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‘Why wouldn’t I hate him?’ He looked at her then, his eyes suddenly empty shells, lost, lonely and soulless. ‘Because your brother killed my fiancée.’
CHAPTER ELEVEN
HIS fiancée? Oh God. She remembered the photo in the guest room, the smiling girl Millie had said had died in tragic circumstances, and whose picture Daniel couldn’t bear either to part with or to see. But what could her brother possibly have had to do with her death?
Nothing.
‘No.’ Sophie wasn’t even sure why she’d believed that, but she did and it was out there; now the word hung between them, a one-word rebuttal to an accusation of nightmarish proportions. ‘You’re wrong.’
‘You don’t even know him. You don’t know what he was like back then. You have no idea what he was capable of!’
‘Maybe not, but I still don’t believe my brother is the type of man that could have done what you said and be lining up to marry your sister. What kind of man could do such a thing? I’m telling you now, Jake’s not that man.’
‘Then you don’t know your brother at all.’
She shook her head. ‘No. I don’t know you.’ She moved to go past and he caught her arm, his fingers like claws in her flesh, although she felt no pain, her fury consuming her ability to feel anything else.
‘Don’t you want to hear what he did? Or are you too scared to learn the truth about your precious brother?’
He was wound tight as a drum, his skin like a mask over the bones of his face, his eyes deep pits as he challenged her, continuing unbidden, his voice empty and flat. ‘It was our final year at high school. We’d just finished exams and my family all went to Italy for three months, to visit the extended family my parents hadn’t seen for years. Emma and I were to be officially engaged the week after we came back.’
He seemed to realise he was still holding her then, and let her go, turning his head away. ‘Emma wanted to come with us, but she’d just scored a job and we thought it was better to start saving up. Three months away from her seemed an eternity—stupid, really, when I had no idea then what eternity even meant.’
He paused, his head dipped on sagging shoulders. ‘I couldn’t wait to get on that plane home. Except just before we left for the airport we got a phone call. Emma had been thrown from a car when it careened off the road. She wasn’t wearing a seat belt. Maybe she might have survived the crash if she was, maybe she might have survived anyway, but the car rolled on top of her. She didn’t have a chance.’
Sophie shivered, the chill of his words going bone-deep. He’d lost his fiancée in tragic circumstances, then he’d lost his parents in a similar way not long after. No wonder the trauma had cut so deep.
‘I’m truly sorry,’ she said, meaning it. ‘But I still don’t understand what that had to do with my brother.’
His eyes turned to black holes. ‘She was in your brother’s car!’
Sophie swallowed. She knew Jake sometimes had headaches, a legacy of a crash he’d once been in, but she’d had no idea of the details. Was Daniel right? Did she really not know her brother that well? Could he be responsible for such a tragedy?
‘And you blame him?’
‘Who else am I supposed to blame? He always resented that I had money and he had none. He was jealous of my success at sport and my academic results. And he hated the fact the most beautiful girl at school wasn’t interested in him, despite his efforts. So, the moment my back was turned and I was away, he went after her.’
‘You can’t know that, surely? Just because they happened to be in the same car together.’
‘Oh, I know it.’ His lips turned into a thin line. ‘Because there’s more—the autopsy discovered she was pregnant.’ He tilted his head and directed eyes of bleak, black ice at her. ‘The baby wasn’t mine.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘How could it be, when we’d never had sex? We were waiting for the engagement, which was half the reason I couldn’t wait to get back.’
‘And you think it was Jake’s child?’
‘She was six weeks’ pregnant. I’d been gone three months. She was with him when she died. You work it out.’
She swallowed. The horror of the past was so vast, ugly and heinous right here in this room, wound tight inside this man, that she wanted to flee from it and from the island for ever. Because now that horror belonged to her too, courtesy of her brother’s involvement, courtesy of Daniel’s callous seduction of her. And still she couldn’t believe it could be true; she wished she could find the words to console Daniel for his loss, wished she could find the words to defend her brother before she could talk to him and determine the truth herself.
