Modern Romance March 2021 Book 5-8 Carol Marinelli (ebook reader computer txt) 📖

Balling her hands into fists at her sides, Hel took a deep breath and then intentionally released them. “Nothing happened. Because I didn’t let it. I had begun studying self-defense and parkour—mainly because he abhorred women with manly pursuits—and if I hadn’t...” She met his eyes again, the icy distance in them still the only true defense she had against the indisputable proof of her father’s feelings toward her...and the fact it never stopped hurting. “They wanted to force me and wanted to ensure there could be no annulment—the property deal the marriage secured was too important to both families. I was lucky. I escaped my, ‘fiancé,’ and my mother helped me run away to the academy. We made sure everything was high-profile enough and we made it public enough that there was nothing my father could do, and my fiancé was too embarrassed to have had his butt kicked by the teenage girl he’d tried to force himself on to tell anything but the official story.”

An inferno raged in the deep wells of Drake’s eyes, but he was utterly controlled, utterly terrifying.

On her behalf.

She had no idea what that meant.

She cleared her throat. “So, yeah. Real bad guy.”

“A monster,” he agreed.

Hel nodded.

“You’re his daughter.” He was unflinching without cruelty and it still burned.

Hel’s eyelids fluttered closed. When she could speak, she agreed, “Unfortunately.”

And there would never be enough she could do to make up for it.

When she opened her eyes, he was watching her with a serious frown, which somehow only emphasized the boy still hidden in his face.

“You are your father’s daughter, but you are not your father, and you are not responsible for his actions,” he said.

Her smile was a small and weak thing. “It sure doesn’t feel that way.”

“Only you can set that burden down.”

“I’m strong enough to carry it.”

He surprised her when he asked, “But are you strong enough to put it down?” His words were heavy with the weight of the bigger question between them.

She shook her head. “Strength isn’t always a good thing.”

He frowned, his eyes seeing something far away from the moment they shared. “But it’s necessary, nonetheless. There is something poetic in the fact that the strength he gave you would become part of the weapon to destroy him—because whether or not you adopt my plan, you have already defeated him.” He shook his head and added quietly, “My father wasn’t strong.”

Hel frowned. “Your father was heartbroken. No one was more loving or loyal than Uncle Ibrahim.” The familiar address rolled off her tongue as smoothly as if it hadn’t been nearly thirty years since the last time she’d uttered it.

Looking away, turning to the stars overhead, shining bright through the open viewing wall of the pool room, Drake said, “And he used that as an excuse to break. He left my mother alone, in a strange land, to care for two children in poverty. She had no skills for that...”

And he didn’t want to say what it had required of her, because he loved his mother. That much was obvious.

“But you’ve made up for it now. I imagine she enjoys the good life all the more for having watched her son build it from the ground up...with his own hands.”

Instead of the glint of pride that she saw in his eyes whenever he spoke of his accomplishment, Drake closed his eyes with a dry clearing of his throat. “She did.”

Did. Hel’s chest squeezed. “What happened?”

“Breast cancer.”

“What?” She’d heard him—of course, she had—but the detail didn’t fit with the narrative. How could a woman who had survived such incredible trauma and upheaval, whose life had had all the highs and lows of a long-running television drama, fall to such a quotidian evil as cancer?

Hel would have had an easier time accepting an anvil falling from the sky than the reality that the woman of her memories and Drake’s description, one whose light had burned indefatigable, had been snuffed out, betrayed by her own body.

Hel’s heart broke for Drake and Nya and Amira, whom she would never reunite with now, no matter how things worked out with her son. The family would have had no skills for the kind of life they found themselves in. But they had endured.

She thought of herself before the rigors of military training and her stubborn will had broken her of the helplessness bred into her by the lap of luxury. What a hard lesson that would have been to learn, and to be forced into it, rather than to have willingly selected it.

They had survived Hel’s father, the loss of Ibrahim and poverty. They held, through it all, and long enough for Drake to play Atlas, raising them up through seeming strength of will alone.

Hel would have thought whatever fates existed would have been satisfied with all of that for one family story. But she was apparently destined to be wrong where the fates were concerned.

As if strangely affirming her thinking, Drake said, “My father’s love left our family more than half-drowned on a beach. My mother’s will brought us back to life. Or, most of us, anyway. And then she died of cancer.”

The subtext was clear—whatever had happened to Ibrahim, it was Hel’s father who had killed him. Uncle Ibrahim, it seemed, wasn’t the type who could come back from being betrayed by someone he loved and trusted so much.

Drake was more like his mother, then—granite-tough and as gorgeous as marble. He was lucky.

Hel’s own strength, as he’d noted, came from more tainted sources. She said, “My mother isn’t so strong.”

The corner of Drake’s mouth lifted, a mischievous glint coming to his eye. “I can remember a few times she was strong enough to be downright scary...”

The boyish lightness in his tone shed lines of care from his face, hooking his beauty even deeper into Hel’s psyche. She knew that even after this encounter, he would be her standard of male perfection. “I never said she wasn’t a mother,” she said. “As a