Page 52 of One Dangerous Desire
“I won’t be deterred, Papa.” Nor would she be distracted by talk of opportunities he’d never considered affording her before.
Her father sighed heavily and got to his feet. May had never seen him so weary. Tilting his head, he studied her, truly looked at her as he hadn’t done in a long while. The hint of a grin softened the lines of his mouth, and she thought, for one breath-stalling moment, that he would relent.
“Well, my girl, then I will have to find a way to dissuade you.”
Chapter Seventeen
GEORGECROSS WASmuch smaller than Rex imagined he’d be. As a child he’d envisioned his father as a giant, a behemoth casting a long shadow over his and his mother’s lives—the originator of all their woes. Not that his mother had ever acknowledged as much. In fuzzy childhood memories, he recalled her saying “when your father comes” or “when you meet your father,” always in that soft gentling voice of hers.
One day, not long before she died, he’d snapped at her, demanding that she stop believing. Hope hurt too much. He hadn’t wanted to hope anymore. Hope had become pain, and the only way a nine-year-old knew to stop it was to scream at his mother, force her to acknowledge that George Cross was never going to come. Never going to save them. Never going to love them.
She’d cried with such wrenching sobs, setting off one of her coughing fits. After a round of wet hacking coughs had rattled her thin frame, she’d stained her prettiest handkerchief with blood. One she’d embroidered by the fire. The reality of her sickness hit him in that moment. Consumption was going to kill his mother, and he’d done nothing to improve her life. He was a rotten, heartless child, stealing every last scrap of hope from his dying mother.
The saddest part of looking into the face of the man before him was realizing he’d never been their hope. Even if he’d come to New York, Rex suspected George Cross wouldn’t have made their lives any better.
“How did you find me?” Rex positioned himself in front of his desk, forcing the smaller man to take a spot farther away. Unsurprisingly, he chose a position near the door, as if preparing himself for a quick escape.
“Were you hiding, boy?”
Rex didn’t know which was worse—the sickening sneer that caught the man’s upper lip at a right angle, like a fish snagged on a hook, or the irritating glint of confidence in his bulging, brown-speckled blue eyes.
“I saw an article in a newspaper. And don’t look so bleedin’ surprised.” George Cross sniffed as if offended and then clenched a hand around each of his grimy lapels, puffing out his barrel chest. “I can read. Mostly check to see me own name is kept out of ’em. Saw her surname, didn’t I? Suspected it was you.”
Her name.The man was lucky he didn’t speak it. Rex couldn’t bear to hear the man who’d ruined his mother, abandoned her, speak of her as if he had any claim at all.
“Why use your mother’s name? We were married, you know.”
“Yes, just before you sent her across an ocean alone.” His shouted words ricocheted in the room like the report of the gun when he’d shot the wall.
“Never told you the tale, did she?” Cross smirked. He seemed to enjoy every reaction he stoked in Rex. He watched him like a predator, with half downturned eyes. “Took a bracelet, you see, when we left her father’s estate. Got what money I could for the thing. Paid for a trip to Gretna Green, train tickets to Liverpool, and one passage to New York Harbor. Planned to follow—”
“But you didn’t.” Rex knew the rest of the story. He’d lived it. Cross could offer him nothing.
The man shrugged, confirming Rex’s thought.
“Headed back to London, didn’t I? Had family there. Made a life for me self.”
“London was preferable to the pregnant wife waiting for you in America?” Rex didn’t bother pointing out that his father would have had family in New York too.
“London was what I knew, boy.” Cross took a heavy step forward that he seemed to intend as menacing. “A place I could make my way. Obviously you feel the same. Look at what you’ve made of yourself in London. New York City didn’t do that for you, did it?”
Rex couldn’t deny it, but the notion that he and his father had anything in common sparked a wave of nausea.
“What do you want, Cross?” He wasn’t inclined to give the man anything, except a swift escort out his house.
A knock against the paneled wood of his office door cut through the tension in the room. A moment later, Mrs. Hark entered. “Mr. Leighton, sir, I thought you might like a spot of tea for you and your guest.” As she swept into the room to place the tray on his desk, she whispered as she passed by, “I’ve sent for Mr. Sullivan.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Hark,” Rex said sternly. “We’re not to be disturbed again.” He didn’t want his housekeeper associated with George Cross any more than he wanted the man near May.
The older woman cast him a defiant gaze, sniffed, not unlike his father had a moment before, and lifted her chin as she sailed from the room, slamming the door harder than necessary in her wake. She did hate when her attempts at assistance were met with less than enthusiastic gratitude.
Rex didn’t offer his father tea. He didn’t move toward the steaming pot at all, just held his ground, arms crossed, and asked again, “What is it you want?”
“Why not serve me a bit of tea? That would be the polite thing to do.”
“I’ll have mine when you go.” Rex took one step toward his father, and Cross flinched back, despite the distance between them. “Which will be right after you tell me why you’re here.”
“Won’t be welcoming your father back into your life, then, will you, boy?” The man turned his eyes down to the ground as he muttered, “Won’t make a difference to you now, but I didn’t know.”
