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Rachel glared her resentment. “Well, of course Casper would tell you that.”
“Are you saying it isn’t true?”
Rachel’s jaw clenched. “I’m saying you don’t mean anything more to him than the legion of other women who’ve shared his bed for a night. When he’s ready, he’ll settle down with just one woman.”
“You?”
“Why not me?” Rachel snapped.
“Because I’m not in love with you, I’m in love with Persephone.”
Both women turned to see that the men had left Mike’s office and were now standing just feet away and obviously listening to their conversation.
* * *
It hurt Casper to look at Rachel and see the almost manic glitter in her eyes. He’d known her since she was eight years old when he and Mike first met at university and afterward spent so much time together.
“No,” she said forcefully now. “You can’t be in love with her!”
“But I am,” Casper told her softly. He gave a gentle shake of his head. “I’m sorry, Rachel. I didn’t know… Had no idea…” He sounded pained, because he was. It had never occurred to him that the girl he had always thought of as Mike’s little sister imagined herself in love with him.
“No idea of what?” she challenged.
“Give it up, squirt,” Mike said heavily. “We’ve both looked at the security footage, the one I told the police I don’t have, and recognized it’s you beneath the dark hoodie and sweats.”
“No!” his sister protested loudly. “Of course it isn’t me. Why would I want to hurt something Casper values so highly?”
Mike shrugged. “To gain his attention? To punish him for not noticing you in a romantic way? Probably for a similar reason you punctured the tires on my racing bicycle on the morning I was due to start the marathon from Edinburgh to Land’s End.”
“Which is?”
“Jealousy.” He sighed. “You didn’t want me to be away from home for a week.”
“It wasn’t fair!” Rachel wailed. “If you were going, I wanted to come too. But Mum and Dad said no, I had to stay home and go to school.”
“Because I was an adult, and you were only twelve.”
“Still not fair,” she repeated stubbornly.
Mike sighed. “So you punctured the tires on my bicycle believing I wouldn’t be able to go either.”
“It didn’t stop you, though, did it, because you had several sets of spares,” she reminded him sulkily.
Mike looked sad as he shook his head. “There were so many things you did to me to get your own way when you were growing up. Still do, given the chance. It’s the reason that I and Mum and Dad thought it best that when you left school, you should work here with me and not for someone else you might decide was stopping you from doing what you wanted to do or getting where you wanted to go. But I never thought, never even imagined, that you would start the same shit with Casper. For God’s sake, you almost killed him when you messed with the brakes on his car.”
Rachel gave a dismissive sniff. “It was just a slow leak of the brake fluid.”
“That eventually resulted in the car having no fucking brakes at all!” Mike accused.
“Yes. Well.” His sister gave a less-than-apologetic grimace. “I didn’t actually expect something so dramatic to happen. I thought he would notice the brakes were sluggish and bring the car in to be fixed, and then I could see him again.”
“You almost killed him,” Mike insisted. “I thought your meds were keeping things under control, but all these weeks, you’ve been deliberately damaging Casper’s car and puncturing the tires.”
Despite the things Rachel had apparently done to him growing up, Mike seemed as genuinely shocked by Rachel’s behavior toward Casper as he was.
Casper had never known of any of Rachel’s petty jealousies toward Mike. Or considered her as a suspect in the multiple attacks on his car and the cause of the brakes failing.
Until Mike told him a few minutes ago that Rachel had been diagnosed with a mental illness ten years ago. That although she had meds she took daily, the highs and lows of that illness occasionally caused her to behave irrationally and sometimes indulge in destructive behavior.
