Except, of course, that it wasn’t.
Being with Keira was my absolute top priority and nothing was going to dissuade me from doing so, but that didn’t mean that I didn’t love my family. I’d had my differences with them over the years—some their fault, many mine—but I still cared about them. We were an odd family, but that was sort of inevitable in the circumstances, and our oddness drew us together rather than forced us apart. I knew that since I’d met Keira, I’d become a different person. A better person. More to the point, I’d become the person my mother had wanted me to be all my life. But it had taken me so long to become that person that she’d obviously long since given up believing that it might ever happen. She wouldn’t believe that the decent, committed version of me actually existed, and she still saw this as just an act or a phase I was going through that would shortly be replaced by the more familiar womanizing jackass. I didn’t like to look back at that period of my life now, and I could understand my mother’s reticence in believing me, but I needed her to; I needed her to see what I’d become and be grateful that I’d finally got there. I wanted her to be proud of me.
Of course, even if she was proud of me for the man I’d become, that didn’t mean that she’d be proud of me for the situation I was now in. Convincing her that Keira’s pregnancy was a good thing would be an uphill struggle, but again, it was one I wanted to make. I couldn’t wait to be a father, and I wanted her to be just as excited about being a grandmother.
It had taken me far longer than it took most to out-grow my wild adolescence, but now I craved family life, even in the odd little family that I had. I’d be with Keira no matter what, but another thing that excited me was the tantalizing possibility of more—of us all being one happy family. I wasn’t afraid of what I might lose; I was afraid to dream of what I might gain, just in case it slipped through my grasp.
As I headed towards the private office where I knew my mother would be, I imagined her potential reactions and arguments at each point, and I mentally answered them until I thought I’d covered every potential scenario and had a response for anything that might go wrong.
In the event, I was about as wrong as it was possible for a person to be.
“Andrew.”
I turned at the voice from behind me and found my brother there, smiling an unpleasant smile. It was possible that Michael was one of those unfortunate people who always looked evil when they smile, whether they were evil or not, but I knew this particular smile very well: it meant that Michael had won. What he’d won, I had no idea, but given my current mission, Michael’s presence was a profoundly disconcerting one.
“Hi, Michael. I’m just going to see Mother, so if you don’t mind…”
“I was on my way to see her too.” The smile remained fixed on his face.
“Would you mind if I go first?” I asked. I was sure this conversation was going somewhere, but I was determined to keep it light and casual if I could.
“I think she’ll be more interested in what I have to say,” said Michael, with the sly demeanor of a James Bond villain. “Unless you’d like to stop me, that is.”
This game-playing and pussy-footing around the point was fast becoming wearing for me. “Look, do you want to stop acting like a cock and say what you have to say?”
Michael looked a little irritated to have had his moment stolen, but he recovered himself admirably and reached into the pocket of his jacket to produce a handful of photos. He’d obviously seen us and taken them from a distance when we thought we’d been sneaky enough to not get caught, and the pictures featured Keira in her maid uniform, skirt hitched up around her waist as I pounded into her. Seeing as the pictures had been taken from a distance, they were a bit grainy, but they were still clear enough to identify exactly who it was in them.
Michael grinned as he saw my face. “We already know you’ve been sleeping with the maid, seeing as you told us about your little ‘relationship’. But the public doesn’t know yet…”
“And?”
“You got her pregnant, didn’t you?”
That he wasn’t supposed to know, and my face must have betrayed my shock because Michael’s smile widened to a leer of satisfaction.
“I knew it. The future ruler of Great Britain conceived outside of wedlock with a servant—disgraceful. What would Mother make of that? What would the press? What will the public?”
I said nothing. There was a lot that I wanted to say, mostly of the four-lettered variety, but I knew that Michael was building to something. In the event of him ever needing another career, Michael had a great future as a super-villain, stringing out his taunting of the good guy for long enough to allow him to concoct an escape plan.