Harlequin Presents April 2018 - Box Set 2 of 2 by Dani Collins Caitlin Crews Heidi Rice & Pippa Roscoe

Author:Dani Collins, Caitlin Crews, Heidi Rice & Pippa Roscoe
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781488084034
Publisher: Harlequin Enterprises Limited
Published: 2018-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

ELEVEN YEARS LATER Atlas stood out on that same bluff in Martha’s Vineyard and watched the sailboats in the distance, tacking back and forth as they headed upwind.

He remembered that long ago day when he’d found Lexi here, frightened and defiant in turn. He remembered the things they’d said and the way they’d fought their way to each other as clearly as if it had happened yesterday.

But so much had happened since.

It had taken longer than it should have to gather enough evidence to prove what Atlas had long suspected, that Richard had been the one to choke his own daughter before dropping her in the pool that Lexi had long since had removed from the property. There was a flower garden where it had stood, fragrant and colorful blooms to celebrate Philippa’s life rather than mourn her death.

Lexi called that moving on.

Atlas liked the flowers. But he much preferred visiting the old man in prison where he belonged.

“Have you come to gloat again?” Richard had asked the last time he’d made the pilgrimage to the prison that had swallowed up a decade of Atlas’s life. “What a petty man you are.”

Atlas had only smiled. “You never have told me why you did it. Why you killed your own daughter.”

Richard looked older. Diminished. But he’d still stared at Atlas with that same flat dislike.

“She defied me,” he’d said simply, as if that explained everything.

And perhaps it did. Perhaps, for a man like Richard, obedience was the only thing that mattered. He’d wanted his daughter to marry at his command and she’d refused, so he’d disposed of her.

Atlas preferred his own, far more complicated and textured life. He could hear his ten-year-old son Ari in the distance, shouting out excited directions to his faithful sidekick, eight-year-old Nikolai, as the boys tried to overhead smash each other to death on the tennis court.

And when he turned his head, he saw his lovely wife walking toward him, holding the chubby little hand of their five-year-old, Gabriel.

Everything that mattered was right here. In his heart, in his arms, in this life he and Lexi had built together.

She had taught him forgiveness, and though he would always be a hard man, he tried. After their father’s arrest, Gerard and Harry had been left reeling. Gerard and his titled wife still marched along in the genteel misery they seemed to prefer, but even they could manage to lock it up enough to indulge in the family gatherings Lexi had insisted they try to hold.

“Because we get to decide what our family is,” she’d told Atlas years ago, with that determination that made him adore her all the more. “Not a sick, old man behind bars. Us.”

And so they had.

Even Harry had cleaned up his act. First, he’d stopped drinking. Then he’d actually gotten a job at a London charity, as a figurehead of sorts at first—but these days, he ran the place. He’d married a woman who gazed at him with stars in her eyes and they had two-year-old twins.

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