No worries. Can just about manage without you.

Although he knew his business partner was being sarcastic, Henry very much hoped that wasn’t the case. Their business had been a lifeline over the years and if it hadn’t been for Ben, who the hell knew where Henry might have ended up? Probably at the bottom of a bottle. As long as it wasn’t a wine bottle.

Seriously, bro, how’s it all going?

Henry sighed. Bloody awful?

It’s OK.

It certainly would be better now that he’d given the staff four weeks of paid leave. He’d needed some time alone. Just to be. Without hotel guests, or staff members filling rooms that had changed in the ten years since he’d last stepped foot in the estate that had been in his family for generations. The hotel manager had made the calls cancelling the scheduled guests willingly enough, seeming to understand the precarious position they were now all in.

This was the first morning he’d been in the place by himself since he’d arrived. He’d flown into London the morning after his mother had called. Spent a few days with her and her husband in Borehamwood – his mother, sad-faced but dry-eyed, watching as Henry had spent hours on the phone organizing a funeral for a man who he hadn’t spoken to in ten years.

He loved you, Henry. But you were both as stubborn as each other.

Henry had made it down to Hawke’s Cove in his rental the night before the funeral and stood at the front of the mourners that numbered almost the whole bloody town. He shivered at the memory of casting the dry earth on his father’s coffin, still not quite able to believe that he was gone.

The last few weeks had been tough. Tougher than he’d expected. He’d met with Blake’s estate lawyers who seemed, if not surprised, then at least satisfied, with his mother relinquishing any rights to the estate from a will that had been made years before.

Henry shook his head and looked, unseeing, out of the window of the top-floor room he’d been using, utterly unable to step foot back in his old bedroom. Blake had left him everything. He’d genuinely expected to go to the lawyer’s, sign some piece of paper agreeing to walk away with nothing. And now he was the owner of a five-star hotel, over three hundred acres of woodland and working vineyards, one private beach and nearly thirty employees.

And almost each and every one of them had answered nearly every question he’d had about the estate with, Ask Lily Atwell. A familiar sense of frustration rose within him. He’d had no idea how involved in the estate she’d become in the last ten years.