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“Is Miranda all right, dear?” Pamela asked, feigning concern with a shit-eating grin on her face.
Derek ignored her.
“Take care of Miss Dalton in my absence, will you?” Slapping him on the back, he bent down and leaned into his ear. “One task, cousin. You better get it done.” Then he kissed Breanna’s cheek. “Be a good girl and listen to Mr. Maynard. I’ll be back soon, sweetheart.”
“What do we do now, Sinjin?”
“We keep looking for the documents.” Ian glanced at Francie. “You wouldn’t happen to know where Valerie might have kept them?”
“No,” she said, worrying her lip.
He sat back and exhaled, lacing his fingers behind his head. “I’m going to Sacramento on Monday, then. I can slip into the office after hours, get the files, and slip back out.”
“It isn’t just about money for him, I’m afraid. The root of it goes much deeper than that.” Pamela pursed her lips and sighed. “Like his father, he’d love nothing more than to wipe out the Dalton name.”
“Why?” Breanna asked, putting down her fork.
“Revenge.” She paused, her bottom lip disappearing behind her teeth. “Once, there were four of us, you see. My sister, Sharon, was the eldest. The summer she graduated from high school, she came up here to help the former Mrs. Dalton, your great-grandmother. Lawrence was home from college for the summer. Sharon was always going on about him. Your grandfather was quite handsome when he was younger, and quite the catch, too.” With a bob of her head, Pamela’s lips curved into a soft smile. “Anyway, she fancied herself in love with him, and one thing led to another, I suppose. Summer fling, you know? School started up again in the fall, and that was the end of that.”
Ian knew this story, of course, but Breanna didn’t. His arm went around her shoulders, hugging her to his side. No more secrets, baby.
Still smiling, his mother continued. “I was only eleven, but I remember watching Sharon get ready for the Thanksgiving open house. She was so excited to see him again. You see, she believed Lawrence was in love with her, too.”
“But he wasn’t?”
“No, as it turned out,” Pamela said with a shake of her head. “They were, you know, typical kids with raging hormones. She wasn’t quite nineteen that summer and Lawrence was just a couple of years older.”
“What happened?” Breanna asked, her attention rapt.
“We walked into the grand foyer, and there was your grandfather, looking as handsome as ever, with Valerie Kimball on his arm.” She blew out a breath. “They announced their engagement at dinner.”
“Oh, no.” Her fairytale eyes going wide, Breanna gasped. “How awful for her.”
“She was devastated, to say the least.”
“I remember that and I was only five.” With a nod, Francie finally spoke. “Sharon ran out of there in tears.”
“No one could console her. Not even my brother, and she and Raymond were extremely close. Two days later, Sharon came out of her room smiling as if she didn’t have a care in the world. Told my father she was going shopping, kissed his cheek, and said she’d be back before dinner.”
Pamela wasn’t smiling anymore.
The eyes behind her glasses pained, Francie shrugged a shoulder. “But she never came back.”
“They found what was left of her car the next morning,” his mother recounted, staring out at the mountains through the window. “She drove herself right off the pass.”
“On purpose?” Her jaw slack, Breanna gazed up at him with a look of disbelief on her face.
Pamela nodded. “And Raymond never got over it. He blamed your grandfather for her death.”
“Because he broke her heart?”
“There’s so much gray to every story, dear. Nothing is ever black and white. I don’t know this to be fact, but supposedly, Sharon was three months pregnant with your grandfather’s baby when she died.”
“Oh, Jesus.” Breanna covered her mouth with her hand. “Wait, weren’t Raymond and my grandfather good friends?”
“You know the old saying, don’t you? Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.” She pursed her lips to the side, then released a heavy breath. “Look, I loved my brother, and while I understood his grief for our sister, as the years went by, he became more and more unhinged. Drove his wife to divorce him. Infected Derek with his crazy nonsense, too, it seems.”
Ian glanced down at Breanna. She seemed a bit shaken. Hugging her to him a little tighter, he kissed her crown.
