Page 43 of Falling For The Enemy (The Gilbert Curse)

The party continued until almost midnight and Rory hadn’t laughed that much in a long time. When everyone was gone and it was just her and Kit, she knew it was time for that talk she’d been thinking about all night.

But now that the time was here, she wasn’t sure she was ready to face what was to come.

If finding the letter in his father’s papers had started him questioning everything that his aunt and father had told him about Declan’s accident, this evening had just muddled things even more.

Making it damn near impossible to keep the heat of hatred that he’d had for Dash Gilbert alive.

Because tonight, after watching him tease his fiancée, and duet with his sister and cousin, it was hard to keep that image of a man who was ruthless in his mind. Rory wasn’t going to know what had happened during the car crash. Dash had said he didn’t want to add to her trauma of that night, but next week when he spoke to Con and Dash, he’d learn more, hopefully.

But he was going to have to tell her who his brother was and try to find out more of what had happened at the winter gala,beforethe accident occurred.

“So...?” Rory was sitting in the big armchair catty-corner to the fireplace, with her legs curled up underneath her.

“I’m not sure where to start.” That much was totally true. He’d made this into something bigger than he wanted it to be by his reactions earlier. And maybe if he’d been better prepared to let go of his vengeance he wouldn’t have.

“Tell me about your family. I don’t know anything about them,” she said.

He moved to sit on the couch corner closest to her. Then glanced around the living room, seeing the work they’d done together to bring this room to life. This room could be a stepping stone to his future. If only he handled this right.

“You know my brother died, and then my dad turned to alcohol, which eventually led to his death.” Starting with the easiest part of his past. Just facts. He tried to keep his emotions in check but it was hard.

“Yes, I do. I’m sorry about that. How old were you?”

“I was a freshman in college. I was on the West Coast when it happened. I flew back when my aunt called to let me know what happened,” he said.

“I was a freshman, too, when everything happened to me,” she told him. “It’s funny that our lives were both changed at eighteen.”

More like ironic. She didn’t know it was the same accident that had shaped them. “Yeah.”

That was all he could say to that. It was harder than he’d anticipated, going back to that time in his mind. The grief and anger and panic. All of those emotions had swamped him and it was only the fact that his father was always drunk that had kept Kit from turning to drink himself.

“So eventually it was just you and your aunt?” she probed carefully.

“Yes. I dropped out of Berkeley and moved back to Boston. Our family business was shattered and I took night classes at a community college while working to try to save it.”

He looked over at her. She watched him with so much pure emotion on her face that it made his insides hurt. She shouldn’t be looking at him with compassion and empathy. Not now. Not when he’d taken what was left of his family company and reshaped it to go after hers.

He’d used those long days to form a plan with his aunt in their shared grief. One that would take everything from the Gilberts in return for what they’d lost.

“Kit, that’s so...” She trailed off.

“What?”

“Sad. So sad.” Turning toward him, she said softly, “You should have been enjoying college and making mistakes and finding yourself, and instead you had to come back and step into someone else’s life.”

Someone else’s? “How do you figure?”

“Well, you didn’t want to run your family company, did you? You had to because that’s what your aunt and father needed you to do. You never had a chance to know if it was what you wanted.”

He hadn’t ever considered that before. At this point, ten years into running the company, he couldn’t think of what else his life might have been. Until this moment, he’d just assumed that even if Dec had lived, he’d still be where he was.

But now he wasn’t so sure.

“I guess so,” he said.

“Did your aunt help you run it?” she asked.

“No. That’s not her thing, really. She’s good at socializing and finding the right connections. And I used those connections to build our business up from nothing,” he explained.

---