are going to be out in front of this apartment building, where I will pick you up so we can go into the training center together.”
“I don’t have to be checked out—”
“You do. Because if you are pregnant, then it’s my young and I am going to make sure that the both of you are taken care of on every level there is.”
As he stalked out of her bedroom, Helania stared after him. She wanted to call him back, but to what end? So they could argue over something that wasn’t happening? They had both just been through a version of hell, and what they needed was food, sleep, and a break. More talking was not the answer.
Besides, there was nothing to talk about.
She wasn’t pregnant.
Boone arrived back at his father’s house—wait, it would be Marquist’s house now, and he needed to remember that—in a foul mood. He hated conflict to begin with, and it turned out that that non-affinity was even more intense when it had to do with Helania.
Everything had gone badly around his departure from her.
But damn. She was so determined not to have his young that she wasn’t willing to take care of herself. What the hell?
As he came stomping up through the snow, he was hoping the front door was locked again. He wanted to take his entire body and break something down with it, leaving bloodstains on the wood and bruises on his flesh.
Unfortunately, the frickin’ thing opened right up.
Inside, he went straight back to the kitchen, following the dense, floury aroma of baking bread that permeated that whole wing of the house. As he passed through the polishing room and the pantry, he stopped in front of the butler’s suite of rooms. Everything was open, for once, and he walked into the sitting room/office area.
Well . . . look who had moved out.
Several discarded cardboard boxes and a roll of tape were in the center of the faded Oriental rug, and a stack of leather-bound books was sitting on the armchair by the fireplace, ready for relocation. The ledgers for the household accounts were still open on the serviceable desk, the ink pot and old-fashioned pen that the head of staff had always used in their ready position on the blotter. But the sepia photographs of what he had always assumed were Marquist’s sire and mahmen were gone. And so, too, were his personal effects from the side tables.
Going deeper inside, Boone entered the bedroom. Although he had been in the front office area before—back on the nights when he’d had to go to the butler for spending money—he had never proceeded any farther. Private space was private space. He had been taught that since birth. But given that the butler clearly was no longer butle’ing for the household, so to speak?
No reason not to look around.
The bedroom had a twin mattress on a nineteen fifties wooden frame against the far wall. The matelassé quilt was precisely arranged and folded up over the pillow. The night stand on the right had a single lamp on it, a coaster for a glass of water, and a charging stand that Boone was willing to bet had been forgotten in the rush to move up a floor and down many, many rooms to the best suite in the house.
Heading over to the bureau, he opened the top drawer. Well, what do you know. Rows of boxer shorts and undershirts. Next one was full of starched button-downs. On the bottom were a hundred pairs of bundled black socks.
Marquist had left his butler uniform behind.
To confirm this, even though it didn’t really matter to Boone and he already was sure of the answer, he crossed the bare wooden floorboards and opened the narrow closet door. Sure enough, there were about ten different black suits. Some overcoats. A heavy black robe.
Probably leaving it all for the next hire. And what a line in the sand, huh.
Once the staff, now on the hiring side of things as the estate’s owner. Boone stood there, staring into the closet, for a long while, and he supposed he was waiting for some kind of anger to take over. It really seemed like he should care more about this extraordinary turn of events.
Especially given the fact that he might just have the next generation of his bloodline to think about.
The longer he considered everything, however, the more he questioned what he had ever gotten out of this august background of his. Sure, the money