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He knew the moment Senator Davis Allen Hampstead recognized him. Alyssa’s father would have made certain he knew the identities of the men who had stolen his daughter’s innocence and apparently sent such pictures to him.
The door closed rather hard. The senator’s eyes narrowed on him before he turned to his lover. “When did you intend to introduce me to your nephew, Landra?”
Sebastian faced the painful knowledge that his aunt might have lost the man she had come to love so deeply.
“It’s not her fault, Hampstead,” Sebastian informed him, watching the other man closely.
The senator held his hand out to Landra, though he made no comment either way to Sebastian’s claim.
“Davis, you should have told me what happened to Alyssa,” she whispered. “Especially if you knew Sebastian was my nephew.”
She went to him, taking his hand and allowing him to draw her to his chest. His hard, cold gaze remained on Sebastian, though.
“Summer finally got around to telling me a few things a few weeks ago,” he stated. “I’ve let it ride until I could meet them myself.” Anger flashed in his gaze. “Where’s your cousin, De Loren?”
Sebastian crossed his arms over his chest and stared back at Alyssa’s father silently. Shane’s location was no one’s business at the moment.
“Davis, they’re good boys,” Landra protested the air of tension in the room.
“They seduced an eighteen-year-old girl with no experience, and no concept of the pain they could end up causing her,” Hampstead retorted. “They were nearly twenty-five years old, Landra. Old enough to know what they were doing. And they had been doing it long enough to know what she would face.”
“You believe all we wanted was Alyssa in our bed for a few paltry months?” Sebastian could barely believe her father would accept such a simplistic view of the cousins’ relationship with her. “We met her here, Senator, at the Winter Ball Landra threw. We didn’t seduce her then, nor did we pursue her until she came to Spain. By the time she arrived we could think of nothing but her. Neither of us could. She belongs to us—”
“No, Sebastian, not anymore she doesn’t.” Hampstead shook his head wearily. “She might have, until two years ago. Whatever Stanhope did to her changed something inside her. When she woke, Alyssa wasn’t the same. There’s nothing inside her but anger now. Anger and a determination to never need either of you again.”
She might have wanted to be determined, but she still wanted them. With a fiery, feminine heat he’d carried in his dreams for eight years now, she still wanted them.
“We won’t accept that.” He wouldn’t accept it. Ever.
“You waited too long,” the senator stated with a brief shake of his head. “Eight years too long is my guess.”
“She’s still ours.” Her response to him in the gardens had proven that. If he hadn’t felt her, hadn’t lost himself in her for that brief period of time, then he might have believed too much time had passed, too much hurt stood between them. But he had felt her need for him, and he had lost himself in her. “And trust me, Senator, there’s not a chance in hell we’re going to let her go.”
15
Alyssa had known once she’d seen Sebastian’s reaction and realized the past wasn’t as she’d believed that there were going to be problems. Once, she had known them well enough that she had the ability to guess fairly accurately what they would do from one moment to the next in any given situation. And she’d known that she’d have to face Shane next. For that reason, she found herself on pins and needles the day after her father’s party, certain he would arrive at any given moment.
As the day progressed far too quietly instead, Alyssa told herself she wasn’t in the least disappointed that he didn’t show. She hoped that, unlike Sebastian, he was willing to accept the fact that too many years had passed and far too much pain filled the void and the years between them. Bridging that time and the memories that filled them would be impossible now.
As Sunday rolled into Monday and Monday slid silently into Tuesday, she assured herself the faint ache she felt in her chest wasn’t because he hadn’t shown. Yet Tuesday night she was still in her office, next to the renovated suite she’d been stuck in for months two years before, after Harvey’s attack.
Harvey had planned to kill her, she thought painfully, reaching to rub at the scar beneath the blouse she’d pulled from the band of her skirt hours ago. The resulting infection combined with blood loss, anemia, and her weakened system should have killed her.
Without thought her fingers returned to the three gems hanging on the gold chain around her neck. Rising from her desk and stepping to the opened door, she stared into the night beyond the sheltered patio, still worrying the two nearly flawless diamonds and accompanying sapphire.
Summer had never told her where she’d found the necklace. She had frowned, looked at it, and given her one of those wide-eyed little-girl looks and said, “Well, honey, I guess I found it wherever you lost it. I thought it was too pretty not to be worn, though.”
She’d never lost it. It had been stolen from her. She had thought Summer had found a way to resteal it and return it.
Leaning against the side of the open French doors, her head resting against the glass as the summer breeze played over her, she wondered what would have happened if Gregory hadn’t stolen eight years of their lives. Had he been behind the death of their son? Of the last link she’d had to the men she loved with everything inside her heart and soul?
Her baby would have lived. Dr. Brennan’s tests had revealed a drug in her system at the time known to result in miscarriages. Somehow, she’d been drugged, and there were so many of her father’s staff members and employees who worked in the mansion at any given time that there had been no way to determine whom to suspect or the reason behind taking her child from her.
Margot had been certain the order had originated from Shane and Sebastian. She’d been furious, so enraged by Alyssa’s loss that for a while Alyssa had feared what her mother would do. A lifetime of her mother’s distance had ended that night. In the years that passed Alyssa had gotten to know her in ways she’d never imagined possible.
That loss had stolen a part of Alyssa’s soul, though. Taken a part of her so vital, so intrinsic to who and what she was, that there had been no healing from the loss.
The child she had named Shane Sebastian Hampstead—not Stanhope, she would not have allowed their child to carry another man’s name—had been stolen from life with such monstrous cruelty that Alyssa still fought to fathom why, to make sense of the reason for it.
