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My side-eye turned into a glare. “Buying a house is the least my father could do. It’s not like he does anything else for me, is it?”
“Dunno. You have a fancy title on your mail. Way better than‘Miss.’ Sometimes I pretend we live in Downton Abbey, and I’m your maid.”
“And you want me to help you respond to this bad date of yours? The fancy title you refer to doesn’t exactly help with my own dating life. Granny did warn me.”
Seriously. You’d be surprised how many guys were intimidated when they found out that I was, in fact,LadyGrace Montgomery-Brown, not Miss Grace Montgomery-Brown.
Not that it mattered. My relationship with my father was distant at best, thanks to his less-than-stellar treatment of my mother when I was nine.
Namely knocking up his mistress and insisting that my mother divorce him quickly since the unborn baby was a boy—also known as the child he’d always wanted that she’d failed to provide.
Like she was in control of what gender I was.
Still, that didn’t stop my father trying to smoosh me into his cosy new family with my stepmother and half-brother. I had nothing against Vincent, nor did I care that he would one day inherit my father’s title of Earl of Loxford and the hassle that would come with maintaining the estate attached to the title, but Ididtake issue with my stepmother’s flagrant flaunting of her relationship with my father both before and after theyvery quicklygot married.
Like nobody knew that the only reason he married her was because she was pregnant.
Needless to say, I didn’t spend any more time than absolutely necessary with them. I kept to our monthly dinner agreement, visited around Christmas, and spoke to Vincent occasionally outside of it, but it was kind of hard to strike up a conversation with a seventeen-year-old boy whose interests were largely football and Fortnite.
At least, I think that’s what it was. I didn’t know what seventeen-year-old boys did in their spare time and I didn’t want to know.
No, thank you.
The tempestuous relationship had only worsened after my mother’s death when I was fifteen. I’d had no choice but to move back to the Loxford estate with my dad and his new happy family, and it’d been the worst three years of my life. Not only had my nightmare stepmother tried to take the place of my mother, but my dad didn’t exactly realise what was going on.
I have a not-so-fond memory of dragging him to a joint therapy session where he realised that his wife, Carmen, had been hugely overstepping, and I didn’tneeda new mum. I wanted my own, not the woman who’d had a hand in blowing up my entire family.
The insane grief Mum had gone through after her life literally crashed down around her meant that she hadn’t looked after herself properly. Maybe if none of it had happened, she’d have realised she was sick, and they would have discovered the cancer soon enough to save her life.
Like I said.
I didn’t want to say Carmen had had a hand in killing my mum, but she certainly wasn’t innocent. Neither was my father, for that matter, but he’d at least stepped up and made sure she didn’t have to worry about money.
After our therapy session, we’d had a few more and Dad had finally realised that it wasn’t a healthy environment for me. He agreed to pay for my housing during my time at university, and having the distance between me and Carmen helped our relationship somewhat.
I would never like the woman, but it made her a little bit tolerable.
The problem came after university. I didn’t want to return to Loxford House, and I was pretty sure Carmen didn’t want me there either, so we compromised.
Dad would gift me the money to buy a house up to a certain value in cash. Carmen wasn’t happy that he was more than willing to buy me an admittedly very nice house, completely missing the point that her son would hopefully never have to buy one and that I would get only slightly over absolutely nothing of cash value from my father’s estate on his death.
It was probably the only time my father ever told her to shut up.
In return, I would show up once a month for dinner and make a concerted effort to tell my grandmother not to bitch out Carmen on a regular basis.
Somehow, we’d carved out a relationship that was kind of… functional.
Not really.
Still, I continued to show up for our monthly dinner date, and I made a half-hearted attempt on occasion to remind my grandmother not to be a bitch to her whenever they saw one another.
Not that Olive Brown cared a damn about the opinions of two people who ripped her daughter and granddaughter’s lives in two, even if it was almost twenty years ago. The woman could hold a grudge like nobody else I’d ever met.
Granny didn’t much care for my father and would have nothing to do with him at all if not for me, and she went out of her way to deliberately piss Carmen off whenever she could. I’d tried reminding her that I was an adult now and there was no need to have any kind of relationship with my father, but she saw it as her duty to ensure I did in fact receive my part of my inheritance.
She and Carmen had been arguing for a decade over how much that should be. As far as my stepmother was concerned, my house was the entirety of my estate, but Granny thought very differently.
I did wonder if Carmen had even seen my father’s will.
