But she didn’t bother to rehash old arguments that only led her down the rocky road to nowhere.
‘So you want me to...what? Forgive him? Not a chance in hell. Make him feel better? I don’t. So why should he?’
‘Because this team is going down. Do you really want that?’
She let loose a sigh. ‘You know I don’t.’ Team Scott Lansing was her family. Her entire life. A colourful, vibrant rabble of friends and adoptive uncles and she’d missed them all. But the entire scene just brought back too many memories she was ill-equipped to handle right now.
‘So think of the bigger picture. Read my lips when I say, for the final time, it wasn’t Finn’s fault. It was an accident. Let it go. You are doing no one any favours quibbling about it—least of all me.’
He pinched the bridge of his nose as if to stem one of his killer migraines and guilt fisted her heart.
He was suffering. They were all suffering. In silence. Let it go...
But why was it every time they spoke of that tragic day, when the phone had shrilled ominously through their trailer, she was slapped with the perfidious feeling she was being kept in the dark? And she loathed the dark.
It didn’t matter how many times she asked her father to elucidate he was forever cutting her off.
‘Tom wouldn’t want to see you like this,’ he said, irritation inching his volume a decibel higher. ‘Blaming Finn. Doing your moonlit flit routine. Holing up in London. Burying your head in work. You’ve done all you can at base—now it’s time to get back in the field. Quit running and stop hiding.’
‘I haven’t been hiding!’
He snorted in disbelief.
Okay, maybe she’d been hiding. Licking her wounds was best attempted in peace, as far as she was concerned. But honestly...? How far was solitude getting her on the heart-healing scale?
Serena’s heavy lids shuttered. God, she was tired.
She’d lost her brother, her best friend, and she kept forgetting she was supposed to carry on regardless. This was tough love and she’d been reared on it. Admittedly the vast majority of the time she’d appreciated Michael Scott’s particular method of parentage. You needed skin as thick as cowhide to trail the world for ten months of the year in the company of men. Not the best way to raise two children, but she’d genuinely loved her life. Honest.
If she’d often stared at other children with their mothers, wondering what it would be like to have one of her own, to live in a normal house and walk to an actual brick-built, other-children-present school every morning, she’d just reminded herself that her life was exciting. And if she’d prayed for a mum all those years ago when her adolescence had been shattered, leaving her broken and torn, she’d comforted herself that she had Tom. Tom had been her rock.
But now he was gone. Nothing was exciting any more and there was no one to hold her hand in the dead of night when the shadows loomed. You don’t need your hand held. You’re stronger than that. Snap out of it!
She swallowed around the lump in her throat, forcing the overwhelming knot of grief to plunge into her chest. Buried so deep her stomach ached.
‘If what you say is true and there is a problem,’ she said dubiously, ‘how can I possibly help?’
‘Get him to take an interest in the prototype or work on your latest designs... I don’t know—just get him to focus on something other than women or the bottom of a bottle.’
Impossible.
‘I’m a woman.’
‘Only in the technical sense.’
‘Gee, thanks.’ As if she needed reminding.
Then again, the last thing she wanted was to be like one of Finn’s regulars. They were the skirt to Serena’s jeans. The buxom bombshells to Serena’s boyish figure. The strappy sandals to Serena’s biker boots. The super-soft, twice-conditioned spiralling blonde locks to Serena’s wild mane of a hue so bizarre it defied all colour charts.
Which was wonderful. Inordinately satisfying. Exactly the way she liked it.
‘The last thing he needs is another bedmate,’ he muttered wryly. ‘He needs a kick up the backside. A challenge. And, let’s face it, you two create enough spark to fire a twin-stroke. Therefore I am asking—no, you know what...? I am telling you to help. You’re on my payroll. You move back in here and you chip in.’
Tough love.
Then his graphite gaze turned speculative. Calculating. An expression she didn’t care for that nailed her to the wall.
‘Or you can kiss the Silverstone launch of your prototype goodbye.’
A gasp of air hit the back of her throat. ‘You wouldn’t dare.’
‘Wouldn’t I?’