Page 183 of Boyfriend of the Hour

“What is it?” Xavier asked as he took my arm. He glanced back toward the gala. “What can I do? Where can I take you?”

The blare of the loudspeaker sounded, and vaguely, I heard the sound of a deep man’s voice. “I’d like to take this opportunity to announce my retirement from Huntwell Corporation, but that the company will continue in the hands of my capable son, Nathaniel…”

“Marie,” I whimpered into my hands. “I just want my sister. I want Marie.”

Xavier nodded, though he looked somewhat confused as he punched a message into his phone. “Done. Come with me.”

HUNTWELL FARM

Nathan Hunt didn’t have a home.

Maybe it was a funny thing to admit, being a thirty-four-year-old doctor who couldn’t call anyplace home. But what did “home” even mean, anyway?

He had a place to live, of course. A decently sized two-bedroom apartment on Riverside Drive. It was his first purchase after buying into Manhattan Surgery Associates. But that was just a place to sleep.

Home wasn’t the string of apartments he’d rented while attending medical school, doing his residency, completing two fellowships, and becoming the youngest burn specialist in New York City.

Nor was it the dormitory at Duke or the house in Durham he kept his senior year.

Nor did it lie behind the twenty-foot doors he was poised to enter the day before Easter.

His parents loved Huntwell Farm, as had his grandparents, and their parents before them. The estate had been in the Hunt family since General James Hunt had been granted more than fifteen hundred acres for his service to George Washington himself and had built the stone mansion complete with twogatehouses, three servants’ quarters, a trout-stocked lake, and the Doric columns framing the front entrance.

Nathan, Carrick, and Spencer had been regaled with outlandish tales of the estate’s history since before they could walk. But where Nathan’s family saw history, he only saw the people whose backs this wealth was built on. Shadows of enslaved peoples, war criminals, and exploited workers roamed these halls. And, of course, the echoes of the unhappy present.

Those echoes were too loud off the polished oak and black-and-white marble. The rooms were too empty, all of them dressed in damask and curling millwork, like belles waiting for music they’d never hear. And his family was too cold, too forbidding.

No, Huntwell never was and never would be Nathan’s true home, whatever that even meant.

He suspected that honor only belonged to her. And now she was gone.

The front door opened a solid five minutes after Nathan rang the bell, and he was met by Holden, the butler/driver/all-around dogsbody who had to be as old as the house itself. The old man pushed back his last surviving tuft of white hair, then offered the same droll expression he might have given the postman.

“Dr. Hunt,” he said with the barest hint of familiarity, then stepped aside so that Nathan could drop his suitcase in the foyer.

“Holden.” Nathan dropped his suitcase in the foyer. “I’ll take that up after I speak to my parents.”

“As you wish, sir.”

As Holden took his jacket, it occurred to Nathan, for likely the thousandth time, that the butler could reasonably use his given name. Just as it also occurred to him that Holden had no reason to guide him through the halls he’d grown up in or that meetings with his parents might be more comfortable if theywere held in the family room or even the rec room rather than one of the formal parlors with stiff antique furniture.

But Nathan said nothing as he followed the butler down the black-and-white-marbled corridor, their footsteps echoing off the high ceilings and portrait-covered walls. Because this was just the way it was here. This was the routine.

Why question it?

They found Lillian and Radford sitting in the second parlor, a fire blazing in one of the house’s thirty-four hearths, despite the fact that it was a balmy sixty-four degrees outside. Lillian was always cold, and Radford was always indifferent. Lillian was sipping her customary cup of afternoon coffee—decaf, of course—while Radford puffed at one of his favorite cigars as he paged through the Business section of theWashington Post.

“They still haven’t made the announcement,” he remarked to Lillian. “DamnPost. Knew I should have bought it when we had the chance.”

“Carrick said they won’t until Nathaniel confirms,” Lillian replied. “And that stubborn boy refuses to take any of their calls.”

“That’s because I never accepted it,” Nathan said, startling both of them enough that Radford ashed directly onto his cashmere cardigan, and Lillian spilled a bit of coffee onto her linen pants.

“Oh, shoot!” she cried, dabbing at the spot. “Holden!”

“I’ll fetch a towel at once, ma’am,” the butler said in his droll voice before disappearing into the hall.

“You might have warned us,” Lillian said as Nathan entered the room.