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“Oh no, I never told my dad on Stefan.” She shuddered at the thought. “Stefan was his heir. My dad loved me, but Stefan was the future. I was just a girl.”
“Fuck your father,” he said.
She gave him a startled look. None of this was her father’s fault.
“Just because you are a girl, he let your brother and nanny abuse you? No. That’s not the way things work. He’s supposed to protect and take care of all of his children, understand me? If we’d had a sister, she’d have been the most protected out of all of us. The most cherished.”
“Really?”
“Hell, yeah. You think she would have been allowed to date? Nope. She’d have had to wait until we were all dead and buried. She’d have been lucky to have been let out of the house.”
Swallowing heavily, she drunk in all of his words.
“Poor girl would have been completely smothered. If any boy interested in my sister had come on our property, I’d have shot the tires out on his car.”
“Tanner! You would not!”
“Why not? I’ve done it before. Mostly to Jardin. He’s a pretentious ass.”
“Who is Jardin?” she asked.
“Didn’t you hear me? He’s a dick.”
“No. I mean . . . who is he?”
“Oh, just one of our cousins. The New Orleans Malones. All of them are assholes. Well, except Lottie. She’s a sweetheart. Where was I? Oh yeah, your asshole of a father. Fuck, what sort of family did you grow up in? Sounds like the fucking mafia.”
Oh hell.
She’d said too much. She’d known that as she was talking.
His eyes widened. “Oh, fuck.”
Tanner started to pace.
“Please don’t go looking into him, Tanner. That will just alert him to where we are. He’s clever and he has people searching for us. Please.” There was a reason she’d always been careful not to say his name. Even though Tanner didn’t know her real last name it might not take much to find Stefan.
“Hey.” He walked over to her, sitting on the bed and facing her. “I’m not going to do anything rash.”
She eyed him doubtfully.
“Sheesh, you do a few impulsive things in your life, and you get labelled as a hothead,” he teased.
She laughed, then snorted before putting her hand over her mouth. “Oops. Sorry.”
“I’ve missed your snort-laugh, pretty girl.”
“Tanner,” she moaned.
“I won’t go looking for him. I promise.”
She breathed out a sigh of relief. “Thank you.”
“But I can tell you right now that when I find this fucker, he’s a dead man for touching you. For hurting you.”
“No! No, you won’t. You’ll go nowhere near him. He’s dangerous. If he knew how I felt about you, he’d . . . he’d hurt you. That’s what he does to keep me in line. After my dad died, he moved away from punishing me by destroying my stuff and moved onto destroying people. I couldn’t make friends with any of the staff because he’d use them to punish me. He finally figured he could get me to do what he wanted by threatening people I cared about.”
“That motherfucker. He needs to die, Lilac.”
