I hate to love my British Bad Boy

The Terms

I don't sleep well in houses that hold secrets.

Never have. Even as a child I could feel the weight of unspoken things pressing through the walls of this townhouse like damp — slow, persistent, impossible to fully clear. My father used to say I was too perceptive for my own good. That I noticed things before people were ready to explain them.

He meant it as a flaw.

Lying in my old bed at six in the morning, staring at a ceiling I haven't seen in five years, I think maybe he was simply warning me.

I give up on sleep at six fifteen. Dress in the dark — jeans, a thick cream jumper, hair pulled back with the efficiency of someone who has decided today requires armor. I look at the freesias on the windowsill before I leave the room. Still fresh. Still deliberate.

I go downstairs.

He's already in the kitchen.

Of course he is.

Callum stands at the stove with his back to me and the specific ease of someone completely at home in this space — because he is, I remind myself, he has been at home in this space for three years while I was building a life in another country. There's a pan on the hob, two mugs already on the counter, and the smell of coffee doing something entirely unfair to my ability to maintain hostility.

He doesn't turn around when I come in.

"Black, two sugars," he says. "Unless that's changed."

It hasn't changed. I hate that it hasn't changed and I hate more that he said it with zero performance — not a power move, not a display of intimacy, just a fact he's retained like a person retains things about someone they've paid genuine attention to for a long time.

I cross to the counter and pick up the mug and wrap both hands around it and say nothing.

He plates eggs and toast and sets one in front of the kitchen island without ceremony. I sit because I'm hungry and refusing food on principle is a seventeen year old's move. We eat in silence. It's not uncomfortable, which is its own kind of uncomfortable.

"I want answers," I say when half the plate is gone.

"I know."

"Not managed ones." I set my fork down and look at him directly across the island. "Three years, Callum. You've been living in this house for three years and I didn't know. My mother's solicitor has been writing to me about this property for months and your name appeared exactly nowhere."

He meets my eyes. Doesn't flinch.

"Your mother asked me not to tell you," he says.

The words land quietly. They do damage anyway.

"My mother," I repeat.

"She was worried you wouldn't come back if you knew I was here."

"She was right."

"Yes." A beat. "She knew that too."

I push back from the island and stand because sitting feels passive and I am not feeling passive. I go to the window and look out at the walled garden — immaculate, hedges trimmed, stone path clear — and I breathe through the specific frustration of being managed by people who love you.

My mother. Keeping this from me deliberately. Protecting something she decided I needed protecting from, or protecting him, or protecting whatever arrangement exists between them that I still don't have the full shape of.

"What is the arrangement," I say. My back to him.

"Between you and my mother. You've been living in her house, you've changed her locks, you clearly have a working relationship with her solicitor." I turn around. "What exactly is the deal."

He's quiet for a moment — not evasive, considering. Choosing the order of things.

"When your mother got sick," he starts, "eighteen months ago, before you were told —"

"Before I was told." I stop him there. "You knew before I did."

"Yes."

"How long before."

A pause. Shorter than I'd like. "Three weeks."

Three weeks. My mother was ill and Callum Ashford knew three weeks before her own daughter. I absorb this with the careful deliberateness of someone handling something that could detonate — slow, precise, not showing the shaking.

"She didn't want to worry you during your placement," he says. His tone carries no defense in it, just the fact laid flat.

"And you decided that was acceptable."

"I decided it wasn't my place to override what she asked of me."

"But it was your place to be here at all." My voice has gone quiet. He remembers what that means — I can tell from the slight shift in his jaw. Quiet is worse. It always was. "You specifically. The person with the most reason to be kept away from this house."

Something moves beneath his expression. Not quite pain — Callum keeps pain somewhere unreachable. Something more like acknowledgment. Like I've pressed against something that matters and he's decided not to protect it.

"Your mother doesn't blame me for what happened," he says carefully.

"I'm not my mother."

"No." His eyes hold mine. Steady. "You're not."

Marcus Webb arrives at ten.

Sixties, silver-haired, the careful professional warmth of a man whose empathy costs four hundred pounds an hour. He sits on the sitting room sofa with his leather portfolio open across his knees, and Callum leans against the fireplace, and I take the armchair closest to the door because old habits are structural.

Marcus smiles. "Miss Osei. Wonderful to finally meet you in person. Your mother speaks of you —"

"Constantly, I'm sure." I smile back with the warmth I currently have available. "She speaks considerably less of you. Let's start with the financial documents."

He glances at Callum. Just briefly — a flicker of checking in, of seeking permission — and that small reflexive look tells me everything about the real power dynamic in this room before a single document is produced.

Callum gives nothing. Just the slight tilt of his chin. Go ahead.

Marcus opens his portfolio.

Forty minutes. That's how long it takes to dismantle my understanding of the last three years.

The townhouse — four storeys, Mayfair, somewhere north of four million on the current market — has not been solely in my mother's name for the past three years. A private arrangement was made when she first became ill, when the medical expenses began accumulating and the estate management became impossible alone. Not a sale, not a formal transfer — a guardianship of assets, Marcus calls it, with the careful pronunciation of a man who has rehearsed this specific phrase.

Callum covered everything. Medical treatment, property maintenance, household costs. In exchange — and here Marcus pauses, just a fraction, just enough — primary residency rights until the estate is formally settled.

I let the silence sit for a moment.

"How much," I say.

Marcus consults his portfolio. "In total across thirty months, approximately —"

"How much, Marcus."

"Eight hundred thousand pounds."

The number occupies the room like furniture nobody ordered.

Eight hundred thousand pounds. On my mother's care. On this house. On a woman who is not his family, not his obligation, not anyone he owes anything to — unless there is a debt here running in a direction I haven't mapped yet, which feels increasingly probable.

I look at Callum. He looks back. Still against the fireplace, giving nothing.

"Why," I ask him directly.

"She needed it."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only one available right now."

I turn back to Marcus. "Can the residency arrangement be contested."

Another portfolio glance. Another Callum glance. "It's a private agreement rather than an enforceable legal instrument, so technically —"

"Technically."

"Any challenge would likely generate a counter-claim that could complicate the estate settlement considerably." He delivers this with the smooth regret of a man whose job is to say difficult things pleasantly.

Meaning Callum could make this extraordinarily complicated if he chose to. Meaning eight hundred thousand pounds is leverage whether it was intended as such or not.

I stand. "Thank you Marcus. Leave the portfolio."

He leaves the portfolio. He leaves shortly after, visibly relieved, and then it's just me and Callum and the grey morning rain against the sitting room windows.

I take the portfolio to the window seat and read every page properly. Callum moves to the armchair Marcus vacated and sits in silence while I read, which is more tolerable than I expected. His silence has always had presence — it was never an absence of something, always the weight of it, Callum fully occupying whatever space he's in without requiring noise to justify it.

Thirty minutes. Every page. By the end I understand the architecture of what has been quietly constructed around my mother, around this house, around me without my knowledge. It is meticulous. Every payment documented, every arrangement noted with the precision of someone who thinks in sequences and moves.

He always did think in sequences.

"Your business," I say without looking up from the final page. "What is it. Specifically."

"Why now specifically."

"Because eight hundred thousand pounds came from somewhere and I want to understand the source." I look up. "I'm not asking for tabloid reasons. I'm trying to understand what I've walked into."

He considers me. Then he leans forward, elbows on his knees — less guarded, more direct.

"Import and export. Legitimate, largely. High-end private contracts, some property development."

"Largely," I repeat, catching it.

That almost-movement at the corner of his mouth. "There are older interests. Harder to exit cleanly."

"The underground circuits."

His eyes sharpen. "You've been keeping track."

"I've been ignoring it. The tabloids do the keeping track." I pause. "Is the racing still —"

"Done." Definitive. Final. "Two years."

"And the rest."

"Transitioning out."

"That's a careful way of saying not yet."

"It's a careful world," he says simply. "Leaving certain things requires time if you want to leave intact."

I close the portfolio. Look at him directly — really look, past the five years and the history and the feeling, trying to see clearly.

What I see is more complicated than his reputation. A man who planned quietly, protected deliberately, spent eight hundred thousand pounds on a woman whose daughter he let go without a fight. There is something underneath the danger that is not reckless. Something that considered consequences and bore them anyway.

I don't know what to do with that yet.

"The people you deal with," I say carefully. "The older interests. Is anyone connected to this house. To my mother. To me."

The pause before his answer is a fraction too long.

"Callum."

"There was someone," he says. "Who became aware of your mother's situation through our mutual history. It was dealt with."

"What does dealt with mean."

"It means it no longer requires your concern."

"That's not —"

"Zara." Quiet. Even. The tone that means actually hear me. "There are things I'll tell you. All of them, eventually. But the order matters. Some things need context before they make sense rather than simply frightening you."

I stare at him across the sitting room.

"You want me to trust you," I say flatly.

"I want three days." He holds my gaze without apology. "Before you make decisions about the house, before you call your own lawyers, before you decide what this is. Three days to show you the full picture."

"And if I don't like it."

"Then you'll have everything you need to leave and never come back." He says it without flinching. "And I won't stop you."

The rain against the windows. The quiet house around us.

I should say no. Every rebuilt, functional, carefully maintained part of me says no — take the portfolio, call my own solicitor, handle this from the clean distance I've spent five years perfecting.

"Three days," I say instead.

Something shifts in his expression. Controlled immediately.

"Three days," he confirms.

I stand and pick up the portfolio and I almost make it to the door before his voice reaches me.

"Zara."

I stop. Don't turn.

"The freesias in your room," he says quietly. "Your mother asked me to put them there before you arrived. She said you'd need something familiar when you walked in."

I don't respond.

I walk out and up the stairs and I sit on the edge of my old bed and look at the white freesias on the windowsill and I understand suddenly that my mother didn't just ask Callum to keep the lights on.

She asked him to make it feel like coming home.

The afternoon passes quietly.

I review documents. I avoid the study. I stay in the geography of the house that feels like mine — my room, the kitchen, the small sitting room at the back that was always mine as a child.

Callum is in the study. I know this because the light under the door is on and I can hear, occasionally, the low sound of a call conducted in the quiet controlled way of someone who doesn't need volume to be authoritative.

At seven he knocks on the kitchen doorframe where I'm eating toast for dinner because I haven't managed anything more substantial.

"There's food," he says.

"I have food," I say.

He looks at the toast. Says nothing. Goes back to the study.

At nine I walk past the study door and it's open an inch and he's at the desk reading something, one hand loosely holding a pen, completely absorbed.

My father used to sit exactly like that.

I keep walking.

But the image follows me upstairs and into sleep — Callum at my father's desk, in my father's study, in my family's house.

Not like an intruder.

Like someone who belongs there.

And I don't know yet whether that should frighten me.

I think it should.

I think it does.

I think those might not be the same thing.