Welcome to Mills & Boon. Jennifer Rae
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father just suffered a massive heart attack. Last I heard, he still hadn’t woken up. Forgive me for not pressing her on the formalities just yet.’ His voice sounded icy-cold, even to his own ears, but Flynn wondered how much he was speaking to his father and how much to himself. He wanted this sorted as much as the old man did.
He wanted it finished so he could move past the ache that never seemed to leave his chest.
‘I understand that Thomas has the only woman he needs dancing attendance on him already.’ There was bitterness in Ezekiel’s voice, deeper than Flynn had heard from him before. ‘I’m sure his daughter is superfluous to the proceedings.’
‘She’s in love with him, you know. Mum, I mean.’ Flynn didn’t say it to wound. Just to see if his father would react. If he could even feign surprise this late in the game.
‘Of course she is,’ Ezekiel scoffed. ‘Any fool could see that for the last ten years or more. But she never left me, did she? She always knew I could give her more.’
Flynn thought about his mother’s face, careworn in a way he’d never seen it as she’d brushed her hand against Thomas’s cheek. ‘She might now, I think.’
‘Then she’s more of a fool than your brother and your runaway bride put together.’
‘Actually,’ Flynn said, ‘I’m starting to think that Thea and Zeke were the only ones to get things right in all this.’
Ezekiel’s blank expression told Flynn all he needed to know. His father would never understand love—not the way that Flynn hoped to understand it one day.
‘Get that post-nuptial agreement to me by the end of the week,’ Ezekiel said before turning and walking away.
Flynn stared after him long after he had gone. Whatever happened next with him and Helena, it wouldn’t be about paperwork, not any more. It wouldn’t be a schedule or a plan.
He couldn’t love a woman who couldn’t love her own child; it was as simple and as hard as that. Couldn’t trust a woman who had lied, and left a helpless baby behind, not to do the same to him when it suited her. And no amount of planning or paperwork could change that.
* * *
Helena awoke from dozing in her chair at the sound of a phone ringing. It took a moment for her to identify it as hers, and longer to find and answer it.
‘Helena? It’s Henry. I wanted to let you know that I got hold of your sister. She’ll meet you at the hospital as soon as her flight gets in tonight.’
‘I’ll be there.’ She wiped the sleep from her eyes and tried to focus. ‘Thanks, Henry.’
Dropping the phone into her lap, she stretched her arms up above her head, trying to relieve the ache in her shoulders. It was almost six; Flynn would be home before too long, she assumed, and she wanted to be out of the way again before that happened.
She bit her lip and stared at the mass of paper in her lap, no longer neatly clipped together and numbered, but loose and covered in her messy scrawl that grew less intelligible by the word. It would probably never make sense to another person, and she wasn’t even sure she could take it with her and look at it every day without remembering the day she hadn’t signed it. But she’d written it, and somehow that felt like enough.
Leaving the agreement on Flynn’s desk, Helena grabbed a few of her things, packing a bag with some changes of clothes and the basic necessities. She’d need to come back sooner rather than later, but it would see her through the next day at least. Isabella might have moved her stuff here, but Helena knew she couldn’t stay. She’d figure something else out.
So, with only a brief glance back at the manifesto she’d written, Helena Ashton straightened her hair and clothes and silently slipped out of the house that should have been her home.
It was time to move on.
* * *
The hospital room looked almost exactly as she had left it. Thomas still lay peacefully sleeping, the heart monitor beeping at his side, and Isabella sat in the armchair beside him, pretending to read a magazine. Helena thought she might still be on the same page she’d been staring at that morning.
‘No change?’ she asked from the door, and Isabella’s head jerked up at the sound of her voice.
‘He woke up earlier. Not for very long. But he seemed himself. He...was glad I was here.’ The relief in Isabella’s voice was palpable and Helena felt the knot in her middle start to loosen, just a touch.
‘That’s great. That’s...wonderful.’ Helena sank down into the other, less comfortable chair in the room. She might not be sure how she felt about her father right now—beyond furious and hurt—but she wasn’t ready to lose the only parent she had left. Not yet. And not before she’d figured out what to make of her relationship with him.
‘Henry called earlier,’ Helena said, smoothing down the edge of Thomas’s sheets, even though they didn’t need it. ‘Thea’s on her way—presumably with Zeke; I didn’t ask. She’ll be here tonight.’
Isabella froze, the lines of her shoulders and neck suddenly sharp. ‘I must admit, I didn’t expect to see them again so soon.’
‘I imagine they feel the same.’
Helena had assumed that everyone would have had time to get over the wedding fallout before they were all together again. That she and Flynn would be happily living their lives and Thea’s runaway bride act could become a near-miss, a funny story to tell at dinner parties. Can you believe how wrong we nearly got this? Thea almost married Flynn! Isn’t that crazy?
But not now. Now, those conversations would go very differently indeed. And Helena had been so preoccupied with the idea of having her big sister here, where she belonged, where she needed her, that she hadn’t even thought about what she was going to say. How she was going to explain what had happened since she’d left.
Or how other people would feel to see her.
Their father had been furiously disappointed in Thea. But surely that would change now? Now that he was lying in a hospital bed with an uncertain future, of course he’d want both his daughters there.
Helena had to believe that or there was no hope for her family at all.
‘I’m going to get coffee,’ Helena said. ‘Do you want coffee?’
Isabella nodded, but her eyes were already fixed on Thomas’s face again.
Three cups of coffee later, Thea arrived in a flurry of activity, sweeping through the hospital as if she were back in her power suit and high heels instead of the floaty sundress she was actually wearing. Zeke followed in her wake, grim-faced and suitcase in hand.
Their father was sleeping again, so Thea quizzed his doctors more thoroughly than Isabella or Helena had managed. Helena waited outside while Zeke spoke with his mother and Thea asked more questions.
Then they stepped out of the room again and Helena felt the weight on her shoulders start to lift.
‘You’re here.’ Helena stared at her sister across the hospital corridor. ‘You came.’ And then she burst into tears.
* * *
‘Okay, so I was gone less than a week,’ Thea said, putting her arm around Helena’s shoulders. Helena resisted the urge to snuggle up to her like a toddler, but only just. ‘Explain to me exactly how everything went up in smoke in my absence?’
‘Firstly, it is not my fault that Dad had a heart attack,’ Helena said. ‘Or that Isabella appears to have left Ezekiel and moved into Dad’s house.’
Thea blinked. ‘Okay, well, that’s a start. What is your fault, then?’
This was the big one. Helena almost wished she didn’t have to tell her. Thea looked so relaxed, so happy—and at least five