Chapter 1
One
THEO
Iloved women. The silk of their skin beneath my hands.
Their breathy gasps. The bite of their nails on my back, my arse.
The way they can be pliant and submissive beneath me or ride me like there’s no tomorrow, mindless to everything but their passion and need.
I loved their laughter, their easy affection.
Give me soft, hard, voluptuous, slender, short, tall, redhead, blond, brunette, black, brown, white … I had no type. Woman was my type.
The only kind of woman I avoided like the plague was the innocent kind.
The ones who didn’t know how to play the game.
Because as much as I loved women, I would never fall in love again.
I’d made that decision long ago, and once I made up my mind about something, I was the most stubborn bastard a person did meet.
I’d encountered enchanting, intelligent, funny, beautiful women from all over the world. I’d even fucked a fair few of them. And in the last fifteen years, I hadn’t fallen in love with a single one. If they couldn’t do it for me, no one could.
I was immune to the emotion.
Which was why I sought out women like actor Angeline Potter when I needed a distraction. Angeline would most likely talk my ear off about the minutiae of her day at the spa, all the while bitching about everyone in her life, but she would offer me a small reprieve from my concerns.
My writer’s block was still very much in force. It was driving me up the wall. It was scaring the shit out of me.
And I remembered seeing Angeline arrive at the estate for the weekend. I might have gone down on her at the last Ardnoch Christmas party. She seemed open to another recurrence of my head between her toned thighs, so I’d thought, why not?
I’d gone to her room and part of me admired her honesty when she agreed to fuck under the condition that she was a selfish lover and I wasn’t to expect reciprocation.
Thinking she meant she expected to receive head but not give it, I agreed. I went down on her, she came, and then when I was inside her, she came again. I did not expect her to then hurry me up to orgasm like an impatient harpy.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake, just fucking come already,” she’d snapped multiple times, lying there with a bored expression beneath me.
I’m afraid it rather killed my urgency to climax.
On the contrary, I pulled out of her and fell onto my back, staring at the ceiling, balls blue, wishing like hell I’d just stayed in my room and masturbated my boredom away. Limpid jade eyes that darkened with an unexpected fire filled my vision, and I scrubbed my hand over my face in frustration.
Sarah McCulloch had entered my thoughts far too often these past few days since her clandestine visit to my room.
Long, elegant fingers smoothed over my chest. I turned to stare stonily into Angeline Potter’s now soft countenance.
“Stay. Cuddle.”
What the fuck? I hadn’t even come and she didn’t give a rat’s arse. Again, part of me admired her selfishness and sense of worth. The other half disliked her greatly for it. What can I say? I’m complicated.
“I don’t cuddle.” I pushed up off the bed.
“Fair enough.” She shrugged and snuggled back down under the bedcovers, eyes drowsy.
I smirked in disbelief, shaking my head. I wondered how many men had treated Angeline the same way and if she’d finally just decided to hell with all of them. If they were going to treat her as disposable, she’d do the same. If that was true, good for her.
After I returned from the bathroom where I disposed of the somewhat used condom, I pulled on my underwear and trousers. Angeline’s eyes popped open. “Oh. My friend, Kitty—Kitty Lawson.”
I nodded. I knew of Kitty. She was a respected British actor, and I’d put Kitty on a list of actors I wanted to work with. You know, whenever my writer’s block ended and I had a bloody script ready for development.
“She fancies you and has been going on and on about finding a way to meet you … but I’d rather you didn’t dip your wick in my friend pool now that we’ve fucked. And Kitty’s one of my best friends, you know.”
Pulling on my shirt, I tried to mask my irritation.
I was an imperfect man. I knew my faults.
But I liked to think disloyalty wasn’t one of them.
Friendship was the one state of human pairing that meant something to me.
“You fucked me even though your best friend has a crush on me. How very catty schoolgirl of you, darling.”
Angeline shrugged lazily, brushing her sex-mussed hair off her face. “I like taking what others covet.”
Feeling the sudden need to shower, I shoved on my shoes, my expression a mask of cold boredom. “You didn’t take a fucking thing, darling. But I’ll be sure to tell Kitty how much her friendship means to you when we cross paths.” Turning, I strode to her door, hearing her outraged gasp.
“You wouldn’t dare!”
I glanced over my shoulder. “Oh, if the mood strikes me, I can be a bit of a shit-stirrer. I absolutely would dare.” Flashing her a dark grin, I marched out of her room, ignoring the curse words she threw at me. They were muffled as the door closed behind me, and I made my way toward the stairwell.
I should have gone to the gym instead. I liked using the rowing machine in light of the fact that I was so far away from the Thames River, where I rowed regularly.
I’d been part of a rowing team at Oxford, and we’d tried to keep it up after graduation.
Sometimes we still got together, but mostly I rowed in a single scull these days.
With no scull or river, I worked off that energy in the gym.
It should have been my first choice instead of Angeline.
While the great hall and reception rooms of Ardnoch Castle reminded you that you were somewhere stately, the upper hallways felt like they could belong in any luxury hotel.
Except for the turret. The turret on the guest wing had been converted into a reading nook, and it had all the atmosphere of a medieval castle, even though the castle itself was built in the nineteenth century.
I’d grown up in a home only somewhat smaller than Ardnoch.
Haleshall Manor in Suffolk. My father’s viscountcy was one of the oldest in England, dating back to the sixteenth century.
Haleshall sat on the Suffolk Coast, and for all its grandeur, it had been fucking freezing to live in during the winter.
Not that I’d spent more than a few weeks at Christmas every year at our ancestral home.
I was sent to Eton College at thirteen years old and lived there for most of the year.
During summers, I’d join my family at our townhouse in Belgravia, London.
A place filled with my best and worst memories.
As a child, I’d lived there during the school year to attend a preparatory school in Notting Hill before my father demanded I leave everything behind for Eton.
Not a single Cavendish male had failed to attend Eton, and I wouldn’t be the one to break tradition.
My footsteps made no sound on the plush tartan carpeting as I walked to my room.
Lachlan Adair had renovated this castle to within an inch of its life.
I couldn’t even imagine the fortune he’d spent.
As wealthy as my father was, he’d balk at the cost of renovating Haleshall Manor to this level.
It would remain as grand and aristocratically cold as the old bastard himself.
I followed the tartan up wide, elegant stairs to the lavish Gothic windows along the landing. It was a clear night as the rain had given way a few days ago to sunshine.
Following the familiar hallway to my suite, it bemused me how much Ardnoch had come to feel like home this past year.
Never would I have believed I’d join a members-only club.
As the second son of an English viscount, I’d grown up in a world of members-only clubs.
My father and brother were members of White’s, an exclusive, centuries-old gentlemen’s club in St. James, London.
King Charles and Prince William were members. I’d refused my invitation to join.
I’d taken my inheritance from my mother and left that world, as much as it was possible to leave it behind. I didn’t want it if it meant being close to my father or giving him anything that might make him happy.
Ardnoch was different. It was salt in the wound to my father. A reminder of what I’d become. Not a respected barrister and member of Parliament like my brother Sebastian or a viscount turned wealthy investment banker like my father.
I was a creative. A writer. I made movies and TV shows.
It didn’t matter if my work was important to me, that it made me happy. Or that it was a respected career in the twenty-first century.
It wasn’t worthy of the son of a viscount. And that son buying membership to a club for film and television professionals while snubbing a membership to White’s … oh, that pissed the old man off.
I felt a petty resurgence of pleasure that I’d angered the old fucker by buying into Ardnoch. Maybe my reason for doing so was childish, but I’d grown to love the Highlands. The people here weren’t too bad either.
Immediately, my mind returned to Sarah. I hadn’t seen the little mouse around the estate these last few days. My gaze zeroed in on my bedstand where her book lay unopened.
She’d taken me by surprise with her bold request to write with me.
Even more so that she was a successful crime fiction writer.
In fact, I’d been so shocked that someone still could knock me off-balance that I might have lashed out a little.
It was just … how could someone so guileless and innocent astonish me?
And in return, I’d treated her with sly superiority, thinking her too ignorant to sense it.
How wrong I’d been.
Moreover, she didn’t let it lie. She called me out. She got me wrong, but she also got me right, and I hadn’t known whether to rage at her well-targeted skewering or clap.
In the end, I mentally applauded the little mouse.
Good for her.
She’d need that ability to fight back. Someone whose books were that successful couldn’t stay anonymous forever.
A piercing ring sliced through the quiet of the bedroom suite, startling me out of my thoughts.
Hurrying across the room to where my ringing phone sat on the desk beside my discarded laptop and career, I grabbed the mobile.
There was no caller ID. Not in the mood for a sales call, I picked up and answered with lazy boredom, “You’ve called Hot Boys Twenty-Four Seven, Fabio speaking. How can I help you with your kink?”
There was silence. And then a huff of annoyance. “Still haven’t grown up, I see.”
The familiar voice tightened my fingers around the phone. “Seb?”
“Hmm, yes,” my brother responded with impatience. “I’m surprised you recognize my voice it’s been so long. I tried calling you from my phone, but I have a sneaking suspicion you blocked my number.”
I had blocked my elder brother’s number. “What do you want?”
“We haven’t spoken in four years and that’s all I get?”
“Seb, what do you want?” I repeated, trying to remain unaffected and relaxed.
Sebastian hesitated, and then his heavy sigh crackled the line. “Father is ill. Cancer. You need to come home.”
Rage filled me at the C word. The memories it evoked. “You mean, the way he didn’t come home while our mother was dying?”
“You need to forgive him, Theo.”
Like hell. “Is he dying?”
“You need to come home.”
I took an inner breath, refusing to reveal my anger. My repeated question came out calm and uninterested. “Is he dying?”
“We’re not sure.”
Liar. My brother had always been a terrible liar. “What kind of cancer? What stage?”
Seb cleared his throat. “It’s not something one talks about in polite conversation.”
I grinned darkly. “It’s his fucking balls, isn’t it?”
Sebastian snarled, “Do you have to always be so crude?”
Laughing, I shook my head. “That’s bloody brilliant. He spent his whole life dipping his wick in places he shouldn’t, and now he’s got ball cancer. Perhaps Karma exists, after all.”
“I cannot believe you are mocking our father’s cancer.”
“Oh, I’m not mocking cancer, Sebastian,” I drawled. “I’m applauding a universe that respects justice.”
“There’s a very big difference between justice and revenge, Theodore. To wish this on anyone, most especially your father, is outrageous.”
His indignation did nothing to me. “I didn’t wish this on him. I’m just not going to come running to his side to shower him with sympathy. And frankly, I doubt very much he needs me to hold his hand while he loses his balls.”
Silence greeted me for a few seconds and then Seb said quietly, “Your bitterness will eat you alive if you’re not careful, brother.”
His words found their target, and I wanted to hurt him back. “I’m not your brother, Sebastian. You stopped being that for me a very long time ago.” I hung up, throwing my phone on the bed as memories rose from the corners of the room, pressing in on me.
A bright, agonizing flame of pain scored across my chest, and I dragged a hand down my face, trying to push the memories back.
Distraction. I needed a distraction.
Usually writing was my distraction.
Opening my eyes, the first thing I saw was her book.
Hollow Grave by S. M. Brodie.
It suddenly looked more like a life raft than pages bound together, so I kicked off my shoes and clambered onto the bed. Picking up the hefty tome, I pried it open and hoped like hell Sarah McCulloch was about to surprise me some more.