Free The River of No Return by Bee Ridgway

red to white again. Then, with visible effort, he smiled. “So it is true.” He dusted his hands together, then gestured for her to sit again. “Please,” he said. “Please be seated. I am sorry if I scared you. But you see, my tactics take me far in a short span of time. And
time
is what we are discussing, yes?”
    Julia’s heart was pounding. He had tricked her, playing on her temper, which had always been her weakness. She forced herself to calm down. “I will discuss nothing with you.”
    “Sit down, Julia. We have begun our discussion and you cannot choose to stop now.”
    “I have nothing to say.”
    “Sit down.” There was an edge to his voice, and she saw his white hands clench.
    “I prefer to stand.”
    “As you wish. But I shall sit.” Eamon made a show of walking back around his desk and arranging himself in his chair, enjoying every second of his rudeness in sitting while she remained on her feet. Now Julia stood before him as a servant stands before her master, and she felt the insult in her bones. But if Eamon expected to cow her this way . . . She straightened her back.
    “Now,” Eamon said, examining his fingernails. “To our discussion. I have named your grandfather’s little hobby, and you have agreed that he had what you might call a ‘gift,’ yes?” He looked up at her.
    Julia said nothing.
    “I take your silence for assent. He had a gift, and that gift was nothing more nor less than the ability to manipulate time; to wit, he could stop it for considerable periods, and while it was stopped, he could move about, doing what he wished with aprons and the like, was that not so?”
    Julia cursed herself. It had taken Eamon one week of silence and a few insults to break her. He had known it already, but still. She had admitted knowledge of Grandfather’s secret. The deepest, darkest secret in the world. Julia’s earliest memories were of her grandfather drilling her with the necessity to keep quiet about what he could do. On his deathbed Grandfather had told her to pretend. Instead she had given in to her temper and blabbed like a magpie.
    Eamon picked up the carved marble head of Mercury that Grandfather had used as a paperweight. “Your grandfather knew how to stop time. A remarkable gift indeed. You and I may disagree on how he used it; you say he larked about humiliating his relatives, and I say he was a thief. He wanted to steal my inheritance from me, and he tried to use time itself to do it.”
    “He was not a thief, and you are a blackguard.”
    Eamon looked up, hefting the marble head. “Careful, kitten. Claws.” He passed the head from hand to hand. “He wasn’t a thief, you say. Then why did he spend years trying to disinherit me? Me, his last living male relative?”
    “Perhaps because he was a good man and you are an excrescence!”
    Eamon slammed the two-thousand-year-old marble head down on the table, and its blank eyes glared accusingly at Julia. “Your grandfather a good man? You clearly know nothing of men. He never once brought you to London, my dear. You should have seen him there. No respect for his own rank. Always to be seen in the most disreputable parts of town with his gang of foreign friends. Thieves and drunkards and revolutionaries. And his mistress. Opening her house and her legs to any passing riffraff. Your precious grandfather threw his money away on her, and on his ridiculous coterie. Meanwhile I, his own flesh and blood, was left to suffer in penury.”
    “I hear nothing in that to diminish him in my eyes,” Julia said.
    “You don’t? Then why did you blush when I spoke of his mistress?”
    “If my face is flushed, Cousin, it is because I am angry.”
    Eamon leaned over the desk. “Are you so hardened that talk of mistresses—of the women with whom men lie for pleasure alone—falls on your ears as easily as talk of the weather? I wonder why that is? Perhaps you are already fallen, kitten. Tell me, was it that little footman who ran off