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“I’m aware it’s not exactly orthodox.”
“We’re well into the twenty-first century, Miss Stallone. What the hell does being orthodox have to do with anything?”
“Strange, coming from you.”
“What does that mean?”
“Lord Ashcombe,” she reminded him. “A bastion of tradition, I should have thought.”
He made a grunting noise; she far preferred laughter.
“I’ve seen enough,” he said, in the silence that followed. “I’ll take the apartment.”
Her brows lifted. “You’ve seen barely any of it.”
“Miss Stallone, please. I didn’t come here to waste your time. I’ve viewed the walkthrough on your website, seen the floorplan, and the plans for the renovations. I’ve now also seen that the interior matches the description, and yes, I’d like the furniture to remain. Please organise the contracts and we’ll go from there.”
Her jaw dropped. “The asking price—”
“I’m well aware of that, too,” he said, stepping out of the sunlight glow and moving towards her, winking in a way that made her stomach knot. “Shall we?”
It took her a second to compute his meaning; she was genuinely dazzled by him. As a teenager, she’d fallen in love with the Twilight movies—hard. She and Grace had watched them over and over, their own way of escaping the hellishness of their realities. In one scene, Edward stepped into the sun and revealed the effects it had on his skin, flickering little sparks of light over the surface, almost like a sea of diamonds. She had that feeling now, when he came close.
“Shall we?”
His lips curled in a smile and her stomach twisted. “Shall we go, Miss Stallone?”
“Right, of course.” Embarrassment had her cheeks heating. She resolved then and there to have her assistant deal with the contracts. It would be better for Tia’s sanity if she never saw Lord-sinfully-hot-Ashcombe again.
Chapter Two
HAMISH DIDN’T PARTICULARLY BELIEVE in coincidences or fate or the idea of the universe providing whatever one manifested, but he couldn’t deny the electric current that had run through his veins when his realtor had started babbling about her IVF.
It was a stupid idea. Not her having IVF, but him offering to have any part in it. But even when he knew it was stupid, even when he knew he should shut all thoughts of this down, he found he couldn’t.
At thirty-five, his parents had long run out of patience with his lack of both a wife and an heir (or three) to the Ashcombe title. And while he’d been raised, from birth, to understand his ‘noble obligation’, and thus it was somehow woven into the fabric of his very soul—even when he also despised the idea—begetting an heir was more personal.
More…malicious.
He hated his own pettiness then, but so it was. If he were to have a child, it would be one way of reclaiming something his younger brother had taken from him when he’d stolen Hamish’s fiancée and made her his wife instead. Bitterness flooded him, even now, four years later. Four years of estrangement from his family, his home that he loved so much, the life that had once meant so much to him. Four years of missed birthdays, Christmases, of absenting himself completely from the UK. Not that it had mattered. The tabloids still had a field day, buying photos of him snapped in the States and printing them in their gossip magazines, speculating on the life of ‘the jilted lord’, or ‘lord left-behind’.
Perhaps if his father hadn’t called him the week before he viewed the apartment, the idea of propositioning his realtor wouldn’t have struck him so forcibly as an option. But the 14th Earl of Ashcombe had been beside himself.
“It’s official. They can’t have kids.”
Hamish had taken a moment to connect the dots, and then, it was like being doused with ice. Four years later and he still couldn’t hear the news without feeling a tightening in his heart, an ache for the woman he’d once loved, who’d cheated on him with his own brother, then married him in the sort of splashy society wedding their family was expected to participate in.
“They’ve tried everything, but Ewan is…it’s…he’s infertile, Haim. There’s no hope.”
“They could adopt,” he pointed out, sadness washing over him, because he knew how badly Cressida had wanted a family. On one level, he wanted to think, ‘serves her right’, but even after what they’d done, he couldn’t go there. He felt only sympathy.
“And well they might, but that child will not inherit our estate.”
“Come on, Dad, don’t be absurd. An adopted child is just as legitimate—”
“Fifteen generations of our blood and this land.” The Earl—Rupert, to those who knew him well, but always ‘the Earl’ in Hamish’s mind—made a desperate sound. “No, son. It has to be you. God, unless you have the same issue.”
He didn’t. Another twist in his chest as he thought of the pregnancy, and her choice not to have the baby. How it had haunted him for years, wondering what their child would have been like. It was one of the things he’d first disclosed to Cressida—how he knew it was the right choice for his then-girlfriend, but how hard he’d found it to let the idea of their child go. Not because he’d always known he’d need, one day, to provide an heir—the duty all oldest children of peerages felt—but because it had been his flesh and blood. He’d had the means to support the child and his girlfriend, he would have been a completely different father to his own, as well. But it hadn’t been what she’d wanted, and the strain of it was the beginning of the end for their relationship.
