Chapter 39
Hargrove
ALISTAIR
The light comes in grey and cold through the curtains.
Ivy is against my side, her hair across my chest, her breathing slow. Outside the window Ashworth Park is still. No birds yet, just the flat grey of the early morning pressing against the glass.
My muscles are stiff and my cock feels raw.
Then I remember what happened at the Orchid House and it pulses with the memories and my morning wood.
Fuck. What the fuck happened? Was it really as insane as I remember?
My cock seems to think so. Jesus Christ. I look at Ivy, worried that it was all too much, but she seems peaceful and content. We’d only been home for a few hours.
Jesus H Christ. I’ve been to plenty of lifestyle parties before, but that was just absolutely insane. I rub my eyes again and clear my throat. My phone is charging on the nightstand, the screen lit. That’s what must have woken me.
I rub my scratchy eyes and pick it up.
It’s a Signal message from Brodie. I’m not in the mood for Brodie, but I read the message anyway.
Full ID confirmed on Hargrove. Real name Matthew Parkinson. L.A. resident, currently in London on business. Arrived four days ago. Departure window closes in nineteen hours. Recommend immediate action. Full brief to follow.
There’s a photograph attached, encoded. I open it and I choke.
A spike of adrenaline hits me so hard I fly out of bed. Telling myself not to panic, I pull on kit and go downstairs and out through the kitchen door into the grounds.
The cold hits me immediately. My breath clouds in front of me. The gravel is hard underfoot, the grass beyond it white with frost, the sky to the east showing the first pale edge of light.
I run. I think of Ivy’s trusting body last night.
Hargrove, AKA Matthew Parkinson, will be gone in nineteen hours.
My feet on the gravel path, the east lawn, the gate to the lane beyond. The cold air burning my throat. Nineteen hours and then his jet takes him back to Los Angeles.
I think about his hands. I think about his face. The way he positioned himself. The ease of him. The casual questions he asked. The way he had inserted himself first into our honeymoon and then our marriage bed.
It was the worst kind of subterfuge, the worst betrayal.
If I felt so violated, how would Ivy feel?
He wanted to put his hands on Ivy and watch me watch it and he did.
I watched and I felt nothing but desire.
He was thinking about this. While it was happening he was thinking about this exact morning, this photograph landing on my phone.
How it would tear Ivy apart. I can’t bear it.
He has won a round I did not know I was playing.
My hands are fists. I push harder.
Nineteen hours. He thinks he is untouchable. He’ll go home feeling like a man who has done exactly what he came to do.
Henderson. I need Henderson. I need Brodie on a call within the hour. Hotel layout. Security. How many men he travels with. Whether he knows we know.
I need to think about what assets are in London. The risk of waiting against the risk of moving without the full brief.
He was inside my wife last night.
I push harder.
He planned all of it. The resort. Sarah's warmth. The way Ivy trusted her. The Orchid House invitation arriving the week after Elena’s bomb, when I was stretched thin and Ivy needed something good. He timed it. He built it. It was a weapon from the beginning.
Elena had help blowing up that nursery. His help. His money. His network running through Christopher and Vellcottt and Pearl Lambert Holdings.
His men had been in my house.
I turn at the end of the lane and run back harder.
I stop on the gravel at the kitchen door with my hands on my knees and breathe. I need to pull myself together.
Ashworth Park spreads out around me in the early light. The walled garden. The old stables. The long lawn going to the tree line. My mother's house. The house my family came to because someone bombed the nursery where my baby son slept.
Ivy is awake when I come upstairs.
Sitting up with her knees drawn to her chest, still in my shirt. She looks at me in such a dazed, loved-up way that there is no possible way I can tell her the truth. It will destroy her. I won’t allow her to be violated any more than she already has been.
I’ve never wanted to keep a secret from my wife, but this morning changed everything.