Page 76 of A Star is Scorned
“I am not, nor have I ever been engaged to Miss Powers.”
His mother frowned. “But then, why—”
“Rhonda is… Well, she’s convinced herself that we’re meant to be, but we never even dated, Mother. She claims I jilted her at the altar and has made my life a living hell ever since, but I assure you there isn’t the slightest chance of our marrying. I can’t imagine a lifetime stuck with that redheaded harpy.”
Violet’s brow wrinkled in confusion. “But your fiancée is raven-haired.”
He stood up in frustration. “Mother, I have no fiancée!”
“You seemed so close to that girl in the pictures,” she murmured. “You looked genuinely happy. In all the years of seeing your photograph in the papers, I’d never seen you look that way. Content. At ease. The way you’d looked as a small boy.”
It hit him then. The photos his mother had seen. They weren’t of him and Rhonda. They were of Livvy—the ones Harry had sent out to every movie magazine and Hollywood rag that would publish them. The staged pictures intended to sell their relationship and the idea that Flynn Banks had cleaned up his act. He swallowed down a fresh wave of tears.
“I was…close to that girl. But she was never my fiancée. Never anything but a way to show the world I’d changed. It was a setup. The studio wanted everyone to think we were falling for each other, but none of it was real.” If he said it enough times, maybe he would accept it as the truth.
Violet gave him a knowing look. The same one she used to give him as a child when he’d insist he hadn’t had any sweets while a ring of sugar coated his lips. “I know what I saw in thosephotographs, and it was very real.”
“It doesn’t matter what you thought you saw. My relationship with Livvy is fake.” It was exhausting, trying to explain this. To deny the feelings he knew they both had for each other. He sat back down, suddenly weary to his bones. He was resigned to the fact that Livvy would never share his bed again. He’d told Harry he wouldn’t abandon her, and that was true. But he wouldn’t force himself on her against her will either. She would set the terms—when and where they’d be seen. One day, the magical night they’d shared here together would fade to a warm memory, one he could think of fondly and without the piercing ache in his chest it currently caused.
He sipped at his tea as his mother perused the items on the side table next to the chair. Her eyes lit on the copy ofTreasure Islandstill sitting there, untouched since the night of the Halloween party. “You still have it,” she murmured.
His heart twinged. “Of course I do. It’s my most prized possession.”
She gave him a watery smile. “I wish I could have given you more. Left some better advice in my absence. But it all happened so quickly.”
He thought of the letter he had tucked away in the globe, sitting just out of arm’s reach from his mother. The one that had made clear to him why his mother had left their family the way she did. “You don’t need to apologize or explain. You did what you had to do. Besides, you couldn’t have offered me better advice. You told me to ‘choose joy,’ and I have lived every day by those words.”
Violet flipped open the cover of the dog-eared book and traced over the words she had inscribed so many years ago. The ones that Flynn had set his life to, like the steady pace of ametronome or the winding of a watch. “You’ve tried, anyway. And that is all that a mother can hope for.”
Flynn ran his hands through his hair in irritation. “What do you mean,I’ve tried? I have lived my life entirely on my own terms, answering only to my whims. The only factor I’ve ever used to make a decision is whether or not the choice will bring me pleasure. I’ve drank what I want, slept with who I want—” His mother’s eyebrows lifted, and he realized he probably should’ve omitted that bit. She might lead a bohemian life in Paris, but there were certain things a mother preferred not to hear uttered by her son. “And despite what the misleading missive that has brought you here suggests, I have kept to my pledge to never, ever marry. To instead, choose joy.”
She nodded, taking in his words and seeming to collect her thoughts. “Am I to understand that you took my urging to ‘choose joy’ to mean that you should avoid romantic entanglements, most particularly matrimony?”
He was well and truly exasperated now. “Of course. What else could you have meant? Marriage was a prison for you. It nearly proved your death sentence.”
“Well, now, that’s a tad dramatic.”
He stood and crossed to the globe, rifling through the papers he kept tucked in the fixture’s drawer. “It is not. I have the proof of it here.” He found the letter containing his father’s dark secret and thrust it at her. “You thought I didn’t know. You were trying to protect me. But I found this the summer after you left, hidden away in Father’s study. Incontrovertible proof that he planned to murder you.”
She took the paper, brown and crinkled with age, and studied it, reading through the lines he’d committed to memory. It was a letter from his father to the local chemist.
Bertie, I require a tincture of henbane for the she-devil. Do not send it with our next delivery lest the servants see. Let me know when it is ready and I will send my man to retrieve it.
Flynn remembered the rage he had felt the first time he had read those words. He’d leaned over and retched in his father’s rubbish bin. His mother hadn’t abandoned him. She had escaped before his father had murdered her with deadly henbane. But he was shocked now when his mother suddenly burst out laughing.
“I fail to see what is so funny about the fact that Father planned to kill you.”
Violet scrubbed her face with her hands, trying to recover herself. “Oh, Flynn, I see why you might think that. But no.”
“No? How can you say this is anything other than what it looks like?”
“Because I asked your father to buy me henbane. I told him I was having difficulty sleeping and that I required it so that I might rest.”
“But he called you a she-devil. He hid it from the servants.”
“Yes, well, he did have a lot of colorful names for me.”
Flynn began to pace between the bookshelves. His whole life, he had believed that his father was a monster. One who had planned to kill his mother. That his mother had left to save herself from this terrible plot. “But why would you ask him for it?”
