Page 131 of Necessary Cruelty

Trouble in paradise might be the understatement of the year. “You don’t have any idea where he is?

“Last I heard, he was going to visit you in the hospital.” Her gaze travels up my body, taking in the hospital scrubs I had to put on since the emergency room staff cut my wedding dress off of me. “I assume that you’re fully recovered.”

“Getting there, thanks. I’m going to call around and see if anyone has seen Vin. Maybe I should ask Duke.”

She shakes her head. “He’s away on business.”

I’m about to turn away when something occurs to me. “Do you remember my mother?”

Her lip quirks. “Vaguely. I wouldn’t say we ran in the same circles.”

“She worked for you, right?”

“She did,” Giselle replies slowly. “But that was years ago. She never came back to work after Vin’s accident. Of course, we would have had to let her go even if she had. Accidental ingestion or not, you expect more from the people caring for your children.”

“Yeah, of course.” I don’t know what drives me to ask her about this. But the more I think about it, the stranger it seems that none of them ever suspected my mother of being involved with his poisoning. She had been Vin’s nanny at the time, after all. “Did they ever figure out how Vin got the oleander in his system?

Instead of answering, she moves to a small end table near the top of the stairs and opens the drawer. “It’s really too bad that Julia decided to leave town. Considering she was the one there at the time, these seem like better questions to ask her. It’s a shame that she hasn’t ever come back to Deception.”

“Julia never came back because you killed her.” Vin says from below us. His voice startles me so much that I stumble on the last step when I turn to see him standing below us in the entryway. He bounds up the stairs and comes to a stop right behind me. “Isn’t that right, mother dearest?”

When I turn back to Giselle, she pulls a gun out of the drawer and points it at my chest.

---