Chapter 20
CHAPTER 20
Brandy and Regrets
T he air inside was thick with smoke and regret. The curtains remained drawn, so it could be day or night outside. James didn’t really care. His only concern was that he was running out of brandy.
He could barely remember how long it had been since he practically shut himself away in his bachelor’s lodgings. Of course, he left his house. There was no way he could stay under the same roof as his father, no matter how it broke his grandmother’s heart.
He sat in his study, his shirt unbuttoned, his cravat discarded, staring blankly at the fire. The embers glowed, mocking him. They had burned out too quickly. So had he.
Somewhere in the back of his mind, he knew he should be doing something. Anything. But he had no will to do anything. He was caught in an endless loop of anger and regret. And most of all her . A constant repeat of everything that was her . From the moment she took the first jab at him to that final “I see” that dripped ice on his cold soul.
The glass in his hand was empty again. Had he finished it? When? He wasn’t sure.
A knock sounded at the door. James ignored it. The knock sounded again. Louder. More insistent.
“Bloody hell,” he muttered, running a hand over his face. Whoever it was, they could damn well go away.
The door burst open. James blinked.
Richard strode inside, looking around with a mix of concern and disgust. “Christ,” he muttered, kicking a discarded waistcoat out of the way. “I thought you were dead.”
“I’ll try harder next time,” James slurred.
“What in God’s name are you doing?”
“Drinking myself into a stupor.”
“I gathered.” Richard gave him a pointed look. “And after that?”
James raised his empty glass. “Refilling my cup.”
Richard snatched the glass from his hand and tossed it across the room. It shattered against the wall.
James glared at him. “Was that necessary?”
“I’ll break the next one, too.” Richard’s voice was sharp. “Get a hold of yourself, James.”
James exhaled slowly, dragging a hand through his hair. “Leave me alone, Richard.”
“So you can slowly kill yourself?”
James looked up and blinked.
“Or I can have Stephen come over and kill you himself,” Richard threatened. “What did you do?”
James got up and went to the liquor cabinet. He needed something stronger to get through this conversation.
“What do I always do?” He chuckled cruelly.
“I am not joking. Selina told me that Diana was ill . That girl has never been ill all the years I have known her, and now she is shut away in her room.”
James’s body locked up, and he gripped his glass tighter. Diana was…
He shouldn’t care.
“I am sorry to hear that,” he offered coldly.
“Sorry to hear that? I had to physically restrain Stephen from coming here and decapitate you. And to be honest, I was coming here with more or less the same intention. I believed that I would find you with some fling, having the time of your life while Diana… And I find you like this.”
James sat back on the sofa, his elbows on his knees, his head dipped. He should have never come back to London.
“James.” Richard approached him and put a hand on his shoulder. “What is going on? What happened?”
James looked up at his friend. He saw genuine concern in his eyes. It would have been so much easier if Richard did what everyone else did—blame everything on him.
“Solomon invited Diana to tea behind my back.”
“Oh.” Richard sighed. “Don’t tell me you blamed Diana for it.”
James looked away.
“You bloody idiot!”
“She was trying to tell me that Solomon was struggling, that I should give him a chance.” James got up and started pacing.
“How absolutely monstrous of her to want you to have a relationship with the only parent you have left,” Richard snapped.
“What relationship?” James shouted. “The man abandoned me when I needed him the most! I was thirteen! I just lost my mother, and he just sank in his sorrow. As if I wasn’t enough reason for him to live!”
James was fuming, his body tense, his features distorted, and yet his blue eyes hid something that looked more like regret than anger.
Richard leaned back as if he was physically hit. Then, he looked at his friend and nodded. “I understand. It was cruel what happened to you. You have every right to be angry with Solomon.”
James’s chest was heaving, and he was frowning. He staggered back to support himself against his desk. It was as if saying those words out loud took every last ounce of energy he had left.
“Have you told him how you feel?” Richard asked.
James looked down, his shoulders sagging. “What difference would it make?”
“James, you’ve been running all your life, ever since I met you. Too afraid to sit still for one moment.”
The two friends looked at each other, and a deep understanding passed between them.
“Do it for yourself, my friend. Just say what weighs down your soul. You might be surprised.”
James straightened his back. He was tired, but not in a way that would make him just give up. Not in a way that would make him think that things could not get worse, so he might do as he felt.
Richard was right. James couldn’t live in this constant anger. He had let this grievance define him for too long. He had held onto it for far too long. It was time to put it to rest.
“And have a bath, for Christ’s sake.” Richard smiled.
James snorted.
James stood outside the house he grew up in and looked at it as if for the first time. He had so many fond memories there. There was so much love in this house. The three of them. They had loved each other so much, and their love multiplied when it came to him. A life filled with laughter and hugs and smiles and jokes.
He clenched his jaw as he entered the house. The butler did not dare to stop him as he stormed to his father’s study. He found him sitting at the desk, a glass of brandy in hand.
Solomon barely raised his gaze as James pushed the door open. “James.”
The greeting was measured.
“You had no right.” James slammed the door shut behind him.
Solomon raised an eyebrow. “Come now, son. A man should be more specific when making accusations.”
James balled his fists. “Diana. You had no right to go behind my back.”
“I was merely trying to see if the girl was a suitable match.”
James saw red. The outrageous man had left him to assume the duties of a duke when he wasn’t ready. Now, he had the nerve to meddle in his life because he “was feeling better” as if he had the flu and was indisposed for a few days.
“Who the hell do you think you are?” James spat.
Solomon’s gaze sharpened. “Your father, last I checked.”
“Last I checked, you ungraciously bowed out of that role.”
Solomon’s cold facade crumbled. His face contorted with pain. Still, he managed to compose himself when he turned to James.
“You had no right—” James took one step forward.
“I had every right!” Solomon stood up. “I wasn’t going to sit back, watching you waste your life away and soil our good name.”
“What good name? I had to live my life followed by whispers of you being mad!”
Solomon looked shocked.
“Oh, right!” James barked, his voice dripping poison. “You were away . I was here. I had to go to college and university and be pointed at as the boy whose father had gone mad.”
Solomon looked away, his jaw ticking.
“So, I decided if they were going to point, I would give them a new reason to do so.”
“Calling you a rake was the solution? Earning yourself the reputation of a scoundrel was your way of?—”
“You weren’t here!” James shouted. “You have no right to judge me!”
Solomon swallowed. His fingers tightened around the glass in his hand. He put it down and placed both hands on the desk, his chin dipped to his chest.
“And what would you have had me do, James?” His voice was low and controlled, but he was shaking beneath it.
“I don’t know.” James laughed bitterly. “Be a father, perhaps? Stay? Face your grief like a man instead of crawling into the dark and leaving me to fend for myself?”
Solomon’s eyes snapped back to James’s. “You think I wanted to leave you?” he croaked.
“I don’t give a damn what you wanted.” James’s voice was sharp as a blade. “I know what you did.”
Solomon’s chest rose and fell too quickly. He rounded the desk. “James?—”
“No.” James took another step forward. “You weren’t there, damn it! You weren’t there when I was a boy shouldering the weight of a title that should not have been mine to bear alone.”
“I…” Solomon exhaled, his voice cracking. “I thought I was protecting you.”
“Protecting me? You did a lousy job at it.”
Solomon closed his eyes for half a second, regret written all over his face. “I thought my grief would poison you,” he admitted.
James looked over his father’s shoulder and ran a hand through his hair. Pain, sharp pain lanced through him. The same one he felt that night when his father woke him up with the news that changed his life forever. With the same look he had right now. The one of complete defeat and utter grief.
“I loved your mother so much,” Solomon continued. “She meant everything to me. I thought if I stayed, if you saw me like that, you would drown in it, too.”
James felt sorrow and anger flood him.
“So, you left me to drown on my own,” James said firmly. “I lost her too, you know.”
Solomon collapsed on the closest chair and dropped his head in his hands. And James saw his body shake.
His father was crying .
The shock was so great. He had never seen his father cry. Not even after his mother died.
James watched, stunned, frozen, unable to move. His father, the Duke of Pemberton, the man who had always been untouchable, unreadable, was crying. Not silent, dignified grief. Not a single tear wiped away before anyone could notice. He was shaking. His shoulders shuddered, his breath came uneven and harsh, and his hands were gripping his head as if to hold him together.
James had never seen him like this. Not when his mother died. Not when he left. Not ever. And now, he didn’t know what to do. He should feel relieved, satisfied, vindicated. He didn’t. Because, for all his father’s failures, for all the years of neglect, he had never once imagined this—this broken man before him.
“I am so sorry, son,” Solomon said between sobs. “I failed you. I abandoned the only good thing I had left.”
James had to sit. His legs could no longer support him. He never imagined how much he longed to hear those words.
He exhaled as if he was exhaling for the first time in years. Solomon looked up at him, and James’s jaw dropped at the sheer grief he saw on his father’s usually stony face.
“I don’t expect you to forgive me, James. I have no right to even ask that. I just had to make sure…”
“Sure of what?” James whispered.
“That you wouldn’t be alone. I know you hate me, and Mother… Mother is old. I couldn’t bear the thought that you’d waste away alone.”
James sat back in surprise as Solomon chuckled bitterly.
“And I dragged that brilliant girl into it.”
Diana.
“I thought that perhaps she could be… And you like spending time with her. So, I figured I would get to know the man you are now, how you’ve grown from the boy I knew so well.”
James felt his eyes sting and balled his fists.
“I was right here,” he muttered.
“You were.” Solomon shook his head. “But I was a coward. Fearing that you’d tell me all the things you just told me. Fearing that’d hear the person I love most in the world lay out all my failures.”
Love .
James’s jaw tensed, and he shook his head to keep his body in check. This was not… He didn’t know what he expected would happen when he came in determined to confront his father, but this was not it.
“I don’t know, James.” Solomon let his body sag on the chair. “I don’t know how to fix it.”
Then, he looked straight at him, his eyes bloodshot from crying. His look was soft, caring. The look James hadn’t seen since he was a boy.
“But I will die trying, my boy.”
James got up and went straight to the sideboard. He filled two glasses of brandy and handed one to his father. The two men looked at each other and then downed their drinks.
James looked at his empty glass as if it held the mysteries of the world. Then, he looked at his father.
“I don’t know if it can’t be fixed,” he admitted. “But we can try.”
Solomon sat up.
“On my terms,” James added.
Solomon didn’t care. He nodded with a strained smile on his lips. His body leaned toward James, but he held back. His lips were trembling.
“Thank you, my boy.”
“I never said?—”
“It doesn’t matter.” Solomon had never looked more alive. “Even this is more than I deserve.”
James poured more brandy for both of them, and they drank while watching the crackling fire.
“ She is something extraordinary, though.”
James didn’t even try to hide his smile. Diana was so much more than that.