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He sighed.
Deeply.
“His allowance will be defined by me. That doesn’t exactly say, ‘Do what you want when you want.’ I’m not going to make them live like paupers among splendor, but part of me understands a man’s son controlling his finances would be humiliating. Which is why he should have found some way to make his own money.”
“Like you did,” I noted.
He nodded. “Even when my son, if I have one, turns thirty-eight, I won’t need to rely on him. Far from it. As it should be. My grandfather saw the writing on the wall. He knew the covenants. He was an architect. When his time was up, he moved my grandmother to a beautiful home he designed himself over on the coast, continued his work at his firm, and I don’t think he took another penny from the estate. Same, in a sense, with my great-grandfather. He ended his career as an admiral in the Royal Navy when he was in his sixties, and he retired in Cornwall.”
“Impressive. You come from good stock.”
His eyes twinkled.
It was fabulous.
Yeesh.
He seemed too good to be true.
However, the twinkle died. “Granddad was disappointed in my father. I have two uncles and an aunt. One is a solicitor. One is a retired pilot in the RAF. My aunt’s still a practicing psychologist. But Dad always lived off the estate. The only one of the four. In fact, my uncles and aunt all moved out for college and never came back. Dad went to Oxford. All the Alcotts do. But he didn’t do anything with the degree he earned.”
“Did you go to Oxford?”
He nodded. “And Eton. Same with Danny.”
“And again, I’m impressed.”
This time, he shook his head. “Don’t be. The Alcotts have endowed both. We had guaranteed places.”
“I bet you were a good student.”
“You’d bet wrong. I spent more time taking my mates’ money and investing it in the stock market, and losing most of it, than I did studying while I was at Oxford. It was a game to me, but I was fascinated with it.”
“That losing streak obviously ended.”
One side of his mouth went up. “It did.”
“Hm.” I took the last sip of my Amaretto.
When I did, Ian took my glass.
He reached to the table to set it down, crush out his cigarette, set his glass aside.
Then he came back to me.
“Come here,” he ordered gently.
I looked at his face and my chest got tight.
Because it wasn’t first kiss time.
It was something else.
“Ian—”
“Please, come here, sweetheart.”
I’d been holding it together. All that was me told me I needed to keep holding it together.
