Endeared (The Accidental Billionaires #5) - J. S. Scott Page 0,61

me because I wasn’t perfect.

“So, what can I do to convince you that you’ll never see me walking away?” I asked softly as I looked into his endlessly tender eyes.

Owen looked at me like I was the only woman in the world who existed for him, and I found it strange that I’d never noticed it before tonight.

“Right now, you can kiss me,” he answered throatily.

I immediately gave him exactly what he wanted.

CHAPTER 21

OWEN

“Tell me again exactly why you’re dragging us through this hellish San Diego traffic when we could be back home with our wives in Citrus Beach,” Seth requested dryly from the back seat of my vehicle.

Aiden was riding shotgun beside me, and Seth had hopped into the back when I’d told them I needed them.

Neither one had even questioned why I needed them at the time.

“Because if you’re not with me, I’m very likely to kill somebody, and I’d rather not. I’m a doctor, and I took that Hippocratic oath pretty seriously at the time. I’m just not sure I can uphold it if I don’t have anybody to hold me back,” I told them bluntly.

It hadn’t taken me long to track down Layla’s father, which I’d been itching to do since the moment she’d told me everything last night.

I’d wanted to rant, rave, and lose my shit over all the crappy cards she’d been dealt in her life, but in the end, the most important thing I could do was to protect her so they never fucking happened again.

If I thought too much about a confused, lost, helpless, adolescent Layla who had been submerged in so much darkness that she climbed into a bathtub and slit her wrists, I’d completely lose my mind.

After I’d taken her home last night, I hadn’t slept much. My mind had gone over and over everything I could remember in high school, trying to figure out how I’d missed the fact that she was being tortured by her violent, alcoholic mother.

I had noticed some marks on her a couple of times, but she’d explained them away with so much nonchalance that I hadn’t even questioned whether or not she was telling me the truth.

By the time the sun had risen, I’d decided that she was right. I hadn’t known because she’d become a master at hiding what was happening to her at home.

Did I hate the fact that I hadn’t known? Yes.

Did I understand why she’d hid it? Yeah. How could I not? I was a physician now, somebody who was fully trained to recognize how an abused child became codependent and actually tried to cover up for an alcoholic parent. I got why she’d been ashamed, and how she’d spiraled down into major depression, too.

It was just a hell of a lot harder to handle when that person was somebody you cared about. A lot.

“You planning on sharing with us about why exactly you want to commit this homicide?” Aiden questioned.

I wasn’t about to share all of Layla’s secrets, but I gave my brothers the brief version of what she’d been through as a child. Her mental breakdown was private, and not something they needed to hear unless Layla someday decided she wanted them to know.

“How in the hell does that happen?” Aiden said, sounding infuriated. “If somebody messed with a single hair on my daughter’s head, I’d kill the bastard.”

Shit! Wasn’t that the truth? Aiden was an extremely protective father. I wasn’t sure he’d even let Maya date until she was over the age of thirty.

“He knew,” I explained. “The asshole knew that Layla was being abused, but he never lifted a hand or even a damn telephone to make it stop. She called him, begging him to help her, and he never even called her back. Yeah, maybe we all had an absent father, too. But we had a mother who loved us, and did her best to take care of us. Layla had nobody. No siblings, no close family who wanted her. Nowhere to run. Nobody she could turn to about it.” My voice cracked with emotion, but I wasn’t concerned about hiding shit from my brothers. They understood how pissed off I was, because we were all Sinclairs, and no Sinclair in this generation would ever abandon their child.

“If I’d known, I would have done everything in my power to help her,” Seth said, his voice dripping with regret.

I shook my head as I pulled into the parking area of the office building where her father