when caught off-guard and what to do when you face the threat of a deadly enemy. MacLaine’s driver turns, surveilling me in a way that tells me he’s here to provide more than car service. But he’s old, and I doubt he’s got as little as I do to lose. It would be so easy to cross that street and take them both down. I could probably count on Luca to join me. He doesn’t need a reason to start a fight.
And then Angus MacLaine makes the decision for me. He places one hand on his bodyguard’s arm and turns away, walking with a limp toward the gated building behind him without so much as one final glance.
“Come on,” Noah urges.
I shake it off, or I try to, but adrenaline hums through me from the encounter. We catch up with Luca and Jack, who’d stopped fifty paces away. Luca’s eyes glint with whatever wicked thoughts are currently dominating his brain, but Jack’s are furrowed with concern.
“What was that about?” he asks.
I may as well be honest, because I finally know what I need to do—and I’m going to need them to help me figure out how to do it. “That’s the man who ruined my life,” I tell them, “and someday I’m going to destroy him.”
“That’s when you came up with your plan,” she says softly as the memory fades.
“I was so consumed with hating him, I never stopped to consider…”
“If I was in the building…” trails Adair.
Realizing how close we came to finding each other—on a different continent and without knowing we were in the same city—just makes it more painful for her.
For both of us.
“I could have done something. I could have checked. Before you had to go through everything you did. But all I could see was revenge.” I realize my hands are still fisted and force myself to relax them. “But looking back—it was like I could feel you were there somehow. Like I knew Angus MacLaine would get out of the Bentley. My body stopped to wait before my eyes understood what I was seeing. Probably sounds crazy.”
“If you didn’t know I was there, what could you have done?” Adair says, apparently determined not to pass the buck of self-loathing.
“I don’t want to keep dragging us back into the past. I want us to move on, but I have to know why,” I say.
“Why?” she repeats.
I choose my words carefully. After everything she went through without me, I won’t pile on another accusation, but why did she choose to go through it alone? “You didn’t have to do this alone. I wouldn’t have left you. Why…” A horrible realization dawns on me, and I bury my head in my hands. “The drinking. The fighting. I’m sitting here acting like I was some prize catch instead of a damaged sperm donor.”
“Don’t,” she says in a wounded voice. “Ellie’s amazing because you’re her father.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” The question explodes out of me.
“I didn’t know where you were!” she fires back. “You just took off without a word.”
“I came back. I looked for you.” You didn’t come. I manage to swallow the last bit before it gets out.
“My friends thought it was better not to tell me,” she mumbles. “Poppy only got the guts up to say something a few weeks ago.”
“I sent you a note.”
“I didn’t get it,” she says in a small voice. “Did you get mine?”
“You sent me one, too?” I ask, shocked.
“Before you left. I think. Honestly, I’m not sure how long it took them to come clean that you’d gone. I wasn’t coping well after the video.”
“Video?” I echo the word, trying to make sense of it.
She takes a deep breath, her face as pale as the glowing moon outside, and I brace myself for whatever she’s about to tell me.
“The video of us having sex,” she says in a rush.
“The what?” I’m back on my feet, needing to dissipate the surge of adrenaline her words sent shooting through me.
“You didn’t know.” Her eyes close and she sighs in relief.
“That there’s a video of us having sex? No, and I have a few questions now.”
“I don’t have any answers,” she says with a shake of her head. “It had to have been my dad. He had private investigators looking into you.”
“I remember,” I say in disgust. I’d never forget having my sins dredged up by Angus MacLaine. I’d also never forgive him for it.