Page 106 of High Sea Seduction

“Oh, you mean Seven hasn’t come up with any yet?” she asks with a voice devoid of emotion.

Blackness encroaches, and I scramble to stay above the void threatening to swallow me up. “Shit.” I stop to regroup. “She found a property in the Hollywood Hills area that matches what you described, but the house was pulled down and rebuilt three years ago. She’ll carry on looking, if you want.”

“I don’t want.”

Shock spikes through me. “What? Why not?”

“Did you stop to think there might be another reason why I wouldn’t want to know what happened to me? Why I wouldn’t want justice for myself?”

The bleak echoes in her voice have deepened, shadowing her beautiful face, shrouding her precious body. I scramble harder to follow what she’s saying. “Why wouldn’t you want justice?”

She shakes her head in deep mournful twists. “You seem to think I hate you for all the things you’ve done. I don’t.”

I know I’m not safe, that the ground beneath my feet is shifting and cracking, ready to swallow me whole should I misstep. But I move toward her anyway.

“If you don’t hate me, then why are we fighting?”

“We’re not fighting. It’s just the ugliness, which we both know lives beneath the surface, coming up.”

“No, this is me. All me. Kitten, you have nothing to feel ugly about. You’re beautiful.”

“No!”

I reel at the tears filling her eyes. I reach out for her and my hands are shaking. She evades my grasp, and the soul I thought I didn’t possess shrivels at the stark emptiness I see in her eyes. “I’m not. Please… I’m not,” she repeats. “I’m so, so far from beautiful that… Oh,God!”

She releases a God-awful sound and crumples before my eyes. I catch her before she falls. She moans and tries to get away from me. I hold on tighter, tuck her face against my shoulder for far more selfish reasons than the comfort I freely offer her. When she’s in my arms, I can dare to believe that there will be a way back for me.

I run my fingers through her hair and plead, “Keely, baby, please. Tell me what’s going on.”

She sobs quietly for another minute. Then she raises her wet, guilt-ravaged face to mine. “What you said just now, about me not knowing the hell of losing a child…”

I frown and try to backtrack. “Yes?”

“I said you were wrong. I wasn’t being empathetic. I was being factual. Iknowhow it feels to lose a child.”

The naked agony shrieking from her is the final string of code that connects the dots. Visions of her on the beach at Montauk and in the shower afterward; the outbursts that guaranteed she would get punished. Her certainty that she didn’t have anything to live for. The facts whizz through my brain at top speed as she staggers away from me.

I follow, needing to tell her she can lean on me if she wants. We can be battered, broken halves of a jagged whole. But she’s staring at me with those big, guilt-soaked eyes again, and the force of her pain is so visceral it paralyzes me.

“You loved your son, Mason. Enough to find answers. I gave birth to mine and gave him away without a single question or protest minutes later. Which one of us is a monster now?”

Shock rains on me and I watch her drag herself to the door. I can’t lift a finger to stop her. The depths of what was done to her are too much for me to fathom.

So I stand still. And I drown.

Her hand trembles as she turns the handle. Then her back tenses.

“Oh, by the way, the message Cassie left? She wants you to call her back asap. Her exact words were, ‘Tell him the head of the institute wants to know which way to go concerning Max Peterson.’”

31

KEELY

Six days later

“Thank fuck that’s over!” Bethany flops into the club seat next to me on Zach’s private plane and secures her seatbelt over her Zac Posen dress and matching shoes combo. “Don’t get me wrong, I love the Indigo Lounge and everything Zach’s built. But no matter how extensively you vet them, the guests arealwaysan unknown variable. Case in point—Fake Rack Olga the Ogre for me last year, and Tetanus Titus with you this trip.” She stops and giggles, then purses her adorable lips. “Hmm, I think if we put our heads together, we can come up with some idea of a personality yardstick to measure them with. Or beat the crap out of them if they misbehave. What you do you think, Keels?”

I drag my frozen heart and aching body out of its icy morass and force my head to bob up and down. “Yeah, sure. Whatever.”

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