Fuck her, impregnate her, and forget about her.
Things were looking dire on all fronts.
I headed to what used to be my father’s office. My mother was there.
She looked to be in her natural habitat behind his Victorian desk, scribbling in the margins of some documents while typing numbers on a calculator next to her. It reminded me what I knew to be the truth for years—that my mother was indeed the operating force behind the Whitehall empire. My father was a rake with a title, while Ursula was her father’s smart and resourceful daughter. Tony Dodkin might’ve been a common earl, but he was a math genius and a real estate mogul who knew his way around a good deal. Mum took after him. She was extremely capable.
Which begged the question, how had she not known that he was abusing me? But opening that old wound wasn’t going to do much help.
“Devvie, my love.” She let out a little sigh, putting her pen down and tilting her head up with a smile, like a flower stretching and opening for the sun. “Do sit down.”
I took a seat in front of her, gazing at the portrait behind her: Papa and myself, when I was a boy of maybe four or five. We both looked so utterly miserable and out of place, the only thing connecting us was DNA. Our sharp Nordic features and glacial eyes.
“The conservatory is dusty,” I drawled.
“Is it, now?” She licked her finger before flipping a page on the document in front of her. “Well, I must tell the cleaners to pay extra attention to the room tomorrow.”
“Are you having financial issues?”
She was still frowning at the number splayed on the paper. “Oh, Devvie. Must we talk about finances? It’s so very common. You just got here. I want us to brunch and to catch up properly. Maybe catch a horse race.”
“We’ll do all of that, Mummy. But I need to know that you’re taken care of.”
“We’ll survive.” She looked up, offering me a wobbly smile.
“When’s the reading of the will exactly? Tomorrow or the next day?”
“Actually…” she finished writing a sentence on a document, setting her pen down “…the reading of the will, will be severely delayed, I’m afraid.”
“Severely?” I arched an eyebrow. “Why?”
“Mr. Tindall is currently abroad.”
Harry Tindall was my late father’s trusted solicitor.
“And you failed to mention that before I boarded a plane?”
She smiled thoughtfully, staring at my hair like she wanted to swipe her motherly fingers across it lovingly. “I guess you could say the opportunity to see you presented itself, and the human that I was, I yielded to temptation. I’m sorry.” Her eyes shone with unshed tears. “Terribly so.”
That soothed my anger. “Shush, Mum. I’m here for you.”
I reached across the desk and grabbed her hand. She was frail under my touch.
“I’ll wire you money to tide you over until the reading of the will,” I heard myself say.
“No, darling, we couldn’t possibly …”
“Of course you could. You’re my mother. It’s the least I can do for you.”
For a moment, all we did was stare at each other, drinking every new line and wrinkle we’d accumulated in the last year.
“I hear Drew leaves much to be desired in the making Cecilia happy department.” I sprawled in my seat, crossing my ankles over the desk.
My mother picked up her pen again and scribbled on the edges of the file, gnawing on her lower lip, as she did whenever my father was up to no good and she knew she was about to clean up his mess. “Quite.”
“What can I do to help?”
“There’s nothing you can do, really. That is for your sister to handle.”
“Cece is not used to taking care of such things.” Understatement of the fucking century. When we were kids, I got into hot water on a daily basis to save my sister’s arse.
Mum tugged at her lower lip, mulling this over. “All the same, it is time for her to start learning how to hold her own. The only thing you can do for me now is refrain from providing us with any scandalous headlines. We certainly don’t need those.”
In that moment, my mother looked so broken, so tired, so weathered by the tragedies life had thrown at her, I couldn’t crush her completely. Not when there was so little hope left for her.
Which was why I couldn’t tell her I was planning to impregnate a ditzy burlesque club owner out of wedlock, who, by the way, was sprawled on billboards all over the East Coast positively naked.
But Belle wasn’t even pregnant. What was the point of telling my mother about this? This situation could be revisited in three, four, or five months, when the dust on my father’s grave had settled.
No need to give my mother more bad news.
“No scandalous headlines …” I grinned back at her. “Promise.”