Total pages in book: 101
Estimated words: 93482 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 467(@200wpm)___ 374(@250wpm)___ 312(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 93482 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 467(@200wpm)___ 374(@250wpm)___ 312(@300wpm)
I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with this information yet. There were just so many possibilities.
Sitting back on the leather couch, I was taking a moment for contemplation, a tumbler of my family’s reserve whisky in one hand and a leather-bound book in the other. I was interrupted when my father yet again barged into my private quarters, uninvited.
“I am in the rectory of a Catholic church. Aren’t you worried that your mere presence is going to have you smited?” I asked, already bored with whatever this was. He slammed my door behind him.
“Is it true? Did you do it?” he demanded.
“I’m going to need you to be more specific.” I gave my father a blank look.
“There is a rumor going around that Mary Quinn was stolen from. That somebody emptied the contents of her safe deposit box where she kept the blackmail material she held on several families.”
“Oh, that.” I feigned surprise. “Yeah, I did that.”
“So you have it?” he asked again, his eyes narrowing.
“I have everything that was in her safe deposit box,” I confirmed. “I have to admit I was shocked and frankly disgusted with how many pictures of your dick in different men’s wives are in those folders. Not even just in the Manwarring folder. I have seen the blackmail she has on every single family and somehow, they connected to you. I open up a folder and bam, there’s your dick. It was horrifying. I don’t know how I’ll ever recover.”
“This isn’t a joke,” he barked.
“What’s wrong, Father?” I asked, setting my book down on the coffee table. “Worried about what I might do with the information that I found? I admit I thought I knew about most of the skeletons in our closet, but I did not know how deep some of this actually went. How did Mary Quinn get her vile claws into this information?”
“Never mind that. Are you going to protect the family?”
“Family,” I scoffed. “Do you mean the same family that betrayed me? The same family that shipped me off to Rome to become a priest without even asking if that was something that I wanted to do? The same family that never even bothered to call me, or check up on me? You never called unless I was misbehaving, and you needed to pay someone off.”
“I was trying to protect you. Mary Quinn was going to scream rape and have you dragged to prison. She was going to hold your safety over my head. Every time I didn’t do exactly what she wanted, you were going to get a beating. Did you want that to happen?” he yelled, not even stopping to take a breath. “I did what I had to do to keep you safe.”
I got to my feet. Rage that had been building in my soul for the past seven years rushed to the surface, and I didn’t want to hold it back any longer.
“You should have believed me.”
He flinched. My father, Lucian Manwarring, actually flinched.
“Of course I believed you,” he said, his voice much lower. “I always believed you. You’re my son.”
We both stopped for a moment, just staring at each other in shock. I hadn’t expected that. The Lucian I knew should have been yelling back, screaming about how I was a disappointment, the black mark on the family name.
“No,” I said. “You didn’t believe me. You pulled me out of that stable like I was a criminal and threw me on a helicopter. Without even talking to me, you sentenced me to a life suffocating under this collar.”
Father pushed past me and collapsed on the couch.
“I should have talked to you. I should have actually talked to you. There wasn’t a single moment I ever believed that you tried to rape Mary Quinn Astrid. With cases like that, facts don’t matter. Perception does. She was telling everyone who would listen and even those who wouldn’t. The warrant had already been issued for your arrest. I needed to get you out of there immediately and to make sure that you wouldn’t come back until it was settled.”
“When was it settled?” I asked.
Father looked up at me, guilt in his eyes.
“When were the charges dropped and the warrant pulled?” I asked again, knowing that I would have been arrested at the airport when I came home if they hadn’t been.
“Four years ago,” he admitted.
“And yet you kept me there. Refusing to let me come home, and ready to pay an exorbitant amount of money to keep me from being excommunicated.”
“Fuck,” he said, scrubbing his hands over his face.
“Yeah,” I said, sitting back down on the couch across from him.
“Stella says I need to work on my communication skills,” he sighed.
“I think she might understate it.”
He huffed in agreement.
Before he could say anything else, or I could tell him I had intended on shredding the Manwarring file, Luc marched in, his face red and his jaw clenched.