Page 47 of The Anchor Holds

My spine stiffened. “What competition?”

“For Beau Shaw’s attention,” Jasper replied. “I assume that you’re fucking him. That’s why you went so far as to ask me for a favor that would save his daughter.”

My body started trembling. How obtuse of me to think that Jasper wouldn’t research the woman I tasked him with finding. Wouldn’t discover the connections and come to the most logical conclusion. Plus, if you looked at it from the outside, Beau was more my type.

But Elliot was my type on the inside, in the cracks I didn’t even know I had. Where the light came in.

Not that Jasper would know that.

My mind quickly went over my options, considering the lies I could tell. Protecting Clara was the most important thing to do right then. And if Jasper thought I was fucking Beau, it put her in his crosshairs. No fucking way.

“I wanted to save a little girl’s life, Jasper,” I snapped, then I took a mental breath, knowing that Jasper wouldn’t accept a single noble motivation from me. “And I’m fucking her uncle, not her father.”

A risk. A deplorable one, taking one brother out of the viper’s crosshairs to replace it with another. Elliot was safer because hedidn’t have dependents, because Jasper might do his research and mistakenly brush him off.

A pause. Birds sang, the breeze rustled leaves. I’d surprised Jasper. I’d pointed out that he was wrong. He didn’t like that.

“Wasfucking,” I continued, forcing my eyes to remain on the body with an intensity that would ensure her lifeless stare would follow me to my dreams.

“I was fucking Elliot Shaw.” I used my sleeve to wipe the sweat from my forehead “Not anymore. It was a one-time thing. When in Rome, and all that.” I forced a casualness into my tone, a verbal shrug. “That’s how I learned about his niece. So you didn’t eliminate my competition; you killed a miserable woman who didn’t matter to me at all.”

I gripped the phone so tight, I could feel the edges imprinting into my fingers. I hoped it scarred them, cut through to my bone so I’d forever remember this moment. To ensure that I didn’t make stupid, greedy decisions without thought of the consequences ever again.

I continued staring at the body.

“No great loss,” Jasper said after remaining silent for a long moment. “Since I was able to do some sightseeing during my trip. Jupiter really is idyllic.”

Every word was a threat, I could feel it. His tone was insinuating that he’d find a way to ruin something good and pure if I didn’t come to heel, if I didn’t walk down the path he’d paved with dead bodies and shady deals.

“Don’t worry about the body, the grave. I’ll take care of it. No one will find it. No one will tie you to this.”

There it was. Another threat. He knew I wouldn’t report this. Therefore, I was an accessory to murder. Did he have some kind of evidence that I was there? Some kind of insurance policy he could hang over my head? Maybe.

I wouldn’t put it past him. But my instincts told me Jasper had done this for sport. To send a message more than anything.

“How gentlemanly of you.” I spoke with a fake, ultra-sugary sweetness. “Next time you think to get me a gift, don’t. I can buy my own diamonds, cars, purses. And if I have a need to have someone killed, I’ll do that myself too.” The last sentence wasn’t technically a lie but one I hoped to fuck I wouldn’t have to prove to Jasper or myself.

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Jasper responded dispassionately followed by a loaded pause. I mentally cursed myself for not having the strength to hang up. The talons on that man dug deep. It was a process, ripping them from my insides.

“I miss you.”

My whole body jerked.

Jasper’s words were incomprehensible. He never spoke fondly, never expressed feelings he had toward me.

“I miss me too,” I told him truthfully. “The me I was before all this shit.” I looked down at the body. “I miss the you that you were before all this shit.”

Then I hung up.

I was very good at compartmentalizing. At shoving things into dark corners of my mind and refusing to think of them. That’s the only way I’d survived. And I had to continue surviving. Because I liked my life. And I loved my family, I would never inflict the pain my death would give them. Not until the harm of my death was the safest thing for them to experience.

At that point, I was still fighting.

And in denial about my role in a woman’s murder.

“Sweetheart, I know you’re a grown woman, but this fridge looks like it belongs in a frat house.” Her head peeked around the door. Dark brown hair, cut a little longer than a bob, smooth and styled. Ice-blue eyes that my brother had inherited, a delicate face, wrinkled from a life of laughter and the stress endured as a mother of three. “All you have in here are condiments and booze.”

“A frat house would bankrupt themselves in a day if they spent on booze and condiments what I did.” I swallowed my smile, sitting at the breakfast bar, sipping the coffee the woman in question had turned up at the door with.

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