Pregnant on the Earl's Doorstep, page 15
Which meant that the only way out of this was to tell the truth.
All of it.
However terrifying that was.
But first he needed to take care of Daisy and Ryan.
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s go find some hot chocolate and talk about all this. I have some questions—and I’m sure you both do, too. And questions always go better with chocolate.’
That sounded like something Heather would say. Heather, who had given him all this. Heather, whose smile lit him up from the inside and whose body against his had made everything feel real and right for the first time in his life.
Heather, whom he wanted to protect and care for, just as much as he did the children. Heather, who was carrying another child that he wanted to be a part of their family.
Heather, who...
Oh, hell. Ryan was right.
Except Heather was missing in action right now, so there wasn’t anything he could do about his realisation except stamp it down to deal with later. The children came first, and without Heather there to help this was all on him.
For the first time he felt as if he was equal to the challenge.
* * *
Heather stared at the rucksack on her bed, filled with only the things she’d brought with her when she’d arrived at Lengroth Castle. She couldn’t take any of the things Cal had bought her. Not now.
It looked strangely empty, though.
She should have left already. She should have run the moment that Anna had gone from the castle. How could she stay now all their secrets were out?
Cal had spent a lifetime keeping his family’s secrets—and his forebears had been doing it for much longer. And she... She’d worked so hard always to do the right thing, never to make her father worry, never to bring gossip and talk to his door—until this year.
This year she’d thrown caution to the wind—twice—and given up everything she’d fought for since her mother had left in her own cloud of disgrace.
The moment Anna published news of the Lengroth scandal—online or in print—Heather’s name would be out there. And so would her misdeeds.
She had to get home to her father and tell him before he heard it from someone else. But she had to talk to Cal first. Which was why she was still standing there, staring at a half-empty rucksack as if it reflected her own half-empty heart.
‘The kids are in bed.’
Cal’s quiet voice behind her made her jump. She spun to see him standing in the open doorway, leaning against the doorframe, his amber eyes watchful.
‘I’m sorry. I should have stayed with you. But I needed to—’
‘Pack,’ Cal interrupted, his gaze flicking to the rucksack.
‘Think,’ she corrected. ‘And I wasn’t going to leave without talking to you first.’
‘But you are going to leave.’ His eyes weren’t watchful any longer. They were hard. ‘You said you weren’t going to do that.’
Heather swallowed. ‘My contract with you finishes next week anyway. You’re sending the kids away, remember?’
Cursing under his breath, Cal crossed the room and took her hands. ‘Do you really think things are the same as they were at the start of this summer? Heather, everything has changed.’
‘Does that mean you’re going to pay me anyway? Even if I leave a few days early?’ she joked, but Cal didn’t seem to find it funny.
‘You can take all the money you want if you’re insisting on leaving. I’d hoped... I’d thought we could talk tonight. Come up with a plan for what happens next.’
Heather gave a small bitter laugh. ‘We both heard what Ryan and Daisy said to Anna. I think we know what happens next. The whole country finds out that I slept with a married man, got knocked up from my one-night stand with him, then came here to seduce his brother and win over his other kids. My father will spiral into despair at my actions, and I will become an absolute outcast and a scandal.’
She’d seen it before. Her mother would have been forced to leave the village in the end—even if she hadn’t taken off with her lover. It would have become untenable for her to stay.
Just as it was for Heather now.
‘It doesn’t have to be that way,’ Cal offered.
Heather shook her head. ‘You know better than that, Cal. How can I walk into Lengroth with Daisy and Ryan now, with everyone knowing who I am and what I’ve done?’
‘With me at your side,’ Cal said, squeezing her hands as he dropped to one knee. ‘Heather, stay here and marry me.’
A chill swept through Heather as if the Lengroth ghost had walked right through her. That poor woman who’d been knocked up by the old Earl and murdered when she’d tried to tell the truth about it.
Now here was Cal, offering her everything that any woman could have wanted—and Heather knew she couldn’t take it.
‘I can’t—’ Her voice broke on the words.
‘Why?’ Cal didn’t move from his knee. ‘We can make this work, Heather—you’ve taught me that. You’ve taught me that I can love, even if my parents never could. I know I can do this now—be a parent to Ryan and Daisy, love them the way they need to be loved. And if I can do that maybe I can even have a happy marriage—as long as it’s with you. You’ve shown me that it’s not always what we do that hurts others, it’s the secrets we keep. So I’m not going to keep secrets any more. I’m going to shout the truth from the turrets of this cursed castle.’
He swallowed so hard she saw his throat bob, then he held her gaze with his own as he spoke.
‘I’m going to tell the world that I love you. Starting with you. Heather Reid, I’m in love with you—and I need you to stay.’
Oh, God, his words were arrows through her heart. She knew how much those words must have cost him. How hard he’d fought to be able even to think them, let alone say them. And she wasn’t even going to try to deny any longer that she was just as much in love with him.
But it didn’t matter.
She couldn’t live this life.
Couldn’t stay here with everyone—even Daisy and Ryan—knowing what sort of a person she was. With her child knowing.
‘What about Anna?’ she asked, her mouth dry.
Cal smiled, obviously taking her question as agreement. ‘I’ve already called Anna’s magazine and offered them a proper interview about it all with a different journalist if they don’t print Anna’s piece. We can announce our engagement, explain our side of the story. It’ll all blow over in no time.’
But it wouldn’t. People in her village still talked about her mother’s misdeeds now, eighteen years or more later. Nobody would forget what she’d done, either—and, most of all, she wouldn’t forget.
She’d done the wrong thing—sleeping with a married man, falling for Cal, lying about it all.
She didn’t deserve a happy-ever-after here.
But her child did.
And she was going to make sure he or she got it.
Even if it broke her heart.
* * *
This was all going to work out. All she had to do was say yes and he could fix everything—just as he’d been fixing things ever since he’d returned to Lengroth Castle. With Heather at his side he could do it all.
Except she wasn’t saying yes.
‘I’m sorry, Cal. I can’t marry you.’
He could see the pain in her eyes, hear her voice cracking. He knew she wanted this every bit as much as he did. He didn’t need her to say the words. He could feel it between them whenever they were together. Hell, she’d probably known he loved her before he did. They’d both just pushed everything aside to deal with later.
But she wanted them to be a family. She wanted him. So why wouldn’t she say yes?
‘I’m not doing this because it will avoid a scandal. I’m doing this because I love you.’
It was possibly the first time anyone in his family had ever proposed purely for love. Janey had been pregnant when Ross had put a ring on her finger, and Cal was pretty sure he wouldn’t have if their father hadn’t insisted.
And Heather was turning him down.
‘I know. I know. And I love you, too. I tried not to, but...’
There were tears in her eyes, he realised.
Cal pulled himself up to stand, tugging her closer as he did so. ‘You love me, Heather. And I love you. So to hell with everyone else. Marry me, make us a real family and let us be happy together.’
She met his gaze, eyes gleaming. ‘I want to. But I won’t do that to my child. I won’t let my child grow up here, where people will always talk about us. Where his or her whole life will be defined by what I did before he or she was even born. I grew up like that, Cal, and I can’t do it to my baby. However much I love you, I love my baby more.’
His hands fell away from hers without his permission and he stepped back without planning to. It seemed his body had accepted what she was saying even if his heart hadn’t.
‘What about Daisy and Ryan? I thought you loved them, too.’
‘I do,’ she said, her voice pained. ‘But they have you—and you have them. I know the three of you can be a happy family together. And it will be easier for you without me and my scandal hanging over you.’
‘Nothing will be easier without you,’ Cal replied, his temper rising.
But Heather only shook her head. As if the matter was out of her hands. But it wasn’t. His whole future was in her hands.
‘You’re running scared,’ he accused her. ‘I always thought that I was the one too scared of repeating the past to risk falling in love, to try to be part of a functioning happy family. But you’re the one who told me that I could—that kids need love more than perfection. More than anything else. Well, the same goes for me. I need your love—not for you to be perfect, or scandal-free.’
‘You might not say that when people start talking.’
‘I will. I know I will. Because you’ve made me believe it—made me believe that I can change my family legacy. But you won’t even take a chance on changing yours.’
‘I can’t, Cal.’
His heart breaking, Cal tried one last time. ‘You say you’re doing this for your baby, to make things easier for Daisy and Ryan and even me. But what about you? What about what you want?’
With a sad smile Heather picked up the rucksack from her bed. ‘I don’t deserve what I want.’
And then she walked out of the room, the castle and his life—like the ghost he wasn’t even sure existed.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
THE TRAIN RIDE home was miserable.
Even in summer the sleeper train from Edinburgh to London was freezing, and Heather’s coat barely kept her warm enough to stop her shivering. Tears leaked constantly from her eyes, chilling her cheeks, but she couldn’t have stopped them if she’d tried.
She’d left her heart, maybe even her soul, in Lengroth Castle, and she had no idea if she’d ever get them back again.
But the train wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was telling her father everything.
It took her four days to pluck up the courage, but in the end she knew she couldn’t wait any longer if she wanted him to hear it from her instead of reading it in some magazine.
It was a miracle the news wasn’t out there already—that or the fact that Cal had used the old Bryce magic to keep it hidden for now. But the truth would come out in the end. Even the truth about her feelings for Cal, which she realised now she’d been denying for as long as she’d been feeling them.
Now her father sat opposite her, in the same armchair by the window that had been ‘Dad’s chair’ her whole life, a cup of tea long gone cold at his elbow. She’d wanted to shield him from the worst of her actions, wanted to fudge the truth and skip over certain events.
But she hadn’t been able to. She owed him the whole truth, however awful it was.
‘And so you came back here?’ her dad asked eventually, after she’d finished.
‘Yes.’
Her dad reached for a biscuit from the plate on the coffee table.
‘I can leave if you want,’ Heather said. ‘I mean, I know this is going to be a big story. It’ll probably make the papers. And I’ll totally understand if you want me far away when that happens. I was thinking maybe I could rent a cottage somewhere in Wales—like where we used to go on holiday. Take some time away from everything.’
Before she’d even reached London there had been a full year’s wages sitting in her bank account. Cal had been as good as his word—even when she hadn’t. He’d given her the means to take time to figure out what to do next, and she could never thank him enough for that.
Maybe she’d send him a postcard from Wales. If he ever wanted to hear from her again, that was.
‘Or you could go back to Scotland right now,’ her dad said, and Heather started, staring at him in confusion.
‘You...you really want me to go?’
She’d said she’d understand it if he did, but when it came to it she’d hoped her father would support her. And why would she run away to Scotland, of all places?
Her dad slipped his glasses from his nose, folded them, then placed them on the table next to his cold tea—a gesture so familiar that it made Heather’s heart ache for the time before this summer. Before she’d ever met Ross Bryce, when life had been simple, ordered and safe.
‘Heather. Sweetheart. I will love you and support you your whole life—whatever you choose to do, and whatever mistakes you make. And you will always have a home here.’
‘Thank you,’ Heather whispered, her eyes burning with more tears that wouldn’t fall.
‘But I’m your father, and it’s my job to tell you when I think you’re making a mistake. And I don’t mean getting pregnant by an earl, or running away and not telling me. I mean leaving Cal and those two children up there in Lengroth.’
Heather blinked. ‘I’m sorry...?’
Sighing, her dad reached forward to take her hands—a reassuring gesture that reminded her so much of Cal that her heart ached anew.
‘You love that man, and those children—even I can see that, just hearing you talking about them. Not to mention how miserable you’ve been since you arrived home. So you need to go back and be with them.’
‘But—’
Her father put up a hand to stop her. ‘No buts. Whatever reasons you’ve dreamed up to keep you apart from them, I guarantee they’re not good enough. When your mother left...’
‘Dad, you don’t have to talk about this.’ He never had—not once before. She didn’t want to think about how miserable she must look to make him want to talk about it now.
‘Yes, I do. Because you need to understand. When she left...she took my heart with her. All the talk, all the gossip...it hurt, of course it did. But not because of what other people thought about me, or my marriage. It was because every single word was a reminder that she didn’t love me the way I’d loved her, the way she’d said she did, right until that last day. Worse—it was a reminder that she didn’t even love you enough to stay. And that was the part I just couldn’t make sense of. Because you are the best thing in my life, and I don’t understand how anyone could walk away from you.’
‘Dad...’
‘I’m not finished. Because if your Cal feels about you half the way you feel about him... I imagine he’s in a lot of pain right now. Just like I was.’
‘I need your love—not for you to be perfect, or scandal-free.’
Oh, God, what if he’d really meant that? And what if...what if that was all her baby needed, too?
Two parents who loved him or her. A family to be part of.
Cal might not be her child’s biological father, but she knew he’d be his or her dad in his heart, just as he would for Daisy and Ryan.
‘I always thought... I thought it was the scandal that broke you. I spent my whole life trying to avoid bringing that kind of talk to your door again.’
Had it all been for nothing? No. Because it had made her the person she was. The person who’d trekked all the way to Lengroth to do ‘the right thing’.
The person Cal had fallen in love with.
Cal had loved Ross—loved him still, despite all his flaws. And he loved her, too. Maybe as much as she loved him.
‘I can take any words any person throws at me,’ her dad said softly. ‘But I can’t take my only daughter, the love of my life, being unhappy when she doesn’t need to be.’
Heather fell to her knees in front of his chair, letting her father wrap his arms around her as she sobbed into his lap. And when at last she was all out of tears, he helped her to her feet and said, ‘Grab your bag. I’ll take you back to the station.’
* * *
‘What are you going to do now?’
Cal looked up as Mrs Peterson placed a cup of hot chocolate on the table in front of him, then added a tumbler of brandy beside it. She’d been apologetic and full of guilt ever since she’d realised that Anna had tricked her into getting the children alone so she could interrogate them.
‘What can I do? I’ll call Anna’s editor again—manage the story as well as I can now it’s out there. I’ve already paid Heather what I owed her, so that’s sorted. Next I’ll call the boarding school and—’
‘And what?’ Daisy’s voice rang out from the kitchen door, where she stood with her pale hair hanging around her face and her pyjamas hanging off her slim frame. ‘Do we have to go? Now that Heather isn’t here?’
Telling the kids she was gone had been awful. Daisy had pretended she didn’t care, of course, but Ryan had sobbed, and Cal had known that Daisy was lying, so that wasn’t any easier. They couldn’t understand why she’d gone if it wasn’t because she was cross with them, and Cal hadn’t been able to explain because he didn’t understand either.
