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He hesitated. Her stance was still and straight, and the emotions that swam around him thick with pain. Yet he had to ask the question, if only because he sensed this could explain why she was the way she was—strong and independent, yet oddly vulnerable. “Why not?”
She looked at him. Tears touched her green eyes but were quickly blinked away. “Because my mother sold herself to feed her habit. My father could have been any one of the dozen men she’d had on the day of my conception.”
It was a familiar enough story—many addicts fed their habit that way. He took a sip of his coffee, then said, “It sounds as if you know who her clients were that day.”
She snorted softly. “I do. I stupidly asked her once. She gave me a very detailed account of the possibilities.”
/> A charming woman, from the sound of it. “And you never tried to track any of them down, just to see?”
She looked at him, her expression closed but her eyes filled with sudden anger. “Why should I? Mom was nothing more than a body on which they rutted to relieve themselves. What difference would it make knowing which one of them was my father?”
So they were back to that again. “Kat—”
She held out a hand. “I’ve heard all the bullshit, Ethan. I don’t want to hear it again.”
“I told you the truth last night.” His voice was amazingly calm, given the anger beginning to surge through his veins. “Don’t keep pushing for what we both know isn’t there.”
“You told me part of the truth,” she shot back. “As much as you thought I needed to know, nothing more.”
“Because there is nothing of importance left to say.” Nothing except the reason his world, his heart, had shattered so completely.
Pain rose like a tide, threatening to engulf him. Even now, all these years later, that night still haunted him. The image of Jacinta, deliberately throwing herself down those stairs … He shuddered and finished his coffee in one long gulp.
It didn’t drown the images of all the blood. On her head, between her legs …
“I’ll wait in the car.” He slammed the cup down on the railing and stalked toward the vehicle.
Kat joined him about ten minutes later. She threw a pack onto the backseat, then fastened her seat belt. He started the car and headed for the mountains.
“I’m sorry,” she said after a few minutes.
She didn’t sound sorry. “Forget it.”
His voice was still brusque, and she sighed. “Ethan, how old were you when you met Jacinta?”
He barely glanced at her. “I told you last night. Seventeen.”
“And she was your first?”
He smiled grimly. “Hardly. When puberty hits, so too does the power of the moon.”
“But she was the first woman you’d really fallen for, as opposed to just mating with?”
“Yes.” He hesitated. “Why?”
She regarded him for a second, her green eyes serious. “If she was the first woman you felt anything for, how do you really know she was it, rather than just a rather heated crush?”
“She wasn’t a crush.” His voice was tight with the anger that rolled through him. “Drop it, Kat.”
She sighed again. “You are really the most stubborn and irritating man.”
“Takes one to know one.”
Amusement swam around him. “I hardly think you can call me a man.”
He couldn’t help smiling, despite the anger. “Well, no.”
“Will you answer just one more question?”
