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Brice looked up, startled. “Don’t you ever knock?”
Logan shook his head. “I’m not sure you’d have heard me anyway. I really need to discuss something with you.”
“About?”
“James.” He didn’t want to refer to him as a father any longer. If Brice had an issue with that, too bad. He was done.
Brice closed his laptop and leaned back in his high-back leather chair. “Take a seat. Let’s talk.”
Logan was going to cut right to the point. “You knew him better than any of us.”
“If you mean I caught more beatings, then yes.”
“I know you were with him when he was dying. I’ve seen enough death to know right before a person goes, they occasionally come clean and share things they’d held on to for years. I need to know if he did that with you.” Brice’s jaw twitched, and Logan had his answer. Now all he needed was what was said between the two of them. “I don’t care if you don’t think we should know, I need to. If I’m ever going to be able to move forward, I need to understand what made him who he was.”
“Why are you asking now? Does it really matter?”
Logan nodded. “I met someone who said our grandmother hated men. Not just disliked them but hated them. That’s a powerful word. James hated women. Do you see a pattern here or is it just me? I can’t risk bringing this into a relationship.” Cori doesn’t need it. Hell, no one does.
“You’re not like him, Logan, if that’s what you’re worried about,” Brice said, leaning forward. “If you were you wouldn’t care what you brought into a relationship. Hell, you wouldn’t be capable of one.”
“Why is that? What made him that way?”
Brice let out a long exhale. “I’m telling you, Logan, it’s not something I wanted to know. Why should we both have to carry this secret?”
So you do know.“It’s my right and because I’m asking. Don’t make me find out for myself.”
“I’ll tell you, but I don’t want the others to know. It won’t help. Trust me.” Logan agreed, and Brice continued, “I’m not sure why our grandmother hated men so much, but James told me she was vicious. She physically and mentally abused him all of his life.”
“How bad?”
Brice opened his desk drawer and pulled out two glasses and poured them each a generous shot of bourbon.
“I don’t need a drink. I need answers,” Logan barked.
Brice handed him a glass anyway. “You’ll need it. I did after he told me.”
Logan took the glass but didn’t even take a sip. He wasn’t a child. What really could be worse than everything else he’d already learned?
“You know she hated men, but she thought men were nasty, disgusting creatures that only used women for sex.”
“What does that have to do with Da—James?”
“When he entered puberty, he faced what all of us do. With no man in the house to explain things, he learned on his own. He told me his mother walked in on him in his bedroom one day when he was... masturbating.”
Logan took a sip of bourbon. Maybe I do need this.
“She beat the hell out of him, calling him a dirty little boy. That day she had all the doors removed from every room but hers. Even his bathroom didn’t have a door or a shower liner. He never had any privacy at all. And she’d go in and check on him while he was in bed. If she caught him with an erection, she would beat him again and again until his mind made it no longer possible.”
Fuck, that’s sick. Cruel.“You’re telling me that she tortured him.”
“I am.”
“But he had us. So he obviously wasn’t so scarred he wasn’t able to have sex.”
Brice nodded. “That’s why he went to Tabiq. It was far away where he could hide his dirty little secret. He needed the women to be innocent, so they didn’t know he wasn’t... experienced.”
Logan downed his drink and handed Brice the glass for a refill. “But what he started there was because of—”
