AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I looked between them both. A terrible, heavy feeling of dread settled in my stomach. “What’s going on?”
Lauren continued, “I had my private investigator do a little digging. I’ll send you the bill, Deacon,” she added in an aside. “It didn’t take long to discover your friend here was hiding under a fake name.”
“A fake name? Kendall?” I asked, turning my back on her. “What is she talking about?” Why wasn’t Kendall denying Lauren’s accusation? Why wasn’t he calling her crazy? And why did it look like Kendall’s entire world has shattered around him?
“I’m sorry,” Kendall said. “I wanted to tell you, but you were leaving in a few days—”
“Tell me what?” I snapped, tired of the games.
Lauren got there first. “Tell you his real name, of course. And why he hid it from you. He isn’t Kendall Johnson. He’s Kendall Langston.”
For the space of one glorious heartbeat, I didn’t understand. Langston. Why did that name sound so familiar—
Realization struck me with the force of a blow. I actually took a step back. “Langston? Like… Stephen Langston?”
Kendall looked green, like he was going to throw up. “My father,” he said.
“No.” I shook my head. “No… You can’t… You can’t be…”
“I wanted to tell you,” Kendall said weakly.
“When?” I demanded. “How long have you known about our connection? Is that why you—” The next question was too terrible to finish.
Is that why you were assigned to my villa? Why you slept with me? To discredit me as some sort of last revenge for your criminal father?
I didn’t say the words, but Kendall seemed to hear them in the air anyway.
“Deacon, no!” He took a step forward.
I flinched away.
I looked at him with new eyes. They didn’t look much alike, father and son. Stephen had been a heavyset man, wispy balding hair. His son—Oh my God, his son—was light and lithe. Unless the hair was a dye job. And could those be colored contacts, too?
They did share the same long, aquiline nose. I remembered Stephen Langston looking down his nose at our ruined family during the criminal, and later the civil court proceedings. Not that the latter had done any good. By then, my family’s fortune had been entirely stolen and lost to Stephen Langston’s whims.
I had eventually rebuilt the business, bigger and better than ever. But it had cost me years of my life.
My father… My father never entirely got over the betrayal and the fall from grace. We had tried to help, but some wounds ran too deeply. When he had taken his own life, it hadn’t been a shock.
And now, the Langston curse had hit my family again. Now it was Kendall who was the betrayer.
“Get out,” I said, and my voice was a hard, distant thing that even I didn’t recognize.
“I didn’t know who you were when you first came to the resort,” Kendall said. “How could I? I’ve been out of the states for years. I didn’t… I couldn’t…”
Lauren pushed forward, eager. I had forgotten that she was there at all. “So, this was—What? A little revenge for your father? It would make quite the story during his next parole hearing, wouldn’t it?” she sneered. “Unless of course, Deacon paid you to stay silent. How much were you going to ask him for?”
Kendall rounded on her. “That is not true! I have never asked Deacon for a dime!”
“But you haven’t been truthful with me, either,” I said.
Lauren turned back to me, almost gleeful. “He has been biding his time. How do you know he doesn’t have a sex tape—”
“Enough!” I was hurt, devastated, and confused. This felt like a nightmare that I couldn’t wake up from. But even with the revelations of the last few minutes, Lauren’s ugly accusations didn’t hold water.
No, the truth was terrible enough.
“I’m leaving,” I said.
