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Seth shrugged. “Okay, maybe I did take the letter she left. Jesus, Aiden. You were all torn up about her leaving. The last thing you needed was a written farewell. I thought you’d be able to get over her quicker if you didn’t have to read a bunch of crap from her. She left you for somebody else. What more was there to say?”
My vision was clouded with rage, and for the first time in my life, I wanted to seriously hurt one of my own brothers. “What did it say?”
“I have no idea,” he admitted. “I never opened it. It wasn’t addressed to me. I tossed it in the fireplace and watched it burn. Looking back, maybe it wasn’t the right thing to do. But we were all working our asses off to survive. When I saw your reaction to the fact that Skye had left for San Diego with somebody else, I didn’t want you to have any reminders of her around. So I took the letter before you saw it.”
I rubbed the back of my neck, trying to ease the tension there. I wanted to punch my brother out for taking that letter, but I knew he’d been trying to protect me at the time. “Did she say anything?”
Seth shook his head. “No. She just said that she was leaving for San Diego with Marco. And that she wanted to give you a letter.”
Marco Marino.
A family friend of Skye’s late mother.
And a bastard I’d wanted to kill when I found out he’d stolen my girl.
Marco was old enough to be Skye’s father, so it wasn’t difficult to figure out that his money had been a big factor in Skye’s willingness to marry him. I hadn’t known him personally, but I’d been damn tempted to find him in San Diego.
I’d wanted Skye back.
But I’d given up because it was obvious she hadn’t wanted me.
And could I really blame her?
Back then, we’d hardly been able to survive. Noah, Seth, and I had barely made ends meet, and we’d had three younger siblings to worry about. But what I’d told Skye was true. If I’d known that her crazy, overly religious mother had threatened to turn her out, I would have found a way to keep her with me.
Seth was shifting around uncomfortably as he said, “What explanation is there for leaving a guy to marry another one with a lot of money?”
I glared at him. “I guess I’ll never know, since you decided to get rid of any reasons she had.”
“I’m sorry, okay? I was angry that she dumped you. And I didn’t see the point in you reading about how she’d left you for somebody who had the money to support her.”
I folded my arms in front of me. “You think that’s why she took off? Because I couldn’t take care of her?”
“What other reason could there be? Marino had nothing going for him except money. And even that ended up being dirty money that he made in organized crime.”
My brother was right. Marco had been put in jail with all the rest of his Italian mob family before Skye had divorced him and returned to Citrus Beach to run the Weston Café. He was serving a life sentence in prison. “Do you think she knew?” I asked Seth. “Do you think she knew that he was in the mob?”
“Doubtful,” he replied. “If she had, I think she’d be in jail, too.”
I scraped a hand through my hair in frustration. “Why in the fuck did she do it?”
I’d spent years trying to convince myself that Skye was out to use anybody to get what she wanted. Now I didn’t know what the hell to think. It had been a lot easier when I hadn’t known she’d left a final letter. I’d been able to write her off as a woman who valued money over anything else.
Not that I’d ever forgotten her.
I still remembered what it had been like to be the first man she’d ever had, and I couldn’t forget the feel of her tight, virginal body taking me inside her. I’d fallen for her hard and fast that summer, even though I’d already been a man, and she had just barely been an adult.
Maybe that was why I’d gotten so damn enraged about any other guy touching her. She’d been mine. Only mine. And I didn’t want any other bastard looking at her, much less touching her.
“She was barely eighteen, Aiden,” Seth pointed out. “And we all knew that her mother was a crazy woman. Maybe she needed a way out.”
You already had enough mouths to feed.
She’d said that. Could it be that she’d at least thought about staying with me?
“She said her mother forced her to marry Marco,” I told Seth. “That she didn’t have a choice.”
Seth sent me a skeptical look. “She had a choice. She could have found a way out, even though it sure as hell wouldn’t have been easy. This isn’t the Dark Ages. Maybe she thought it was the only way out of the loony bin back then, but it wasn’t.”
“Her mother really was certifiable,” I said angrily.
Skye’s mother had been involved in her cultlike church in San Diego for years. She’d joined when Skye’s father had died of cancer. Her daughter had only been five years old.
“I didn’t know Mrs. Weston very well, but she did tell me I was going to hell a couple of times,” Seth answered drily.
“I think she thought everybody was going to hell except members of her church.”
“Like Marino?” Seth questioned.
Marco Marino had been a member and a founder of the wacky religious cult. That’s how Skye’s mother had met him and the crime family who were supposedly upstanding members of the religious organization.
“I wish I had that goddamn letter,” I said gutturally.
I wanted explanations.
I wanted to know exactly why Skye had left, and what she was thinking when she had.
I wanted to find out if she’d ever given a damn about . . . me.
Maybe it was old news, but Skye and I had never really closed our relationship. She’d just . . . left.
“If it makes you feel any better, I regret getting rid of the letter, Aiden. I really do. It was instinct.”
I looked at Seth, and he did look pretty repentant, and regret was something I rarely saw in my brother’s expression.
Yeah, I got it. Maybe I would have wanted to protect him, too, if our positions were reversed. The Sinclairs watched each other’s backs. Always. We wouldn’t have survived if we hadn’t. We’d all parented each other—badly, sometimes. But we’d done our best to make sure our siblings weren’t suffering.
“Anything else you want to confess?” I asked bitterly.
“Nope. That’s about the only shitty thing I did to you that I can think of right now,” he said.
“Why didn’t you tell me before?”
“I didn’t think it mattered before. But you’ve never really put Skye behind you, have you? In all these years, I’ve never seen you serious about any other female.”
“Fuck!” I grumbled.
Yeah, I’d always wanted to see Skye Weston as just a small part of my history. But ever since she’d come back to Citrus Beach with her daughter in tow, I’d wondered what in the hell had happened between the two of us. She’d been fine on the day I’d left for a two-month fishing job. We’d been planning all the things we wanted to do together in the future, and damned if I hadn’t been missing her already the minute I’d left. She’d haunted me throughout that two-month job, and I’d been counting the days until I could get back to her.
