Page 53 of A Star is Scorned

It hit him then. The photos his mother had seen.

They weren’t of him and Rhonda. They were of Livvy—the ones Harry had sent out to every movie magazine and Hollywood rag that would publish them.

The staged pictures intended to sell their relationship and the idea that Flynn Banks had cleaned up his act.

He swallowed down a fresh wave of tears.

“I was…close to that girl. But she was never my fiancée. Never anything but a way to show the world I’d changed. It was a setup. The studio wanted everyone to think we were falling for each other, but none of it was real.” If he said it enough times, maybe he would accept it as the truth.

Violet gave him a knowing look. The same one she used to give him as a child when he’d insist he hadn’t had any sweets while a ring of sugar coated his lips. “I know what I saw in those photographs, and it was very real.”

“It doesn’t matter what you thought you saw.

My relationship with Livvy is fake.” It was exhausting, trying to explain this.

To deny the feelings he knew they both had for each other.

He sat back down, suddenly weary to his bones.

He was resigned to the fact that Livvy would never share his bed again.

He’d told Harry he wouldn’t abandon her, and that was true.

But he wouldn’t force himself on her against her will either.

She would set the terms—when and where they’d be seen.

One day, the magical night they’d shared here together would fade to a warm memory, one he could think of fondly and without the piercing ache in his chest it currently caused.

He sipped at his tea as his mother perused the items on the side table next to the chair. Her eyes lit on the copy of Treasure Island still sitting there, untouched since the night of the Halloween party. “You still have it,” she murmured.

His heart twinged. “Of course I do. It’s my most prized possession.”

She gave him a watery smile. “I wish I could have given you more. Left some better advice in my absence. But it all happened so quickly.”

He thought of the letter he had tucked away in the globe, sitting just out of arm’s reach from his mother.

The one that had made clear to him why his mother had left their family the way she did.

“You don’t need to apologize or explain.

You did what you had to do. Besides, you couldn’t have offered me better advice.

You told me to ‘choose joy,’ and I have lived every day by those words. ”

Violet flipped open the cover of the dog-eared book and traced over the words she had inscribed so many years ago. The ones that Flynn had set his life to, like the steady pace of a metronome or the winding of a watch. “You’ve tried, anyway. And that is all that a mother can hope for.”

Flynn ran his hands through his hair in irritation.

“What do you mean, I’ve tried? I have lived my life entirely on my own terms, answering only to my whims. The only factor I’ve ever used to make a decision is whether or not the choice will bring me pleasure.

I’ve drank what I want, slept with who I want—” His mother’s eyebrows lifted, and he realized he probably should’ve omitted that bit.

She might lead a bohemian life in Paris, but there were certain things a mother preferred not to hear uttered by her son.

“And despite what the misleading missive that has brought you here suggests, I have kept to my pledge to never, ever marry. To instead, choose joy.”

She nodded, taking in his words and seeming to collect her thoughts. “Am I to understand that you took my urging to ‘choose joy’ to mean that you should avoid romantic entanglements, most particularly matrimony?”

He was well and truly exasperated now. “Of course. What else could you have meant? Marriage was a prison for you. It nearly proved your death sentence.”

“Well, now, that’s a tad dramatic.”

He stood and crossed to the globe, rifling through the papers he kept tucked in the fixture’s drawer.

“It is not. I have the proof of it here.” He found the letter containing his father’s dark secret and thrust it at her.

“You thought I didn’t know. You were trying to protect me.

But I found this the summer after you left, hidden away in Father’s study.

Incontrovertible proof that he planned to murder you. ”

She took the paper, brown and crinkled with age, and studied it, reading through the lines he’d committed to memory. It was a letter from his father to the local chemist.

Bertie, I require a tincture of henbane for the she-devil. Do not send it with our next delivery lest the servants see. Let me know when it is ready and I will send my man to retrieve it.

Flynn remembered the rage he had felt the first time he had read those words.

He’d leaned over and retched in his father’s rubbish bin.

His mother hadn’t abandoned him. She had escaped before his father had murdered her with deadly henbane.

But he was shocked now when his mother suddenly burst out laughing.

“I fail to see what is so funny about the fact that Father planned to kill you.”

Violet scrubbed her face with her hands, trying to recover herself. “Oh, Flynn, I see why you might think that. But no.”

“No? How can you say this is anything other than what it looks like?”

“Because I asked your father to buy me henbane. I told him I was having difficulty sleeping and that I required it so that I might rest.”

“But he called you a she-devil. He hid it from the servants.”

“Yes, well, he did have a lot of colorful names for me.”

Flynn began to pace between the bookshelves. His whole life, he had believed that his father was a monster. One who had planned to kill his mother. That his mother had left to save herself from this terrible plot. “But why would you ask him for it?”

“Because I needed a powerful sleeping draught for him. To drug him and give myself time to escape with Pierre. I knew if I tried to sneak it in myself, he would catch me. And my plans would come to naught. But if I asked him for it, then he would never suspect my true use for it.”

Flynn’s head was spinning as he tried to recalibrate his understanding of his father, his mother, and the night she fled, leaving him and Edgar alone.

Flynn had always suspected that his father knew that he had found the letter about the henbane.

Because for years after, Lord Banks had been unnecessarily cruel, favoring Edgar in all things.

Flynn rubbed absentmindedly at his side, remembering the time his father had kicked him in the ribs like a dog.

Flynn had always chalked it up to the cost of knowing the truth.

Violet rose and took his hands in hers. “My darling boy, your father was a monster. Make no mistake about that. He was a cruel man, rapacious and greedy. The only happy days I ever had in his home were the ones I spent with you. But he was not a murderer.”

Flynn let his arms go limp in his mother’s grasp. “Edgar said the old man had something to tell me. That he wanted to clear his conscience before he died. I had assumed it must be this.”

His mother smiled again. “Oh, I suspect I know what he wanted to tell you.”

Flynn pinched his nose between his fingers and scrunched up his nose. “I’ve already had one life-altering revelation today. I don’t know if I can stand another.”

Violet chuckled. “It’s an awfully good thing you’re an actor, because you’re far too dramatic for any other profession.”

He groaned in response, to which she replied, “Perhaps you should sit down.”

She led him gently to the velvet chair and deposited him in it.

She kneeled next to him, the way she had done beside his bed when she tucked him into sleep at night, and she rubbed a soothing pattern over his knee.

“I should have told you this years ago, but I thought I was protecting you.” He looked at her expectantly.

He had no idea what she could possibly have to confess.

“But the truth is, you are not your father’s son.

You are the product of my affair with Pierre.

It’s why your father was so cruel to you.

He suspected you were not his. Though he could never prove it. ”

Flynn was stunned. He was not a Banks. Not a product of a hateful man. “So, he wanted to use his dying breath to disavow me?”

His mother shrugged. “It seems so. But it doesn’t matter.

He couldn’t omit you from the will without admitting he was cuckolded.

You would think the fact I ran away with Pierre and never returned would pretty demonstrably prove that.

But he could not weather the shame of having a bastard born under his roof. ”

Flynn’s mind was reeling. All these years he’d spent hating his father, and the man was not even his own flesh and blood.

The Banks name, all of it, was not his problem.

Even if Harry fired him, Edgar had no leverage to guilt him into returning to England or pouring his funds into that moldering estate.

He was, at last, free of the yoke of the aristocracy.

He sighed, relief flooding his senses, and he blinked back tears.

“I hope you are not too disappointed,” his mother murmured. “But you are and always have been the product of my joy. That is why I wrote those words for you. To remind you what joy can bring, even amidst pain and great unhappiness.”

He pulled his mother to her feet and into a tight hug. “I am so bloody grateful that I no longer have to think of that terrible man as my father.”

He held her close, trying to convey all the love and respect he had for his mother and her courage through their embrace.

He pulled apart, leaving the shoulder of her dress a bit damp with his tears of relief.

She cupped his cheeks in her palms and looked up at him with the pure joy and love he remembered from his childhood.

As she wiped away the tears still streaming down his face, she asked, “Now what’s this about choosing joy meaning you should never marry? ”

“I thought it was a warning. You never married Pierre.”

She scoffed. “Because I was still legally married to your father, and he refused to grant me a divorce. Now that he’s dead, I plan to marry Pierre as soon as I return to Paris.” She released his face and flashed the enormous engagement ring on her left hand in front of his eyes.

He smiled and kissed his mother on the cheek.

“I wish you two nothing but happiness.” She patted him on the back in response, and he realized what an utter fool he had been.

Denying himself a companion because he believed it would only spell misery.

If only he had figured it out sooner. That joy and love were not mutually exclusive.

That, in fact, they were possibly contingent upon each other.

Perhaps then it would not have been too late for him and Livvy.

His mother grabbed his hands and squeezed. “When I told you to choose joy, I meant for you to choose love. To choose companionship. To choose a woman who makes you happy. Not a marriage you deemed advantageous to your rank and status.”

“I see that now.”

She looked at him expectantly. “And?”

“And what?”

“This raven-haired beauty. Why are you not banging down her door this minute? Confessing your undying love.”

“I do not have undying love for her,” he retorted, but even he couldn’t finish the thought without realizing what a lie it was. His mother giggled at the look on his face. “Even if I did…love her terribly, she doesn’t want me.”

“So, fix it then.”

Fix it. That was what he had promised Harry he would do, wasn’t it? He didn’t know how. But he did know that moping in his library was not the way to get answers. There was only one option. He needed to pay a visit to Stanley Devlin.