Page 81 of Mad Love

“Whoa, what?” I straightened. “Gary and… your mom?”

Chase nodded. “Yes. They had an affair. She became pregnant, against medical advice, but Gary knocked her up on purpose. Her placenta detached, and she hemorrhaged to death.” His jaw clenched and he looked at his hands.

Tyler’s lips pressed together. “Chase found her.”

“I’m sorry.” My apology was genuine. If he loved his mom half as much as I’d loved mine, then his grief was consuming. I couldn’t imagine losing mom and Cori.

“He wanted another child so he could get rid of Madelaine,” Chase added, swallowing his emotions.

“He had one. Maddie,” I countered.

“And look at how much trouble it’s been,” Chase pointed out. “She isn’t the grateful little gutter rat he plucked from the slums and gave the world to. She questions things, defies him. Sometimes in more ways than her sister ever did.”

Annoyance rippled across my skin, but I could see his point. Killing Madelaine and raising a new baby would have been easier. And we’d been wrong about Gary needing the inheritance immediately; he seemed to have been operating just fine before he’d gotten ahold of it.

“I can’t believe you gave him that money,” I bit out, rubbing the back of my neck.

“We did it to get Maddie free,” Tyler protested. She glared at her cousin. “I told you not to get emotional. But no, you had to tell her the truth.”

Chase frowned at her. “You didn’t see what I saw. Maddie needed hope, Tyler.”

I leaned forward. “And how exactly did you get in a position to give her that hope?”

“Gary reached out to several people in his European circles about her. One of them was my father. It was a dig, mostly, to point out that my father no longer had a wife, but my father shared the message with me, and I realized Maddie was in trouble,” Chase explained.

“Reached out how?” I pressed.

“He was attempting to sell her off and recoup some of what he’d lost.” Chase’s flat tone was jarring. “I know you’re well aware of the types of men he was offering her to.”

Bile rose in my throat, burning me from the inside out. That fucking cocksucker. I knew exactly the type of men he’d offered my girl up to. Men who would look at a gorgeous girl like her and crave nothing more than to break her apart the way a child pulled the wings off a fly when they were bored.

Chase nodded at me. “I offered him a better solution. In exchange for Maddie and five percent of the inheritance, Tyler would locate the money and have it transferred to him.”

Tyler cringed a little in her seat. “If it helps, I think I can get the money back.”

Ash cocked his head. “You can?”

She shifted in her seat. “Yeah. It’ll take a little time, but I wired it through a network that I can use to backtrace it.”

“Smart,” Ash murmured, giving her a tiny smile of approval that turned her cheeks pink.

“Thanks.”

I looked at Chase. “Okay, so back to Madelaine. What did she say?”

“That she’d been watching her father for years. That she wanted to stop him, and she thought we could help each other. The plan was for her to meet me at my family’s summer house in Athens, but she never showed up.”

“Because Gary had her killed,” I surmised.

Chase nodded. “When she didn’t show, Tyler tried to track her down. We heard about the fire, but I never connected the dots. I decided to transfer from Oxford to Pacific Cross to get close to her. When I met her that first day, it was fairly obvious she wasn’t the girl I’d been working with.”

I shook my head, wondering how this asshat had instantly seen what I’d missed for months. Maddie was nothing like her sister. They might have looked identical, but just talking to her should have clued me in. Hell, the first time I’d met her, I’d pinned her to the bed. Madelaine would’ve submitted and tried to seduce me, but Maddie had fought me for every inch.

I’d been so blinded by my hatred of Madelaine that I’d missed enjoying the first time I’d met the woman who would eventually become my entire reason for existing.

“To be fair, I tried to warn her off you,” Chase added with a wry smile. “Still might, but she’s convinced her sister was wrong about you lot.” He pointed from me to Ash.

“Meaning what?” Ash demanded.

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