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The sun was shining hard but there was a light breeze, just enough to make the heat bearable. He tilted the glass in his hand to his mouth. This wine was perfect, too. Cool, bright and energetic with apricot and peach flavours.
Finally, everything was going according to plan.
He glanced across the table to where Lily should have been sitting.
Lily was cooperating. But only in the same way that a soldier accepted being a prisoner of war. Outwardly passive while privately counting down until the day of their release.
Somehow she had managed to eat breakfast and then lunch without saying more than ten words to him in total, before evaporating without any explanation or excuse. It was annoying as hell, doubly so because he could hardly force her to talk to him so the chances of things being any different at dinner seemed slim at best.
Because Lily didn’t want to talk to him. Didn’t want to look at him. Didn’t want to be around him. Which was why he was drinking alone—always a good look—and she was presumably holed up in her bedroom, no doubt hating him with every fibre of her being.
His shoulders stiffened as he remembered that moment out in the barn when he’d realised she was crying.
Because of him.
He gazed up into the sun, deliberately letting the white light fill his head so that it would block out the image of Lily’s face and an ache that was stretching from one temple to the other. But that only made things worse because now he could hear her voice.
Not ever.
The phrase batted back and forth inside his head and his fingers moved automatically to tap the union valley point in the webbing between his thumb and finger.
He still didn’t understand what had happened in the barn.
That she had even been there at all had thrown him off balance. She wasn’t supposed to have been. In fact, he had only been there because the tension between them was turning to chaos beneath his skin.
A shiver ran across the bare skin of his arm. Turning to find her watching him with Acrux, he’d never felt more vulnerable, more exposed. Aside from his immediate family and the various therapists he’d seen over the years, nobody knew that he had ADHD. Not officially anyway. His teachers had suspected, his friends joked about it, but Henry had always refused to have him labelled. The family name must be protected at all costs.
Remembering how he’d used to catch his father watching him sometimes, Trip felt his spine tense.
He’d lost count of the number of times he’d been told that coping mechanisms could and should involve family members, and maybe if his mother had been less wrapped up in her own affairs then it might have been different. She might have recognised and praised his ingenuity and energy and his ability to talk to anyone. Perhaps if Charlie had been closer in age and not so scared of displeasing Henry, they might have been friends and his brother could have helped him navigate those confusing early years.
But the Winslows were not a family. They were four individuals who shared a surname, some DNA and a portfolio of prime real estate.
He was ten when, finally, he’d been diagnosed and initially it had been a relief to know why he was different from other people, particularly the father he admired but with whom he so often clashed. The downside was that his father had made it his mission to ‘fix’ him and his relief had evaporated and he’d started to feel like a lab rat. There had been countless assessments, medication tried and abandoned, counselling sessions, techniques to master, some of which helped some of the time. But it wasn’t until one of the therapists had suggested equine-assisted psychotherapy that he’d found a way to make sense of the chaos inside his head.
And because his dad was Henry Winslow II, he hadn’t just sent him to an accredited therapist. Wherever it was possible, his homes around the globe had been equipped with stables and the all-important horses to fill them. On the face of it, his father had gone above and beyond what any parent could reasonably be expected to do.
But it had always felt like just another double-edged sword in their complicated, combative relationship. Because despite the progress Trip had made, it had never been enough.
Not even when he had proven that he was more than capable of running the business, more capable than Charlie in many ways because out of the two of them he was the one who had taken risks. He had gone out on his own without his father’s blessing or guidance. And yes, he had failed initially, but for him failure was part of innovating. He anticipated it, accepted it. His goal was always to fail better right up until the moment he succeeded.
And he had succeeded. Above and beyond what Henry had at the same age.
But still his father had made him wait, had held back anointing him as his successor, and, via those old men back at the office, he was still holding him to account even though he had no right because Henry had not been the perfect man he’d claimed to be.
His eyes moved to where Acrux was standing beneath one of the chestnut trees that stippled the curving green landscape. Discovering his father’s hypocrisy was just one of the reasons why he was struggling to stop his thoughts from stampeding like a herd of wild horses.
He felt the skin on his face tighten.
What he hadn’t fully acknowledged until yesterday was how much Lily was struggling too.
Reluctantly he returned to that scene in the barn, those grey eyes of hers resting on his face. Curious, but soft too. As if she understood him. As if she had crept beneath the barriers he’d built between himself and the world.
He couldn’t remember anyone looking at him like that. Not even his mother. Alessandra Winslow had been too lost in her own thoughts to have ever really focused on his.
Maybe that was why he’d been caught off guard. Why what had happened next had been so shocking that he’d forgotten his frustration and his anger, that dark consuming fury that he couldn’t seem to shift so that it felt as though he’d been furious for almost his whole life. Since before he’d found those letters in his father’s things.
He felt his chest tighten. He wasn’t a total moron. He knew that there was grief mixed up in that terrible fury. But knowing that hadn’t done much to soothe the fury, or staunch the pain, the ache of losing his father, not once, but twice, because that was what it had felt like finding those letters. Reading those impassioned words from Henry’s mistress had made him question everything he’d thought he knew about the man who’d raised him.
