Hide and Seek - Lara Adrian Page 0,34
you going to tell me about this? After you fucked me a few more times?”
He bit off a sharp denial, but she was already pivoting away from him. She couldn’t talk to him anymore. She didn’t want to hear anything more, could hardly breathe through the tumult of confusion and outrage and hurt that held her in its grasp.
Storming back into the guest room, she began picking up her clothing. John came in behind her, his presence sucking even more of the air from around her. Her skin tingled in reaction to him, all of her senses instinctively drawing toward him even while she struggled to ignore him.
“It isn’t like that,” he said gently at her back. “I didn’t mean to keep it a secret from you. I just knew it would hurt you to hear it, and I didn’t want to be the one to do it.”
She spun a pained look at him. “Do you think it hurts me any less to find out this way? To be blindsided by the fact that you and Alec are conspiring against my brother?”
John huffed out a curse. “We weren’t conspiring, damn it. We were hashing things out, trying to make sense of it all. You think Alec and I want to believe Kyle’s guilty any more than you do?”
Tears pricked her eyes, but she held them back with fury alone. “Tell me what you’ll do to him if you’re able to find him.”
“Make him tell us the truth. Give him the chance to convince us we’re wrong.”
“And then what?”
A tendon ticked in John’s bearded jaw. “That will depend on Talon.”
“Stop calling him that! His name is Kyle. He was your best friend, John. He thinks of you like a brother. I know because he’s told me so. You and Alec both are like family to him.”
John nodded soberly. “You’re right. Kyle Becker was my closest friend, a brother I’d never had. But when the three of us joined the Phoenix program, we all took an oath—to put the program ahead of anything, and anyone, else. We left our pasts behind us. We devoted our lives to it, Lisa. Our futures, too. That’s how important our work was. We all believed in that, but someone betrayed us. Someone betrayed that oath.”
“Not my brother.” Her voice sounded small, wooden. As if even she was beginning to doubt.
Kyle was her only family. He was all she had in the world. For that reason alone, she would cling to her faith in him.
“I hope you’re right,” John murmured. “Alec and I both hope you’re right. But understand, we have to find out.”
She stared into his handsome face, heartbroken by the solemnity of his expression. “Then I hope you understand that you’ll be doing it without me.”
Turning away, she walked into the bathroom to take the towel off her head. She finger-combed her damp hair and met John’s reflection in the large mirror over the sink. “I want to leave. Right now.”
“No, you don’t. You want to run away. From me. From us.” He shook his head slowly. “But I can’t let you do that.”
“Why not?” she shot back. “Isn’t that what you did five years ago?”
A direct hit. She could see it in the way his mouth pressed into a flat line, his dark eyes piercing her in the glass. “Yeah, I did. And if you think I haven’t spent a lot of those years regretting it, then you’d be wrong about that, too.”
God, she didn’t want to be swayed by his tender words right now. She didn’t want to believe the raw honesty in his deep voice, or the way it made her melt inside.
She wrenched her gaze away from him and busied herself with the makeup and brushes left on the bathroom countertop where she dumped them out last night in search of the condom. Just the thought of making love with him made her legs go a little weak beneath her. Worse, it made her anger lose some of its edge.
She dropped a handful of cosmetics into the cloth bag, then gathered up the scattered brushes. “I can’t do this, Johnny. Please... just go tell Alec and his thug friends I want to get off this island as soon as possible.”
“It’s not that simple, Lisa. I can’t let you go. If anything were to happen to you—” He broke off abruptly, and in her peripheral vision she saw him cross his arms over his broad chest. “I need to keep you close