Dirty Beautiful Rich Part Four by Eva Devon

Chapter 1
    I t was a miracle the Fitzgeralds were still around. Julie studied the family tree and she shook her head. Death after death after death marred the branches. Early deaths. Tragic deaths. The Earls of Clare were on close terms with the grim reaper. Damian’s grandfather had been killed in a hunting accident, his great-grandfather had died as a POW in WWII, his great-great- grandfather had been left in the bloody fields of WWI.
    That was just the last one hundred years.
    She leaned back in the leather bound chair and stared at the crackling fire. The hearth was massive. It was another fireplace she could stand up in with carved stone all about it. After six weeks, she still felt fairly out of place in a castle but Margaret, Damian’s grandmother, had insisted she make her self at home.
    It had been so tempting to cut and run. The moment Damian’s icy and oh so superior mother had dropped the bomb of her son’s vanishing act, it had taken a will Julie didn’t know she had to stop herself from grabbing the first flight back to the States.
    If she was honest there was one factor that she simply couldn’t escape.
    She needed the money.
    Turning down an additional fifty grand for wounded pride would have been an idiotic move. Maybe she was naive, maybe she was fool, but she was not an idiot. This was her one chance at economic freedom, and well, if she’d learned the hard way that there were no knights in shining armor, all the better.
    She could finally abandon that hope that one day she’d find a love like her parents had.
    Which immediately reminded her of Alanna. Supposedly, she’d once been very much in love with Damian’s father. As much as Julie hated to admit it, it was easy to see what had turned Alanna bitter.
    Julie had gone through the articles online and in scrapbooks in the library. When Alanna and Damian’s father had first married, they were always front and center of every society page. Their London and Dublin houses were brimming with people, excitement, and happiness. Then something had happened.
    Damian’s father started to take a drink too many.
    It had all started out innocently enough. In the papers there were slight mentions of him tripping, or falling at an event. No blatant comments. But then, when Damian was about five, his father had slipped over some invisible edge and he was constantly being spotted drunk out of his mind in public places. Sometimes unsavory places. . . with unsavory people.
    Or women.
    There it was. Damian’s father had been in the company of many women when drunk. But as she’d looked at the pictures of the handsome man who looked so much like his son, she’d been unable to be disgusted by him. There was a sadness to Damian’s father’s face. A brokenness.
    A broken man was hard to hate or sneer at.
    Then when Damian was fourteen, his father had died suddenly. There was no mention of cause of death. There’d been no elaborate funeral. Just a few lines in the paper. She was going to have to ask Margaret. Alanna would probably kill her in her sleep if she asked why her husband’s death had been swept under the proverbial rug.
    Then again, maybe she should just let it ago. After all, it was highly unlikely that when Damian had asked for a family history to be written he’d meant a detailed analysis of his father’s decline. No. He’d almost certainly meant the history of the ancient Fitzgeralds and all their knightly deeds. Still, she couldn’t help feeling that the reason Damian had cut and run after that one night they’d shared was because of his dad.
    Maybe she was wrong. Maybe she’d meant absolutely nothing to him. No, she knew that wasn’t true. It couldn’t be. . . She refused to believe he could be so thoughtful, so kind, and then hack out her heart without mercy.
    She’d seen him with his grandmother and even with his mother. Damian was not a cruel man. He wasn’t. She had to believe that. Or else, she’d done the unthinkable. She’d