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“Oh,” I breathed. “Ohno.”
I stood beside him, not knowing if he even wanted me there or not. His big shoulders were hunched, but it wasn’t until I touched one that I realized he was shaking too. He flinched, but then a second later, flung his arms around my waist and buried his face into my hip. He breathed deeply, like I was a direct source of oxygen.
I stroked his hair. I couldn’t help it.
“Please, Ces,” he whispered into me. “Please don’t go. You’re all I’ve got left. You and Sofia. I can’t—I can’t lose you too.”
Perhaps I should have said no. Our fights, these hardships—they didn’t just disappear because he was sad and needed me.
But at that moment, I realized something else.
I’d never seen Xavier Sato Parker this vulnerable.
Which is also why I knew I couldn’t just walk away.
PART4
THE HEIR
INTERLUDE III
FIVE YEARS EARLIER
Xavier
“Itell you, boy, youwill come home!”
Henry Parker’s voice thundered on the other end of the line, to the point where I had to hold my phone away from my head so as not to break my eardrums.
“You promised, Xavier,” he was saying when I brought it back. “And now, after all I’ve done to—”
“Allyou’vedone?” I interrupted. “What have you done? It’s my idiot father who shoved all this on me. Shovedyouon me. I didn’t want it. I would have been fine being his bastard the rest of my life if he preferred it.”
“YOU ARE NOT RUPERT PARKER’S BASTARD!”
I held the phone away once more until Henry was done shouting, then tentatively brought it back, nursing my beer bottle as I did.
“All right,” I said. “Calm down, Hal.”
“Say it, then,” he ordered. “I want to know you understand.”
I gritted my teeth. Why was it so hard to say something that, by all accounts, should have been a relief? “Fine. I’m not a bastard.”
It was like I could hear his shoulder relax through the phone’s speaker.
“Good,” Henry said. “Now that that’s cleared up, you need to come home. You’ve a duty here. You learned to cook, as we promised, and then you went off to Japan too. Now, you can’t just keep flitting about the earth like a migrating bird, Xavier. You must come back and take your place at Kendal.”
“Why?” I shot back. “So the old geezer can keep me around as a punching bag? I’ll wait until he’s croaked, thanks.”
“You don’t have to live at Corbray Hall. What will do it? Perhaps another restaurant? There’s a pub in town—”
“I want more than a pub, Henry,” I said. “I want an empire. I can’t build that in the middle of the fucking Lake District.”
He mumbled something on the other side of the line that was unintelligible.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Isaidit’s the first time you’ve truly sounded like a Parker.”
