“To what?” I whispered. My God, what had they done to him? Some kind of torture? Sexual abuse? I suddenly felt sorry for him—which wasn’t an emotion I usually felt for my dark, sarcastic stepbrother.
He shook his head, his jaw clenching.
“Never mind. I just…didn’t want it to happen to you, too—okay?” He looked at me, his eyes blazing. “I want you to be safe, Ani. Even if you’re off limits to me, I want to protect you. You should never have to go through what I did when they took me.” He looked down, his voice dropping to a whisper. “No one should.”
“Jake…” Hardly knowing what I was doing, I reached out to cup his cheek. The stubble on his jaw scratched my palm and I could feel how tense he was, though I was barely touching him. “I’m so sorry,” I murmured. “I didn’t know. If you ever want to talk—”
“Forget it. It was a long time ago and it doesn’t matter.” He jerked away from me and the open, almost vulnerable look in his eyes was replaced by a stony indifference. “Look, you’d better go back to your room the same way you snuck out. Can you climb the trellis by yourself or do you need some help?”
“I can manage,” I said stiffly. Clearly, he didn’t want to talk and this moment of almost-friendship between us was over. Now he would probably treat me like shit for the next six months or however long it was before he let his true self peek out again. This had happened once before, so I wasn’t surprised.
“Good, then go.” Jake nodded at the side of the house where my room was. “Hurry—my dad is probably still up. He never goes to bed before midnight.”
I held out my hand.
“The key? This is my car, you know.”
“I’ll park it in the garage for you. That way if my dad comes out, you don’t have to answer questions about why you’re wearing my shirt. Speaking of which, be sure you throw it in the laundry and hide it so neither of our parents sees it,” he instructed.
“Why?” I snapped, running out of patience again. “Are you afraid if they find your shirt in my laundry hamper they’ll think we’ve been screwing around?”
Jake glared at me and for the first time I saw real anger in those pale gold eyes of his—eyes so like my own.
“I would never touch you that way, Ani.” His voice was a menacing growl. “Never. I told you, I’m your brother and you’re my little sister. It would be beyond wrong for anything like that to happen between us. Do you understand?”
“Look, it’s not like I would want anything like…like that to happen,” I said, taken aback by his intensity.
“Good. Because it’s never going to,” he said shortly. “Now go back to your room. And next time you’re thinking about sneaking out and leaving Branson behind, remember that Sorenson and his people are out there waiting for you to slip up. If they catch you again, I might not be there to save you.”
Then he faced forward and didn’t say another word as I left the car and went around to climb back up the trellis to my room.
SIX
Sneaking back into my room was way harder than sneaking out of it had been. It takes some serious upper body strength and a lot of finesse to climb a slightly rickety wooden trellis up to the second-floor level in a house where all the ceilings are vaulted. By the time I crawled through my open window, I was huffing and puffing, even though I consider myself in generally good shape and I was pretty sure I had a splinter in my hand.
A slinky black shape greeted me with a scratchy little, “Meow” as I finally got all the way through the damn window.
“Oh, hello, Mr. Binkers,” I muttered. “Keep it down—okay? I don’t want anyone to know I went out.”
My cat meowed quietly again. He used to have a full-throated yowl, but that was before the accident, six months ago. Thinking of that made me remember the only other time my stepbrother had let down his guard around me and acted like something other than a sarcastic asshole.
It had happened when Mr. Binkers—who is normally an indoor cat—took it into his head to go roaming for some reason, which he almost never does. I got worried about him one night after supper when I couldn’t find him. After looking everyplace I could think of in the house—and believe me, there are a lot of hiding places for a slinky black cat in this huge old mansion—I decided to search around out of doors.
I found my cat down by the side road, just outside the gates that led into the mansion’s grounds. He was lying on his side, barely breathing, and when I touched him, my hand came away bloody.