Incendiary (15 page)

I want to hug him, but he’ll push me away. Despite his explanation, he has a wall around himself.

“I didn’t see you and me ever becoming intimate,” he continues. “I regretted being with her, once you and I got close. It felt like a betrayal to you. I never wanted you to know. Not to hide it from you. I didn’t want to hurt you, Georgie. In hindsight, I should’ve told you. Dealing with your grandmother, I knew better than to believe she’d not find a way to tell you. I’m sorry,” he rasps, his look so open and earnest hope soars inside of me. His jaw clenches, anger still burning within him, but muted by the intimacy of caring for our baby. “Forgive me.”

“I forgive you,” I whisper.

“Get in bed and rest.” He pulls a key from his pocket and sets it on the nightstand. “Feel free to explore the house.”

“That opens the locks on the inside and the outside?” I ask suspiciously.

He nods.

“Why are locks on both sides of the door?”

“I don’t know,” he admits. “With my father anything is possible.” The awkwardness between us is a new experience. We’ve always talked to each other. “There’s an emergency ladder running between those two windows on the outside. It serves as a fire escape.” He points to the north side of the room.

“Okay. Thanks for telling me.”

“I want you safe,” he murmurs huskily.

“Sloane—”

He holds up his hands. “I don’t want to hear anymore. Allowing you to roam the house and my concern about you being trapped in case of an emergency doesn’t mean we have a future together. You’ll never have me again. I slept with Cassandra, so you sought revenge.”

My mood takes another wild swing and I growl-sob, heading to the huge bed and crawling to the middle. “I went my entire pregnancy without you. My entire
life
,” I amend. “Except for…what…? Four months? So, fuck you.”

Fury and confusion darken his eyes and I raise my chin. Our feelings are similar. Except he never had any faith in me, if he so easily believes I betrayed him.

“I don’t need you, Sloane. Neither does Bryn.”

“Glad to hear,” he says coldly, “because I don’t need
you
.”

What’s happened to us?
This is a rhetorical question. I already have the answer. My age aside, our mistrust and feelings of inadequacy destroyed Sloane and I before we really began.

Lost, I glance away.

He storms out and takes my heart with him.

Georgie’s words pound in my head as I stalk to the other end of the hall, where my room is located. Room? Suite is more apt. Dad didn’t believe in just plain, fucking rooms for Mom and I. Those are on the second floor for the ordinary minions who were lucky enough to score an invitation to the great Mason mansion.

Slamming the door closed, I head to the bar in my…What the fuck did Mom call it? An antechamber. God, these women and their fucking terms. What the fuck happened to the ‘room outside the bedroom’?

I pour a drink, unable to obliterate thoughts of Georgie or how she looked moments ago, so heartbroken.

Tossing back the scotch and pouring another, I thrust my fingers through my hair.

I’m a special kind of motherfucker, refusing to back off, even after I promised myself that I would until I checked into her story about the fucking detective. She’s not denying she talked to him, which sticks in my fucking craw.

My anger rises up and twists inside of me, so I lash out and almost immediately regret it.
Fuck.
This can’t be our sick cycle. It won’t be good for her or Bryn, the reason I apologized to her about her mother. The affair I had with Cassandra, though brief, was one of the biggest mistakes of my life. And Georgie’s right. She deserves answers.

But, fuck, she destroys my determination to keep her at arm’s length. She’s so young and so alone. Her eyes beg me. To believe her. To love her. To be with her. Thanks
to her big mouth, my dealings with her will be even more carefully monitored. By law enforcement—if they knew we were under the same roof, they’d throw me under the fucking jail. Also, by the media and my fans—if
they
knew we were under the same roof, my reputation would be shot to fuck and Georgie’s allegations would have more weight.

She shouldn’t be anywhere near me, but I can’t stay away from her.

Confused at my irrationality, I toss back a third drink. Used to hard living, the scotch goes down like water. In a quest to forget, it’s so easy to move to drugs because of my tolerance to alcohol.

I need to keep my faculties. For Georgie. For Bryn.

For
me
.

She’ll be too vulnerable if I fuck myself up with booze and cocaine.

Georgie loves Bryn. I see that. I’m sure Helen knows it, and will happily use it as leverage, just as she used my affair with Cassandra against me.

My dick fucked that up, but I still don’t trust Helen not to betray Georgie on behalf of Cassandra.

None of them realize Georgie still needs guidance. She has no solid footing.

Crowell pops into my head. In her misguided trust, she believes in him. Just as she believed in me.

Fuck.

The sitting room door opens and Dad walks in. Ignoring his bruised lips and the swollen right side of his face, I scowl.

“What the fuck do you want?”

He nods to the sofa behind me. “Have a seat.”

No fucking way am I entertaining my father outside of the public eye.

“Sit,” he repeats.

“No. You sought me out, unfortunately.”

A muscle ticks in his jaw and he glares at me, before heading to the bar uninvited and pouring himself a drink.

I won’t get rid of him until I hear him out. “What do you want, Dad?”

He sips from his glass. “Are you calmer now that she’s here?”

Brushing past him and refusing to respond, I fix myself another scotch.

“Does she know you were aware of what I planned to say during my interview?” he goads.

I slam my empty glass down. “She fucking knows,” I snarl. She knows and, still, she loves me. That’s who Georgie is. Depthless in her sweetness, despite her sassiness. I’m fucking up because of this asshole and what he did so long ago.

“What. The. Fuck. Do. You. Want?” I stalk to him. “To have me charged with Steffie’s murder? To pull your support from me for the pending statutory rape charges? What?”

His face falls and he reaches out. For some reason, we’re close to one another, a fact I don’t realize until he touches me. Repulsed and shocked, I knock his hand away.

“Sloane,” he croaks in a pleading tone. “Son.”

After all that’s happened, he has the fucking audacity to call me
‘son’
as a term of endearment. “Don’t call me son!
Your
son drowned with his sister.”

“I had no use for Stefanie,” he begins hoarsely. “She was nothing more than an extension of her mother and Alexia was,
is
, a piece of work. As long as your mother wanted Stefanie around, I could deal with her.”

It doesn’t fucking matter what Alexia Mason is or was. Nor does it matter if my mother didn’t wish to bother with Steffie.
I
did. Whatever Dad has to say is years too late.

“Keep your fucking bullshit story, Dad,” I bite out. “I don’t want to hear it.”

“Sloane, son…” He glances away at my growl, but won’t relent on this sudden quest. “Don’t you want to know what happened? Hear my side?”

Is he fucking kidding?
“I know your fucking side. I saw it.”

“Listen on behalf of your mother,” he implores.

Low motherfucker bringing Mom into this. “I heard what happened with Mom and Steffie,” I snap though I’m caving. He knows my fucking weaknesses.

For a minute, I hate Mom, too. And Steffie. And Georgie. I want nothing to do with Bryn, either. I need groupies. They’re just pussy and a means for a dick suck. I don’t give a fuck about them or what they think of me. I don’t fucking need them because they are so easily replaced. But Mom, Stefanie, Georgie, and now my daughter, matter to me. I’m not a superstar to them. I’m a son, a brother, a lover. A father. Roles held by ordinary men, who know what it means to be just a man.

My daughter, for instance, is new and helpless, and didn’t ask to be created
or
to be born. That was a decision Georgie and I made, whether consciously or not, when we had unprotected sex.

Bryn doesn’t give a fuck her daddy’s a mega-wealthy, world-famous man slut. I only have to do right by her and she’ll love me.

“You don’t know the entire story,” Dad presses into the silence.

“I do. Mom decided she didn’t want Steffie around. You killed her, and could no longer keep the hatred you had for me a secret.”

He goes ashen and his eyes widen as if I’ve just accused him of selling national secrets. “Hate you?” he gasps. “You think…I hate you?”

I glare at Dad for his Academy Award worthy performance. “No, you fucking love me. That’s why you’ve threatened to pin Steffie’s murder on me for all these years and fed fuel to the hatred burning between Kiln and me—”

“No!” He points to me. “You did that. I didn’t tell you to stick your dick in your brother’s wife.”

At the time, I felt more than justified. Now? I’m not sure. It becomes a bitter cycle of viciousness, where the wronged becomes the perpetrator and the perpetrator becomes the victim. “No, you didn’t.”

“You’re Bryn’s son. Nothing else matters. I don’t care if you fucked Kiln’s wife. You’re our love child. But why the fuck did you return so quickly? Why didn’t you stay longer at the house, son? You weren’t supposed to see me. It was just supposed to be a horrible accident. But you returned too soon. And I knew you’d talk. The only way to keep you quiet was to accuse you of the murder if you ever went public.”

The words slap me and I stagger back, hitting the bar and shaking the decanters and glasses. Remembering the camera dissipates my shock. He’d planned her murder and his scapegoat in advance. “Lying motherfucker. Dirty, lying bastard. You took photos of me, standing over Steffie’s dead body. You snapped me with my hands on her. You and I know I was trying to revive her, but those fucking pictures made me look like a boy guided by jealousy and revenge, who wanted to eliminate his sister.”

That’s Dad’s story and the photos tell it succinctly.

“What did you expect me to do?” he shouts, throwing up his hands in frustration. “Bryn demanded I take the camera because she couldn’t join us.”

“You had this planned,” I insist. “I don’t remember seeing you with a camera that morning when you sent me back to the house.”

“Your mother and I went to the yacht the night before. She brought it with her then, in case we ran late the next morning. It was a convenience I couldn’t overlook with your untimely return.”

“What about the gun? You had a gun.”

“I was going to shoot Stefanie. Did you not see the tarp? It was laid out so there’d be no blood evidence. The hit I gave her stunned her for a moment, but she got up before I fired. She was wobbly, so I pushed her into the water.”

“If you didn’t want to blame me, why the fuck did you invite me at all?” I might’ve believed his claims of fatherly love toward me if he’d taken means to shield me from the horror of my sister’s death altogether.

“I had to invite you. Stefanie wouldn’t have come otherwise.”

My limbs, so agile onstage, are frozen with the horrible realization that I was the bait used to lure my beautiful sister to her death. I want to throw up.

Heaving in a breath, he glances away. “You came back, and I had to keep you quiet, so I grabbed the camera as an afterthought. It was that or killing you. Sometimes, I wish I had. I would’ve protected you.”

Once, I wished he had, too. Now, I’m glad he didn’t. No matter how fucked up I am, I love living.

“I would’ve fucking drowned you if it meant saving Steffie.”

“That isn’t true,” he denies. “You aren’t a murderer. That’s why I stopped the interview with Crowell Daniels. You
would
kill him to protect Georgiana. You’re like me with your mother, where that girl is concerned.”