Read The Star Child (The Star Child Series) for Free Online Page B

about him, but definitely not the entire story. It was with interest that I greeted Alistair when I first met him as he visited me at boarding school.
    Alistair and Gran had met while he was visiting Dublin on a business trip and she was visiting a cousin. He was leaving a restaurant with a client at the end of his trip, and Gran was sitting alone at a table by the door. Alistair excused himself and went immediately to Gran’s table, where he struck up a conversation. He’d ended up extending his trip a week to stay with her.
    Although they cared for each other very deeply, once they returned to their own worlds it became apparent that they weren’t suited. Gran never wanted a life with “fancy cars and chambermaids”, as Alistair had put it, and Alistair was entirely too fond of his “silk pajamas lifestyle”, as Gran had put it.
    More out of heartbreak than love, he became engaged to a young woman, Imogen, that his parents had recommended. A classic tale, it would eventually become a marriage based on love, though it certainly had a rocky beginning. Within months of leaving Ireland, he was married and living in China with a new business to focus on.
    When Gran found out that she was pregnant with Stephen, she couldn’t find Alistair. Her letters were returned, not having been received at all. Forced to have a child alone, she’d had no way to inform Alistair that he had a son. She even traveled to Dublin to try to find him through his business contact there. Yet when the secretary couldn’t provide Alistair’s whereabouts, Gran left without speaking to anyone else.
    In actuality, it would be several years later, when a colleague asked him if he’d ever connected with the very pretty, and very pregnant, Irish girl who’d come looking for him in Dublin, before he found her.
    That brief conversation triggered a series of events that resulted in Alistair ending up on Gran’s doorstep with a lot of apologies. He found a nine-year-old Stephen that he’d never known about. Gran had married a local fisherman who’d had no problem accepting both Gran and her young child, not having the ability to father a child himself.
    Alistair and Gran found so much contentment in their lives that their friendship was reformed, and plans were made to introduce Stephen to Alistair’s family. Alistair had two sons, Percy and Heath, who were close to Stephen’s age, and both Alistair and Gran believed that there was no reason that they shouldn’t get on famously.
    With my Grandda’s blessing, it was agreed that Stephen would come for an extended visit to London. Yet despite their shared enthusiasm, Stephen was undeniably a bad seed. Whatever hope Alistair had had that they could have a relationship vanished within a month of Stephen’s arrival.
    Initially, Stephen had been an angel, winning over Alistair’s wife, Imogen, and befriending both of the boys. Alistair had even gone through the process of formally adopting Stephen and giving him the St. James name. He even added him to his will.
    After the initial introductions to the household were made, things started to go downhill and the accidents started happening. If you could call them “accidents”.
    First, the dog was poisoned. Percy had started screaming early one Sunday morning when he’d found Cleo, his best friend, dead on the kitchen floor. Percy had clung to the animal sobbing, unable to leave him as Alistair had held him close.
    Further investigation had uncovered that straight bleach had been poured into the dog’s water dish. Alistair was forced to fire the horrified servant that fed the dog, though he wasn’t entirely convinced at the time that the woman was to blame.
    As terrible as that was, it was far worse when Percy almost drowned in the river the following week. Percy had blamed Stephen, stating that the older boy had pushed him in. However, the butler claimed that Stephen was in his room studying the entire time and didn’t remember seeing him leave