Enamoured (The Enslaved Duet 2)

For the first time, he frowned at me, obviously put out by my attitude. “Cosi, I would think you are old enough to know I did the best I could given the circumstances.”

“I would think you’d know I’m old enough not to buy wholesale into your lies. You fucked us over all our lives, and now you’re back, to what?”

“I wasn’t in a good…position to help you much before now, but I have the means to make a difference to your life and I want to help. Especially with the situation you’ve embroiled yourself in. Honestly, carina, I taught you to be shrewder than all this.”

“All this?” The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end in the suddenly electric air. “What do you know about my life?”

“More than you might think,” he said with this sly, trickster smile.

“Don’t be a smug bastardo. You don’t know anything about me.”

“Oh, but I do,” he said, leaning forward to rest his forearms on his thighs, the expensive material of his suit gleaming in the low light. I noted the luxury David Yurman watch on his wrists and wondered how my terminally poor father could have afforded it. “I’ve been watching you for years, since I had to hand you over to that British swine.”

“What?” I asked, mouthing the words because my voice had fled.

“It wasn’t always easy,” he confided, both casually and conspiratorially, the contrast so Seamus that I had to blink away the feeling of déjà vu. “Those Davenports have some good security, but a cousin of mine lives in Manchester. Wasn’t too inconvenient to drive down to Thornton and get the village gossip about the big bad Davenports up in the grand house.” He paused, sliding his eyes out the window just as pain flashed through them. “Heard you lost the baby. I’m so sorry, carina.”

Something about the way he said that abraded my flesh like nails over a chalkboard. I shuddered, biting my tongue in the process so that when I spoke, it was with blood on my teeth. “How did you know about the baby?”

My dad flashed me a sharp-toothed grin, shark-like but cartoonish as though he’d studied it. “Who do you think paid the good ole doctor to switch out your birth control?”

Thundered rumbled through my head, the rush of blood so fierce I thought I would pass out. I couldn’t comprehend his words, and my body went numb with shock.

“Why would you do something like that?” I breathed, sucker punched.

Seamus finally shed the act, scooting forward on his seat to take my limp hands in his, chafing my cold skin between his rough palms. His fingernails were short and misshapen, never having healed from when Tossi pulled them out with pliers. The physical contact seeped through my astonishment and brought my riotous emotions to the surface. First, unexpectedly, was nostalgia. I’d forgotten that my dad could be affectionate when he was around to be so. I’d missed it without even realizing it, and I felt some shame at taking comfort from the very man who had set me up to need it in the first place.

“I put you in an…impossible situation, Cosi. I know it. I own it. You made the ultimate sacrifice for your family. I knew leaving was best for everyone, but how could I leave you all alone with those beasts? I did what I could from afar. Figured if you had the creep’s baby, it would give you some measure of power.”

The creep’s baby.

I squeezed my eyes shut as molten tears swamped my ducts and scorched trails down my cheeks.

Fuck me.

Why was my reproduction such an available tool of manipulation?

Mrs. White, Noel, and now my father had all schemed against me as if a baby was a tool and not a person.

I had only known about my pregnancy for a day, and still, the death of that baby haunted me. I couldn’t look at baby shoes without feeling an aching absence in my womb.

My father hadn’t killed that baby, but he’d put it in peril before it even stood a chance of survival.

I opened my eyes and stared into my father’s face so close to mine. He watched me with open, guileless eyes, offering his sincerity to me like a gift.

“I was trying to help,” he whispered after seeing the vivid pain in my expression.

He was only trying to help.

Hadn’t he always only been trying to help?

It was his excuse for gambling, for getting involved with the Camorra, for selling me to the highest bidder.

Well, the means did not justify any of the ends. Not to me. Not ever.

I pulled my hands from his and sat back, needing the space, hating that we were even breathing the same air.

Something spasmed across his face, a clenching and closing like an octopus poised to flee. “I’m in a better place now, Cosi. I have money, influence, that you couldn’t believe.”