Everything I Need, page 20
“A fair shake?” Disbelieving laugh. “What, like you’ve given London?”
Well, he had her there, not that she planned to admit it.
“See, this is one of those moments that married people tend to run into. Where they have to see if they can work things out. Preferably without getting ugly about it,” she said calmly.
His lip curled. He took a deep breath.
“We’ve talked about this, darling. I made a promise to my grandmother to help out when my grandfather died.”
“But that was years ago, Anthony. And you’re not a senior royal. You’re so far down in the line of succession that you should be allowed to live your own life and do what you want to do.”
His dimpled chin suddenly seemed to have a lot more stubborn in it.
“I gave my word.”
“I know you did,” she said soothingly. “You’re an honorable person. You keep your word. And I love you for that.”
He looked slightly mollified.
“But I don’t think this is your calling. It might be your grandmother’s calling, but it’s not yours.”
“How would you know?” he said, his voice brittle as he got up from the sofa and strode to the window, where he paced and cracked his knuckles.
“You can get angry at me all you want, but I’m going to tell you the truth.”
“The truth as you see it.”
“The truth as a person who loves you and wants the very best for you.”
“Ah.” Crooked smile. “Which is living in Journey’s End. Where I’ve been traipsing nearly every week for nearly a year whilst hoping you would meet me halfway one day and show me half as much commitment.”
She froze.
“What’s wrong darling?” That crooked smile widened. “Isn’t it acceptable for me to tell the truth as well?”
“Tell all the truth you want,” she said, determined to stand her ground at this crucial juncture. “As long as you understand that as far as I’m concerned, we have two issues to work out: where we’re going to live and what you’re going to do for your career.”
“I already have a career!”
“No, you don’t! You have something you fell into when your grandfather died and you tried to do the right thing by your grandmother because you love her and she needed you.”
“Well, what did you expect?” he roared, his voice booming through the room like a clap of thunder. “You weren’t here! You didn’t see what she did for me when Mum died!”
Melody froze, knowing he was about to give her a glimpse into a sacred emotional place he normally kept locked tight.
“Why don’t you explain it to me?”
“She kept me together! She made me get my arse out of bed, take a shower and go to school when I would have preferred to die with my mother! She let me cry myself to sleep with my head in her lap! She forced me to rejoin the living and to really live because Mum would have wanted me to! And the least I can do now is return the favor and live up to my word.”
In the ringing silence that followed, he tried to catch his breath while she tried to gather her words.
“I don’t know your grandmother. But from everything you’ve told me, she’s a wonderful woman who wants you to be happy. Maybe your debt is paid by now. And maybe she never even saw it as a debt.”
He snorted. “That’s not how things work round here. You don’t just clock out when you’ve had enough.”
“You make it sound like the Mafia.”
“There are some startling similarities, I’ll admit.”
“Have you ever even discussed it with her, Anthony?”
“Discussed what?” he asked, flaring up again.
“Discussed that you want to be a lawyer. Told her that you read every legal biography and thriller you can get your hands on and watch every courtroom show and movie. And I’m betting you have been reading those study guides I got you even though you’ve never said a word about it to me. Am I right?”
He hastily turned away, his cheeks flooding with color.
“You look so unhappy and uncomfortable every time you have one of your charity events or speeches or meetings. It’s all over your face in the pictures. You’d rather be having dental work done. I know it. Why won’t you even consider—”
“And why won’t you consider moving here to be with me? My life is here. My family are here. My work is here.”
“I will consider it. I am considering it.”
He gaped at her. “You are?”
“Oh, my God,” she said, smacking her forehead. “Have you not been paying attention for the last few months? I love you. I swore off men and made peace with being a slave to my career and dying alone with only my twelve cats to notice. And then you came along.”
His expression softened.
“I’ve never been happier,” she said, fighting off a sudden surge of happy tears. “In my entire life, I never knew I could be this happy. You’re everything I need in a partner. If you said you wanted to get married tomorrow and live in Journey’s End with me, I’d say yes in a heartbeat. I would do anything to be with you.”
“Melody…”
He reached for her, but she held up a hand to keep him at a distance for now.
“But you need to think about what you’re asking me to do, Anthony. Don’t ask me to uproot my entire life based on an obligation that you may or may not even need to fulfill.”
“Uproot your entire life?” He looked stricken. Outraged. “Haven’t we just established that we are the most important things in each other’s lives?”
“The most important things? Yes. The only things? No.” Her voice grew husky with all the day’s overflowing emotion. “I love Journey’s End. I love the shops and the river and the mountains. I love the leaves in the fall and the fact that I can walk everywhere. I love Samira and my other friends. I love that my parents are just a few hours away in Chicago and my sister is just a couple hours away in the city. I love my hospital and my colleagues and knowing that my mentor, Dr. Muhammed, is right there when I need her. I can’t wait to get back there and see what’s going to come through the doors on any given day.” She hesitated, but, screw it, she’d come this far and might as well put it all out there. “I love the house that Raymond told me about the other day. It’s my dream house. I’ve been wanting to buy that house for a while now. And I finally have the money and the opportunity.”
His face turned purple.
“I can give you a palace!” he shouted, flinging an arm toward where KP loomed outside his window. “I can make you a countess! I’m to be worth nearly a billion dollars when I come into my trust! What more do you want?”
Did he really not see? Was that it?
“It’s a cage, Anthony! A gilded cage is still a cage! Over here, you don’t have the freedom to come and go without security and paparazzi. You need your grandmother’s permission to live here or to move into an apartment in KP. And you want me to move into the cage with you. You want me to give up my country, my town, my hospital, my friends and family, all my support system, my dream house, my freedom of movement and my privacy.”
“It’s a privilege to live here. To have the wealth and the opportunities.”
“It’s also a tremendous personal sacrifice. Don’t deny it.”
He opened his mouth as though he wanted to deny it, but wound up muttering a curse instead.
“And that’s not all,” she continued. “You’re asking me to subject myself to photographers waiting to ambush me and tabloids waiting to make snide comments about my clothes and my face and my background.” The beginnings of a dry sob rose up to choke her, but she ruthlessly swallowed it back down. She would not fall apart. “And you know what? I’ll give them my clothes and my face. I don’t wear designer clothes and shoes, and I do have a messed-up face—”
“Don’t say that!”
“—but I will not stand around for this veiled racism about my unusual background and my urban beginnings. My parents are both Ivy League trained doctors like I am. Do you get that? They worked their asses off to put themselves through school and to put me and my sister through school. But I guess we’re all less than because my father is black and we weren’t smart enough to be born into posh families like the ones who live near here. I guess the press gets to say whatever the hell they want to say and I’m supposed to keep my head up and smile because that’s protocol. Well, that’s bullshit.”
“I’m so sorry, darling. But we all have to learn to ignore it as best we can—”
“Well, I don’t have a switch I can turn on or off, Anthony! How am I supposed to ignore it when they reduce my entire life to the color of my skin and my noble victimhood because of my scar? And when they get up in my face to keep me from walking to the car, then call me a bitch when I don’t smile for them?”
“Christ.”
“Yeah, that happened today. Welcome to London, Mel. Oh, and my sister had a DUI. Did you see that that made the news as well? They’re saying you have a drunk as a future sister-in-law. Just so you know.” Outrage flared anew. “My sister may have made a terrible mistake by drinking and driving, but she is not a drunk.”
“I’m sorry about all that. It’s killing me that I can’t protect you any better than that.”
She could see that. The guilt and shame were written all over his shadowed face.
“It’s not your fault,” she said. “You did the best you could. You’re only human.”
He ran both hands over the top of his head, rubbing until she wondered if he wasn’t yanking his hair out by the roots. Then he blew out a breath.
“I don’t know what to say. You’ve caught me completely off guard. I never thought of leaving London. It’s my home. Everything I know is here.”
“You’re asking me to leave everything I know, yet you won’t even take a hard look inside yourself and ask whether you’re happy with your work. You won’t take the time to see about getting your license to practice law, which we both know is what you really want to do. If Nelson Mandela were here—”
“Don’t you bring him into it!”
“He’d tell you that it’s not right to play small and settle for a life that’s less than what you’re capable of. And you know that.”
Anthony glared at her, jaw tight and nostrils flaring.
“That’s quite the speech. Anything else?”
She took a deep breath, determined to say all of her piece.
“Yeah. Don’t get it twisted. You are the prize here. Not KP or your title or your money.”
He stared at her, his expression turbulent, until his flaring nostrils and wobbling chin forced him to turn away and swipe his eyes with the backs of his hands.
She didn’t blame him. She felt a little teary herself.
“The thing is, if you said that you wanted me to move here so you could become a barrister, I’d do it in a heartbeat. I want you to be happy with your career. I could find a new hospital and make new friends. I could work on toughening up my skin and ignoring what the press says about me. I could get used to security trailing me around. But you want me to give up my entire Journey’s End existence and everything I know so that we can live here and you can keep doing something that makes you miserable just because you’re too stuck or too afraid to make a change and reach for what you really want. And I don’t think that’s right.”
They gave each other hard stares for several beats. She had the despairing thought that a hungry crocodile and a gazelle getting a sip of water at a river’s edge had a better chance of coming to a workable resolution than she and Anthony did in that moment.
“The press can find us in Journey’s End, too, Melody.”
“Yeah, but I can handle it better there. All of my emotional support group is there. And the thought of moving here and having you be my whole world terrifies me.” She paused. “And it should terrify you, too.”
He turned away, a muscle throbbing in his temple, and refused to meet her gaze.
19
Bloody coffee, Anthony fumed as he left the cottage and made the short drive to Buckingham Palace a few minutes later.
What was the one thing Anthony needed to plunge his flagging morale into subterranean level? Coffee with his grandmother and father, two people who harbored as much affection for each other as Henry VIII had for Anne Boleyn in the final days of their marriage. But Granny was determined for the two of them to mend their fences ahead of the investiture tomorrow—actually, mend was probably too strong a word; more like put a patch on and pray it held long enough for them to remain civil during the ceremony and reception afterward—and Anthony was the necessary third party to prevent them from coming to blows over their scones.
But in his current mood? He doubted he’d be much help to anyone.
Hell. He couldn’t even help himself.
As evidenced by the lashing he’d just received from the lovely Dr. Harrison.
He rubbed his roiling gut, which seemed unlikely to take kindly to any food or drink at the moment.
For the life of him, he couldn’t begin to understand how he’d so badly misjudged the situation with Melody. And to think that this whole time, he’d thought he had it figured out.
Maybe he was delusional. That would certainly explain a great deal, wouldn’t it?
It had all gone so smoothly in his mind—their entire relationship, from beginning to end.
Step 1: They got to know each other and fell in love.
Step 2: Melody moved to London, where he proposed.
Step 3: They got married, had a family and lived happily ever after. In London.
Up until now, it had all gone according to plan.
Step 1? No problem.
So he’d thought that they were happily moving on to Step 2 (she’d admitted she loved and wanted to marry him a little while ago, for God’s sake) only to discover that she hated Step 2.
She had, in fact, pretty much told him to take his stupid Step 2 and go fuck himself.
He wouldn’t have been any more astonished if she’d announced she wanted to turn the Tower of London into a supermarket.
How on earth had he got things so wrong? It was as though he’d gone to Las Vegas to make his fortune on the blackjack table and lost all his money only to discover that he should have been aiming for nineteen rather than twenty-one.
Well, no. He knew, didn’t he? He wasn’t a mind reader (clearly) and they’d never discussed their long-term next steps in detail. They’d been so determined to get their courtship right that they’d tiptoed around the elephant in the room, which was how they’d manage the logistics of merging their lives on the same continent.
Now that ignored elephant had gone and shat all over their room.
And what was he doing? Was he back in the cottage, pleading his case and making sure that Melody wasn’t packing her bags and heading back to Journey’s End without him? No. He was headed to this bloody coffee that he didn’t even want, followed by the investiture that he didn’t even want.
On his current trajectory? He’d find himself married to Annabella Carmichael, living in KP and being the honorary head of every obscure charity in Britain for the rest of his life if he wasn’t careful.
The surprises continued when he arrived at his grandmother’s private sitting room and discovered his father whispering in the ear of his grandmother’s ancient retainer, Mrs. Brompton.
Anthony stopped dead in his tracks, taking a moment to scrape his lower jaw off the floor.
It was no surprise to see the old man flirting, of course. He took it as his righteous mission from God to charm, beguile and/or seduce every possessor of a pair of ovaries over the age of eighteen. No. The surprising thing here was that Mrs. Brompton, a woman who didn’t suffer fools—or anyone else—gladly and had never smiled a true smile in Anthony’s living memory, was blushing and giggling like teenyboppers had during Frank Sinatra concerts back in the 1950s. With her white teeth and dimples, she looked lovely. Almost luminescent.
“Mrs. Brompton,” Anthony said, unable to contain his shock. “What’s got into you?”
Startled, Mrs. Brompton looked around at him, her face turning the vivid pink of little girls’ rooms. She hastily cleared her throat and smoothed her hair, whisking that smile away to parts unknown, probably never to be seen again.
“Just having a word with your father, sir.”
“You laughed.”
She shrugged, all that color concentrating in her cheeks. “It’s been known to happen.”
“No, it hasn’t,” Anthony cried, pistons firing in his brain. “And…hang on, now that I think about it, this explains all the times Granny knew things about my father, here, and my father knew things about Granny. You’re the grapevine, Mrs. Brompton.”
Tony tried to look innocent, doing his usual poor job of managing his amused smirk.
“Of course I’m not,” Mrs. Brompton said severely, making a minute adjustment to the elaborate silver service and pastries, which already sat in pride of place on the coffee table. “Stop talking such nonsense.”
Anthony barked out an incredulous laugh and wagged a finger at her. “I’ve finally got you all figured out.”
But Mrs. Brompton was far too old and had been around the block far too many times to let a young guy like Anthony give her the business.
“You’ve done no such thing,” she said, smoothing the front of her dress. “And you’d best make sure nothing happens to any of these cakes before your grandmother comes. Or else I won’t be responsible for the consequences.”
Lobbing a final glare at Anthony and something that might have passed as a rueful grin at Tony, who answered with a tiny wink, she swept out, banging the mirrored door behind her.
“Gotta love Millicent,” Tony said, chuckling as he reached for one of the smoked salmon sandwiches on rye and popped it into his mouth.
Anthony’s brain nearly exploded.
“Millicent? Mrs. Brompton doesn’t have a first name!”
“’Course she does,” Tony said around his mouthful.
“And you’d better leave Granny’s sandwiches alone or your life won’t be worth living.”
