“He owned a tavern on the waterfront—The Four Leafed Clover. On South Street. Right on the busy banks of the East River where all the merchant ships docked.” The mention of it took him right back there. That brief, halcyon time in New York when he had never had a care in the world. “It was in such a prime spot, it was a gold mine. Always crowded. From the minute the doors opened until he had to push the customers out in the small hours.”
All that hubbub was still one of Gal’s favorite noises. The sounds of laughter, chatter, and dice hitting the tables meant money hitting the till. But it also reminded him of the worry-free existence he had enjoyed back then, when food, shelter, and safety had been things he had taken for granted. When he had never had to look over his shoulder or be wary of another’s motives or live hand to mouth: The memories of those struggles were so painfully fresh they plagued him daily. For the most part, he used them to spur him onward. Those hardships were the fuel that powered his ambition and the stone that strengthened his necessary defenses against anything threatening it. But sometimes, like tonight, all that negativity weighed him down.
“From my earliest recollections I was always beside him as he worked, learning at his knee while he entertained his customers—or his only grandson—with stories of his past. Several of them were about that place.” He jerked his thumb back toward The Mermaid. “He grew up there. It belonged to his father and was the place my grandpa first learned his trade. I came to find it almost as soon as I arrived in England,and when I saw it was in disrepair and discovered Nelly was broke and on the cusp of closing it, I felt I owed it to my ancestors, and most especially to my grandpa, to save it.”
“Oh, Galahad.” Venus slipped her arm through his and briefly hugged it tight. It felt wonderful. “I never realized you were a sentimentalist.”
“It’s not an acceptable trait in a ruthless businessman, so it’s not a side of me I advertise.” That he was allowing her to see this side of him was… unprecedented. And perhaps more than a little terrifying when exposing any of his vulnerabilities went completely against the grain.
“So Nelly is family?”
“No.” He shook his head, wondering why he still felt compelled to speak when his instincts warned him that it would be more prudent to shut the hell up. “My great-granddaddy lost the business when my grandpa was still a boy, and the place changed hands many times since. I’m not sure of the exact circumstances but I know that my family fell on hard times and were left with nowhere to live. That, I suppose, was the catalyst that ultimately sent them stateside to new pastures. It was my grandpa who first opened the tavern on the waterfront because that was his dream, and he passed the dream on to me, so I guess innkeeping is in the blood. Growing up, I recall him often reminiscing about this place.” Instantly his head was filled with the sounds of his grandpa’s voice, warming him from inside.
“He always wore a faraway smile when he told me about his childhood and how he used to think about the other side of this ocean from his bedchamber in the attic as he planned his future. Always lamented how much he missed it despite the good life he had built for himself in America. Always planned to return here to see it one last time but…”
“Fate had other plans?”
Gal nodded, wishing he did not possess that awful memory more than any of the others burdening him. Wishing more that the memory still didn’t cut him to the quick each time he remembered it. “He died when I was twelve. So sudden it floored me and my ma.”
“Am I allowed to ask what happened?” He could tell by the pity etched in her lovely face that she wouldn’t pry if he chose not to elaborate, but for some reason he wanted to, which was bizarre when it was a memory he had been avoiding ever since it had happened.
“He was shot.” The bile churned in his gut as the more dreadful images he preferred to suppress assaulted him. “By a customer. Right in front of me while he was trying to break up a fight.”
She stopped dead, halting him in the process, her lovely eyes swimming with tears. “Oh, Galahad—that is awful.” She reached up until her gloved hand cupped his cheek tenderly in comfort. “I am so sorry.”
He found himself leaning into her palm before he realized what he was doing and shrugged to cover his uncustomary display of weakness. “Not as sorry as I am.”
His grandpa’s murder had been the first pivotal moment of his life, and one that had changed everything catastrophically. It had been the decisive end of that halcyon era and the abrupt beginning of the end of his childhood. His first lesson that the world could be cruel and wasn’t as solid or safe as he had been convinced it was. The grief had been… relentless. The loss unbearable. But it had also signaled the end of everything he knew.
Which, he realized with a jolt, probably accounted for his melancholic mood of earlier. His ambition—his drive to be a success—was as much about righting the wrongs of his past as it was about controlling every aspect of his future. About rebuilding his grandpa’s legacy, chasinghisdreams, and returning what had been stolen from him as well as about ensuring Gal never had to suffer any of that misery again. He couldn’t bring his ma back, or his grandpa, but he could resurrect something of what had been from the ashes. His victory today was, therefore, bittersweet because the price for it had been too high.
Too damn high.
But he had felt sorry for himself enough for one night. All the self-pity in the world wouldn’t bring back his family, or the life they had once had. He had known that when he came here, determined tomake a fresh start away from all that pain—but it had followed him anyway. Shaped him still. “Anyway, I guess you’ve worked out already that I bought this place for him—because it is here that I feel the most connection to him now that I am so far away from home.” A truth he was surprised to admit aloud.
She stared back at the inn, taking it all in before she sighed. “The need to feel that tangible connection to hearth and home is one of the things that makes us human, so it makes perfect sense to me that you bought it. What happened to The Four Leafed Clover?”
Rather than tell her that sorry truth, he sugared it. “Long gone. Demolished now, I believe, to make way for something new.” Watching them tear down his last link to his family back in New York had been another pivotal moment. One that had left him rudderless and anchorless, because he had always planned to buy it back. To run it as his grandpa had always intended. “Hence I decided to make a go of it here when fate dragged me back to the land ofallmy ancestors—both the good ones and the rotten eggs like my undisputedly evil father.”
“When did he reappear in your life?”
He wasn’t ready to talk about Gervais’s initial reappearance in the dark days after his grandpa had passed, or the way the bastard had tricked his mother, and him, into believing he was a “changed man” keen to make amends for abandoning them and ready to take on all the responsibilities of a husband and father.
Gal had needed a father then so very badly, he’d welcomed the man with open arms. And because his ailing mother had started to smile once more, he’d allowed himself to briefly be a boy again. Except his vulnerability, neediness, and gullibility had quickly turned around and not so much bitten him on the ass as ripped it into shreds. So Gal skipped over almost all of the single most pivotal decade of his life with the most abridged version of the truth he could. “Gervais turned up like a bad penny a few days before I turned twenty-one, keen to profit from my inheritance so he could get himself back here to swindle Giles—and so I let him. But only to stop him.”
Thankfully, he had been a very different Galahad by then. The too-trusting boy was long gone and had been replaced by the cynical, battle-scarred, and wary man that he was now—but angrier. He hadn’t allowed Gervais into the solicitor’s office when he finally collected the mysterious locked box of belongings his grandpa had left him for the day he reached his majority, so his father never knew that the one hundred dollars that Gal had used to pay their passage to England came alongside a more valuable nest egg: the share certificates he had used to buy The Den. He spent the anger on the cathartic pursuit of seeing that Gervais got exactly what he was due, then tried to lock all of the past in a box and move on.
“If it’s any consolation, at least you found Giles and turned out to be nothing like Gervais.” As if she understood he wasn’t ready to let her delve much deeper, she tugged his arm to continue walking despite the thickening snowflakes being tossed around in the frigid sea breeze.
“We were both cursed with awful fathers, weren’t we?” She instinctively hugged his arm tighter against the cold. “At least you know what happened to yours and have been able to bolt the door on that part of your life and put it behind you.” He’d wanted to. Hoped to. But knew those experiences influenced him still and likely always would. “Alfred Merriwell seems to have disappeared into the ether so I cannot turn that page—but then he always excelled in that. My sisters like to think he came to a sticky end and is buried in an unmarked pit somewhere or rotting facedown in a ditch unmourned. But I suspect he’s out there lurking somewhere still, biding his time to bother us again. I hope he is.”
“Why?” Her father was a forger who had abandoned his daughters to poverty then turned up again when Minerva found Hugh, only to blackmail her. “From what I hear, you are better off without him.” Gal’s life would have been so much better if Gervais had remained lost. Everything would be different.
Literally everything. But then he wouldn’t be here, and as muchas he wanted to deny the truth of it, right here, right now with her was exactly where he wanted to be.
“That is also undisputable but…” Myriad complex emotions played across her features. “I hate my last memory of him. I hate that I begged him to stay. That I wanted a father in my life so much that I was prepared to turn a blind eye to all his many faults and unconscionable crimes.” A childish sentiment and shameful regret he well understood. “That he left anyway. He got the last word when I realize now that I had more to say. More I wish I could say. It feels like…”
“Unfinished business.” He understood that only too well, too. It had been the bellows that had stoked his ambition for more than half of his life.
