Royal Bastard (Instantly Royal 1)

Nick didn’t say anything—he didn’t have to—and something inside her broke with such a clear finality, she swore she could hear the snap echoing in her ears.

…

Why wouldn’t she list

en to him? All he wanted to do was protect her, minimize the eventual agony. People left. Friends moved away. His dad abandoned his family. His mom died, and if someone thought that wasn’t leaving, then they’d never been lost and alone and at the mercy of an overburdened governmental system. He couldn’t stop that loss from hitting Brooke square in the face, but he could help her get out in front of it. If you moved fast and kept moving, then no one could leave you first.

“I asked you a question, Nick,” she said, her voice strained and shaking. “Please offer me the common curtesy of an answer.”

God, he didn’t want to do this, but he didn’t have a choice. He had to be cruel to be kind. She’d hate him, but she’d be better off. He could live with that.

He forced his shoulders to relax, took on the lazy, bored posture he’d worn as armor for as long as he could remember. “Look, Brooke, I’m not the kind of guy you need. It’s not in my DNA to stick around. Just look at the people I come from. Everybody leaves, even me—especially me.”

The words were knives and they landed perfectly. Her blue eyes grew wide, then watery, and it took everything he had not to fall to his knees before her and lie—tell her he’d stay, that he’d never leave. But he would. That’s what the Vanes did, and no matter how much he wanted to deny it, he was a Vane through and through. So he forced himself to stay, not to give in an inch.

Then Brooke transformed in front of him. Her spine straightened. Her chin lifted. She blinked away the unshed tears. Taking in a deep breath, she raised a hand and smoothed her blond hair back. By the time she rose from her chair, Brooke had disappeared and Lady Lemons had taken her place.

“I’m not going anywhere,” she said. “This is my home and I’ll win them back over. One can’t just give up and leave every time something gets hard.”

“Leaving isn’t giving in; it’s playing it smart. It’s self-preservation. It’s survival.” Alone was better than abandoned and unwanted. Always. “You can’t fool yourself thinking that the whole I’ll-walk-five-hundred-miles thing is real. It’s not. Everyone leaves, and they don’t come back, so why not get out of there first?”

She looked him dead in the eyes. “Because not all of us are thirty-two-year-old man children.”

“Is that what you think I am?”

One blond eyebrow went up. “That’s what you’re acting like.”

And that’s what he got for trying to help. Insults. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.” The manila envelope a crumpled mess in his fist, he turned and started for the door leading into the pub so he could get away from this woman.

“Leaving so soon?” she asked, a mocking derision giving her words a sharp edge. “What a shock.”

He yanked the door open but paused before he walked through, pivoting so he could get a good look at the woman who’d actually made him want to stay even when he knew he couldn’t. “Ever think that this place isn’t worth fighting for?”

“No,” she said without the slightest hesitation. “That’s the thing about Bowhaven. It demands fighters, and if you’re not one, then maybe you should go.”

“That’s exactly what I’ve been telling you people since you first contacted me. I don’t belong here.”

He’d known it all along. This place. These people. They didn’t want him and he didn’t want to be here. Now it was time he took his own advice and got the hell out of here for good.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Dallinger Park loomed ahead of Nick after the long trudge from the village, dark and craggy against the fading purple of the heather-covered hills. For once, he was glad to see the place and all it represented, because he was finally getting to do what he’d promised himself he would on the plane to England—tell the old earl to fuck straight off. Then he’d head home in the morning. The two-mile walk from the village had given him enough time to make the travel arrangements he’d been putting off in favor of spending his time feeling Brooke come apart in his arms.

Striding up toward the front doors, too preoccupied to be paying attention, he stepped ankle-deep right into a puddle left over from the afternoon rain. It soaked straight through his sock before he pulled his foot free with a loud squelch.

What a perfect end to a delightfully shitty day.

If he hadn’t been so distracted, he would have noticed the rain-filled pothole. But he had been. Hell, he’d been distracted since he got that first email from Brooke in all her Lady Lemons glory ordering him to England as if she actually wanted him. But she didn’t. All she wanted was for Bowhaven to want her. Now, that was a foolhardy endeavor. Places or people, it didn’t matter. They never really wanted you beyond what you could get them at that moment. After that? You were back out there on your own again feeling like a sucker. He’d learned all that early in life, and yet here he was like an asshole, half hoping he’d found a place where he actually belonged.

Brooke had been right about one thing—it was best for him to leave.

He stripped the mud off the bottom of his shoes on the boot scrapper and slipped the shoes off anyway when he walked inside Dallinger Park. The rug was old and worn, but his mama had taught him better than to track dirt inside.

The place was quiet, since the small number of people on staff had the day off to recover from cleaning up after the chaos of the movie shoot.

“Hello,” he hollered out.

No one responded. Of course not. Why should anything in this godforsaken country go as planned? All he wanted to do was tell good old Gramps to stick his earldom where the sun didn’t shine, and then he could go home. It’s what he should have done in the first place.