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“You’re defending them?” she asked, amazed that he would do so. After the party he had refused to even discuss their presence in town.
“Defending them?” Stepping back, he shook his graying head slowly. “I’m not defending them, sweetheart. Let’s say, I hate what they did to you. Hate them for it. But I like to be honest with myself.” Shoving his hands in the pockets of his slacks, her father grimaced tightly. “And honestly, Alyssa, in their position, unaware of what you were suffering, believing they were protecting you from the evil threatening you, I would have done the same damned thing.”
He would have done the same thing?
Wonderful.
So she was supposed to just forgive them because her father agreed with the choices they’d made? She didn’t think so. They had let some nameless, faceless blackmailer keep them from her for years, but what about the last two?
They were blaming Summer for it.
There was always a reason, always an excuse.
Alyssa didn’t want to hear any more excuses. She didn’t want to know the cousins’ reasons or their excuses. She might not have been happy without them in her life, and she might not have been content. Resignation had sucked, though.
“Alyssa, do you still love them?” her father asked then, tipping her chin up with one finger and staring down at her with all the love and understanding that had seen her through twenty-six years and all his gray hairs, as he told it.
“From the first week I knew them,” she whispered. “But I love strawberries too,” she sighed. “Until I start swelling up and choking.” Her allergy to strawberries could be life threatening. As they’d learned more than once.
For a second, her father’s expression was completely blank before his laughter escaped.
“Alyssa, sweetheart, you never fail to remind me why I have so many gray hairs.” The amusement could have been offensive, she told herself, but after years of putting him through hell with one scrape or another she imagined he deserved a moment of laughter.
“Well, I’m glad to know I can at least provide you with a moment of amusement, Dad.” She shook her head at his laughter. “Don’t you have things to do this afternoon? I’m sure I need to go over Candy’s notes and see how many files she completely screwed up for me.”
Her assistant was still in training, she told herself again. Candy had been in training for over a year now. Her humor and ability to field phone calls while keeping fresh coffee at Alyssa’s elbow often made the screwed-up files less of a hassle.
“She guarded your door like a basset hound,” her father snorted. “All big sad eyes and silent chastisement until someone actually reached for the doorknob. I thought she was going to bite my hand off before I made it through the door.”
Yeah. She was going to believe that one. Just after she started believing in fairy godmothers.
“Try to make it to dinner tonight,” he told her firmly as he headed for the door. “Cook has promised one of his premier meals in honor of your survival. It’s guaranteed to be a good one.”
Alyssa rolled her eyes. “You act like nearly getting run over by some bastard is a monthly occurrence.”
Pausing at the door, he turned back, his gaze still sparkling with mirth despite the concern lurking behind it. “Playing with SUVs in the street, falling from trees, or losing your balance while climbing on chairs. The results are actually rather similar, wouldn’t you say?”
She glared back at him, but she had to admit, the bruises were pretty much in the same places and her head had taken the brunt of the damage. Just as it usually did.
His expression softened then. “You look like your mother when you get that look. You look remarkably like her anyway. She loved you, Alyssa. She didn’t say the words—”
“She showed it in the only ways she knew how,” Alyssa finished for him. “I know, Dad.”
He breathed out slowly. “We were probably the only two on the face of the earth who saw that part of her. Everyone else saw the ice. Only we saw the fires beneath.”
“I know,” she said again, and she did.
As the door closed behind her father Alyssa moved back to the large window, wrapping her arms around herself and staring into the sun-splashed day as she tried to make sense of far too many things in her life.
It all came back to Shane and Sebastian, though. Or did it come back to her?
They had been blackmailed to keep pictures from being leaked to porn sites and the media. Pictures that showed her intimate relationship with two men, rather than one.
To ensure Alyssa didn’t attempt to contact them, the same pictures were sent to her parents and a far different threat made.
It was all designed to keep her and her lovers apart. And Shane and Sebastian had taken the responsibility of protecting her, as her father said. Without her knowledge of the true danger facing all of them.
Her father asked what she would have done if they had come to her and told her. It was a question she couldn’t answer, because they hadn’t given her the chance to fight at their sides. Instead, she had existed. Bound to them, a part of her obviously knowing they hadn’t considered the summer just a brief sexual escape.
