Page 12 of Nash Falls
“Then what’s the white crap on your cheek, boy? You can’t even lie worth a shit.”
Rhett rubbed at his face. “I’ll do the mea culpa with Nash. Are we good here?”
“Yeah, you better get on back to thatpenthouseyou earned all by yourself,” Barton snapped, tacking on a snort of contempt.
As Rhett walked out, his father called after him, “And get yourself a damn wife and start making some babies, boy. You still won’t be an alpha but you can at least pretend you’re one.”
Rhett hated being called boy, which was why his father only called him that.
He stopped at a powder room and cleaned his face, then made a detour on his way out and popped his head into a bedroom on the second floor.
Angelina—Angie—Temple was sitting up in her bed and staring at the ceiling, which was littered with pasted-on stars. The whole room was a nod to her perpetual childhood, filled with dolls and stuffed animals, and old Disney movie posters. Her hair was cut in bangs and was nearly all gray now.
Her gaze dropped from the ceiling to him.
“Et?”
She had never managed to pronounce his name, soEthad stuck. Doctors didn’t use the termlow-functioninganymore, but Rhett knew that Angie would fall into that category. Yet she was kind and gentle, except for the occasional outburst because of a loud sound or a bright light. Sometimes nothing at all would set her off, but those times were now rare. Rhett knew this was because she was on a litany of medications to moderate her hyperactivity, control her ritualized behavior and irritability, and reduce her anxiety. She seemed happy, he thought.
Lucky her.
“Hey, Angie.”
He pulled up a chair and sat down next to the bed.
“Et?” she said again, her mouth wide with smiles. She leaned over but did not hug him. She did not like to touch or be touched. “Et, Et, Et, Et,” she said in a singsong voice.
Angie had been his big sister growing up; they had played for hours at a time. She was the perfect companion to an energetic little boy because she never tired of having adventures, or doing goofy stuff that children did. But as a little boy he had also witnessed in terror her uncontrollable tirades. As a man he just felt sorry for her.
Back then he had been closer to Angie than anyone else in his family. But then Rhett had grown up and Angie couldn’t.
“Why aren’t you sleeping?”
In answer she pointed to the ceiling. “Tars. Pretty.”
He looked up, too. “Yep, the stars sure are pretty. But they’ll be there when you wake up tomorrow, okay? So, night-night-night.” This was a phrase indoctrinated into Angie’s mind by her therapists; it worked like clockwork to get her to go to sleep. His father had insisted on something like that to control her. Rhett had understood his desire to have a tool such as that, but part of him loved to see Angie rebuff the old man.
“Night-night, night-night, Et, Et, Et, Et.” She lay back and closed her eyes. She was asleep by the time he reached the door.
He looked back at her resting peacefully, and then Rhett went on his way wishing he were a little boy again, playing with his big sister.
But that wish was never going to come true, so he trudged back into the world that his father had fashioned for him.
CHAPTER
7
LET ME GO! GET OFFme, you jerks!”
Rhett had walked outside in time to see his father’s sex-mate for the night being forced by two men into an SUV, with her eyes still blindfolded.
“Hey,” he called out.
“Yeah?” said the biggest of the men, who was the head of Barton Temple’s personal security team.
“Where are you taking her?”
“Back to where she came from,sir,” said the same man.
