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‘No, he’ll chargeyou.’
Her credit card is on his agency’s file. I’m being ridiculous—I know I am. An invitation to a rugby match, some pub grub, and the offer to meet his friends isn’t a ploy for business. A ploy to get into my panties, maybe. But I think I might be okay with that. A no-strings vacation non-romance?
‘I have it on extremely good authority that Will has no intention of charging either of us a thing. And that he’s not the settling down type.’
‘Great deduction, Sherlock.’ I doubt many escorts have husbands and wives.
‘Sadie, what are you frightened of?’ she asks quite suddenly.
‘The same as everyone. Getting hurt.’
‘Then what better opportunity than this? You’re there for six weeks, tops. Will is the perfect opportunity for a summer fling.’
‘I’ll think about it,’ I respond. Truthfully, since he’d turned up on the doorstep, it’s been hard to think of anything else.
Chapter Twelve
WILL
My phone rings again, though I’ve already sent six of his calls to voicemail. Which means my father is either drunk, or in one of his moods. Or both.
‘I want you up here next weekend.’
There’s no preamble with my father. No greeting or easing into a discussion as there would be with a regular call.
‘So you went, then?’ I saw my father on Saturday morning for the first time in eight months. He was planning on taking the train to Scotland to the crumbling pile he owns up there. I should’ve listened to instincts and not met him at all because he’s like a dog with a bone.
‘Of course, I bloody well did! I said I was going to, didn’t I?’ I bite my tongue from suggesting those sorts of questions are the first signs of senility, mainly because this call needs to be short, if not sweet. ‘And I want you here by Saturday morning at the latest,’ his raspy twenty-a-day for fifty years voice demands.
‘And I told you,’ I reply evenly. ‘I can’t.’
‘Can’t? Can’t! Of course, you bloody well can,’ he yells down the phone. This is generally how our calls go. Thankfully, they’re few and far between.
I turn my back on my office door and lean back against the desk as my fingers instinctively pinch the bridge of my nose, warding off the tension in my head from this conversation.
‘Can’t. Won’t. Take your pick,’ I answer.
‘Do you care nothing for your family, boy?’
It’s been a while since I was a boy. I’m thirty-fucking-two, and seeing as he’s my only family now, the answer is no. I care not a jot because it’s hard to care for someone who’s interested in nothing but himself, and his “good name” that never means, because the Travers family tree is one of gambling philanderers and general fuckwits right back to the Battle of Agincourt.
And my father is right up there with the best of them, the drunken sot.
‘You will be here Saturday, boy,’ he warns, his tone full of bombast. ‘If you know what’s good for you.’
‘I suggest you keep your threats for someone who’s actually frightened of you, old man. If you can find anyone, that is.’
‘Frightened!’ Anger spills from impotency. ‘You should be fucking frightened, my boy. If not of me, then of the tax man! When I die, what will you do then, hey? What will you do!’
‘Sell off the little that’s left. Burn the rest. Let it turn into rubble that scatters the ground.’
He knows I won’t do any of that, unless I want to end up in prison for destroying architectural history. Travers Hall was designed by the eminent eighteenth-century architect, Sir John Vanbrugh. It might be falling apart poxy brick by brick—half of one wing destroyed by a fire decades ago—but it’s not like I can just knock it down.
And that is my lot. Once he dies, I’ll be in debt to the taxman for the rest of my life, while paying for the upkeep of a pile of sandstone and the rotting carcass of an ancient castle that no one wants.
‘Tax still needs to be paid on rubble, boy.’ He cackles like one of Macbeth’s witches. ‘The fucking Russians will be here next Friday night, and they’re bringing their youngest with them.’
‘She’s twenty-fucking-two,’ I answer wearily.
