by Nikki Logan
‘Thank you for taking my phone,’ he said, sobering, staring up at the two puffy clouds populating the blue sky.
She let her head flop sideways on the earth, towards him. He was lying much closer to her than she’d realised. ‘You’re welcome. How are you doing without it?’
‘Better than I’ve felt in ages.’
That momentary flash of vulnerability deserved a reward. ‘Well, thank you for the paddle-boat race. It’s nice being able to give something one hundred per cent.’
‘Yet you still lost.’
‘Barely.’ She reached over and thumped him, aiming for his stomach but encountering only hard, trained muscle under wet shirt. It felt as good as it looked.
Sigh.
‘Seriously,’ he said, ‘why would you not give it your full effort, ordinarily?’
There was no judgement there, just curiosity. ‘People don’t like being shown up, as a rule.’
His groan was more of a curse. ‘Do you know how long it’s been since someone gave me a run for my money in any capacity? Bring it on.’
‘Maybe no one wants to cross the rich guy?’
‘You cross me daily.’
‘I don’t care about the money. Or the power. Or the sexy, expensive suits. But other people do. Maybe your cousins just let you win at paddle boats when you were young.’
His gasp turned into a chuckle. ‘Wash your mouth out.’
The nearby water lapped the shore and washed against their beached paddle boats in dull whumps that exactly matched the steady thrum of her blood.
‘Was it your father that taught you to downplay your assets?’
Every part of her tensed up. So much for the relaxation of the afternoon.
Aiden pressed, ignoring her flashing neon body language. ‘I know it wasn’t your mother. Not from the way you’ve spoken of her. Or was it Jardine?’
Pfft. ‘I wouldn’t give Kyle the satisfaction.’
He leaned up on one elbow and held her eyes. ‘So your father, then.’
Trust didn’t just materialise. It took risk. ‘When I was seven I started to express my independence, like all kids.’ His steady gaze was encouraging. ‘Dad found it amusing for about five minutes.’
Aiden frowned. ‘He punished you for testing the boundaries?’
‘I think he punished me for being too much like her.’ The words bubbled up from her subconscious for the first time. ‘He thrashed me a few times but realised pretty quick it wasn’t effective. It just made me more determined to stand my ground. And that just inflamed him more.’ She took a breath. ‘We lived pretty much in a permanent state of conflict, the two of us, and he disciplined me with whatever he could without getting arrested by the Child Protection Authority: denying me permission for school excursions, withholding pocket money, refusing to sign my school notes so I’d get in trouble.’
Yeah, Eric Sinclair loved other people to do his dirty work.
‘So what changed? If you were seven that was right before...’
‘He found my off switch.’
Aiden frowned. And he hesitated for an age before risking, ‘What was it?’
She picked at the grass on the bank of the shore. ‘Mum. When I was bad, he hurt her instead of me.’
Blue eyes widened and flooded first with relief—that her father hadn’t touched her, presumably—but then the reality of Eric’s insidiousness dawned on him and they filled with the same expression she’d seen on his face when he’d locked them in the coatroom. Fury.
‘Pretty soon he was hurting her preventatively, if he even got a whiff of attitude from me. It was like negative conditioning.’
Aiden just stared, unable to make words.
‘As long as I was subservient and respectful and didn’t show off or try to antagonise him, he left her alone. But if he got the slightest suggestion I was defying him...’ She twisted her fingers around in the grass and pulled a dirt-packed clump free. ‘It was quite effective.’
Aiden gently unfolded her fingers and let the dirt fall free, then wrapped them in his own warm strong ones. ‘What changed?’
‘She told me much later she’d spent all year trying to figure out what she was doing to cause his rages. But she knew me, she saw me dying inside and she started watching him. Finally she realised what was happening.’ Tash lifted her eyes. ‘And so she called your father.’
Aiden froze. ‘That’s why they got back in touch after all that time?’
‘He was the only one she knew could help.’
It took three swallows before he could speak clearly. ‘And did he?’
She shuddered in a breath, glad to be rid of those days. ‘Within a month we were in our own place and my father’s hand was forced by how public it all was. Saving face was everything to him. He let her go. But not before trashing her name with everyone we knew.’
His eyes blazed. ‘Did they even sleep together at all? Or did he just want your father to think that?’
The question was clear. Did he destroy my family to save yours?
‘In her diary she talks about how ashamed she was to lie with him given the marks of abuse on her body, how all she could remember was how he used to look at her when she was young and beautiful.’ She squeezed the fingers still curled around hers. ‘But he made her feel beautiful one last time.’
Aiden frowned.
‘As soon as he’d set the wheels in motion he went back to your mother. To you. I think he might have paid my father a visit, too. Warned him off.’
He fell to silence, and she let him process. As he did she poked around in her heart for the usual shame she felt when she thought about those awful days, but there was nothing there. As if revealing it had allowed it to flutter free. Adele Sinclair had spent the next decade trying to undo the damage her husband had done, trying to patch up Tash’s fractured little soul. Yet she was thirty before she realised none of those days were really about her at all.
He hurt her mother to punish Tash.
And he punished Tash because that hurt her mother much more than any bruises ever would.
Win-win.
Aiden’s words came after a very long time. ‘Do you hate him?’
‘I will never love him. Or like him. But reading her diaries has helped me understand him. He was so weak. Such a victim. Even back at uni. I was the only one he could dominate.’
‘And then you started showing your natural strength.’
‘I didn’t always feel strong.’
He sat up, taking both her hands in his. ‘Never dumb yourself down, Tash. Not for anyone.’
She could have kept it light. Put them back on more familiar footing. ‘Sometimes it’s just easier.’
He nodded. ‘Correction, then. Promise me you’ll never dumb yourself down for me.’
He said that just as if they’d be spending a lot of time together. But the echo of such a serious statement—such a serious conversation—hung awkwardly between them. Until Aiden threw out a life preserver.
‘So...what did you think I dragged you out of the observatory for, if not a lusty bout of paddle-boating?’
She grabbed the subject-change willingly. ‘Something a whole lot less public.’ But every bit as lusty.
‘You came very willingly.’
There was a hot question in his gaze. A question she wasn’t in a position to answer. ‘There was a child there. I thought it would be more appropriate to move the conversation—’ and the undercurrent ‘—elsewhere.’
He matched her smile. ‘Good call.’
‘Sadly, now we’re exhausted.’
‘I rally very quickly,’ he assured her, leaning closer.
Oh, that she could believe. ‘I promised your assistant I’d have you back at your office by four p.m. All those messages, re
member?’
‘Screw that. Simone will reschedule. I can even put on one of my sexy suits for you.’ The ridiculous eyebrow waggle mended one of the fissures in her heart. Inexplicably.
Her laugh flung up high, then settled softly back down where they lay like a gossamer parachute. ‘My work ethic is sound even if you’re embracing your new phone-free status. I have a prototype piece to start work on tonight.’
The teasing dropped immediately and his eyes grew keen. ‘The starfish?’
‘Yes. I’m determined to capture those little tube feet just right.’
‘Maybe not everything can be recreated in glass?’
She pulled herself up to a sitting position. ‘Now it’s your turn to wash out your mouth.’
He didn’t want to let her go. It was evident in the deep blue depths of his eyes. But he pulled himself into a sit and smiled sadly. ‘I have a favour to ask.’
‘Wow. One lusty bout of paddle-boat racing and you think you can ask favours.’
‘I want to watch.’
Everything in Tash’s chest tightened up with a twisted kind of anticipation. But experience had taught her not to assume. ‘Care to rephrase?’
‘Your work. I want to watch you make the starfish.’
That was even more personal than what she’d thought he meant. Momentary panic robbed her of brain cells. ‘Why?’
‘I want to see the whole process.’
Again... ‘Why?’
‘Because it’s interesting. And because it’s your work.’
A small fist formed high in her gut, where her throat started. ‘I usually don’t work with an audience....’
Intent blue locked on her. ‘Would you make an exception?’
The only person she’d ever blown glass for was her mother. It was something special between them, so that she could understand her daughter’s passion. Maybe that was all Aiden wanted, too. She took a deep breath.
‘Sure.’ Though the permission was nowhere near as casual as that. ‘It’ll only be a test piece. I’ll have to spend some time on it to get it right.’
‘Test piece is fine.’
She narrowed her eyes as something dawned on her. He looked as awkward as she felt. ‘You look very uncomfortable.’
‘I don’t do supplication.’
Her laugh exploded out. ‘No. I can see that. How does it feel?’
He took his time answering, and then a word formed after his chest rose and fell heavily, just once. ‘Odd.’
‘Well, that’s okay, then. As long as you realise how special this opportunity is.’
‘Oh, I’m getting that loud and clear.’
Was he talking about more than just a glass-blowing demonstration? It was tempting to imagine.
‘Thursday?’ Because, secretly, there was no way she was letting him see her first feeble efforts. If she pushed herself, she could get somewhat proficient with the sea star by Thursday.
Preserving her dignity had become strangely meaningful around Aiden.
‘See you then.’
SEVEN
A changeling stolen from our family...
Aiden’s words swirled around and through the troubling undercurrent from his father’s startling pronouncement just days before. That he and her mother had been together at university. The moment he’d uttered the casual words in the observatory this afternoon, something had shifted and clicked in her subconscious. Like the barrels of a lock clunking into place.
Tash stared at the books scattered around her on the pretty rug on her lounge room floor. Yet there was nothing about it in her mother’s diaries. Nathaniel suggested that was born of fear. It made sense. Adele Sinclair had feared many things about her husband; he absolutely was the sort to violate her most private thoughts in feeding his own ravenous paranoia. That would have been the lesser of many, many evils.
She shook her head and murmured, ‘Why did you stay with him so long, Mum?’
Because she had made her bed, probably. Or maybe because she didn’t think she would do better after she’d watched the love of her life walk away with someone else. From her mother’s diaries it was clear that Eric Sinclair was no prize in their youth—never quite as bright, quick-witted or vibrant as the rest of their group of friends—but he’d apparently seemed harmless enough...then. In the years after they all went their separate ways his true colours emerged—or maybe they were drawn out of him by his fear and suspicion—and perhaps her mother stayed with him out of a deep-seated belief that she’d somehow earned her lot. Eric had resisted every subtle attempt his wife had made to change the dynamic in their relationship and he’d flat out refused her attempts to seek counselling and her threats to leave to force things to be better.
His irrational fear made so much more sense if Nathaniel and Adele had actually been sleeping together.
Tash reached for the palest of the diaries. The oldest. She’d pored over these multiple times; she knew what was there. Or not there. She knew there was no mention of any kind of intimacy between her mother and Nathaniel in their university days, but maybe she was missing something. Something between the lines.
Or between the pages....
She left blank pages in the diary where I would be, Nathaniel had said.
She flicked through the earliest pages in the book. Tales of going to the movies with Laura, or class with Eric, or lunch at the student cafeteria with Nathaniel. But nothing more meaningful. A few pages wailing about some tough exams and—
There!
A blank page. After her first-year exams. Positioned so it just looked like the passing of time. And there—another. On a mid-semester break early in second year to a sleepy little town with Laura. At least it had appeared to be just the two of them, but there was a gently humorous tale of her and Laura in the back seat of the car killing time with a word game.
So if Laura was in the back seat with Adele, who was driving?
No mention. Just another blank page two days into their trip. Did Nathaniel occupy the blank pages of her mother’s diaries just as he’d said? And if he did, what was she being so careful to leave out? He wasn’t completely absent; Tash supposed that would have been as telling as full disclosure when Eric knew the group of friends spent so much time together. So what had they done that warranted blank pages?
It wasn’t hard to guess.
Her mother and Nathaniel had been lovers. Years before that one time. And then something pulled them apart long enough for Laura to get her hooks into the man she, apparently, had a thing for all along and she got pregnant by Nathaniel.
He and her mother had reunited, according to Nathaniel, but when he’d discovered Laura was pregnant with his child, he’d made the hard choice and stuck by the woman he didn’t love.
Which left Eric the last single man standing. Conveniently poised to pick up the pieces of a shattered Adele. Lucky for Tash or she might not exist at this moment. She’d come along not long after Aiden had. Almost as if her mother couldn’t bear to watch the man she loved be father to someone else’s child when she was—
An icy chill worked its way through Tash’s arteries.
She’d come along not long after Aiden had. And he’d come along pretty much straight away thanks to Laura and Nathaniel’s irresponsible hook-up.
A flicker-show played out behind Tash’s eyes. Of the tilt of Nathaniel’s head when he laughed, so like her own. The two of them cheering the same football team on and her turning to smile into eyes the same colour as her own. Their similar taste in food and in humour. His obsessive focus on her and the way he was letting his business slide to spend time with her.
A changeling stolen from our family...
The chill turned to a thick, stagnant goo that made beating agony for Tash’s straining heart.
What
if there was a reason she and Nathaniel had connected so instantly? Were so alike? What if something other than heartbreak came of those few weeks that her mother and Nathaniel were back together? Before he discovered he was a father.
Her heart hammered. What if Adele was pregnant, too, when they broke up? That would explain why her mother would have stayed with a man like Eric. And it would explain why Tash had nothing in common with Eric Sinclair. And—absolutely—why he’d have hated her enough to treat her the way he did.
Because maybe he wasn’t her real father. And maybe he knew it. And maybe the reason her daddy had hated her so much was because of whose genes she carried, not because of who she was.
Blind hope welled, warm and soothing through the thick dread. What if Nathaniel Moore was her real father? A man that she could respect. A man that she could love so very easily. A man worthy of the title. A raft of tingles settled through her body and it was almost the angelic touch of her mother from on high, soft and benevolent and comforting...
And all-confirming.
A slight tremble started up deep in her muscles. How different might her life have been if she’d had Nathaniel as a father instead of Eric? A father who encouraged and praised her successes rather than trying to break her. A father who moved heaven and earth to keep their family together instead of throwing it away in a poisonous, vengeful and public outburst.
She blinked back tears.
God, how much better might she have been being raised a Moore, like Aiden, instead of a—
The blue diary slipped from her suddenly nerveless fingers.
Like Aiden.
If she was a Moore then that meant Aiden was—
Nausea swilled in and replaced the breathless excitement of moments before as she replayed the memory at the football game when Nathaniel had urged her, so intently, not to get involved with Aiden.
Promise me...
A sickening kind of dread took root deep in her soul. The longer she sat there, the more awfully, horribly right it felt. Her stomach muscles locked up hard on the implications.
Aiden was her half-brother.
