Silver Falls - Anne Stuart [74]
“Stop!” she said, gagging.
“Oh, Christ. You’re not going to puke again, are you?”
She managed to swallow the bile that rose in her throat. “If you didn’t, then who did?”
“Who do you think, Rachel? Your sweet, angelic husband who’s so sensitive he won’t even eat meat that someone else has butchered. If you’re wondering who the budding sociopath in the family was, you’re looking in the wrong direction. Just as everyone else in this fucking town did. Now settle down and stop fighting me, or I swear to God I’ll clock you one.”
She glared at him. He was crazy, he was a bully and a liar. His hatred for his younger brother had clearly put him over the edge.
He was also much stronger than she was, and he already had her at a disadvantage. “Okay,” she said with deceptive calm. “If you’ll tell me where you’re taking me.”
“Somewhere that my brother can’t get to you. Long enough to talk some sense into you. Are you going to stop fighting me?”
He was focusing on the dark, rain-slick road, and in the reflection of the streetlights his face looked almost frightening.
He was going too fast for her to jump out of the car. She forced herself to breathe slowly, trying to look at him objectively, and as she did, she calmed. He might be batshit insane, but he wasn’t going to hurt her. Totally deluded, but he wasn’t the Northwest Strangler. Of that, at least, she was sure.
“I’ll stop fighting you,” she said. Wondering if she’d just made the worst mistake of her life.
15
David came back late. Rachel’s car was gone, and he smiled smugly, until he noticed the tire tracks in the lawn. He let out a moan of pain, parking his car and stumbling over to the damaged apple tree. The trunk was split in half—in a matter of months, maybe sooner, it would be dead. He knelt down on the muddy lawn, tears in his eyes as he touched the dying tree. The loss of its perfection seared his soul.
It was her fault. He’d brought her into his life, with her exquisite daughter, sure that she would adapt, become a graceful complement while he watched Sophie blossom and mature. He’d been so sure it would fill that dark, empty hole inside him.
It hadn’t. She was too bright, too brash, her colors clashing with his muted palate, her music ripping through the calm of his house. She stood between him and Sophie, thwarting him, when she’d promised to love and obey him. They hadn’t used those words in the judge’s office in San Francisco, but she knew they were implied.
Instead she’d taken over his house, turning his breakfast room into a studio for her silly photography, she’d put bright scarves over the furniture in her bedroom, and she used crude language in front of her angelic daughter. He thought she’d be reasonable. Instead she was a disaster.
But he was a man who knew how to deal with disaster, he reminded himself, brushing away his tears as he rose from his muddy spot on the ground, keeping his eyes averted from the ruin of the lawn. She refused to even look at the adoption papers, she kept coming between him and Sophie, when clearly Sophie adored him. The answer had been beautiful in its simplicity.
His brother had returned. His brother, who had always taken everything David had ever wanted. When Caleb was around, no one would look twice at David. Even the stray mutt he’d picked up would whine and cringe when David came near it. He’d taken care of that, of course.
The girls as well. Caleb had an unerring instinct for picking the girls that David would have fallen in love with. It was cosmically unfair—he never realized he loved them until Caleb would bring them around. And he’d made them pay. But Caleb had haunted him all his life. Even his mother had preferred the stranger to her own flesh-and-blood son.
He’d dealt with that as well. It had been Caleb’s fault, of course. If it weren’t for him he never would have had to do the terrible things he did.
And in truth, only the ignorant ones would think his actions were terrible. He understood his choices,