Page 160 of Bitter Secrets

“Nothing.”

She blinked. “Excuse me?”

“I didn’t have anything on you. If it wasn’t for Sarai giving me your Thalia Crane book, I wouldn’t know what you’ve been up to since you walked out on me.” He gave her a sardonic look. “It seems that I’m your dirty little secret.”

Wasn’t that the fucking truth. “Do you have anything on Kye and Bailey?” she asked sarcastically.

He didn’t skip a beat.

“They run a scam on their tutor. Kye cries so Bailey can grab candy. They split their winnings fifty-fifty.”

A hysterical laugh bubbled up in her throat, but she didn’t let it out because if she started, she wouldn’t stop. “And Lyle?”

His hesitation made her heart beat double time.

“Roth?”

“You can’t handle that one.”

She took a step toward him before she stopped herself. “What the hell are you talking about? I’m handling you, aren’t I? Why would you protect Lyle?”

“It’s not him I’m protecting.”

For a second, she was totally at sea, and then her mouth dropped. “You’re trying to protectme?”

“I always did.”

Something popped in her chest with the same force as a cork from a bottle as her temper erupted. “You haveneverprotected me! Not once! You weren’t there when I was shunned by my family. You left me on my own to face society and the day to day without you.” She jabbed her finger at him. “You can’t even protect me fromyourself!”

“I had to become someone else to get where I am today. I didn’t want you to see that side of me. I gave you the best of me when I visited. You caught me off guard when you came to London. If you hadn’t left so quickly, I would have caught you. I came back within the hour.”

She stared at him for a full minute before she spun away. It didn’t matter that he came back. His confession was five years too late. She shook her head as she paced. He was turning her inside out, but that was nothing new. If he caught her before she left London, could he have convinced her to give him another shot?

She was so in her head, she didn’t realize he moved until she bumped into him. She opened her mouth to let him have it, but resorted to baser instincts and took her frustrations out on him by beating her fists against his chest as everything she was trying to hold in boiled over.

“You’re the worst thing that ever happened to me! I wish I never met you. You ruined my life—and my family’s! If it wasn’t for you, I—”

He grasped her shoulders and gave her a shake to jolt her out of her hysteria. “If it wasn’t for me, your sisters would have lost Hennessy & Co to someone else.”

“You don’t know that! Everything could be different.”

“Or the same. You could still be estranged from your family if you chose yourself and left Ford to become a writer. Same results, but you never would have made up with your father, and you wouldn’t be worth three hundred million.”

“Stop twisting this around! Maybe I would have been happy as his wife.”

“You wouldn’t be.”

Deep down, she knew he was right, but her life wasn’t better for selecting her own path instead of her father’s. She was fucking miserable. As if he could hear her thoughts, his fingers flexed on her.

“There’s no sense debating what could have been. We made our choices. This is where we are now.”

Despair made her voice crack. “But I didn’t know…”

“You did.”

“What?”

“What you identified in Grayson, you saw in me too. You were naive, but you knew what you were doing. You could have turned me down. You didn’t. You wanted me to ruin you, to take what should have been Ford’s. You wanted it dirty and rough, and that’s what I gave you.”

---