Chapter 10
June
Riggins
I'd been running. Literally every day. And metaphorically from everything else-impending fatherhood. That damn dukedom. My feelings for Haley. No matter what I did, or how hard I tried, I couldn't fall out of love with her.
Not when we talked via video chat and she looked tired and wan. Not when she was so exhausted and sick she lost her sense of humor. Not when she showed me her growing belly. Not when I lay sleepless and alone in my luxury bed at night. She was out of sight, but never out of mind.
Every little thing she did made me fall more in love with her. The notes she sent me. The stories she managed to tell me about castle life. The way she held up her blouse and pressed her pregnant belly to the computer screen so I could see the baby move. Or imagine I did.
Not when I saw the hell she was going through carrying my child and how bravely she faced it. Not when she'd be in the middle of a sentence and have to tear off to the bathroom.
She was trying so damn hard to make me fall in love with my unborn baby. It was cute. Damn. Why did I find that so adorable?
I read her social posts, full of humor about being pregnant and sick. Even though I knew her media team was managing them, they were somehow intimate and sweet. When it came right down to it, I loved everything about her.
Life would have been simpler if I could have gotten over her. It was a selfish thought, I knew. I kept hoping it would happen. And only grew more miserable at the thought of losing her.
As the gender reveal approached, I grew more and more apprehensive. I should have told her months ago when I flew to England to tell her the night I found out about the baby. Now I'd waited too long and found myself conflicted. How did I tell her I loved her now? In a song? Written in the sky? Blurt it out? Take her in my arms and tell her straight out, softly, intimately, I love you.
What if this baby was a boy? She'd get her bonus for having an heir. The Dead Duke would give her Sid's cure and she could walk. We both could. The thought of her leaving me tore me up. How would I live without her? I'd been such a douche.
A week before I left for England, my PI found something in China. He turned up a connection between Bird and Sid's biological mother. He had proof they knew each other. People who reported they'd been on very friendly terms. And something else-Will Bird was adopted. The Dead Duke had been instrumental in arranging it.
We had enough circumstantial evidence now to build a case that Bird was likely Sid's dad. But what we really needed was a DNA test. I held on to the information. I wanted to give it to Haley in person. This was something we needed to discuss.
Damn. This could all fall apart so easily. I had a gut feeling that I had to arrange for Sid to meet Bird. That if they met, Bird would see himself in her. That if I dropped enough hints and laid enough groundwork, he'd realize Sid was his daughter. Barring that …
Hell, I hoped I didn't have to be more obvious.
The gender-reveal party would be the perfect place to bring them together.
On another front, I was still trying to puzzle out how much the Dead Duke was controlling us from the grave. Haley's reaction to being pregnant and her claims that she was as surprised as I was that she'd gotten pregnant seemed genuine. She claimed she'd taken her pills. I'd seen her take them on many occasions. The results came back from the lab-the pills were genuine. Not placebos.
Now, it was true that someone could have replaced one pill, one she'd already taken. But how would they have done that? And why not replace the entire pill card to ensure she got a placebo enough times for it to be effective?
Checking the pills had been a wild goose chase to begin with. Tampering with them had seemed like an improbable plot from the beginning. How could the Dead Duke have assured that Haley would get pregnant? Was she innocent, as she claimed?
The doubt. That damn lingering doubt drove me crazy. I wasn't big on faith. I liked fact.
Haley sent me a canister of Duke of Witham tea as a surprise. Something to remind me of her. And the castle. It was a diligent, if futile, attempt to make me homesick for a place I barely knew.
I didn't care for the stuff. I wasn't fond of tea in general. One evening in early June, a cold, rainy front came through. Though it had been unusually hot the last few Junes, it wasn't odd for June to be cool in Seattle. I was working late, as usual. I sat in my office overlooking Puget Sound, watching the raindrops splashing in the water and decided, what the hell? Now was as good a time as any for a cup of that damn tea.
I made myself a cup and Britished it up with milk. I was trying. I really was. One sip and I was about to lose my resolve to drink it. I was ready to toss it and make a cup of nice dark roast coffee. The aroma of the tea reminded me too much of Haley and how much I missed her. That had essentially been the point.
Jennifer, my office assistant, was working late with me. She'd stepped out for a minute to grab some paperwork I needed. She knocked on the door when she returned. "Boss? Got it."
I waved her inside.
"Something smells good in here." She inhaled deeply. "Is that tea?"
I groused and held up my cup. "It is." I wrinkled my nose. "Haley sent it over for me from the castle. She's trying to turn me into a Brit." I nodded toward my coffee machine and the canister of tea sitting by it. "Help yourself."
Jennifer loved tea. She took me up on my offer without hesitating and headed for the machine to make herself a cup of hot water to steep it in. I had half a mind to give the rest of the tea to her. I watched as she opened the canister and took a deep whiff of it.
"Mmmmmm … delicious." She scooped a large scoop of the loose-leaf tea into an infuser and dropped it in her cup. "This is a blend I haven't seen before."
"It's Haley's favorite. She drinks it all the time."
"What is it?" Jennifer was something of an aficionado.
"A special custom castle blend-Duke of Witham tea," I said sourly.
Jennifer laughed and got a look on her face like she was about to tease me.
"Don't say it! Don't even think it," I warned her. "I didn't name the damn stuff. Blame the narcissistic name on one of my predecessors."
"I wasn't going to say a thing, boss." She looked too apparently innocent to be telling the truth. "Just … irreconcilable differences already? A coffee man should never marry a tea gal."
She studied the tea in the canister and finally took a sip out of her cup. "Red clover. It's definitely heavy on red clover. The sweet honey flavor gives it away."
She squinted and smacked her mouth in that way people do when they're trying to figure out what they're tasting. She was trying to guess the secret ingredients. Which was typical for her.
Red clover meant nothing to me. Jennifer was a master gardener. She grew a huge variety of herbs and flowers in her garden. And was a bit of an herbalist as a hobby. She believed in natural remedies and liked to grow her own ingredients as much as possible.
"Makes sense," she said. "England has a lot of red clover." She took another sip. "This really is sublime. A very nice blend."
She was just begging me to ask her.
"Go on." I grinned at her. "You're dying to tell me. Red clover must have some medicinal properties."
She raised an eyebrow. "Oh, it's used for a lot of things." She tried to look modest about her knowledge of plants. And failed. "You find red clover tea in all the good health food stores."
She got a devilish twinkle in her eyes. "Women use it to control symptoms of PMS and menopause. Some even believe it enhances fertility. Which hasn't been proven, I don't think."
She paused. "Unless you're on the pill. You have to be careful with it then. Red clover tea absolutely negates the effects of the hormones in the pill. It's the equivalent of poking a hole in a condom. You'll get rid of PMS, all right. For nine months." She shook her head and laughed softly.
I paled. Shit. Haley drank it by the gallon.
"Riggins? Are you okay?"
"Fine." I stared at my cup of tea as if it were poison.
Or maybe it was absolution. I had no doubt that Haley didn't know there was red clover in the tea. Even if she had, I'd bet she had no idea what its properties were. Why would she? Mystery solved. Haley was innocent on all charges of conspiring to get pregnant. She'd been conned as seriously as I had. But she'd been smart enough to realize the extent of the Dead Duke's manipulation before I had.