Penmort Castle (Ghosts and Reincarnation #1)(145)

Once there Cash leaned threateningly closer but didn’t touch the older man.

“Your days of malice toward the Fitzhugh women are over, starting now. I hear you’ve even looked at one of them funny, tomorrow or twenty years in the future, I swear to Christ you’ll wish you were never f**king born. Do you get my meaning?”

“Back off,” Alistair demanded but his voice held a betraying tremor.

Cash didn’t move instead he repeated, “I asked, do you get my meaning?”

“Frankly, I’ll be thrilled if I never see them again,” Alistair snapped, his voice and words ugly.

“I’m sure they feel the same,” Cash replied, stepped back and then moved away from Alistair, his eyes going to Nicola. “You and your daughters are free to stay at Penmort for as long as you wish.”

“You’re not taking Penmort!” Alistair shouted and Cash stopped on his way back to Abby and turned to his uncle.

“I am,” Cash announced, “tomorrow, I’ve got six people coming to the castle to do an inventory. You’ve got a week to find other accommodation, gather together your clothes and other personal belongings, none of which will have any attachment to the history this building, and you’re getting the f**k out.”

Abby wanted to clap her hands, jump up and down and shout, “Hurrah!” but Alistair wasn’t finished.

“I pay on the notes, you’ve got no –”

“You fight me, I’ll drag your ass into court and demand a DNA test,” Cash returned and Alistair’s mottled face became confused.

“A DNA test?” he asked.

Cash for some reason didn’t utter an immediate retort.

Abby watched as his jaw grew tight and he stared at his uncle a moment before he replied, “You don’t want to continue this conversation with an audience.”

Alistair, proving once again he wasn’t exactly the sharpest tack in the box, queried snidely, “Are you insinuating I’m not a Beaumaris?”

“Trust me, Alistair, you want to back down,” Cash advised.

“How bloody dare you make that accusation! Of all the bloody cheek, you,” he jeered, “claiming I’m not a blood Beaumaris.”

“Look around you,” Cash stated, indicating the portraits with a jerk of his head, all the pictures of the past masters of the castle sharing a strong resemblance with Cash. His voice had grown quiet when he continued, “Now look at me. What do you see?”

Alistair didn’t take his eyes off Cash. “I see a bloody upstart is what I see.”

“Back down,” Cash warned.

Alistair wasn’t smart enough to catch Cash’s hint. “Do what you will. I’ll see you in court.”

Cash shrugged and turned back around, moving toward Abby again while saying, “So be it.”

Alistair’s gaze swept the room and he snapped, “I don’t believe this. In my own home –”

“It isn’t your home, Alistair. After Richard Beaumaris died, it stopped being your home,” Honor told him and Alistair’s eyes shot to her but he was smart enough, after his last crack to Nicola and Cash’s reaction, to clamp his mouth shut. Honor carried on. “Cash is being nice, I don’t know why, he’s got no reason to be, but he is. I, however, don’t feel like being nice after you manhandled my mother in front of an audience.”

Cash had made it to Abby and his arm curved around her shoulders, curling her front to his side even as his eyes were on Honor.

Softly, he murmured, “Honor, don’t.”

But Honor kept going and announced flatly, “Your mother was raped by a gardener. You’re the product of that rape.”

As if struck, Alistair reeled back several paces at her words.

Nicola whispered, “Oh my God.”

Suzanne watched Alistair, a startled look on her face but it shifted quickly and triumphantly to a satisfied smirk.

Honor was relentless. “She wrote all about it in her diaries. I found them and Cash has them now. They’re evidence enough but if you push him and he demands a DNA test, the whole world will know you for what you are.”

“I kind of hope he does,” Mrs. Truman muttered loudly to Kieran and Abby pressed her lips together to stop from smiling.

Instead she turned to the older woman and whispered, “Mrs. Truman, please.”

Mrs. Truman widened her eyes in faux innocence and asked, “What? Everyone can see he’s not a very nice man,” then she declared as a finale, “comeuppance.”

Abby heard Jenny’s half-amused, half-embarrassed giggle and opened her mouth to speak but Alistair got there before her.

“I fail to see,” he started quietly, “what’s funny about my mother being raped.”

“Nothing,” Mrs. Truman returned tartly. “I’m sure everyone in this room agrees it’s very sad about your poor mother. Tragic. What’s more tragic is that you carried on your father’s legacy of cruelty rather than fighting whatever wicked impulse you have that makes you behave the way you behave and, instead, being a good husband and father to a widowed family as it is abundantly clear you have not been.” She leaned forward at the h*ps and declared, “You reap, good man, what you sow.”

“That’ll be enough, Mrs. Truman,” Cash murmured firmly.