Shadows At Sunset - Anne Stuart [44]
“What do you consider my marriage to Alan?”
“An aberration,” she said flatly. “You’re too smart to make that same mistake over again.”
Silence, and he strained closer to listen. “Would it be the same mistake?” Jilly asked in a very soft voice.
“Not the same. Far worse. Alan’s a prick, and a not very adept one at that. Coltrane strikes me as a man who knows how to please women. He could break your heart.”
“Not likely,” Jilly said.
“Likely,” Rachel-Ann corrected her. “Keep away from him, Jilly. I will if you will. Leave him for Dean.”
“I don’t think he’s interested in Dean.”
“Then let him figure out some other way to get what he wants. And he wants something, have no doubt about that. Don’t let him use you. Been there, done that, got the T-shirt. It doesn’t feel good, and I don’t want it to happen to you. Promise me.”
“Promise you what?”
He heard Rachel-Ann’s deep sigh. “I won’t ask you to promise not to sleep with him. I know human nature, and I know you, sometimes better than you know yourself. That would just make him irresistible. Sleep with him if you want. As far as I know you haven’t had a man since Alan, and I can tell you from experience he wasn’t very good.”
“Thanks for sharing,” Jilly said dryly.
“Oh, no, dear, thank you for sharing.” Rachel-Ann said with a rough laugh. “God, I shouldn’t be making jokes about it. Have I told you how sorry—?”
“We don’t need to talk about it, love. It’s past.”
“I don’t want to see you get your heart broken.”
“Alan didn’t break my heart.”
“But Coltrane could. If you let him. Don’t.”
Coltrane pushed the door shut silently, moving away. For some reason he didn’t want to hear any more. He’d found out enough. Jilly was as vulnerable as he thought she was. And if he was as big a bastard as he prided himself on being he could manipulate Rachel-Ann without sleeping with her.
But he wasn’t quite sure if he really was that big of a bastard. Could he deliberately cause pain to his sister, someone who’d battled more than a few demons already, even if all he shared with her was bloodlines? Jilly Meyer was another matter—he owed her nothing, and if she provided him a way to get to Jackson then he’d take it, take her.
Hell, maybe he’d just take her, anyway, whether he had a good reason or not. Maybe wanting her was reason enough.
He had to remember why he was there. To bring Jackson Meyer down. But first he wanted answers. He wanted to know how he ended up with a sister he’d never known about. It didn’t take much to guess who her father was—Jackson Meyer’s adopted daughter was as much the old man’s blood as Jilly and Dean were.
The question was, what was Coltrane going to do about it?
Right now he was going to sleep. He was going to stretch out on his brand-new bed, all alone, and try not to think about anything. Particularly not about Jilly Meyer’s soft, sweet mouth. And what he could talk her into doing with it.
“We’re going to have to get rid of him. I don’t like what he’s doing to our girls.”
“Honeybunch, they’re not our girls,” Ted corrected her patiently.
“We’ve watched them since they were children. They feel like my daughters, and since neither of us had any children there’s no reason why I can’t think of them as mine. After all, their mother is dead,” Brenda said in a cranky voice.
“So are we, my sweet.”
Brenda would have blushed, but she didn’t think she was capable of it. “I hate it when you talk about us like that,” she said. “I don’t like to think about it.”
“Sorry,” Ted said, flicking the end of his cigarette over the railing into the trees below. For the first few years she’d cautioned him about the fire hazard, before she realized that, in fact, there was no flame, no cigarette. No them. “I just wish we had some answers. I want to know what happened.”
Brenda squashed down the shiver of guilt. “We’re better off not knowing.”
“Not knowing how we died? Don’t you think we have a right to know that?”
“Most people