Chapter 18
Harry
The study at Highcourt Hall smells of leather, whiskey, and bad decisions. The kind of room where men like Ralph White thrive — where the wood paneling and shelves of ledgers conspire together to make deals sound ideal, inevitable, unstoppable. Signed in blood if necessary.
He sits across from me now, stiff-backed in one of the armchairs as if he’s afraid the old leather might cling to him and swallow him whole.
His cufflinks glint in the slanted sun coming through the window, his mouth a straight, humorless line.
I didn’t tell Elena he was here — just that I would speak to him at some point. I doubted she wanted to see him.
“Why am I here, Harry?” Ralph asks. “You sounded urgent.”
I pour two fingers of scotch into a glass. Only one. For me. “Because it is urgent,” I say, raising the glass to my lips. “Elena’s pregnant.”
For what I can only imagine is the first time in his calculated, miserly life, Ralph White looks surprised.
His lips part, inhaling like he might actually choke.
“Well,” he says slowly, “that solves one problem, doesn’t it?
That’s permanency, stability. At least now no one can accuse us of disregarding tradition. ”
His tone is too casual, too dismissive, as though my wife is nothing but a signed contract and her pregnancy just another bullet point on the merger report. My jaw tightens. “That’s not what this is.”
He leans forward, his hands clasped over his knee. “Of course it is. That’s what it always was, Harry. That’s why we did this, why we arranged a marriage in the first place, is it not? A White and a Highcourt. A permanent bond. Now with a child on the way—”
“I didn’t bring you here to talk about contracts.”
Ralph's brows furrow in confusion. “I don’t understand.”
“I regret it.”
The silence is immediate and heavy, like a blanket thrown over a fire only to catch flames seconds later.
His eye twitches. “Excuse me?”
“Not the pregnancy,” I clarify. “But I regret it. Arranging this marriage in the first place, my kid and yours. George and Elena’s. The whole thing.”
I toss back the full glass of scotch, letting the burn linger in my throat for a moment, trying to find the right words for what I want to put across.
“It was cowardice. You were treating your daughter like a pawn because it suited our businesses,” I add.
“You were just as complicit as I was,” Ralph snaps. “Don’t act like you’ve suddenly discovered morality because you’re going to be a father again.”
“I’m not pretending like I didn’t play my part,” I shoot back. “But at least I can look at this and recognize that I’ve made a mistake. Can you?”
He exhales heavily through his nose, sharp and angry. “What are you saying, then? You’re backing out?”
I shake my head. “No,” I say. “I’m saying that Elena should get a say in all of this. She should get to choose, for once in her life, what she’s doing. She can stay with me, she can marry George if she wants to — though I’m pretty positive that’s a dead end. Or she could choose no one at all.”
He stares at me like I’ve grown a second head.
“I’m not going to keep her shackled to a deal she never asked for and felt pressured to accept, especially when you wouldn’t even allow it to be postponed so it could go correctly.”
His laugh is humorless, barked across the space between us. “You think she has a choice? You genuinely think that after the scandal of that wedding, after you taking your son’s place, that there’s still room in any of this for her whims?”
“She should be allowed to have them.”
“She is a White,” he sneers, leaning forward, his eyes going cold as ice. “A White does what’s necessary for the family. Always has, always will.”
Something inside me goes rigid. “She is a Highcourt now,” I clarify, my words slow. “And you’ll find that I’m not so easily commanded.”
“This isn’t about you.” His jaw works between words, irritation oozing from him like ichor.
“This is about the empire our families are building together. And if you think for one second that you can just burn the contract we drew up and let her run off to play house with whoever she chooses, you’re a bigger fool than I thought. ”
“Then I’m a fool.”
His eyes flash with anger. “If you breach this agreement, the Whites will pull every barrel, every contract. You’ll be bled dry by the end of the fiscal year.”
I lean forward until the edge of the desk cuts into my forearms. “Do it. Pull it all. I don’t give a damn.”
Ralph falters. “You’d risk Highcourt Hotels?”
“You seem to forget that one of us is old money,” I say carefully, holding his gaze. “I don’t need Highcourt Hotels to survive. I don’t need your contract. Most of all of this, Ralph, is me doing a fucking favor for the Whites.”
He huffs out a breath, his mouth open, his tongue hooked on his top teeth. “You may have more money, but Highcourt Hotels is your legacy.”
“My legacy doesn’t fucking matter if I can’t look her in the eye and tell her she’s more than a ledger entry.
I walked down that aisle when I didn’t need to, and I’ll tell you right now that I didn’t do it for the contract.
I didn’t do it for the merger or for your fucking wine.
I did it because I felt sorry for the woman begging me to marry her so that her sister wasn’t offered up to someone else. ”
We stare at each other across the desk, the air thick with twenty years of deals and dinners and lies.
For the third time now, I see him — not as the partner, the ally, the man with his hand always reaching for the same ladder I was climbing, but as the bastard who raised a daughter like she was an investment he got to cash in on.
“I never should have agreed to this,” I say, quieter now. “Not with George. Not with me. I thought I was securing something for a friend, but all I did was surround a woman with men who never gave her any kind of choice.”
Ralph’s jaw ticks. “You talk like you care about her.”
“I do.”
“Like you’re in love with her.”
I don’t flinch.
He studies me, then scoffs. “Well, that’s rich,” he mutters. “You always were stupidly sentimental under the stone face. Geraldine saw it, thought it was sweet. I should have remembered.”
The mention of her name cuts like a knife, but I don’t let it show.
“You want to know the truth?” I ask. “If Elena decides she doesn’t want to be with me, if she decides she wants nothing to do with this family at all, I will let her walk.
And I’ll protect her as she does it. Both her and the child.
Because they are not yours to barter anymore, Ralph.
She is her own fucking person and deserves to be treated as such. ”
He rises slowly from the chair, his hands flexing by his sides. “You’re making a mistake,” he shoots back. “The kind you don’t come back from.”
I stand too, towering taller, even as I lean over the desk toward him. “I’ll make it gladly.”
“You’ll regret it,” he says.
“No,” I say softly. “The only thing I regret is thinking it was okay to put a price tag on either of our kids’ lives.”
————
I stand at the window long after his car disappears down the drive.
I’m tempted to go to Elena, to talk to her, to tell her what happened — I know she’s probably curled up on the bed in the cottage, watching some vapid show to fill the time, her hand on her stomach the way she’s been doing lately when she thinks I’m not looking.
The thought of it makes something warm bloom in my chest.
But then ice. Because I know what’s waiting in the wings now. George.
If Elena is going to have any chance at making a choice like I’m trying to allow her to, George has to grow up, step up, and at the very least, apologize.
She’s motivated by spite and revenge at this point, and I know damn well she’d choose to stay with me just to annoy him instead of deciding what she actually wants for herself.
But that means George has to stop hiding behind excuses and stop blaming everyone but himself.
He has to be an adult for once in his life.
I press my palm flat against the glass, the weight of it all bearing down.
Geraldine, gone.
George, poisoned by grief and indulgence.
Elena, finally getting a chance to fight for her own life.
And me — a man who thought he could control everything, standing knee-deep now in a mess of his own creation.
But for the first time in a long time, I know what matters to me right now. Not the contracts, not the empire, not the Switzerland project, not the whispers in Manhattan clubs or the headlines in glossy magazines.
It’s her.
Her laughter when she forgets to hold it in, her freckles and the way they shift when she scrunches her nose, the way she says ours when she talks about the life growing inside of her, even though she’s still not sure what the hell either of us is doing.
It feels like she’s mine. And I feel like I can admit to myself that I want her to be.
I just have to let her choose it.