Rogue Love (Kings of Corruption Book 1) by Michelle St. James

Author:Michelle St. James [St. James, Michelle]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780998283814
Publisher: Blackthorn Press
Published: 2017-03-20T18:00:00+00:00

24

She ran the hot water and stripped off her clothes, her heart heavy in her chest. She hadn’t known Braden was wealthy, but that wasn’t the part that hit her the hardest.

It was the sadness in the house that threatened to knock her over, the atmosphere still and quiet, no sign of life other than the little dog named Monty that seemed to be Dorothy Kane’s only company. It was nothing like the big, rambling house on the North Shore where she grew up.

Of course, most people would think she was rich too. In some ways they wouldn’t even be wrong. But her wealth was most evident in other ways: in the way her father had roughhoused with them when they were young, their mother laughingly begging him to stop before he broke a lamp or a vase or a window. In the way she and Erin and the boys had ran up and down the winding staircase like a herd of elephants (according to their mother) and the way they’d piled on top of each other on the sofa in the living room to watch movies.

Braden’s childhood seemed sterile in contrast.

Cold.

Of course, they’d never really talked about their respective childhoods. Nora had steered clear of the subject, not wanting it to lead to questions about her brothers, her mother’s death, what had happened to Erin. Maybe Braden had been happy. Maybe he’d enjoyed being the only child of a wealthy, serious couple in a mansion above the Emerald City.

But somehow Nora didn’t think so.

She stood under the hot water, letting it soak the kinks out of her body from all the hours they’d spent on the road and in the air. She couldn’t afford to feel feel sorry for Braden, and he wouldn’t want her pity anyway. Would loathe knowing she felt sorry for him.

Still, it was hard not to see a lonely little boy hiding beneath the big, closed-off man she was only now really getting to know. And that stuff mattered, didn’t it? The reasons people became the way they were? The things that shaped them? That factored into their decisions? She had to believe it was true. If it wasn’t, it meant there was no rhyme or reason to any of it. It meant her brothers started their business in the aftermath of Erin’s death because they had always been violent men. Because they’d never cared about the law like their father. If it was true it meant Nora hadn’t joined the Bureau to make sense of what happened to her sister or to honor her father’s commitment to the law but because she’d always been that person.

Because she’d never had anything else.

She soaped her body with a thick bar of artisan soap, breathing in the scent of olive oil and verbena. Had Braden’s mother put the soap here to make the bathroom nice for guests that never came? Or was it a detail handled by the older woman named Emily who seemed to take care

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