Page 36 of Cole

“I’d love to see your new items,” Elizabeth said, setting a glass of water in front of Annie.

“You know where to find me.”

Elizabeth laughed. “I sure do.”

“Where’s Benji?” Annie asked. She’d come down to the house at her dad’s request, and she hadn’t seen Benji yet.

“He’s still sleeping,” Elizabeth said.

“He needs to get up soon.” Her dad frowned. “He shouldn’t be sleeping his life away?”

“He’s a growing boy,” Annie said. “He’s eating lots. Practicing lots. Which is probably why he’s sleeping so late.”

“Has he been spending time with the tutor?” her dad asked.

“Yep. He’s been doing an hour a day with her.”

“Good.”

Benji was smart, but sometimes he didn’t like to do the work. So during the summer, their dad insisted that he continue to work with a tutor so that he didn’t lose progress during those months.

“I hope Benjamin doesn’t think he’s going to play basketball for a living,” her dad said with a frown. “Is Cole Halverson a bad influence on him?”

Annie felt an immediate need to defend Cole, but she bit back the words. Coming to his defense was probably the worst thing she could do. It would be like waving a red flag in front of her dad. The thing was, she was sure that if her dad met Cole, he’d see that he definitely was a good man.

“He doesn’t need a career that puts him in the spotlight like that.”

“Julian is in the spotlight a lot,” Annie pointed out.

Her dad’s frown deepened. “And I’m not pleased about that either. However, it is already well known that he is my son. I don’t want people to be able to make that connection with you and Benjamin. Not when he’s still so young. If he pursues a career in the spotlight, sooner or later, they will dig up our connection.”

“You’ve done a lot to keep Benji and me hidden, but it seems inevitable that at some point something will come out.”

“I certainly hope not. I have invested considerable time and money into hiding what happened to you, as well as your identity. Benjamin has been a bit easier, since we’ve hidden his tie to me from when he was born.”

And yet his life was as constrained as hers was.

There were times Annie wondered if the lengths her dad went to were necessary. She knew that because of his considerable wealth and often controversial stand on political issues that people were looking for any reason to hurt him. It was the reason they all had bodyguards when they were off the property. Even Elizabeth had a woman named Abigail who went everywhere she did.

“Are you still trying to find the people who kidnapped me?” Annie asked, venturing into a territory that she usually avoided because her dad rarely gave her anything but vague answers.

“Of course,” her dad responded without hesitation. “We already knowwhotook you. We’ve just never been able to find them.”

“Do you think they’re together wherever they are?”

“I don’t know,” her dad said. “From everything we learned afterwards, they were a married couple, so it’s possible.”

“If you know that much now, why haven’t you been able to find them?”

“They created elaborate identities when they came to work here, and I’m ashamed to admit that we didn’t do the thorough background investigations we do now. I was far too trusting back then. Afterwards, it was like they disappeared into thin air.”

“And they didn’t go back to their old identities?”

“No. They appear to have created new ones,” her dad said. “Ones that have allowed them to really fly under the radar.”

She didn’t usually ask her dad a lot of questions about the situation, but he seemed more willing than usual to talk about it.

But was it because he hoped that reminding her of the event would help her to accept the restrictions he wanted to put on her and Benji?

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