“I’ve got to go,” I muttered, nearly tripping over the chair behind me but righting myself at the last minute.
Mike made a move to come after me, but Lucy must have seen something in my expression, and she put a hand on his arm to stop him. I knew it would look weird if I ran, but the Orangery was really, really long, and I was starting to spiral. So, like the freak I was, by the time I was at end of the long space, I was full-on sprinting.
Chapter 9
You’ve got a deal
Mike
“Hello, young man.”
“Sh–sugar—hey, Margot.”
Bloody hell, the woman came out of nowhere. Totally freaky. But that was Margot for you, always popping up where you least expected her. It was the same when we were kids. Margot would suddenly appear out of nowhere, and she always seemed to know what was going on. She was the type of woman who’d know everything about everyone and would manipulate things as she saw fit, which made her a scary motherfucker in my opinion.
Despite that, I still liked Margot. She was so posh, it was almost as though she broke through class divides with the sheer force of her aristocratic bearing. Nobody said no to Margot. But she was fucking hilarious as well. Always up for a laugh and always had a twinkle in her eye.
“Gosh, aren’t you jumpy,” she said with a small smirk.
I was sitting on one of the many garden benches at Buckingham Manor, kicking a stone with the toe of my boot and thinking that I should probably be getting back to my workshop,but not wanting to leave just yet without seeing Vicky again. There was open lawn all around me. Margot really had appeared out of nowhere. Like I said—scary, but kind of cool.
“But then, in my experience,” Margot said with that eye twinkle again. “It’s always the big, burly chaps who have the most nervous dispositions.”
I narrowed my eyes at her. “I do not have a nervous disposition,” I said through my teeth, and one of her eyebrows went up.
“Tell that to the little boy who ran away screaming when The Hulk arrived for my son’s birthday party.”
Heat flooded my face. When was I going to live that down? “I was four, Margot. And that bastard was massive. How was I to know it was just Jimbo from The Badger’s Sett?”
“None of the other children were scared, darling. It’s okay to be sensitive, you know.”
I rolled my eyes. “I’m not sensitive.”
She hummed but didn’t reply as she sat next to me on the bench.
“I love Vicky,” she said out of the blue after a full minute of silence.
I shifted uncomfortably on my seat and aimed a good bit of side-eye at the old bird. “Yes, okay.”
She turned further to me before she spoke again. “She thinks she’s difficult to love. But she’s not.”
My throat felt tight. How much did Margot know?
“She thinks she doesn’t fit here, that we’re not herrealfamily, so we’re just putting up with her. Have you noticed how she emphasiseshalf-brother andhalf-sister when she talks about my biological children? How she won’t claim Buckingham Manor in any way as one of her homes, just somewhere she’s allowed to visit?”
I cleared my throat. “Is that… is it because she?—?”
“Because she’s my husband’s bastard?”
My back shot straight at Margot’s words. “Hey.” I growled, fully ready to throw down.
How dare Margot call Vicky that?
“It’s okay, Mike,” Margot said with amusement in her tone. “You can relax. I didn’t mean that as an insult to Vicky. She can’t help the circumstances of her birth. But thatishow she thinks of herself. How she’s been made to feel by everyone, and even, I’m ashamed to say this, but even by me at first. It took me longer than it should have done to warm up to that little girl, and I’ll carry that guilt around for the rest of my life. She was six when I first met her, and it was all quite a shock. My feelings were hurt, and I was humiliated. I put up with her like the martyr I felt I was, and interacted with her the minimum amount I could get away with that summer. This wasn’t hard. As you know, the child didn’t speak.
“Now, Ollie, my beautiful, wonderful Oliver, was different. He accepted her immediately. All his anger was directed rightfully towards his father. Claire still struggles with it, and that’s made her… distant from Vicky.
“But for me… one day, I came into the kitchen, and there she was. This silent child just staring out of the patio doors. So still and small. My kids were good eaters. They were loud, and they seemed to be always moving, but Vicky, even though she was a lot younger than both of them, was sosostill. The only way I even knew she was alive was the rise and fall of her chest. Then she looked at me. I think it was the first time I really made eye contact with her. Vicky’s never been the best with eye contact, and it wasn’t like I was seeking it out either. When I looked into those blue eyes, carbon copies of my own children’s, I could suddenly see so much working behind them that I had to look away. That’s the thing with Vicky—a lot of the time, the calmer she is on the surface, the more is going on inside. I vowed thatday to treat Vicky like one of my own children. And I did. Her mother is… well, of course, I don’t have a high opinion of the woman, seeing as she slept with my husband for years behind my back, but she is also one of the most vile people on the planet.
