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She’d never been able to suspect Shane and Sebastian as Margot had, though. And she’d tried to, many times. Now … what a mess she’d allowed herself to be drawn into once again. She’d let herself believe a whisper was a fantasy, a touch a dream, and Sebastian’s possession of her simply a manifestation of hunger. And she’d known better all along. Even as she let him bend her over that bench and surge into her, she’d known better.
Pressing softly against her abdomen, Alyssa reminded herself that she hadn’t been protected and Sebastian hadn’t worn a condom. She’d become pregnant that first week that the cousins had taken her, their cocks bare, spilling semen into her as they cried out her name, as lost in the pleasure as she had been.
“We don’t protect you well enough, sweets,” Shane had breathed out against her neck, his heartbeat racing beneath her cheek as he finished taking her at the kitchen counter, his cock still filling her, still throbbing after releasing inside her. “If you weren’t protected, you’d have already ended up pregnant.”
“And you and Sebastian would be trying to figure out how to hide from Daddy’s wrath.” She’d laughed, only half-joking.
“Only if you were hiding with us.” His voice was strained, his cock immediately iron hard again and moving inside her. “Only if you were hiding with us.”
She would have already been carrying their baby then, tiny, silently, secretly, forming inside her. Her body had defied the medication she’d been taking for birth control and, without any of their knowledge, had created a son.
“I think it’s my turn to have what was taken from us, now.”
Her eyes flared open. Straightening with a gasp, Alyssa stared into Shane’s deep blue eyes. Standing at the entrance created by the house and the evergreen border of narrow, interwoven pines that grew around the patio, he watched her with hooded, brooding eyes.
His statement had her shoulders straightening, her gaze narrowing on him before she turned and walked stiffly back into her office.
> “I don’t think that’s how it works.” Turning to confront him, she found herself confronting his wide chest instead.
“I think that’s exactly how it’s going to work.” His voice was so dark, so deep, that the danger inherent in it vibrated through her senses.
“Wrong.” Her body was screaming yes, though, and she had no idea how to shut it up. “You need to leave and come back at a more acceptable hour and with a more acceptable way of greeting me. We can talk then.”
Alyssa forced herself to meet his eyes; she found herself pressed between the edge of the desk and his advancing body. And her senses were reacting with such strength that she found herself cursing her own awakening sensuality. A sensuality she believed had died a slow, painful death after she’d left Spain.
“Do you really think that’s how it’s going to work?” he growled, hemming her in between the desk and his body. “After everything I’ve learned since Saturday night, do you really think that’s how this night is going to go?”
The cousins’ arrogance had definitely grown in the eight years that had passed.
“After everything you’ve learned,” she murmured, the bitterness seeping into her voice. “How like you and Sebastian to think of it in those terms. How about everything I learned since Saturday, Shane? What about learning that the men I loved beyond anything couldn’t even trust me enough to tell me how my entire world was being threatened?” Her voice rose, though she managed, just barely, to keep from screaming. To keep the throttled rage from spilling out and destroying both of them. “You let me think you no longer wanted me.” A trembling finger stabbed toward him. “You let me marry to ensure you knew I wouldn’t try to claim the child as yours. You let me lose my child alone, and you let me nearly die alone.” She was shaking now, just as she had while confronting Sebastian. “Neither of you could trust me enough to tell me why—”
“Because we didn’t know!” he snapped, moving closer as Alyssa retreated, desperate to keep the cousins from touching her. “We didn’t know about the test you left. We didn’t know about the baby, Alyssa. We did not know about the pictures and the threats sent to you. But just as you accuse us for not coming to you, neither did you come to us.”
“I was terrified—”
“And you think we weren’t?” His expression was like stone; his voice throbbed with anger, with remembered rage. “You were our life. You always have been.”
“You sent me away; I didn’t send you away.” The retort was thick with remembered pain. “No, Shane, you have no right to question why I didn’t come to you for anything. You sent me away believing I was a summer fuck and nothing else.”
“You knew better!” Now his voice did rise. Not enough to be heard far, but it rose.
“And according to Sebastian you knew when I lost my baby.” Fists clenched, she fought to hold on to what little control she had left. What little sanity she had salvaged from the past eight years. “You knew something horrible happened. And you stayed in your drunken stupors until you could bear what you sensed had happened to me. And where were you two years ago?” she sneered. “I nearly died twice and Sebastian said you heard my whisper to you that I was cold?” She had to laugh at that, but there was no amusement left in her. Only the bleak knowledge that they had ignored her every time she needed them. “I screamed for you and Sebastian as I felt our baby die. I screamed for you, Shane. I cried until there were no tears left inside me. And when I felt myself dying two years ago I reached out to you with every fragment left of my soul. Where the hell were you?”
“In this fucking room the night your mother was buried,” he snarled, the fury lining his face now a terrible sight, the words silencing her as nothing else could have. “And we’ve been watching out for you ever since.”
“Like hell—”
“How do you think you came by that necklace that was stolen from you the morning my grandfather had two employees slip in and steal our belongings?” he snapped. “We came to you, Alyssa, and that damned viper Summer Bartlett demanded we give you two years to recover before claiming what was ours. Two more fucking years on top of the hell we had already lived through, and we gave it to you rather than see you suffer more.”
Alyssa felt herself stumble.
Sometime after the infection that raged through her finally responded to the antibiotics she was given, Summer had asked her if she remembered anything that had happened before she woke.
Alyssa hadn’t remembered anything but the darkness and scattered remnants of what she’d believed were dreams.
“We replaced the promises we made to you, Alyssa.” His voice was lower now, the bitterness in it thicker, though. “We made certain Gregory couldn’t hurt you and we came back to you—”
“And it was too late then, just as it’s too late now.” Her hands lifted helplessly as she stared back at him.
