37. Interlude
INTERLUDE
L ucas stared up at the familiar facade of Prideview, unable to ignore the bitterness that choked his throat when he looked at the palatial facade.
Turrets. The place had turrets, for fuck’s sake, alongside the stone towers and beams that comprised its faux-Tudor architecture.
Just what kinds of arrows were his ancestors planning to shoot from up there?
Couldn’t they see the place made them look more like slimy Prince Johns than Robin Hoods?
Then again, they were crooks, all of them.
Robber barons who legitimately believed that the laws of nature and survival of the fittest determined their supremacy simply because they were willing to ruin others to satisfy their own means and fill their coffers.
For a long time, Lucas had bought into that ethos—if not explicitly, then at least by ignoring it.
Maybe he’d convinced himself that he made up for the uglier sides of his job by making sure his personal staff was paid a living wage or that he remembered their names.
What a pathetic, self-important prick he was.
After all, what did names and base pay for a few matter to the hundred, if not thousands of lives he had ruined over twenty years with every takeover, every tax break, every heartless backroom deal?
It was easy to be heartless when you couldn’t see the faces of the people you ruined.
But now they all had the same face. A face with milk-white skin, emerald-colored eyes, rose-petal lips, framed with hair the color of night.
Every night, he dreamed of their faces, and the voices of the people he ruined funneled into one refrain: How many lives would you steal to get your way?
It was like he heard all their voices funneled into that one simple question.
At one time, the answer would have been simple: as many as it took.
But now, he had another that had been bellowing in his chest since the moment he left that hotel room with the knowledge that he’d ruined his only chance at happiness in the process.
No more.
Never again.
Not a single one.
The big front doors swung open, but instead of Henry, the butler, Daniel appeared.
Another life he’d stolen. Or at least condemned just two weeks earlier.
“What the hell are you doing out here?”
To Lucas’s shock, his brother looked reasonably well.
Maybe the honeymoon went better than he thought.
It had taken a fifth and a half of vodka to even get Daniel down the aisle to marry the senator’s daughter, and the rest of that second bottle to get him on the plane to the Grenadines so Lucas had assumed Daniel would spend the next two weeks in a coma while his new bride began her fourth month of pregnancy.
Now, however, Daniel looked bright, chipper, and, more importantly, happy.
“Just taking a second,” Lucas said as he followed him into the foyer and hung his coat in the closet.
“Before the firing squad? I understand completely.” Daniel looked him over. “Where’ve you been? It’s been almost a month since Paris.”
“I’ve been busy.” The rest could wait for all of them.
“Right. Busy.” Daniel studied him with knowing eyes. “You look like hell, by the way.”
“Thanks.”
Lucas followed Daniel below the grand staircase and down the corridor that led into the family room. Everything was exactly as he’d left it: the antique furniture, oil paintings of Lyons patriarchs, even the scattered orchids that were brought in from the greenhouse at this time of year.
Nothing here ever changed.
“It’s about time.”
Winnifred’s sharp voice rang out near the fire, where she was sitting near his father and Emma Hubbard—well, now Emma Lyons—while they played cribbage. Clifford Lyons might have been losing his mind, but he still remembered the rules to every card game on the planet.
“We were beginning to think you’d moved to Tibet,” Winnifred said. “Aren’t you going to say hello to your new sister-in-law?”
In her chair at the card table, Emma Hubbard—now Lyons—gave a weak smile.
“There was traffic,” Lucas said as he crossed the room to give his brother’s new bride a kiss on the cheek. “Hello, Emma.” He dropped a hand on his father’s shoulder. “Dad. You winning?”
“Damn right I am,” said Clifford as he struggled to move one of the pegs up the board. “Glad you’re here. We need to discuss the Morrison account.”
The Morrison account had been closed for fifteen years, but Lucas simply nodded. “Of course, Dad.”
Henry and Ondine appeared in the doorway, the latter carrying a tray of canapés. Her dark eyes met Lucas’s across the room, and the look she gave him could have frozen champagne.
It was all he needed to tell him she knew exactly what had happened between him and Marie.
It shouldn’t have surprised him. Ondine might have worked for the Lyonses, but to her, Marie was like a daughter.
Right after Daniel’s wedding, she had pulled Lucas aside to tell him he had until the end of the year, and then she was beginning her retirement, whether they had a replacement or not.
The former Michelin-starred chef had a bit of cutthroat left in her, for all her grandmotherly looks.
It had taken everything he had not to beg her for Marie’s whereabouts.
“Cocktail, sir?”
Lucas turned to find Henry gesturing toward the bar cart. “Just seltzer, thanks.”
Winnifred looked up sharply. “Since when do you drink seltzer at cocktail hour? Is everyone teetotaling now? Poor Emma has an excuse with the baby, but this isn’t prohibition.”
“Nothing wrong with taking a break, Mom,” Daniel said from where he was sipping on something that looked like a club soda with lime.
That’s what was different, Lucas realized. His brother’s face was missing its usual red tinge.
Something passed between the brothers—understanding, maybe even respect. Lucas felt a flicker of surprise. It hadn’t even required a fourth bout at rehab for Daniel to take another stab at sobriety. Maybe this forced marriage had actually been good for Daniel.
Henry set down Lucas’s seltzer as well as a plate for the tray of food Ondine put on the coffee table. As she turned to leave, Lucas caught her arm gently.
He kept his voice low. “How is she?”
The older woman’s eyes flashed before she muttered something to herself in French that Lucas would have bet his fortune was extremely impolite. “I think if she wanted you to know, she would tell you herself, non ?”
But Lucas didn’t let go. “Please. I don’t want to bother her. Just know that she’s okay.”
Ondine glanced to where Winnifred was shuffling cards for Clifford, and Emma was gazing into the fire. When she looked back at Lucas, her expression had shifted from anger to something almost like pity. “She is making her own way, as she should. I hope you will let her.”
The finality in her tone was unmistakable. Lucas released her arm and watched her disappear back toward the kitchen, taking with her the last connection he had to Marie.
His sweet Marie.
No, that was wrong. She wasn’t ever his.
That had been wishful thinking from the start.
“So,” Lucas said, turning his attention to Daniel beside him. “How was the honeymoon? Did you actually see any of the islands?”
His brother’s smile was almost sheepish. “It was…good. Emma’s all right. Better than all right, actually.”
Across the room, his young bride looked up and smiled with a pleasant flush on her cheeks. To Lucas’s surprise, the girl actually looked happy.
“We played tennis most mornings, hit the golf course in the afternoons. Turns out she’s got a wicked backhand. It’ll be fun playing doubles after the baby’s born.”
“A backhand, huh?” Lucas honestly didn’t know what to say to that. “So that was your honeymoon? Tennis and sunshine?” It sounded like hell to him. At least with a veritable stranger, which was basically what Emma Hubbard was, even if Daniel had gotten the girl pregnant.
“Well, there was a little more than that to it.” Daniel’s expression grew thoughtful, which was when Lucas realized his brother wasn’t trying to be lascivious.
“She felt the baby move while we were there. For the first time. We were having dinner on the terrace, and she got this look on her face. Grabbed my hand, and I felt the little sucker kick.” A different kind of flush touched his cheeks.
One from joy, not alcohol. “Would you believe I’m actually excited about being a father? Me. A dad. Never thought I’d say that.”
Lucas studied his brother, searching for signs of the old Daniel—the one who chased every distraction, every high, every beautiful woman who crossed his path.
He was in there somewhere, Lucas was sure. A leopard doesn’t change its spots, and you couldn’t cure a lifelong problem with a few weeks of sunshine and pending fatherhood.
But he couldn’t deny that this version of Daniel seemed settled. Content, even.
“So, you’re not drinking right now either?” Lucas gestured at Daniel’s soda with his own.
Daniel shook his head. “Emma can’t right now, of course, and I…I realized I didn’t want to be three sheets if something happened, you know? Like, what if she or the baby needs to go to the hospital? I can’t be drunk when my kid comes into the world.”
“That’s not for another four months.”
Daniel gave an oddly sad shrug. “Figured I’d better get used to it now.”
They sat in comfortable silence for a moment, the sound of Winnifred shuffling cards and Clifford’s occasional comments filling the space between them.
“Listen.” Daniel leaned forward, his voice dropping. “I didn’t get a chance to say before the wedding, but I owe you an apology. For Paris. For showing up like that, making demands. The whole thing was?—”
Lucas shook his head. “You don’t need to do this.”