Do Your Worst(76)
He held his father’s glare. “Yes, sir.”
Alfie took out his wallet, threw a tenner down on the table.
“I should have realized.” He laughed, the sound hollow. “You’ve always been easily led.”
Riley sucked in a breath.
Two birds. One stone. Clark had to hand it to him.
His father managed to take every major mistake he’d ever made and sum them up in one neat, biting remark while simultaneously insulting Riley’s integrity.
After the door to the tasting room slammed, they sat in silence for seconds that seemed infinite.
Well. He’d been close to getting his father’s acceptance there for a minute. That was something.
“You okay?” Riley pulled her chair back out, folding herself down neatly and crossing her arms.
“Sterling.” Clark drained the dregs from his glass before propping his elbows on the table and lowering his head into his hands.
“He thinks he knows you, but he doesn’t.” Her voice was low, gentle. “It’s not weakness. The way you trust people.”
Clark looked up, folded his hands together, at a loss. “How can you say that after what just happened?”
It was like a bad play. How many times was he going to appeal to his father for acceptance, affection, before he realized Alfie wasn’t capable of it?
“You know what he’s like.” Riley stared at the door his father had stormed out of. “You knew the risk in standing up to him. But you were giving him a chance. To be better.”
She turned to Clark. “It wasn’t an accident or oversight.” Like everything about her, the words were clear, definitive. “You’re braver than he is.”
Clark swallowed, sat there, tried to make himself hear it. “I don’t know what’s more disconcerting, when you’re cruel to me or when you’re kind.”
“I think you like a bit of both,” she told him, gunning for a smile.
He nodded seriously instead. “It depends on my mood.”
Clark knew his father criticized because he cared. Because he thought Clark needed pushing and prodding to live up to his potential. Inside his dad’s head lived a relentless taskmaster and Alfie Edgeware credited that harsh, wily animal with his success. Knowing didn’t stop the rush of nausea.
“I suppose we’ve only got one real option now.”
“Yeah.” Riley took out her phone. “I’ll order an Uber.”
“No, I meant we pull out the big guns. Break this fucking curse.”
Her brows rose. “I’m listening. You got an idea?”
Clark smiled, surprised that he could. “It just so happens, I do.”
Chapter Twenty
Apparently, for archaeologists, “pulling out the big guns” meant “using your academic credentials to get access to a university’s rare books room, even if said rare books room was technically closed to the public due to ongoing renovations.”
Or at least, that was what Riley had taken away from Clark’s call to the head of the collection at St. Andrews.
“We’re in.” He’d grinned as he hung up, looking only slightly wild-eyed from where he sat beside her in the back of a very expensive Uber on their return trip to Torridon. “A security guard will be there at ten a.m. tomorrow to meet us.”
“Great.” Riley hadn’t totally understood the plan at that point, but he looked so adorably eager. After his dad had been such a horrible monster—like so bad that for a few hours she was glad her own dad had had the decency not to stick around—she would have gone pretty much anywhere that made him smile like that.
When she got back to the inn, after she did all the normal face-washing, teeth-brushing stuff—Riley put on her pj’s and called Ceilidh to see if she’d want to take the train with them in the morning to visit the collection. As far as she could tell, Ceilidh was the only person who loved old books more than Clark.
“Damnit, I’ve got class,” her friend moaned. “Can you just take pictures of everything? Like just all of it?”
“Oh, sure,” Riley agreed. “That shouldn’t be a problem. Clark said they only have like two hundred thousand books in there.”
Ceilidh made another sound of excruciating pain. “Don’t rub it in, you horrible woman, or I won’t let you take my car and you’ll be stuck on the bloody train for one thousand years.”
Riley laughed.
The following morning, Ceilidh not having made good on her threat, Clark and Riley met the surly security guard after the four-hour drive.
“Don’t get yourselves locked in.” The guard ushered them through a very old-looking door. “The knob will lock automatically behind you, and my shift ends in an hour.” His bushy white mustache twitched. “I won’t come back.”
“Noted, sir,” Clark held the door for Riley, who tried to nod in a way that conveyed her utmost respect for academic institutions, their employees, and procedures as they walked inside.
“Whoa.” She hadn’t had a firm vision for a rare books room, having never visited one or really thought about them existing before, but even with some scaffolding and tarps covering parts of the space, the massive room at St. Andrews was majestic.
Riley couldn’t help stopping to take a deep inhale of the sweet, dry scent of preserved paper. America had a lot going for it, as far as she was concerned, but man, Europeans really took the cake when it came to old stuff. And gun laws. But that was a different story.