He should have just signed the whole lot over to the Revenue and let it go. It wasn’t too late... Except there were things he had to do. People he had to protect.
‘Darius?’
‘Flynn,’ he said. ‘His name was Flynn.’
‘He looks real enough to stroke.’
Even now, all these years later, he could feel the springy curls beneath his fingers. Smell the warm dog scent. Leaving him behind had been the hardest thing, but he’d been old—too old to leave the certainty of a warm hearth and a good dinner.
He’d mocked her sentimentality over a child who’d died two hundred years ago but now he was the one with tears stinging at the back of his eyes.
‘Darius, are you okay?’
He cleared his throat. ‘Yes...’
‘So, can I use all this stuff?’
‘Will a smallpox outbreak help to the sell the house, do you think?’ he asked.
‘I’ll probably miss out that bit.’
‘Good decision.’
‘So that’s yes?’
‘That’s a yes with all the usual conditions.’
‘You’ve already got me naked,’ she reminded him.
He’d meant the ones about keeping his name out of it but, just as easily as she could dredge up the sentimental wasteland buried deep in his psyche, she could turn him on, make him laugh. ‘You’re naked?’ he asked.
‘Give me thirty seconds.’
He gripped the phone a little tighter. The temptation was there, but the thought of walking back into that house was like a finger of ice driving into him. ‘Not even thirty minutes, I’m afraid. I’ve hit a complication.’
‘Where are you?’ she asked, as quick to read a shift in tone as body language.
‘I stopped at the gatehouse to visit Mary Webb, Gary’s grandmother,’ he explained. ‘He lives with her.’
‘Oh... That was kind.’
‘It was a duty call. She used to be my grandparents’ cook. I couldn’t just drive past.’ He’d thought he could. He’d spent the last seventeen years mentally driving past.
‘Kindness, duty, it doesn’t matter, Darius, as long as you do it.’
‘I’m glad you think so. She’s five-foot-nothing and frail as a bird these days but it hasn’t stopped her from reading me the riot act.’
‘Give her a cookie,’ she said, not asking why she was angry. No doubt she understood how a woman would feel who’d lost—been abandoned by—a child she’d cared for, loved since infancy. Who, as a result of what happened that day, had lost her own grandson. His grandfather had not been a man to cross... ‘People from the village are keeping an eye on her, doing her shopping, but she needs more than that so I’m taking her to see Gary, then driving her down to stay with her daughter in Brighton.’
‘That should be a fun drive.’