‘My turn to drive.’ Jasper held out his hand for the keys to the four-by-four as they strode across the gravel driveway to where she’d parked, an hour or more earlier.
Tori’s fingers flexed around the keys in her pocket, reluctant to give them up. ‘I can drive back.’
‘I know you can. You drove here, after all. Which is why it’s my turn,’ Jasper said, with exaggerated patience.
Tori hesitated, and he sighed.
‘What? Are you afraid I’ll crash? Or steal you away to some secluded inn in some village and treat you to dinner—I am actually starving, though, so that one might happen.’
Depends on the inn.
But she couldn’t tell him that either, so, reluctantly, she handed over the keys.
‘Thank you.’ Jasper’s smile was wide, bright and genuine—the sort of smile only someone raised with advantages rather than disasters could smile.
It just made her resent him more.
‘Come on,’ she said as she opened the passenger-side door and climbed in. ‘I want to get home.’
Home to Flaxstone, that was, where she could put the past firmly behind her again. Not anywhere along the way that might have once held the title of ‘home’.
Because maybe once she was safely back in her bright, light and solitary cottage, she’d be able to stop thinking about the one night she’d spent with Jasper, and forget all about a dark, cosy inn out on the moors that she used to call home.
Jasper eased himself into the driver’s seat and immediately turned up the car’s heating. It was colder than ever out there—chillier even than his father’s reception when he’d returned home to Flaxstone a week or so earlier. And Jasper hadn’t honestly thought that was possible.
The earl, in all his aristocratic glory, had obviously decided that the rift in the family had to be Jasper’s fault, rather than a result of his own behaviour. Jasper had had plenty of time to think about it over the past five years, and the only conclusion he’d been able to reach was that his father’s life hadn’t ever allowed for the possibility of not getting everything he wanted—so he just took it, and to hell with the consequences for everybody else.
Well. One thing he couldn’t just take was his son’s respect. That had been lost five years ago when he’d discovered the truth about his father—and nothing that had happened since showed any signs of the earl winning it back.
But he was done thinking about his father for the day. He’d done what he came here to do.
Coming back to the UK at all hadn’t been his first choice; he was happy with the life he’d forged over in America, with the reputation he’d built up and the portfolio of work he’d created. But then his father had emailed and told him that, given Jasper’s absence, he intended to legitimise his other son as his heir, too. The title was Jasper’s by law, and Flaxstone went with the title, but everything else—the business, the money, the properties—that was the earl’s to distribute as he pleased.
And apparently his illegitimate son by the housekeeper was what pleased him most. The son Jasper had only discovered existed by accident, five years ago, and the reason he’d left home in the first place.
His best friend, Felix.
Jasper hadn’t come back for the money, or the property, or the business. He’d come back for his reputation and, most of all, for his mother.
And it was his mother that had brought him to Stonebury Hall with Tori.
Stonebury Hall would be the perfect home for his mother, if Jasper couldn’t dissuade his father from making a big, public announcement, and the earl went through with his latest, ruinous plan. Jasper wasn’t even sure his mother knew about Felix, or if his father had any intention of telling her before the rest of the country. His mother, lovely and loving as she was, had never really seemed to inhabit the same world as the rest of them, as far as Jasper could tell. She was perfect for opening church fetes, throwing Christmas parties and keeping their little corner of England the way things had been fifty years ago, when she’d watched her mother run her own home in a fashion that was out of date even then, but she’d never really caught up with the changing times—or shown any desire to.
But the changing times had caught up with them.
Right now, the earl was still sticking his fingers in his ears and humming, metaphorically at least, telling himself that an illegitimate son, brought up in the household, with his mother still working at the house, was nothing in this day and age. That no one would care that the boy Jasper had grown up with, whose birthday was just weeks before his own, was actually his half-brother.
That Jasper’s father had been lying to him, and everyone else, his whole life.
People would care, that Jasper was sure of.
Jasper had cared, mightily, the day he’d found out—an accidental glimpse of some paperwork in his father’s office that had turned out to be his updated last will and testament, detailing what he left to each of his sons.
That plural had nearly destroyed him on its own. Hearing the details from his own father, and realising that Felix already knew exactly who his father was—that was what had driven him away completely.
And now the earl was talking about legitimising Felix, handing responsibility for some of the estates over to him, since, as he put it, ‘My other son seems to have disowned us altogether.’
The media was going to have a field day with that. And Jasper wanted to protect his mother from that, even if he couldn’t protect himself.
She needed a retreat, a bolthole, somewhere to hide away from the media, the public, and her husband for a while. Or for ever. And Stonebury Hall would be perfect for that.
Now he just needed to convince the earl to let him make it happen. His father might be the one who decided on the estate’s investments and built up the property portfolio, but the actual work of transforming these places into whatever it was they believed they could be—and make money as—was delegated to others.
And that work, that sort of huge development project, was exactly what Jasper had spent five years managing overseas. He could take it on, make it everything his mother needed. A home, perhaps with a small business involved to bring in income and give her something else to focus on. Perhaps a teashop. Or a stable yard, if the paddock at the back was large enough. He needed to examine the specifications again.
And then he needed to convince his father. Surely, once the sordid truth about him, about their marriage, was out in the world, the earl would understand that his wife needed an escape, a refuge. He wouldn’t begrudge her that, Jasper was almost certain. At least, not when he saw the inevitable backlash and scandal it caused.
It was possible that the whole announcement was just a ploy to get him back in the country, Jasper mused as he eased the car onto another tiny back road that led to another back road, and another, until they finally reached something wide enough for two cars to pass without one of them ending up in a hedge. Maybe it was all a cunning plan to appeal to Jasper’s pride, or even his greed, by threatening to give away his inheritance, responsibilities and status to Felix.
Which just showed how little his father knew him. He had plenty of money of his own these days, thanks to a lucrative career and some canny investments with his inheritance from his grandparents. And he took pride in the career and the life he’d forged for himself away from Flaxstone. As for the responsibilities, Felix was welcome