Page 89 of One Night in Glasgow
“Actually,” I said, meeting his gaze without flinching, “I didn’t. The photo of me on the balcony at the Hillsdale galawas leaked to a tabloid by a woman named Kyra Monroe, the head of the gala committee.”
“And why, pray tell, would she do that?” my mother asked, a bored expression on her face.
“Because she was having an affair with a colleague of hers named Garrett Reeves,” I said, letting the words hang in the air. “The same Garrett Reeves who had been pursuing me, feeding information about my life in New York back to a ‘backer’ here in Scotland.”
I leaned forward and slid the dossier across the table. “And that backer, I believe, was Stewart Beauchamp.”
I watched as my father’s face went from angry to confused to utterly shocked. He looked at my mother, but her expression remained a mask of perfect, icy composure.
“This is preposterous,” she said, though I noticed her hand trembled slightly as she set her teacup down. “Stewart is a gentleman. A man of good breeding. He would never involve himself in such a sordid, American drama.”
“Wouldn’t he?” I countered. “Even if it meant securing the very generous ‘dowry’ you offered him to marry me? His best chance of getting his hands on the MacLeod fortune was to destabilize my life in New York and force me to come crawling back here.”
My father finally spoke, his voice a low rumble. “Where did you get this… information?”
“From a man Sean knows in New York,” I replied calmly. “A very successful and powerful businessman with extensive resources. His name is Fury Gracen.”
I saw the name registering something with my father. He might not know much about my life, but he knew the world of business. He looked from the dossier to me, then to Sean, and I saw his entire perspective shift. This wasn’t just his hystericaldaughter making wild accusations anymore. This was a business problem. A conspiracy involving powerful people.
“And this… Fury Gracen… he provided this?” he asked, his voice now laced with a new, calculating concern.
“He did,” Sean confirmed, speaking for the first time, his voice calm and steady. “His team is very thorough. Everything in that file is verifiable.”
My mother stood up, her composure finally cracking. “This is a conversation for family, Elisabeth. I think your… friend… should leave.”
“No,” I said, standing to face her. “He’s not leaving. He’s with me. And we are leaving.” I looked from my mother’s furious face to my father’s shocked and uncertain one. “I came here to tell you the truth. What you choose to do with it is up to you. But my life is no longer a business negotiation. And I am no longer for sale.”
With that, I turned, took Sean’s hand, and walked out of the drawing room, leaving the heavy silence and the unexploded bomb of the dossier behind us. For the first time in my entire life, I left that house not feeling like a defeated child, but like a woman who was finally, blessedly in control of her own destiny.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
BETH
The morningafter introducing Sean to my parents, was a tense, quiet affair. Sean and I were a united front, a team, of course, but we were a team waiting for the enemy to make a move. We’d spent the morning in our hotel suite. Sean had been a rock, a steady, calming presence who let me process in my own way, never pushing, just being there. It was a new and unsettling feeling, being so completely supported.
Around noon, my phone buzzed with a number I knew by heart but rarely saw on my screen anymore.My father.Not a text from his assistant, not a message passed through my mother. A direct call. My stomach immediately twisted into a tight, anxious knot.
“It’s my father,” I said to Sean, my voice barely a whisper.
He put his phone down, his full attention on me. “You want me to talk to him?”
“No,” I said, shaking my head. I had to face this. I took adeep, steadying breath and answered, putting the phone on speaker. “Hello, Father.”
“Elisabeth.” His voice was strained, haggard, stripped of its usual booming authority. Almost the voice of a defeated man. “I… I need to see you. Both of you, actually.” My eyes widened.Both of us?“Can you and Sean meet me? Not here at the house. Your mother… she’s in a state, as you can imagine. Can you come to the club? The bar. In an hour.”
I hesitated. Was he trying to smooth things over to calm my mother down? Whatever his reason, I couldn’t ignore him. “We’ll be there,” I said, curiosity churning inside me. He had never, in my entire life, asked to meet me on neutral ground, away from my mother’s watchful eye. Something was seriously wrong.
The drive to my father’s private country club was a journey into the heart of my gilded cage. It was a place I loathed, a stuffy, soulless institution filled with the same people who had whispered about my scandals for years while sipping overpriced scotch.
The air inside the bar was thick with the scent of old leather, cigar smoke, and quiet, generational wealth. It was the smell of my suffocation.
We found my father tucked away in a dark corner booth, looking smaller and older than I had ever seen him. His face was pale, his shoulders slumped. He looked… broken. He didn’t rise to greet us, just gestured to the seats opposite him.
“Thank you for coming,” he said, his voice low, his gaze fixed on the table.
I slid into the booth opposite him, Sean beside me. The air was thick with unspoken misery. “Alright, Father,” I said, my voice deliberately brisk to cut through the tension. “Let’s have it. Did one of Mother’s prize-winning roses wilt and she’sdemanding a state funeral for it? You look like someone’s died.” My mind raced with worse possibilities, each more dramatic than the last. Had she finally driven off a cliff in a fit of pique?
He finally looked up, his eyes meeting mine. The anger I had expected wasn’t there. In its place was a deep, profound shame.
