Page 59 of Sinfully His

“Are you sure Luc will not be mad that I’m borrowing his helicopter?” I asked, chewing on my bottom lip.

“It was actually his idea,” Amelia said, reassuring me. “Also, you’re not staying at the Astrid chalet. You’re going to stay at the Manwarring chalet. It’s across the lake and gets better northern light. Also, nobody’s there. You’ll have the run of the entire place. Luc called ahead to make sure that it was completely stocked, and a caretaker is going to come by a few times a day to make sure that you have food and anything you could need, but mostly you’re going to be on your own. Is that okay?”

“That sounds perfect.”

Within fifteen minutes, I was already on the helicopter on my way to the chalet. As I watched the New York skyline disappear, one dark thought entered my head.

What was going to happen when Father Manwarring discovered his little angel had flown away?

CHAPTER 24

THOMAS

It had been a long couple of days.

Rose wasn’t answering her phone or coming to church. I had considered going over to the Astrid's home to confront her directly, but when I talked to my network of housekeeping spies, they informed me she had run away on some type of holiday.

They did not know where she went. All they knew was that she was not in the state, and that she had taken her paints with her.

Fuck.

Although watching Mary Quinn slowly lose her mind as she tried to regain social status without her blackmail to force people’s hand was… entertaining.

I didn’t know who called her bluff, or how it got out, but people were whispering about that safe deposit box. After going through all the files more thoroughly, avoiding the far-too-many photos of my father, I realized she didn’t have nearly as many families under her thumb as I thought. Only the most powerful.

I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with this information yet. There were just so many possibilities.

Sitting back on the leather couch, I was taking a moment for contemplation, a tumbler of my family’s reserve whisky in one hand and a leather-bound book in the other. I was interrupted when my father yet again barged into my private quarters, uninvited.

“I am in the rectory of a Catholic church. Aren’t you worried that your mere presence is going to have you smited?” I asked, already bored with whatever this was. He slammed my door behind him.

“Is it true? Did you do it?” he demanded.

“I’m going to need you to be more specific.” I gave my father a blank look.

“There is a rumor going around that Mary Quinn was stolen from. That somebody emptied the contents of her safe deposit box where she kept the blackmail material she held on several families.”

“Oh, that.” I feigned surprise. “Yeah, I did that.”

“So you have it?” he asked again, his eyes narrowing.

“I have everything that was in her safe deposit box,” I confirmed. “I have to admit I was shocked and frankly disgusted with how many pictures of your dick in different men’s wives are in those folders. Not even just in the Manwarring folder. I have seen the blackmail she has on every single family and somehow, they connected to you. I open up a folder and bam, there’s your dick. It was horrifying. I don’t know how I’ll ever recover.”

“This isn’t a joke,” he barked.

“What’s wrong, Father?” I asked, setting my book down on the coffee table. “Worried about what I might do with the information that I found? I admit I thought I knew about most of the skeletons in our closet, but I did not know how deep some of this actually went. How did Mary Quinn get her vile claws into this information?”

“Never mind that. Are you going to protect the family?”

“Family,” I scoffed. “Do you mean the same family that betrayed me? The same family that shipped me off to Rome to become a priest without even asking if that was something that I wanted to do? The same family that never even bothered to call me, or check up on me? You never called unless I was misbehaving, and you needed to pay someone off.”

“I was trying to protect you. Mary Quinn was going to scream rape and have you dragged to prison. She was going to hold your safety over my head. Every time I didn’t do exactly what she wanted, you were going to get a beating. Did you want that to happen?” he yelled, not even stopping to take a breath. “I did what I had to do to keep you safe.”

I got to my feet. Rage that had been building in my soul for the past seven years rushed to the surface, and I didn’t want to hold it back any longer.

“You should have believed me.”

He flinched. My father, Lucian Manwarring, actually flinched.

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