by Parker Swift
“But he said he likes you.”
“Yeah, but I like you,” I said, and he turned in my arms so we were hugging and kissed the top of my head. I could hear the glasses clinking behind my back. “I love you.”
He pulled away to look at me. “I suppose I’ll be there to defend your honor, damsel,” he said with a little too much of a twinkle in his eye, like he couldn’t wait to have the chance to humiliate poor Michael or hit him or something else boorish and adolescent.
He shook his head with acceptance, and then I felt him chuckle into my hair.
“Like you’ve left me with any honor to defend, knighty,” I scoffed, imagining all of the ridiculously dishonorable things he’d done to my body over the past couple of months. He gave my ass a quick slap, and I jumped a little in his arms.
“Okay, dinnertime,” he said while stepping back and rubbing his palms together.
“This oughtta be good.”
“Oh, ye of little faith,” Dylan replied, rolling up his sleeves and tying my floral apron around his waist. I flung myself onto the countertop next to the place where he was setting up his cutting board and ingredients. I gripped the edge of the counter and leaned over, examining his project. “You know, there are plenty of chairs,” he added, smirking at me.
“Where’s the fun in chairs?” I asked as I ate a small chunk of Parmesan that had found its way off the cutting board. “What are you making?”
“Gnocchi.”
I raised my eyebrows. “I don’t see any potatoes.”
“Not that kind of gnocchi,” he replied in a way that clearly conveyed that I was not supposed to ask any more questions. So I sat there, dangling my feet, wine in hand, and watched him cook. He put on some Louis Armstrong and just did his thing.
Forty minutes later I was taking my first bite of something that could best be described as a cloud. A cloud dripping with the most flavorful olive oil I’d ever tasted.
“Holy fuck, what is this?” I mumbled, and Dylan just chuckled.
“Ricotta gnocchi with sage,” he said.
“How did you learn to make it?”
Dylan shrugged. “I was in Florence for a summer studying with an architect there. His mother was an amazing cook.” As though that explained everything. As though it didn’t open up an entirely new folder in the Dylan part of my brain now labeled Sweet Young Man Who Learns Italian Cooking from an Old Lady. As if that entire folder didn’t make me love him just a little more.
“Well, now I feel like a prostitute, because I will definitely have as much sex with you as you’d like in exchange for this,” I said.
“You’d be a terrible prostitute.”
“Excuse me, but I think I’d be fabulous,” I protested.
“You’re far too generous a lover,” he said, leaning over my plate and kissing me with his wine-flavored lips. “You’d go broke.”
We ate slowly, savoring, and I was so grateful to feel calm after a week when I’d felt nervous about us, uncertain.
I told him about the day I’d had with his sister, and he smiled curiously through the whole description, as though he’d never seen her the way I did.
“What?” I finally asked. “Why are you smiling like that?”
“You two have become fast friends, haven’t you?” he asked, almost surprised, curious.
“She’s kind of awesome,” I said. “In case you hadn’t noticed.”
After dinner Dylan mumbled about being coated in cheese and flour and went upstairs to take a shower. I pulled on a T-shirt and sleep shorts and crawled over the bed, ready to nestle in with a book while I waited for him. As I pushed the duvet aside, Dylan’s slick leather laptop bag fell to the floor, and a small stack of papers spread out from its unzipped top. I went to pick them up and paused when I saw my own name.
It was an email. To Dylan. Just like the ones I’d received—a series of random digits as the sender. The subject line was just my name, in all capital letters: LYDIA. And the body had one line of text:
You won’t be able to protect her forever.
Below the text was an icon indicating that an audio file had been attached.
I stood there, stock-still, staring down at the email. I looked at the date. It had arrived three days earlier.
I heard Dylan emerge from the bathroom. I could feel the steam enter the room. I could smell his body wash on him, feel the heat coming from his body, but I couldn’t look at him. I just held the slim paper in my hand.
“Three days ago?”
“Lydia—”
“You got this three days ago and didn’t tell me? I thought you were going to tell me if there was any new information!”
“There was no need to worry you—you’re safe.” Dylan was now standing right in front of me, his warm, damp hand cupping my chin, trying to coax me to look at him.
“What was in the audio file?” I demanded, shaking my face free of his hand.
“Lydia, it’s not important. I’ve got it handled.” He was withdrawing at the same rate I was.
“Dylan,” I said, all the warmth from the evening gone.
He sighed, his hands dropping to his towel-clad hips.
“It was a recording of a conversation between Frank Abbott and me. Discussing your schedule. We were discussing when there might be a couple of gaps—when he couldn’t be there, and neither could I.”
My eyes went wide. I really hadn’t thought I was in any danger, but this scared me. All of a sudden I didn’t think of Frank as a lumberjack so much as a ninja, a ninja I wanted around.
He must have seen the look of fear in my eyes, because he put his warm hands around my upper arms and looked me straight in the eye as he said, “You’re safe. There are no gaps in your coverage. I promise. Because I had to be somewhere, he and I solved the problem over text immediately after this recorded conversation, but the person recording us clearly wouldn’t have known that.”
“But—”
“Look, this asshole hasn’t been able to get close enough to you to get any more intimate pictures. That scare tactic is off the table. So he went directly to me. We found the recording device. It was stuck to some flowers that were delivered to Thomas from Alex.”
“Why didn’t you tell me any of this? I’ve been wandering around thinking everything was status quo, and now I find out that this lunatic knows all of these things about my schedule, is looking for times when I won’t have any protection?!” I was trying not to sound panicked, but I knew I was failing.
“Good.”
“What? What do you mean, ‘good’?”
“I mean, I didn’t want you to worry. The whole point was for you to be able to go about your day not worrying.”
I groaned and grunted and threw up my arms in frustration.
“Dylan,” I began, “I don’t want you to handle all this on your own. I want to help. I want to be involved. I want to know what’s going on.” Inside I was an indecipherable swirl of hurt and sadness, anger and frustration. Outwardly I was just exhausted. Mere hours ago I had been shopping for a dress to wear to tea with the queen, and now I was discussing whether or not our threatening cyberstalker was getting closer to committing actual harm.
He pulled me to his chest and held me tightly. “Damsel. Let me take care of this. I won’t let anything happen to you. This is my world. You don’t know how these assholes work—”
“And you do?” I asked, pushing my palms against his chest and creating distance. Since when did being a marquess involve investigating criminal activity?
“I do,” he said firmly. I looked into his eyes, and he did.
“But you’re not going to tell me how you know.”
He stood there silently, not budging.
“I think you should go,” I said. Not fully believing the words myself until they were out of my mouth.
“What?”
“I’m mad, Dylan. You promised to keep me posted. You promised to tell me what was going on with this. This is worse than just having s
ome weirdo freak emailing me.”
“You want me to leave?” he asked, still incredulous.
“Either talk or leave.” I stood there, my arms crossed. Just as mad about ruining what had been shaping up to be a perfectly lovely night at home with him as I was about him not talking to me about this in the first place.
“I can’t,” he said, sitting on the bed.
“Dylan!”
“No, seriously, I really can’t. The people I am quite sure are behind this are dangerous, Lydia. Frank isn’t around for no reason. I wouldn’t hire security for you if I thought this was some prank.”
“So you do know who it is?”
He shook his head. “Not for certain. I’ve not been able to confirm it, but I’m ninety-nine percent sure.”
“And you won’t tell me?” I was still standing, partly in shock that he was actually communicating, partly just eager for this information.
“I’ll tell you at some point—” I rolled my eyes, and threw my hands in the air. “Lydia, I’ll tell you when I know what the situation is. Right now I don’t want to expose you to any more. It’s sensitive information. It involves my father and some horrible decisions he made, and it involves some…criminal information.” I opened my mouth, about to press him further, but he gave me a look that said Please don’t.
“Baby,” he continued, and he fell back onto the bed, grabbing one of my pillows and tucking it under his head. “My father…” He exhaled and rested his forearm over his eyes. I remained standing, still not quite ready to give in. “When I left secondary school, I had top marks and was already certain I wanted to be an architect. My family had taken a trip to Los Angeles when I was fifteen, and I’d seen the Getty Center. Have you been there?”
I shook my head.
“God, its stunning. Architectural perfection. I was mesmerized. When I got home, I took in everything I could. I read every book.” I felt myself give a little, crawled onto the bed, rested my head on his shoulder, and placed my palm on his flat, bare stomach, somehow trying to coax more words from him. “Of course I knew that someday I’d be Duke of Abingdon, but my grandfather ran his own company while he was duke, and he enjoyed my newfound passion. He even took me on a trip to Paris to look at Le Corbusier’s buildings. He encouraged me.”
“He sounds amazing—I wish I could have met him.” I felt myself soften even more.
“As do I,” he said and wrapped his arm around my middle. “God, I had so much energy for it. I was feverish. I went to Cambridge and studied with a fabulous professor. By the end of the first term I had even earned a spot working with him, a kind of apprenticeship—we’d be designing council housing blocks, providing a real service and doing it well, solving problems. I’d found what I wanted to do with my life, and I was good at it.”
“That’s incredible, and you are. You’re amazing at it,” I said softly, letting my anger fade. He was talking. He was telling me what he could tell me, even if it wasn’t the information I’d asked for. And I was all ears.
“Then I came home for Christmas. I felt so alive. I couldn’t wait to tell my parents. I won’t ever forget this conversation.” He paused for a moment, and I thought I could feel him cringe or gulp, like he was bracing himself.
“I came into the library. The fire was roaring. My parents already had their drinks, of course. Emily was off watching the telly or something. It just spilled out of me—the courses, what I’d been learning, the apprenticeship, all of it. I remember my mother smiling, but it was almost a sad smile, and my father told her to leave the room. She gave me one of her patented non-hug hugs without saying a word and left. My father said it was time I grew up, that he barely recognized me as his son. That I was living some pipe dream. He wondered at how I could have missed that my job—my only job—was to fill his shoes. To run Hale Shipping. To be duke. Why else would he have had a son?”
“He said that to you?” I asked, flabbergasted.
“He said that I shouldn’t make the mistake of thinking my life was my own. He couldn’t understand why my grandfather had ever encouraged me. He eventually conceded, in as disgusted a way as possible, that I was free to do what I would while at university, as long as I understood what my real obligations were. That he hoped by the time I was done with Cambridge I would have come to my senses.”
Dylan spoke in such a detached way that I understood it was too painful for him to remember. He’d told me before about his early childhood, his parents instilling him with a sense of duty, but I hadn’t realized that he had held on to hope for so long, that he must have been an optimistic child and adolescent in spite of his parents. That it wasn’t those early toddler moments that had crushed him, changed him, but this moment. The one he shared so vividly with me now.
“I’m so sorry, Dylan. No father should say those things to his son,” I said, stroking his stomach and laying a kiss on his chest. “I don’t understand—your grandfather sounds so wonderful, so open-minded, like such a vibrant person. How did your father become so cruel?”
“I honestly don’t know. But it changed me. I didn’t do the apprenticeship—when I thought about it, I just felt the weight of my father’s words. He robbed me of the pleasure, the joy I’d found in it. That’s when I started acting like the asshole you’ve read about online, like the aristocratic son he wanted me to be, one he identified with—someone who looked like money and treated others accordingly.”
“How did you finally start designing again?”
“Well, you know about Caroline—that was me trying to please him in a way. But one day my grandfather took me to task. He’d been trying to talk to me for ages, trying to bring me back to life, but I had shut down, lowered the curtain on that part of myself. Then that night he took me to dinner, which was normal, but afterwards he had Lloyd park in front of a hotel. I asked him what we were doing there, and he told me to wait. About ten minutes later I saw my father, drunk, with his hands on the ass of his secretary.”
“Your grandfather is the one who told you about your father’s philandering?!”
“Yes. And he said—I’ll never forget his words—‘He is half the man you could be.’ He said there was nothing he could do about the fact that Hale Shipping and the title would go to his son, but that he had been proud of me when I’d found my passion. That he still desired that I become an architect. That he knew I could do something important. No one had said anything like that to me…probably ever.”
“I’m so glad he did.”
“Me too. I broke up with Caroline—I told you a little about that—and I went back to work. It all came back. But I still…I don’t…Lydia, I’ve never told anyone any of this.” He whispered it, almost as though he couldn’t believe he’d just told this story at all.
“Not even to Will? Or Caroline?”
“No one. No one but you. You have to understand that even though my grandfather brought me back to life, there was a part of me that died that day my father spoke to me. Since then, as a rule, I’ve never dared share anything I truly care about with him, really with anyone. I learned the hard way that he could kill it.”
Suddenly I understood Dylan a thousand times better. How closed off he was. How he insisted on control, was pained when he had to give it up. I thought of every time I’d pressed him, defied him, insisted that he move outside his comfort zone. Each time he’d laughed, he’d played along, but I could see now that each time it had also probably been a challenge. Each time I’d been breaking a well-formed mold that had, in some ways, saved him.
“Tomorrow, at Humboldt Park, I will break that rule for that first time in eleven years,” he said and squeezed my hand, linking our fingers.
“What do you mean?”
“I’ll share you.”
Chapter 12
That night we fell asleep after our conversation drifted to more mundane topics, like the first building he’d ever designed—an annex to an old office building that he said he’d made outrageously overcomplicated for what i
t had been, but he was still proud of it. And I told him about my only grandparent I’d ever met, my father’s mother, who’d died when I was seven, but I could still remember the soft, leathery feel of her skin.
Now it was Saturday morning, we were decidedly awake, and I was fretting, packing for one night with his parents, which after last night made me nervous. Nervous for me—I wanted to do what I could to make it go well—and nervous for him, for all the reasons he’d shared.
“What about this one?” I asked, holding up the same printed wrap dress I’d worn on one of our first dates. It was a bit summery but also really cheerful, which I thought might be a good note to strike.
“I told you, damsel, any dress will do. You’d look stunning in a paper sack,” Dylan replied unhelpfully, looking at his computer from my bed. I was pretty sure he was trying not to think about this visit, or certain parts of it.
I groaned in frustration. “Dylan, I’ve never visited anyone who ‘dresses for dinner,’ and the last thing I need is to get this wrong. Please—be specific. Help me.” I was now holding up the wrap dress and one other—a red, tailored dress that I’d always liked.
Dylan had assured me that I had nothing to prove, but he and I both knew that was bullshit. His mother, the Duchess of Abingdon, hated me or at the very least prayed daily that Dylan would get bored of me. And I hated to admit it, but lately I was wondering myself when Dylan might get a little tired of the antics involved in dating again. I was just waiting for him to decide his original plan—hiding out in his architecture firm until he died of old age—was better than this one, which involved having paparazzi comment on whether he wore boxers or briefs (boxer briefs, naturally) and speculated about whether or not I was on birth control (taking it faithfully).
Dylan reached back into my closet and removed a tailored crepe navy-blue dress with a pleated skirt, three-quarter sleeves, and a subtle eyelet trim at the scooped neck. “This one.”
“Really? Not this one?” I double-checked, holding up the red one. “I always get compliments when I wear it.”
