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She grumbled with her mouth full, but he got her disdain for that idea loud and clear.
“Why would I lie about that?” he said.
She laughed, choked and made a grab for her soda.
He was a grown ass man, but her refusal to cut him some slack on this fucking well hurt. It’d hurt when she’d run, because they might’ve had a life together free of fear, full of choices. Without her, he could’ve stripped the bank accounts, sold the great big, sad, dusty mansion of a house and fenced the antiquities to the highest bidder. He wouldn’t have had to risk his freedom grafting for a living because it was the only thing he knew how to do.
“I never lied to you.”
“Why would I ever believe that? You wanted in my pants.”
He toyed with his meal, appetite shot. “I got in your pants. Doesn’t mean I stole your inheritance.”
“Why else would my father leave it all to you if you hadn’t manipulated him into it?”
There was no quick and tasty answer to that. The professor was a hard man, and the more Aria had tried to get him to pay attention to her, the more he’d turned from her.
“You frightened him.”
She scoffed. “The only thing that frightened him was the idea he might get caught and do time.”
“You were anarchy on a sugar high. He didn’t understand you and he didn’t want the responsibility of being your parent.”
“Oh, but he was quite happy to be yours.”
Almost. The professor had been an authority figure, but more like a commanding officer than a father. “He knew about us.”
She stiffened. “He’d have killed you.”
He’d certainly threatened to have Cleve disappeared, and the threats were strong enough to keep him from trying anything other than longing looks at Aria for two whole years. But that was the strange thing. Why would a man who didn’t care about his daughter’s welfare outside of housing and feeding her give a damn about who she slept with? He already thought she was a tramp, and Aria had never disabused him of that idea.
“I’ve had plenty of time to think about this. It’s the only conclusion I’ve got. He knew we were sleeping together. He changed his will when he acquired that new shipment of Middle Eastern antiquities. It was the week you got the tattoo.” He touched his head where her crossbones would be, under her hair. “He must’ve thought I was the responsible one and would take care of you if anything happened.”
She looked away. “He didn’t think I could take care of myself.”
“He didn’t expect to die. He was furious with you. It had to be an impulse and he wasn’t an impulsive man. The lawyer tried to talk him out of it. I’m sure if he’d lived he’d have changed it back once he’d cooled down.”
“You’re defending him.”
“Jesus, no. He’s indefensible, but taking the blame for what happened on yourself isn’t the way to go either.”
She drained her soda. She was trying hard to show she no longer cared, but it bled through her careful nonchalance in the way she squeezed the can until it buckled. He’d do anything to take the bitterness of this from her. He didn’t know why the professor hated his daughter, but he’d seen it often enough for it to feel like it was the normal state of play between father and daughter. Hate was a more destructive force than greed. Greed made you covetous, made you a thief and a liar and a conman. Greed and a sense of entitlement made you take things that didn’t belong to you because you could. Hate made you destroy things you had the chance to love.
Cleve was a greedy man. He’d made a life from greed, but he didn’t hate, didn’t have the incentive or the gene for it, and seeing Aria was making him remember how he’d scorned the idea of being like the professor, still in the game in his fifties, when he had no need to make more money, accumulate more things, hate his own family.
But that’s what he’d become, a man looking for a protégé like he’d once been, without his own family.
“He tried to have me committed once.”
Her voice was so flat with the effort to sound neutral it drove him out of his chair. He stood and pulled her up and then into his lap, and she came without protest. She trusted him for comfort at least.
“He said I was using drugs and had anger issues. I was depressed and was a danger to myself and others. I was fourteen and I was miserable and I missed my mother so much. I’d been in his study when I wasn’t supposed to be and discovered his alternative life. I guess he thought I might turn on him and it was better to discredit me so I had no chance of being believed. Then he taught me about forgery so I couldn’t turn him in because I was guilty too.”
He settled Aria against his arm, took her hand in his. “I never knew my parents, but I got the better end of a bad deal. My grandma was a saint and an excellent card sharp.”
“I don’t know why he hated me, except I looked like my mother and he loved her and she’d up and died on him. I did everything I could not to look like her so he’d love me for myself.”
Fucking hell, that explained some things. “None of that is on you.”
