Michelle Douglas - The Rebel and the Heiress

A sudden heaviness threatened to fell him. One stupid party had led to…

He dragged a hand down his face. Cheryl, at seventeen, hadn’t known what she’d been doing, hadn’t known the trouble that the marijuana she’d bought could get her into—could get them all into. She’d been searching for escape—escape from a sexually abusive father. He understood that, sympathised. The fear that had flashed into her eyes, though, when the police had burst in, her desperation—the desperation of someone who’d been betrayed again and again by people who were supposed to love her—it still plagued his nightmares.

His chest cramped. Little Cheryl who he’d known since she’d started kindergarten. Little Cheryl who he’d done his best to protect…and, when that hadn’t been enough, who he’d tried to comfort. He hadn’t known it then, but there wasn’t enough comfort in the world to help heal her. It hadn’t been her fault.

So he’d taken the blame for her. He’d been a much more likely candidate for the drugs anyway. At the age of eighteen he’d gone to jail for fifteen months. He pulled in a breath. In the end, though, none of it had made any difference. That was what really galled him.

Nell thrust out her chin. ‘So drop the attitude and stop playing the criminal with me.’

It snapped him out of his memories and he couldn’t have said why, but he suddenly wanted to smile.

‘The only way to find out what John has to say is to open the letter.’

He folded his arms. ‘What’s it to you, anyway?’

‘I made a promise to a dying man.’

‘And now you’ve kept it.’

She leaned across, picked up his hand and slapped the letter into it. She smelled sweet, like cupcakes. ‘Now I’ve kept it.’

A pulse pounded inside him. Nell moved back. She moved right across to the other side of the kitchen and refilled their mugs from the pot kept warm by the percolator hotplate. But her sugar-sweet scent remained to swirl around him. He swallowed. He blinked until his vision cleared and he could read his name in black-inked capitals on the envelope. For some reason, those capitals struck him as ominous.

For heaven’s sake, just open the damn thing and be done with it. It’d just be one more righteous citizen telling him the exact moment he’d gone off the rails, listing a litany of perceived injuries received—both imagined and in some cases real—and then a biting critique of what the rest of his life would hold if he didn’t mend his ways.

The entire thing would take him less than a minute to read and then he could draw a line under this whole stupid episode. With a half-smothered curse he made deliberately unintelligible in honour of the Princess’s upper class ears, he tore open the envelope.

Heaving out a breath, he unfolded the enclosed sheet of paper. The letter wasn’t long. At least he wouldn’t have to endure a detailed rant. He registered when Nell placed another mug of coffee in front of him that she even added milk and sugar to it.

He opened his mouth to thank her, but…

The words on the page were in the same odd style of all capitals as the envelope. All in the same black ink. He read the words but couldn’t make sense of them to begin with.

They began to dance on the page and then each word rose up and hit him with the force of a sledgehammer. He flinched. He clenched the letter so hard it tore. He swore—loud and rude and blue—as black dots danced before his eyes.

Nell jumped. He expected her to run away. He told himself he hoped she would.

‘Rick!’ Her voice and its shrillness dive-bombed him like a magpie hostile with nesting instinct. ‘Stick your head between your knees. Now!’

And then she was there, pushing his head between his knees and ordering him to breathe, telling him how to do it. He followed her instructions—pulling air into his lungs, holding it there and releasing it—but as soon as the dizziness left him he surged upright again.

He spun to her and waved the balled-up letter beneath her nose. ‘Do you know what this says? Do you know what the—’

He pulled back the ugly language that clawed at his throat. ‘Do you know what this says?’ he repeated.

She shook her head. ‘I wasn’t there when he wrote it. It was already sealed when he gave it to me. He never confided in me about its contents and I never asked.’ She gave one of those shrugs. ‘I’ll admit to a passing curiosity.’ She drew herself up, all haughty blonde sleekness in her crazy, beautiful Hawaiian dress. ‘But I would never open someone else’s mail. So, no, I haven’t read its contents.’

He wasn’t sure he believed her.

She moved back around the table, sat and brought her mug to her lips. It was so normal it eased some of the raging beast inside him.

She glanced up, her eyes clouded. ‘I do hope he hasn’t accused you of something ridiculous like stealing my grandmother’s pearls.’

He sat too. ‘It’s nothing like that.’

‘Good, because I know for a fact that was my father.’

He choked. Father. The word echoed through his mind. Father. Father. Father. In ugly black capitals.

‘And I’m sorry I’ve not tracked you down sooner to give that letter to you, but John died and then my father’s business fell apart and…and I wasn’t sure where to look for you.’

He could see now that she hadn’t wanted to approach Tash to ask how she might find him.

He wasn’t sorry. Not one little bit.

‘But when I heard you were home…’

He dragged a hand down his face before gulping half his coffee in one go. ‘Did he say anything else to you when he gave you this?’ The letter was still balled in his hand.

She reached out as if to swipe her finger through the frosting of one of the cupcakes, but she pulled her hand back at the last moment. ‘He said you might have some questions you’d like to ask me and that he’d appreciate it if I did my best to answer them.’

He coughed back a hysterical laugh. Some questions? All he had were questions.

Her forehead creased. ‘This isn’t about that nonsense when we were ten-year-olds, is it?’

He didn’t understand why she twisted her hands together. She wasn’t the one who’d been hauled to the police station.

‘I tried to tell my parents and the police that I gave the locket to you of my own free will and that you hadn’t taken it. That I gave it to you as a present.’

She stared down into her coffee and something in her face twisted his gut.

‘I thought it was mine to give.’ She said the words so softly he had to strain to catch them. He thought about how she’d handed her apartment, her car and her trust fund all over to her father without a murmur. So why refuse to hand over Whittaker House?

She straightened and tossed back her hair. ‘That was the moment when I realised my possessions weren’t my own.’

But for some reason she felt that Whittaker House was hers?

‘I told them how I wanted to give you something because you’d given me your toy aeroplane.’

It was the only thing he’d had to give her.

‘Which, mind you, I absolutely refused to hand over when they demanded me to.’

That made him laugh.

She met his gaze squarely and there wasn’t an ounce of haughtiness in her face. He sobered. ‘I’ve never had the chance to say it before but, Rick, I’m sorry. My mother and father were so angry. And then the policeman frightened me so much I…I eventually just told them what they wanted to hear. It was cowardly of me and I’m truly sorry if that episode caused a lot of trouble for you.’

It’d caused trouble all right. It was the first time he’d come to the police’s attention. It hadn’t been the last time he’d been labelled a thief, liar and troublemaker by them, though.