Royal Bastard (Instantly Royal 1)

Nick’s footsteps echoed up the portrait-lined walls of the great hall as he continued through to the staircase that would take him to his room. It went right past a door that had always been locked before. It wasn’t now.

His damn curiosity getting the best of him, he walked inside, still holding his shoes. It was a study. One that wasn’t used very often, judging by the amount of dust on top of the sheets covering the furniture—well, most of the furniture. A desk sat near a set of double windows on the far side of the room. Papers were scattered on its polished oak surface. There was no way he could walk out without knowing. That’s not how he worked.

He set his shoes down in the empty fireplace hearth near the door and strode over to the desk. He recognized the loopy handwriting as soon as he glanced down at the scattered papers and froze. The same handwriting had been on notes to his school to excuse an absence for the flu or a quick good luck written on a napkin snuck into his lunch box on a test day. The last time he’d seen his mother’s handwriting on something new had been the letter she’d left for him to read after she’d died. He’d taken it with him to the first group home, where some asshole riffling through his shit and stealing anything he could sell had shredded the letter in some juvenile show of dominance—one that had cost him a broken nose and a cracked tooth. Of course, that didn’t bring back his mom or the destroyed unread letter.

These letters, though, he’d never seen them before. They were yellowed with age and creased with multiple foldings. He picked up the first one off the pile, reading a passage at random.

You wouldn’t believe how much he’s grown. I no more than walk into the house with groceries and he’s searching through the bags, wondering what kind of snacks I got.

He could hear his mama chuckling at him, the sound muffled by the crinkling of the plastic bags as he checked out what she’d brought home, supposedly while helping her put the groceries away. Most of it would be healthy, lots of fruits and veggies, but she always got him something—Doritos, pizza rolls, extra spicy nacho cheese in the supersize jar. That was his mama.

Dropping the letter, he grabbed another from the pile, a paragraph halfway down the page catching his eye.

And his laugh? Good Lord, it sounds like yours. I can’t hear him without thinking

of the time we went canoeing and I accidentally flipped the damn thing. Thank God the water had only been waist-high. You came up looking like a drowned rat with a fish in your hands. I’ll never understand how you did that. The days when I’m missing you most, I think back to that day and it always makes me smile.

He dropped the page as if it were on fire. It didn’t make sense. She had to be writing to the DNA donor, but they were almost like love letters. That wasn’t right. He’d left them. Never looked back. There were checks and nothing else. His mama would have told him if there was more. He tipped over the rest of the short pile of letters and grabbed the one at the bottom, dated only a few months before she’d died.

I worry sometimes. Nick gets so angry, and I know why. He holds on to every scrap of everything, never throws a thing out. I swear he hordes out of reflex. It’s like he’s afraid he’ll wake up and it’ll all be gone. I know I did this to him. We did this to him. I wish I could tell him the rest. Explain how we didn’t have a choice. How we had to keep everything secret. Love. Family. Loyalty. They’re all things I’m trying to raise him to understand are the most important things, the things that matter. You had reasons for what you did. Someday I’ll figure out how to explain that to him.

She didn’t have a choice? His father didn’t have a choice? The world tilted and the letter fell from his fingers, landed on the edge of the desk, and then fluttered down to the floor. Looking around, he took in the room. There were photos on the desk. Of his mother. Of him as a boy. Of the man who had to be his father holding a baby wrapped in that thin pink-and-blue-striped blanket every baby born in America seemed to get wrapped up in at the hospital. Him. That baby had to be him.

“I don’t suppose she ever got the chance to explain it all to you.” The earl stood in the doorway wearing a tweed blazer and an unreadable expression.

Nick didn’t startle, didn’t flinch. Of course the old man would pick this moment to show. Obviously, the open door had been a trap and he’d walked right in.

“Explain?” he asked, his voice sounding stronger than he felt at the moment. “No. She died.”

The earl nodded. “And you went into care.”

“Is that what you want to call it?” The cruel laugh burst from his chest as he pictured the dingy group home with the broken porch boards and creaking stairs. “Care? It has a nice ring to it, but that’s not exactly what it was.”

The old man rubbed his palm across the back of his neck and strolled to a sheet draped over a rectangle. He slid the sheet off and revealed a small bar with decanters filled with amber liquid and a few crystal glasses. After uncorking one of the decanters and sniffing the contents, he poured some into a glass, seemed to think better of the proportion, and poured more into it.

Nick watched, an icy fury burning inside him, as the earl downed the whiskey in one long drink and then poured another.

“Are you old enough yet to have regrets?” the earl asked as he crossed the room to a covered chair. He flipped the sheet off and sat down. “Not the oh-I-wish-I-had-done-this-differently thing but the absolute certainty that you’ve made a proper wreck of everything you thought you were trying to fix?”

“Is this where you tell me that my DNA donor had a change of heart?” Good fucking luck with that.

“Your father? No, he never did.” The earl took a sip of whiskey. “He never wanted to leave in the first place.”

If it wasn’t such a ridiculous lie, Nick would have laughed in the old man’s face. Instead, he strode over to the bar and poured two fingers of whiskey. It burned its way down his throat and he welcomed the pain. “Don’t give me that bullshit. I know he was weak. He left with you the first chance he got and never looked back.”

“Really? Is that what you deduce from going through those letters your mother wrote to your father?”

“It’s what I know.” He did. He’d always known it.

“How? Did your mother tell you this?”

“She didn’t have to.” He set the empty glass down on the bar before it broke in his white-knuckled grip, and the words poured out hot and angry. “I knew it from the first time I asked her about him and she told me that I’d understand someday, that she’d explain why he left the way he did. And the checks always came. Guilt money or hush money, it didn’t matter because it turned out to be blood money.”

Cool, unflappable British aristocrat to the end, the earl maintained eye contact throughout, his chin high, his posture rigid. Only a flicker of something—pain? guilt?—flashed at the mention of money. No doubt, the old man was wishing he could have some of that back.

“I gather you just made up a fairy tale about what happened between your parents, casting your father as the evil villain.”

“That’s what he was.”