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‘My turn to drive.’ Jasper held out his hand for the keys to the four-by-four as they strode across the gravel driveway to where she’d parked, an hour or more earlier.
Tori’s fingers flexed around the keys in her pocket, reluctant to give them up. ‘I can drive back.’
‘I know you can. You drove here, after all. Which is why it’s my turn,’ Jasper said, with exaggerated patience.
Tori hesitated, and he sighed.
‘What? Are you afraid I’ll crash? Or steal you away to some secluded inn in some village and treat you to dinner—I am actually starving, though, so that one might happen.’
Depends on the inn.
But she couldn’t tell him that either, so, reluctantly, she handed over the keys.
‘Thank you.’ Jasper’s smile was wide, bright and genuine—the sort of smile only someone raised with advantages rather than disasters could smile.
It just made her resent him more.
‘Come on,’ she said as she opened the passenger-side door and climbed in. ‘I want to get home.’
Home to Flaxstone, that was, where she could put the past firmly behind her again. Not anywhere along the way that might have once held the title of ‘home’.
Because maybe once she was safely back in her bright, light and solitary cottage, she’d be able to stop thinking about the one night she’d spent with Jasper, and forget all about a dark, cosy inn out on the moors that she used to call home.
Jasper eased himself into the driver’s seat and immediately turned up the car’s heating. It was colder than ever out there—chillier even than his father’s reception when he’d returned home to Flaxstone a week or so earlier. And Jasper hadn’t honestly thought that was possible.
The earl, in all his aristocratic glory, had obviously decided that the rift in the family had to be Jasper’s fault, rather than a result of his own behaviour. Jasper had had plenty of time to think about it over the past five years, and the only conclusion he’d been able to reach was that his father’s life hadn’t ever allowed for the possibility of not getting everything he wanted—so he just took it, and to hell with the consequences for everybody else.
Well. One thing he couldn’t just take was his son’s respect. That had been lost five years ago when he’d discovered the truth about his father—and nothing that had happened since showed any signs of the earl winning it back.
But he was done thinking about his father for the day. He’d done what he came here to do.
Coming back to the UK at all hadn’t been his first choice; he was happy with the life he’d forged over in America, with the reputation he’d built up and the portfolio of work he’d created. But then his father had emailed and told him that, given Jasper’s absence, he intended to legitimise his other son as his heir, too. The title was Jasper’s by law, and Flaxstone went with the title, but everything else—the business, the money, the properties—that was the earl’s to distribute as he pleased.
And apparently his illegitimate son by the housekeeper was what pleased him most. The son Jasper had only discovered existed by accident, five years ago, and the reason he’d left home in the first place.
His best friend, Felix.
Jasper hadn’t come back for the money, or the property, or the business. He’d come back for his reputation and, most of all, for his mother.
And it was his mother that had brought him to Stonebury Hall with Tori.
Stonebury Hall would be the perfect home for his mother, if Jasper couldn’t dissuade his father from making a big, public announcement, and the earl went through with his latest, ruinous plan. Jasper wasn’t even sure his mother knew about Felix, or if his father had any intention of telling her before the rest of the country. His mother, lovely and loving as she was, had never really seemed to inhabit the same world as the rest of them, as far as Jasper could tell. She was perfect for opening church fetes, throwing Christmas parties and keeping their little corner of England the way things had been fifty years ago, when she’d watched her mother run her own home in a fashion that was out of date even then, but she’d never really caught up with the changing times—or shown any desire to.
But the changing times had caught up with them.
Right now, the earl was still sticking his fingers in his ears and humming, metaphorically at least, telling himself that an illegitimate son, brought up in the household, with his mother still working at the house, was nothing in this day and age. That no one would care that the boy Jasper had grown up with, whose birthday was just weeks before his own, was actually his half-brother.
That Jasper’s father had been lying to him, and everyone else, his whole life.
People would care, that Jasper was sure of.
Jasper had cared, mightily, the day he’d found out—an accidental glimpse of some paperwork in his father’s office that had turned out to be his updated last will and testament, detailing what he left to each of his sons.
That plural had nearly destroyed him on its own. Hearing the details from his own father, and realising that Felix already knew exactly who his father was—that was what had driven him away completely.
And now the earl was talking about legitimising Felix, handing responsibility for some of the estates over to him, since, as he put it, ‘My other son seems to have disowned us altogether.’
The media was going to have a field day with that. And Jasper wanted to protect his mother from that, even if he couldn’t protect himself.
She needed a retreat, a bolthole, somewhere to hide away from the media, the public, and her husband for a while. Or for ever. And Stonebury Hall would be perfect for that.
Now he just needed to convince the earl to let him make it happen. His father might be the one who decided on the estate’s investments and built up the property portfolio, but the actual work of transforming these places into whatever it was they believed they could be—and make money as—was delegated to others.
And that work, that sort of huge development project, was exactly what Jasper had spent five years managing overseas. He could take it on, make it everything his mother needed. A home, perhaps with a small business involved to bring in income and give her something else to focus on. Perhaps a teashop. Or a stable yard, if the paddock at the back was large enough. He needed to examine the specifications again.
And then he needed to convince his father. Surely, once the sordid truth about him, about their marriage, was out in the world, the earl would understand that his wife needed an escape, a refuge. He wouldn’t begrudge her that, Jasper was almost certain. At least, not when he saw the inevitable backlash and scandal it caused.
It was possible that the whole announcement was just a ploy to get him back in the country, Jasper mused as he eased the car onto another tiny back road that led to another back road, and another, until they finally reached something wide enough for two cars to pass without one of them ending up in a hedge. Maybe it was all a cunning plan to appeal to Jasper’s pride, or even his greed, by threatening to give away his inheritance, responsibilities and status to Felix.
Which just showed how little his father knew him. He had plenty of money of his own these days, thanks to a lucrative career and some canny investments with his inheritance from his grandparents. And he took pride in the career and the life he’d forged for himself away from Flaxstone. As for the responsibilities, Felix was welcome to them, too. Living a life free from expectations, except the ones he placed on himself, had a lot going for it.
But he couldn’t leave his mother alone here to be humiliated and, worse, hurt. That was a step too far. If his father was going public, Jasper needed to be there when his mother found out the truth, and he needed to protect her, spirit her away from everything that followed. Preferably to Stonebury Hall.
And he was still thinking about his father.
Shaking his head, Jasper forced himself to focus on the road, the snowflakes starting to fall in earnest outside. The woman sitting next to him.
Anything except what had brought him home.
Although, he had to admit, the line in his father’s email about Tori had only added to his certainty that he urgently needed to return. He hadn’t imagined she’d still even be working for his father after all this time. And just one sentence—a note about how Felix had been working closely with her on estate business—had sent his mind spiralling back to that one night they’d spent together.
The night he’d found his father’s will.
The night before he’d confronted his father and learned the full, awful truth.
He’d left the country without speaking to her again, which was, he had to admit, a pretty shoddy move on his part. But then, she’d clearly regretted their night together because she’d got up early and crept out of her own bedroom, in her own cottage, to avoid him the morning after, so it wasn’t entirely on him.
‘So, shall we take the boring route home or the scenic one?’ he asked, grinning with a jollity he really didn’t feel.
Tori looked up from her phone, eyes wide. The silent journey so far apparently hadn’t bothered her at all—no surprise there, really. Tori Edwards was the most closed-off woman he’d ever met, so unlike all the other women he spent time with. Well, almost all the time…
He allowed himself a real smile at the memory of the one night he’d managed to slip under her defences and find the real woman hiding behind them. Tori had more battlements than Stonebury Hall, Jasper decided, remembering a time before his life had fallen apart, when trying to breach those defences had been a kind of game for him and Felix. A challenge. Something that niggled at him until he couldn’t help but strive to get her to react, to show something of her real personality—rather than those closed doors behind her eyes.
It hadn’t escaped his notice that the one time he’d succeeded was the night he’d felt more wounded and open than ever before.
Maybe it was all the thinking he’d been doing about his father, or maybe it was the snow and the enclosed space, but suddenly Jasper wanted to see if he could break through those battlements again—even if only for a moment.
‘Given the snow, I’d suggest sticking to the main roads,’ Tori said, her voice even, uninterested. At least, if a person weren’t listening carefully.
Jasper was listening very carefully. Which was why he caught the faint tremor underneath her words. She cared, one way or another, and suddenly he wanted to find out which.
He needed a new challenge—a distraction from his disintegrating family. Persuading Tori Edwards to open up a little could be the perfect entertainment for a snowy afternoon.
He smiled, and began his campaign.
‘The snow isn’t that heavy,’ Jasper pointed out, his lazy voice easy with lack of caring. ‘And the main roads will be packed with drivers avoiding the more interesting routes. We could cut across the moors and make it home before the real weather rolls in.’
Tori glanced out of the car window. The clouds above definitely suggested that there was a lot more snow to come.
‘The weather can be different on the moors.’ She bit down on her lower lip to dispel the memories. ‘The snow might have already hit there.’
‘Or it might miss it entirely.’
That didn’t sound likely. But he was irritatingly right about how busy the main roads would be in this weather. If they could make it across the lesser-used moor roads it would be quicker—unless the snow was heavier, or too many other people had the same idea, or there was a rogue tractor or sheep blocking the road…
They were idling now at the crossroads, the junction where Jasper had to choose which path to follow. Any minute now another car would come up behind them and start beeping its horn—not that Jasper seemed bothered about holding other people up. She wasn’t sure he’d ever realised that it was human to worry about anyone else’s feelings.
Normal, empathetic people didn’t leave the country for five years after sleeping with a person, and then never mention it again.
‘Don’t you ever take a risk?’ he asked, that wicked grin she remembered too well on his lips.
That grin had got her into trouble before. Well, that grin and half a bottle of gin—stolen from the earl’s drinks cabinet, of course—and a bad day that had lowered her defences, if she remembered correctly.
‘Unnecessary risk is the height of foolishness.’
Of course she took risks. That was a normal part of doing business. But personal risk? That was another matter. She’d taken enough of those in the past to know what happened when the risk didn’t pay off. Okay, she’d taken precisely one. But that had been more than enough to teach her a lesson.
Her single night with Jasper had just been an extra reminder. She’d known better than to get involved, however fleetingly, with someone for whom romance was basically a sport. But she’d put her fears aside and let herself believe that there might be more to him, that he might think more of her, only for him to prove quite comprehensively that she was as unimportant to him as she’d always imagined.
She didn’t need reminding again.
‘This risk is necessary,’ Jasper announced. ‘I’m starving, and I want to get home for dinner.’
‘Your stomach is not an emergency.’
‘Maybe not to you.’ Jasper pulled on the handbrake and leant closer, looking into her eyes. ‘Are you worried about the snow? Because if it’s bad we’ll turn back. Or find that secluded inn I mentioned and have some dinner while we wait it out…’
Tori tore her gaze away from his. She wasn’t even going to imagine what he was imagining could happen between them if they did that. Jasper’s determined campaign of flirtation had always been distracting, however much she knew better than to let herself fall for it. ‘Not happening. Fine. Just get us home in one piece, okay?’
‘Your wish is my command, milady.’ Humming a few lines from a Christmas carol, Jasper took off again—heading, of course, for the road that traversed the Yorkshire moors.
Tori hunkered down in her seat. It wasn’t the snow she was scared of—not that she planned to let Jasper know that.
She knew those moors. They were her home, her playground, her life, growing up. But she’d avoided so much as driving through them for nearly eight years now. She’d made her whole life away from them—not too far away, but far enough. This was the first time the earl had sent her to look at property practically on them.
And she knew the road that Jasper would take. Knew the tiny villages and hamlets it would wend and wind through, the landmarks and features it would pass. The inn that would be sitting not far from the side of the road that they would speed past without comment, without recognising the part it had played in Tori’s life. The valley they’d pass through, without any sign of the car that had crashed into the rocks there, and torn her future apart.
The car crash that had killed Tyler, the man who was supposed to be the love of her life. Even if she’d been every bit as responsible for his death as those rocks he’d crashed into.
All of that was part of the life she’d put firmly behind her for ever.
Tori tugged her coat tighter around her, feeling a chill that the fancy four-by-four’s heating system couldn’t hope to warm. She couldn’t wait for this cursed trip to be over.
CHAPTER TWO (#uceda260b-55b8-5c02-b994-7eccd6783552)
OKAY, THIS WASN’T working at all.
Keeping his main focus firmly on the road ahead, and the swirling snowflakes that grew heavier with every moment, meant that Jasper could only spare the briefest of glances at his travelling companion. But even that was enough to realise that any hopes he’d had of Tori opening up or even relaxing a little as they took the secluded, picturesque road through the moors were doomed. Curled up in her seat, her coat wrapped tightly around her slim body, she looked almost like a child having a sulk.
Maybe that was what she was doing. And Jasper had teased Felix out of enough sulks in their childhood to know how to fix that.
Except he wasn’t thinking about Felix. Ever.
Think about Tori. And not crashing the car.
Tori Edwards was an enigma. She’d appeared in his life one day and hadn’t left, and despite their night together he wasn’t sure he knew her any better now than the day she’d arrived.
After his father’s revelation about Felix’s parentage, Jasper had worried briefly that Tori was another of the earl’s illegitimate children, but that fear had been quickly dispelled. And given her colouring—her pale skin, her dark hair, and her bright green eyes—he should have known better anyway. He got his own dark hair from his mother, and his eyes were his father’s distinctive golden brown—the same, he realised too late, as Felix’s.
Jasper and Felix had both been about to start their third year of university down in Oxford when Tori had shown up that first summer, a year into her own business degree at York, and working for the earl during the holidays. He’d claimed he’d plucked her from obscurity at some roadside inn where her talents were clearly wasted. Tori had never denied the story, but Jasper suspected that his father’s desire to appear a patron, a benefactor, to a penniless girl who had just needed the right chances in life had had more to do with harking back to a previous era of aristocracy than anything else.
In truth, Jasper assumed the earl had hired Tori because she was very good at her job, patronage be damned. She’d worked hard all that summer learning the ropes at the Flaxstone estate—dealing with the groups of executives there for team building down in the woods, with the paintballing range and the go-kart track; hosting birthday parties for horse-mad little girls; serving teas and coffees in the farm café and even leading walking tours of the land around Flaxstone, up to the ruins of the old hall that had been crumbling away nicely for the last three hundred years. There had been no job she wouldn’t take on, and before long she’d known more about how the estate was run than staff who’d been there for decades.
The earl, for all his many faults, had at least seen the writing on the wall for Britain’s landed gentry, and had found a way to diversify the assets the Flaxstone estate gave them, making the best use of their aristocratic inheritance by turning it into a business. And once Flaxstone itself had been running consistently in the black as a commercial enterprise, he’d turned his sights on the many estates in the country that hadn’t been so prescient—and done the same for them.
And Tori, from what Jasper could gather, had been a big part of that during his absence over the last five years.
But back when she’d first arrived, she’d been nothing more than another girl to flirt with, a challenge when she didn’t flirt back, and then a puzzle for him to solve when he couldn’t get her to open up at all. He and Felix had spent that whole first summer trying to bash holes in those walls she put up; teasing her, asking every question they could think of, even trying to get her drunk on long summer nights. She’d been just nineteen to their nearly twenty-one, close enough in age that it had seemed natural they’d spent time together, even if she’d lived in the staff quarters with the casual summer staff, and they had been up at the main hall.
She had been there again at Christmas that year, organising stalls for the annual Christmas market, decorating trees and staircases in the hall, and corralling carollers. Jasper had wondered briefly why she hadn’t gone home for Christmas, he remembered now. Later, he’d got the feeling that she hadn’t had a home to go to.
But she’d made a new one at Flaxstone. By the time she’d graduated, Tori had earned such respect from the earl that he’d given her the gatekeeper’s cottage and hired her full time, before she’d even attended graduation.
And two years later, the summer he’d found out the truth about Felix, Jasper had finally broken a small hole in those defences of hers, even if only for one night. Or maybe she’d broken a hole in his.
It had been the night that he’d found his father’s will, read about a potential second son he’d never heard of. His father had been out of town for meetings and Jasper had known it wasn’t a conversation he could have over the phone, so he’d resigned himself to waiting until his return the next day for answers.
But patience had never been one of his virtues.
Felix, he remembered now, had been off with some girl he’d fallen for on the summer staff, and not available for drunken oblivion. But Jasper had found Tori hanging bunting on the pop-up coffee stall she’d convinced the earl to install at the start of the garden walk.
‘Don’t you ever stop working?’ he’d asked her, leaning against the nearest tree to watch her work. She’d been methodical, focussed, and the bunting had dipped and hung at precise intervals from the tin roof of the stall.
‘When it’s all done, yes,’ she’d replied without looking at him.
‘When it’s done, I need something stronger than coffee. Join me?’
She’d turned then, looked him in the eye for a long moment, and then nodded.
