Page 51 of One Night in Glasgow (The Scottish Billionaires #15)
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
BETH
The morning after introducing Sean to my parents, was a tense, quiet affair.
Sean and I were a united front, a team, of course, but we were a team waiting for the enemy to make a move.
We’d spent the morning in our hotel suite.
Sean had been a rock, a steady, calming presence who let me process in my own way, never pushing, just being there.
It was a new and unsettling feeling, being so completely supported.
Around noon, my phone buzzed with a number I knew by heart but rarely saw on my screen anymore. My father. Not a text from his assistant, not a message passed through my mother. A direct call. My stomach immediately twisted into a tight, anxious knot.
“It’s my father,” I said to Sean, my voice barely a whisper.
He put his phone down, his full attention on me. “You want me to talk to him?”
“No,” I said, shaking my head. I had to face this. I took a deep, steadying breath and answered, putting the phone on speaker. “Hello, Father.”
“Elisabeth.” His voice was strained, haggard, stripped of its usual booming authority.
Almost the voice of a defeated man. “I… I need to see you. Both of you, actually.” My eyes widened.
Both of us? “Can you and Sean meet me? Not here at the house. Your mother… she’s in a state, as you can imagine.
Can you come to the club? The bar. In an hour. ”
I hesitated. Was he trying to smooth things over to calm my mother down?
Whatever his reason, I couldn’t ignore him.
“We’ll be there,” I said, curiosity churning inside me.
He had never, in my entire life, asked to meet me on neutral ground, away from my mother’s watchful eye. Something was seriously wrong.
The drive to my father’s private country club was a journey into the heart of my gilded cage. It was a place I loathed, a stuffy, soulless institution filled with the same people who had whispered about my scandals for years while sipping overpriced scotch.
The air inside the bar was thick with the scent of old leather, cigar smoke, and quiet, generational wealth. It was the smell of my suffocation.
We found my father tucked away in a dark corner booth, looking smaller and older than I had ever seen him. His face was pale, his shoulders slumped. He looked… broken. He didn’t rise to greet us, just gestured to the seats opposite him.
“Thank you for coming,” he said, his voice low, his gaze fixed on the table.
I slid into the booth opposite him, Sean beside me.
The air was thick with unspoken misery. “Alright, Father,” I said, my voice deliberately brisk to cut through the tension.
“Let’s have it. Did one of Mother’s prize-winning roses wilt and she’s demanding a state funeral for it?
You look like someone’s died.” My mind raced with worse possibilities, each more dramatic than the last. Had she finally driven off a cliff in a fit of pique?
He finally looked up, his eyes meeting mine. The anger I had expected wasn’t there. In its place was a deep, profound shame.
“It’s about Stewart,” he began, his voice raspy. “What you said yesterday… about him being a potential backer for that man in New York…you might be right, Elisabeth.” He pulled out his phone and slid it across the table. “I need you to see this.”
I looked at the screen. It was his private banking app, open to a series of wire transfers.
My eyes scanned the entries, the dates, the amounts.
One transfer for three hundred thousand pounds.
Another two hundred. Another transfer. And another.
All made out to Lord Stewart Beauchamp. Over the last three years, the total was staggering. Over two million pounds.
“What is this?” I whispered, though a cold, sickening understanding was already beginning to dawn. “Is he blackmailing you?”
My father let out a harsh, humorless laugh.
“I wish it were that simple. That, I would understand. No, Elisabeth.” He finally met my gaze, his own filled with a shame so deep it was almost painful to witness.
“It’s not blackmail. It’s sort of a loan or pre-payment.
Your mother… she insisted. It was all on a ‘gentleman’s agreement’. ”
I stared at him, my mind refusing to process his words. “A gentleman’s agreement? For what?”
“For you,” he said, his voice cracking. “It started small. A loan for some ‘urgent castle renovations.’ Then there were more and more castle renovations. But it was for the place where you would be living one day. Your mother… she was so convinced he was the key. To everything. The right connections, the right name. A Lord. You’d be a Lady.
” He shook his head, a look of utter defeat on his face.
“Sometimes he asked your mother for more money, saying you were taking too long to agree to marry him. She was so sure she could convince you. I… I just wanted to make her happy. To keep the peace.”
The room tilted. Two million pounds. Over two fucking million pounds of my family’s money—of my inheritance, my future—had been siphoned off to fund a man I would never marry, all on a handshake, all to appease my mother’s insane social ambitions.
The betrayal was so immense, so absolute, it left me breathless.
Sean’s hand found mine under the table, his grip a firm, grounding pressure. He didn’t say a word, just let me know he was there.
“So you see,” my father continued, his voice heavy with resignation, “when you came to us yesterday with that dossier of the man who Stewart hired to destroy you, it all made sense. Stewart only had one goal: keep the money flow going, even if it meant breaking you. If you were able to build a new life in New York for yourself, without the support of us, Stewart would lose everything. And who knows how far Stewart will go. Your mother made a deal with the devil.”
Just as the full weight of his confession settled over us, a new voice, sharp and cold as ice, cut through the quiet of the bar.
“You’re such a bloody coward, Alexander.”
My mother stood at the edge of our booth, her face a mask of cold fury. She must have suspected where he was going and followed him. She looked from my father’s defeated face to me and Sean, her eyes filled with a withering contempt .
“How dare you go behind my back?” she hissed at my father. “Discussing private family matters with… them.”
“Fiona, please,” he started, but she cut him off.
“Don’t ‘Fiona, please’ me,” she snapped.
She turned her icy gaze on me. “And you. You think you’ve uncovered some great betrayal?
This wasn’t a betrayal. It was an investment in this family’s future!
A pittance to pay for the standing Stewart could give us—give you.
But you had to ruin everything, just like you always do.
Have you any idea how hard I have worked to secure our place in society?
To give you the life you so carelessly throw away? ”
Her words, her cold, transactional view of my life, of me, was the final straw. The last vestiges of the frightened little girl who just wanted her mother’s approval died in that moment.
“Give me?” I said, my voice dangerously calm. “You weren’t giving me a life, Mother. You were buying one. For yourself. You were using your own daughter as currency to purchase a title. You didn’t just try to sell me; you paid him to take me.”
“You ungrateful little…” she started, her composure finally cracking.
“Enough!”
The word was quiet, but it landed with the force of a thunderclap. We all turned to look at my father. He had risen to his feet, his gaze fixed on my mother, his expression one I had never seen before—not anger, not disappointment, but a cold, hard finality.
“I said, enough, Fiona,” he repeated, his voice leaving no room for argument. He looked at me, a deep, profound regret in his eyes. “Elisabeth’s right. This ends now.”
My mother stared at him, her mouth agape, for the first time in her life utterly speechless. The queen had been checked.
The ride back to the hotel was silent, but it wasn’t an uncomfortable silence.
It was the quiet of a battlefield after the tide had turned.
I was still processing the seismic shift in my family’s dynamics, the image of my mother’s stunned, defeated face.
Sean just let me be, his hand resting on my thigh, a constant, reassuring presence.
Back in the cool, quiet sanctuary of our suite, the adrenaline from the confrontation began to fade. I walked over to the floor-to-ceiling window and looked out at my city, which had felt like a cage for so long. But now, it looked different. It looked like a territory to be reclaimed.
The chill from the windowpane seeped through my dress, a cold that had nothing to do with the Glasgow evening and everything to do with the ice in my mother’s eyes.
Then, I felt him. He didn’t say a word, just moved behind me, his body a furnace at my back.
His arms came around my waist, not in a tight, possessive grip, but a steady, grounding weight that seemed to anchor me to the floor.
For the first time all day, I felt like I could actually breathe.
I turned in his arms, needing to see his face. “I just…” I started, but the words caught in my throat.
“I know,” he said softly, his hands coming up to cup my face. His thumbs gently brushed away tears I hadn’t even realized were falling. “You were incredible back there. Absolutely incredible.”
His gaze dropped to my mouth, and the air between us thickened, charged with a heat that had nothing to do with anger and everything to do with us. I saw the admiration in his eyes, but it was mixed with something a raw, possessive desire that mirrored the storm inside me.
“All that fire,” he growled, his voice a low rumble that vibrated through me. “That righteous fury… It’s the sexiest thing I’ve ever seen.”
My breath hitched. The anger, the fury, the years of feeling powerless—it was all swirling inside me, looking for an outlet. And here was Sean, not trying to calm my storm, but wanting to meet it head-on.
“Is that so, McCrae?” I teased, my voice a husky whisper as I rose on my tiptoes, my hands sliding from his chest up to tangle in his hair. “Are you trying to seduce me while I’m plotting a multi-million-pound takedown?”
“Absolutely,” he confirmed, his mouth hovering just inches from mine. “My support is multifaceted.”
The kiss, when it came, wasn’t tender. It was a collision.
A raw, hungry claiming that felt like a release, like a battle cry.
It wiped away the afternoon’s ugliness, replacing it with a clean, sharp, all-consuming want.
My anger at my parents, my fury at Stewart, didn’t disappear.
It transformed. It morphed into a different kind of fire, a passionate energy that I directed entirely at the man holding me, the one person who saw my fire and wasn’t afraid of getting burned.
When we finally broke apart, breathless, my head was clear. The cold resolve had returned, but now it was tempered with a potent heat. It wasn’t just about betrayal anymore. It was about taking back what was mine.
Sean leaned in for another kiss, but I stopped him with my hand on his chest. “I’ve changed my mind,” I said, and walked over to the table to pick up Sean’s phone.
“Babe?” Sean looked puzzled .
“Call Fury,” I told him, my voice steady and clear.
“Let’s get Gianni on this. I want him to find out where every single penny of that two million pounds went.
Every shell corporation, every offshore account, every luxury car, every tart he ever bought a diamond for.
I want a forensic accounting of his entire pathetic life.
I want to know everything.” I turned back to Sean, a wicked glint in my eye.
“And then, I want to burn him to the ground with the truth.”
A slow, proud smile spread across Sean’s face. He pulled out his phone without a moment’s hesitation. I watched as he dialed, a surge of pure, unadulterated power coursing through me. I was no longer the pawn, or the victim. I was the one calling in the cavalry.
He put the call on speaker, and Fury’s voice filled the room. “Sean. How’s Glasgow? Any news?”
“Change of plans,” Sean said, his eyes never leaving mine. “Beth wants to follow the money.”
I took the phone from him. “Fury,” I said, my voice cool and controlled. “It’s Beth. Your man Gianni, how good is he at finding things people don’t want found?”
There was a low chuckle on the other end. “Let’s just say he could find a single grain of sand in the Sahara if it owed him money. What do you need?”
I laid out my request, my voice precise, detailing my need for a full forensic accounting of Stewart Beauchamp’s finances for the past three years.
“Consider it done,” Fury said, the protective warmth in his voice now mixed with a clear admiration. “Gianni loves a good treasure hunt. Especially when the treasure is stolen and the dragon guarding it is an asshole. You’ll have a preliminary report by morning.”
“Thank you, Fury,” I said, meaning it .
“Don’t thank me,” he replied. “Welcome to the family, Beth. We protect our own.”
I ended the call and turned back to Sean, a slow smile spreading across my face. I walked toward him, taking the phone from his hand and setting it on the table. I looped my arms around his neck, pressing my body against his.
“Now,” I whispered, my lips brushing against his. “Where were we? I believe you mentioned something about… multifaceted support?”
Sean’s answering grin was pure sin. “I believe I did,” he growled, before his mouth crashed down on mine, and for the next few hours, there was no thought of Stewart, or my parents, or the war to come. There was only us.