
Anthony focused on adjusting his cuffs and said nothing.
“You gave your word, Anthony,” she said, and there was a lot less kindly grandmother in her voice and a lot more queen. “Don’t think you’re going to weasel out of it.”
The three whiskies he’d drunk had, in fact, set off a wave of magical thinking inside his brain, making him wonder if he could, for example, suggest that the earldom be postponed until his fortieth birthday as well, or if he could perhaps talk her out of it altogether. But no.
Scowling, he leaned back and propped his legs on her desk.
“Feet.”
“Sorry,” Anthony said, hastily swinging them down again.
Granny reached for her drink and sipped thoughtfully. “And what does your wretched father want you to do with yourself, pray?”
“God knows. He wouldn’t cry if I showed up in Houston and demanded the corner office next to his, but I told him that’s not going to happen.”
“Hmm. And what does your Dr. Harrison say about it?”
Anthony stifled a laugh and ducked his head, feeling sheepish.
“She basically gave me a swift kick in the arse and told me to stop feeling sorry for myself because most people don’t have the advantages I have and they’re not marching about whining about not coming into their money.” He shook his head, the memory making him grin. “We should probably run a genetic test on her. I’m convinced she’s got some British blood in her, if you look hard enough.”
Granny had been watching him closely, a speculative gleam in her eyes, but now she frowned thoughtfully and stared off in the distance to some point over his shoulder. His attention drifted to his mother’s smiling face in her frame on the corner of the desk, and the pang in his chest would have knocked him down if he hadn’t already been sitting.
Don’t think about it, he sternly told himself, but it was already way past too late.
Impossible to keep his turmoil off his face.
“What’s wrong, Bubba?” she asked, employing the childhood nickname she’d bestowed when teasing him about his Texan side. “Tell your old granny.”
The soothing note in her voice proved irresistible, as it always did. As a Brit and a former military man, he vastly preferred to pretend he didn’t have any inconvenient feelings and to cold-shoulder them when they insisted on showing up. Expressing his deepest hurts and fears put a chink in the invisible masculine armor he’d spent his life buffing and polishing.
But there was something about talking to Granny that felt okay. She’d seen him at his devastated worst after his mother’s death when he was thirteen, after all. Plus, he could always later tell himself that he hadn’t voluntarily demonstrated a moment of weakness but had been compelled by his sovereign.
Who could tell Granny no?
He opened his mouth. Met the steady warmth of her gaze. Gave himself permission.
“I can’t stand the loneliness sometimes,” he said, finally succumbing to the urge to rub his chest and soothe that unreachable ache. “It’s like it’s trying to choke me. When Mum died, I tried to remember that I wasn’t the only one who missed her. That we were all in it together. And when I was overseas, I tried to remember that the boys were with me. That we were all equally afraid of dying. And now with Melody—”
Granny’s gaze sharpened.
He floundered, trying to get his words to match his turbulent feelings.
“I don’t feel alone when I’m with her. But I’m always saying good-bye to her. And now it’s Christmas and I’m here and she’s there and I just…”
He trailed off and shook his head, exhausted by the effort.
There was a pause.
“You told her who you are, I trust?” Granny asked.
He thought back to that difficult conversation and winced.
“Yes.”
“And how does she feel about that?”
Anthony shot her a wry smile.
“It’s daunting, but she’s stuck around. Much to my astonishment.”
Crisp nod from Granny. “Good.”
He paused, then decided there was no time like the present.
“She’s, ah, …Well, she’s black, Granny. African-American.”
“I know. And…?” she said blankly.
Anthony’s lower jaw hit the desk. “You know? How?”
She frowned. “I looked her up on my smart phone, didn’t I?”
It took everything Anthony had not to keel over in a dead faint.
“White mother. Black father,” Granny continued. “Both physicians. She’s about thirty-five, I believe? Beautiful girl. Unfortunate scar on her lower jaw and neck, but stunning eyes. Very bright. Promising future as a surgeon. Older sister who’s also a doctor, as I recall. Am I missing anything?”
Stunned, Anthony could only shake his head.
“What’s your point in mentioning her race to me?” Granny’s tone acquired a sharp edge or two. A veiled note of suspicion. “You don’t mean to imply anything about how I treat people, do you?”
“Absolutely not,” he said, restraining a disbelieving snort.
Granny watched him, her sternest expression tempered with a hint of repressed laughter.
“Any other details you’d care to share about her?”
“Yes.” Anthony’s lips twitched. “You’d better know the worst. She was talking about getting herself a rescue cat for Christmas.”
“A cat?” Unmistakable horror rippled through her body. “What kind of person wants a cat sneaking about the place? It’s not a black cat, is it?”
“It might well be,” Anthony said gently.
Harsh sigh from Granny. “Bollocks.”
“Before you write her off completely, please know that she likes dogs. It’s just that with her work schedule, she doesn’t have time for one.”
“Pity,” Granny muttered.
“I know.”
It took her a beat or two to absorb this disheartening news, but then she rallied.
“It’s important for one to think things through very carefully. Know what one is getting into. What one can handle and not handle. Our life is not for everyone. There are tremendous sacrifices to go along with the tremendous privileges.”
“I know,” Anthony said, troubled by the implication that his relationship with Melody might have a shelf life. “That’s why this getting to know you phase is so crucial. She needs time to adjust. Before the press gets wind of anything.”
“Which they will. Probably sooner rather than later, if history is any guide.”
“I know. Any advice for me?”
“Yes. Don’t screw it up.”
He barked out a laugh. “Noted.”
She nodded with crisp satisfaction. “Now I have something for you.”
He sat up a little straighter. “Oh? Will I like it?”
“I should think so. Hold out your hand.”
He did, watching as she tugged one of the rings off her pinky and placed it on his palm.
He gasped as a faint bell of remembrance rang in the back of his mind.
It wasn’t one of the glittering diamonds that threatened to blind bystanders every time the light hit her. It was a little silver ring.
He studied it, turning it from side to side.
“This seems so familiar. It almost looks as though someone’s cut the end off a silver teaspoon and made a little ring out of it,” he said.
“That’s exactly what it is. Your mother made it—”
That was it. He quickly looked up, his heart a heavy lump in his chest.
“Mum?”
“Yes. When she was about thirteen, she insisted on going to a summer camp at a ranch in Texas when we wanted her to go to a little finishing school in Switzerland. Rode horses and took a class in metal shop. Whatever that is. Made this ring for herself and an identical one for me. We both wore them all the time.”
“I remember now.”
“They were very much loved. I haven’t wanted to see them for a while. But maybe it’s time to bring them out again.”
He pressed the ring to his lips, his throat tightening.
After his mother’s death, her jewels, of which there were many, had been whisked off somewhere for safekeeping. He hadn’t thought about them since. But now there was something incredibly poignant about holding an item she’d worn. Something she’d made.
He looked at his mother’s photo again. It was a black-and-white one of her wearing a white shirt and sitting on a sofa, laughing on some unremarkable day. His heart contracted almost to the point of pain.
Don’t think about it, he told himself.
“Your mother always answered to her own conscience,” Granny said. “Made her own path. Even when her path didn’t make sense to anyone but her. She was strong that way. Very determined. For good or bad. You’re very much like her.”
“I’m not sure I am,” he said glumly. “If I’m on a path, it’s muddy and overgrown. Probably disappears into the woods up ahead. You may need to send a rescue party.”
Exasperated sigh from his grandmother. “You’re also very much like your father, Young Hamlet.”
“Don’t call me Hamlet. And don’t you mean my wretched father?” he asked, idly rolling the ring between his palms.
“Probably. Thank you for the correction. Like you, he’s far too sensitive about things.”
“That old man is not sensitive,” Anthony said, revolted by the idea. “When did he ever feel anything other than the desire to knock me down or to fuck inappropriate women? Sorry.”
“He hides it behind all his bluster, dear. It’s an act. You should know that by now.”
