Page 87 of The Rose (The Godwicks 2)

“I’d try to sleep in bed with Mona, and I’d have a nightmare about you. I couldn’t sleep unless I was in your nursery or if you were in a bassinet with us in our bedroom.”

“Never have children, Lia,” Mum said with a wink. “You all are hell on a good night’s sleep.”

Her father nodded in agreement. “At night, I’d stand over your cradle and pray every new father’s prayer—‘Whatever god is out there listening, please make my baby immortal.’” He finally met her eyes. “Has it come true yet?”

“Yes,” Lia said, smiling at him through her tears. “I’m immortal.”

“Good,” he said with a sigh. “That’s a relief.”

Lia saw August staring at her out of the corner of her eyes. She ignored his searching look, afraid she’d cry if she met his tender gaze.

“Your father and I didn’t like talking about how we might have lost you when you were born,” her mother said. “Bad enough it gave him nightmares the first three months of your life. We decided together that there was no reason to give you nightmares, too.”

“Not sure where I got the idea...” Daddy said, “but one day I put the statue of Aphrodite in your nursery so she could look over your cradle. And once I did, the nightmares went away. Placebo effect, of course, but I was grateful for the small mercy that I could finally sleep with my wife again.”

“And you’ve always liked that statue,” Mum said to Lia. “When you were a little girl, you used to play with her like a Barbie doll. You made her marry Ken a hundred times at least.”

August laughed much, much too hard at that.

“Ah, that makes me so happy,” he said, wiping a tear from his eye. Meanwhile Lia squirmed in humiliation.

“Weddings, that’s right.” Daddy looked at Mum with a smile. “When Mona came to after passing out, she saw all the rose petals in the room. Do you remember what you said?”

Her mother smiled. “I said, ‘Who’s getting married?’”

Lia watched her father lift her mother’s hand to his lips and kiss it. There really was something very lovely, Lia thought, about old married people still in love with each other. Even if they were her parents and she found it mostly disgusting on every other level.

“Does that answer all your questions?” her father asked August.

“Yes,” August said. “Thank you, Lord Godwick.”

“Good,” her father said. “You can leave my house now.”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

August didn’t leave but her parents did. Day trip to London.

Lia stood at the window of the music room and watched her father’s Bentley carrying him and her mother through the main gate. August came up behind her and peered over her shoulder.

“Breakfast went well,” he said.

Lia resisted the urge to plant her elbow in his liver.

She turned around and looked up at him.

“You practically told my father you and I were shagging. At breakfast.”

“Should I have saved that conversation for lunch?” August asked. She glared at him. “Your father’s not the sort of man who gives up dark family secrets just by asking nicely. I needed him feeling vulnerable. Saying ‘Good morning, old chap, I ate your daughter’s cunt under your roof last night, and there’s nothing you can do about it’ tends to get a man off his game. And it worked.”

“It did work.” Her father was an old-school sort who was happy to laugh and joke and slap his mates on the back down at the pub—or roar at the politicians on the telly or at the players on a rugby pitch. But his fears? His secret sorrows? Those he shared with his wife and no one else, not even his children. “But why do you care so much about the statue of Aphrodite in my room?”

“I’m trying to understand how the Rose Kylix got into your possession.” August wore a faraway look in his eyes.

“And you think it has something to do with that statue?”

He shrugged and came back to her. “There could be a connection. I know you don’t want to believe the kylix actually belongs to a real god, but I believe it. And the toys of the gods tend to pick their owners. Aphrodite’s name was invoked at your birth. You’ve had a shrine to her in your bedroom your entire life... It’s possible the kylix picked you for a reason.”

“What possible reason would make a god want me to have one of their toys?” she asked, skeptical to the core.

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