me that he had a
British accent. Too friendly a tone for another Alexander, I observed with
relief.
He walked with a dark
wooden cane topped with a shiny brass handle embossed with the initials EMK.
Almost pure white hair, green eyes flecked with amber brown that reminded me of
Adrian’s, and skin impressively smooth and youthful for a man who projected a
presence of age and self-possession. No, he didn’t have the look of an
Alexander about him, but there was money—in the Italian shoes, the thin blue cashmere
pullover, even the square-cut manicure. His posture, though, and his earthy
tone suggested a scrapper, a doer. A self-made man.
“Forgive the intrusion,
miss,” he said in a plain accent, workman’s British, being maybe a bit of a
northerner. “I thought I overheard you and the gentleman there speaking of an
Adrian Knight. Is that correct?”
I hesitated, knowing
that had been a privileged conversation, and I was in enough trouble. “Yes,
but…”
The elderly gentleman
held up one hand as though to indicate he understood, which he would have had
he heard much at all. “I don’t mean to pry. I’m just hoping someone can get me
a meeting with Adrian. Nothing too long. Just a few minutes with him. It would mean a great deal to
us.”
“Us?”
“Forgive me. I should
introduce myself. I’m Edward Knight, Adrian’s grandfather.”
“Edward Knight ?” I stumbled verbally over the
thought. “His grandfather? His…his
mother’s father, then?” So Adrian had taken his mother’s surname when
he’d tried to distance himself from the Alexanders .
“Exactly so,” the man
agreed with a crisp nod.
“But you haven’t seen
Adrian in…”
“In
years. Yes, quite right. Since shortly
after his mother passed.” The man’s bright expression dimmed as his
brows curled down at some private thought, a flicker of contained emotion. It
was a British thing, I knew well enough from watching Adrian. Passion they
expressed well enough, at least in private, and anger.
But anything else they kept close to the vest. “We’d lost track of Adrian for
some time, until this news. I’ve been passing a few weeks at the family estate
in Argentina, so I took the opportunity to… Well, to see if I could speak to
Adrian. It’s been a very long time, and this is a distressing development.”
I chewed apprehensively
on my lower lip before finally leaning a little nearer. “Mr. Knight, Adrian
told me your family didn’t want anything to do with him when he was younger.
Why now?”
The Knight patriarch
blinked hard several times. “Nothing to do with him? No, that’s not right. Is that what they told him?” A rumble grew under his deep
voice, and his brow line hardened over his eyes. He pounded his cane against
the floor. “Is that what that damned Alistair Alexander told him?”
“Actually, I believe it
was Adam Alexander, but…yes, essentially.” When Edward continued swearing
lightly under his breath, rubbing his forehead just the way Adrian did when
getting tense, I touched his shoulder and offered, “Would you let a girl buy
you a coffee, Mr. Knight? I think we have a few things to talk about.”
Once he’d taken a
second to straighten, to tap down that cresting temper, he nodded and put on a
brave British smile. “That’s what I’ve always liked about American women,” he
said. “You’re really rather forward.”
This brought me up
short, even as he was offering me his free arm. “I think I see where Adrian
gets what passes for charm,” I chided the man.
“Well it sure as hell
doesn’t come from his father’s side of the family.”
And I decided then and
there that I’d have loved holiday dinners with the Knight family if…if things
had worked out differently for Adrian and me. If we’d met
under different circumstances. If his mother hadn’t
died and left him so young. If neither of us had met Penn Ellison.
When I settled down at
a sidewalk café with Edward Knight, he spooned the