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“Because I’m running out of time to fix the damage I did to two people I care about,” the older man said. He didn’t pretend not to understand. “And it’s the one thing I have to do before I can leave this earth.”
“That’s not on you.” Feeling his chest go cold and tight, Travis dragged his hand down his face. “I’m the one who doubted her.”
“You were a kid and I knew damn well what I was doing.” Miles knew how to use his voice and how to weld words and now he used them like a blade. “I’m tired of seeing you punish yourself whenI’mthe reason you acted as you did.”
“I could have trusted her.”
“And she could have told you before she arrived at the Cape that year, couldn’t she? But she didn’t. How would you have felt if you’d seen her in town? You would have still been hurt, still been confused. I made it worse twisting it the way I did. I fucking well knew what I was doing, so don’t try to absolve me of this.” Miles stopped abruptly as his phone clicked. “I have to go. But we’ll talk ... soon.”
“Not about this.”
But he was already gone.
It was past elevenbefore Isabel let herself slow down.
The second she did, thoughts of Travis all but overwhelmed her.
That wasn’t to say she hadn’t been fighting the intrusion of him in her head all day—and she meantallday, from the time she’d seen those impossibly blue-green eyes staring at her out of a face far too thin, and looking far,fartoo old for his years.
Ten years had passed since she’d seen him.
He’d be thirty-two now, the same age as her, separated by only a couple of months.
But he looked older. Notoldin years. He just ... carried a weight in his eyes.
She’d seen that weight in her own eyes back when she’d been living under the interminable pressure of her father’s influence, knowing what sort of man he was, what he was capable of. She hadn’talwaysknown the full degree of his cruelty, hadn’t always known just how corrupt he was, but after what Stephen Beresford had done, and when her father had just shrugged it off ...
She curled her lip and told herself not to go down that road.
Her father had died in prison four years earlier, although he’d kept trying, until the very last, to get his conviction overturned.
In the end, it had been somebodyhe’dsent to prison that had gotten him ... indirectly, or at least that was what everybody believed. There was no concrete evidence to support the theory, but there were enough threads that Miles felt secure enough to tell her that was what he believed had happened.
He told her he was pretty certain her father’s death had resulted as a ‘favor’by a lifer on the account of somebody in another federal prison in a completely different part of the country, a rival of sorts, in the sex and drug trafficking trade—one Benedict Jenkins. Jenkins’ trial, from what Isabel had learned, had been one of the cornerstones of her father’s career, catapulting him to his appointment as a US District Attorney.
But the man who’d killed Wilson had been clever, going after him when there were no witnesses and he had injuries of his own to back up his claims that Isabel’s father had attacked him first.
Isabel knew her father, though.
He wasn’t a fighter.
He was a tough bastard, but he’d never start a physical confrontation.
However, when she’d been asked whether she had doubts about how the ordeal supposedly went down, she’d smoothly said,My father was a man with a lot of secrets. Who knew what he was capable of?
Nobody had spared a lot of time on the matter.
Wilson Steele had been a criminal who’d caused a lot of pain and had made a mockery of the US justice system. That he’d died in prison had been just desserts as far as most people were concerned.
She still had to occasionally testify, either in court or at a probation hearing, the last time being at Stephen’s attempt to get probation. He’d served ten years of his fifteen-year sentence, but he hadn’t been the easiest man for those on the panel to feel sympathy for, his natural arrogance showing through his attempts at piety.
He wouldn’t ever serve a day for what he’d done to her—or his part in what he’d cost her, but she relished sitting in court the day he’d been sentenced and on his one attempt at an appeal, as well as his recent attempt at early probation.
“Stop it,” she told herself, dropping down on her bed and staring out through the wide, elegant window that faced out over the ocean. “If you keep thinking about him, about your pissant father, you’ll have nightmares.”
But her thoughts were caught in a loop and had been ever since seeing Travis earlier.
Travis, with his too-handsome face and his too-old eyes.
