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“I don’t love her,” I said and started the engine angrily. “I never said I loved her. I care about Bonnie. We’ve become friends. Sort of.” Caring about someone didn’t have to mean more than that, simple human compassion. “I don’t want her to die. I want her to have the life she was on track to have before she met us.”
“With or without you?”
Her question hit me with the force of a Mack truck. Did I want Bonnie to move on and move away from me? Hell no. The answer came instantly, before I was even sure it was the answer. “If that’s what it takes for her to be happy, yes.”
“Bullshit.”
I didn’t want to hear, once again, how or why I was wrong about something, so I shifted the car into drive and headed to Ashby Manor.
“It’s not bullshit, it’s the truth. Sometimes they seem like one and the same.”
“You can lie to yourself if you want, Calvin, but you can’t lie to me. You care about Bonnie because you’re a good man. Despite your father’s and my influence, you are a good man. But you’re also in love with her.”
“We’re friends. She needed a friend and that’s what I was trying to be to her.” That was all it was. If it had been Maisie or another friend, I’d have this same rotten feeling in my gut, the same burning urge for more vengeance that I’d probably ever get.
“Friends?” Sadie didn’t ask the question so much as snort it. “You were trying to be her friend by fucking her?”
“Ma, please!” The last thing I wanted to talk to her about was my sex life. Or Bonnie’s.
She laughed, and it was a new kind of laugh, almost like her laughter back when I was kid. Before everything turned to shit. “It was bound to happen with the chemistry between you two, but it was poor timing on your part.”
“Taking her virginity and then calling her a junkie? Yeah.” I laughed bitterly. “Not my finest moment. So she doesn’t want to see me?”
“Believe or not Calvin, you weren’t our primary topic of conversation. It was hard to get anything out of her at all. Surprised me.” Sadie got quiet, thoughtful as the lights of Glitz faded to the residential area where our home was tucked away. “Bonnie has been through a lot for any woman, but for a sheltered Catholic woman like she was, this is all a shock to her system. Whatever she might—or might not—feel for you has to take a backseat to her healing, maybe indefinitely.”
That wasn’t what I wanted to hear, but I nodded anyway. If that was what Bonnie needed to forget the hell she’d been through over the last few months, then that’s what I’d do.
“Fine. I hear you Ma. Loud and clear.”
“Then you really do love her, and that’s a good thing. Bonnie is gonna need all the love she can get to make it through the next few months.”
I didn’t bother to point out, once again, that I never said I loved Bonnie. Never even thought it. I might, but I wasn’t sure. How could anyone ever really be sure? At some point, my parents had loved each other and look how that had turned out? “We owe her that.”
“You killed one man and nearly killed another for this woman. Why can’t you just fucking admit it?” Sadie rolled her eyes as the car came to a stop. “Men. You’re idiots, all of you.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence, Ma, but we have something else to talk about.” As much as I wanted every detail on Bonnie I could get, she could only be safe if we took care of the other shit too. “Agent Beck.”
Thomas opened the front doors with a welcome smile. “Welcome home, Sadie. Calvin.”
“Hey, Thomas,” I said and caught up to Sadie who was trying to dodge my questions. “So?”
She sighed and walked into her salon, straight toward the bar. “We have no worries where Agent Beck is concerned. Jack was a fine employee and a handsome man. I was sad to lose him. His death, while tragic, was not at the hands of an Ashby.”
“Only due to his association with one?”
She nodded. And shrugged. “That is the nature of the beast, and we all know it, even Agent Beck if she could look at this like an adult and not a wounded little girl.”
The disdain in her voice for that particular weakness was hard to miss.
“Then what do you recommend we do about her? She won’t stop digging.”
“Let her dig,” Sadie said nonchalantly. “She’s found exactly what my investigators and the police found, probably all anyone will ever find. Maybe she’ll find a clue we missed.”
Her tone said that Jack Beck was more than an employee, which worried me even more.
