need to find Irina, to warn her, too.”
Thora shook her head as her thin lips twisted with disgust. “I thought you were smarter than that. How much money did Ariel want for this information? How much were you foolish enough to pay her?”
“She doesn’t want my money.”
Ariel was probably one of the few people to whom wealth meant nothing. She cared only about protecting the sisters she hadn’t seen in so many years. With her determination, it was only a matter of time before she learned everything, like Thora had said, all the family secrets. Elena couldn’t put off telling the truth any longer.
The older woman laughed, the sound of it forced and brittle. “Stupid little girl—”
“She’s telling the truth.” Elena defended her sister, as she should have defended them and their mother two decades ago. She should have insisted that Thora reunite the family she’d destroyed.
But in Thora’s mind, she’d done the right thing by having the children taken away from Myra Cooper. She’d insisted that they were better off away from their mother. She’d relished pointing out how Myra had given up her parental rights to Elena.
Elena swallowed hard, then revealed, “Before Ariel found me, I knew we were in danger.”
“How would you know that?” Thora asked, with more than annoyance in her blue eyes now, an almost indiscernible trace of fear, the same fear Kirk couldn’t quite hide whenever he looked at her. He had to know. He must have figured out exactly what he’d married.
Elena drew in a deep breath. Maybe it was better, for all of them, that they knew. She couldn’t deny the visions any longer, not to herself or anyone else. “I just know.”
“You’re talking that crazy stuff again.” The older woman stood up now and thumped a fist on her desk, scattering papers across the surface as the picture frames rattled. “You will not bring that witchcraft into my home. Do you understand me?”
Elena flashed back, not to a vision or a dream, but to a memory two decades old. The first time she’d told her grandmother of a vision she’d been subjected to a similar tirade. Then she’d been sent to counseling and therapy and prescribed drugs to treat her “disorder.” The doctors and therapists had claimed it was everything from separation anxiety to post-traumatic stress, blaming everything on her mother, like Thora always did. She hated that her son had fallen in love with Myra Cooper.
“I understand you,” Elena said, knowing that the hatred had consumed whatever decency her grandmother might have had. Elena would get no help, from Thora Jones, in locating Irina. “You’ve never understood me. So let me go—”
“Go, get the hell out of here, if that’s the way you want it,” Thora said, shaking with rage. She picked up one of the framed photos from her desk and turned the picture toward Elena. From her grandfather’s arms, a little blond girl smiled sweetly at them. “But she stays.”
Elena’s heart clenched with love and fear. “You can’t take away my daughter.”
“Funny, I think that’s exactly what your mother told me.”
Her grandmother’s laughter echoed in her ears, as Elena rushed out of her rooms. She slammed the door to the corridor, then sagged against it, squeezing her eyes shut on the image of Thora’s hateful face. Every confrontation with her grandmother left Elena this way, weak, shaking…with a little less of her soul.
“Are you all right?”
She opened her eyes, confronting Joseph’s concerned gaze again. “You stayed.”
He nodded, those deep green eyes soft again with sympathy. “Things never go well between you and your grandmother.”
“So you thought what?” She lifted a brow, relieved to feel anger, which made her so much stronger than fear. “That I might need you?”
Haughty, scornful—she’d rather Joseph see her that way than weak. Like Thora, he wouldn’t respect weakness. But why did she want his respect? He was too much like her grandmother. That was why he’d been given the job that by birthright should have been hers. But refusing to hire her had been more favor than punishment for Elena. If she’d worked for Thora, she might have begun to act like her as well, and she never wanted to become that hateful, bitter and unscrupulous.
“I tend to forget that you hate me,” he said, his wide mouth quirking into a wicked grin.
So did she. That scared her nearly as much as her grandmother’s threats, which weren’t empty. She had enough money and power to get whatever she wanted. Not that she especially wanted Stacia. She just wanted to manipulate Elena. Since she couldn’t do it through Elena’s father anymore, she would do it through Elena’s daughter.
Elena did understand the older woman. She understood that Thora couldn’t let her son go despite his death. She needed more than the pictures piled on her desk and adorning every wall of her rooms. Because Elena and Stacia were part of him, she wanted to keep them close even though she hated that Elena was also a part of her mother, and had been punishing Myra through her since the day she’d brought Elena to this house.
Joseph stepped close, the sleeve of his suit brushing against the silk of her blouse. Even through the two layers of material, his heat penetrated, raising her temperature. Her face flushed. She would have stepped away, but her back was against the door. And he towered over her, imposing, intimidating.
Was this why her grandmother had hired him? Because just his presence, his brawn and the breadth of his shoulders and chest, was threatening? Elena suspected the greater threat was the sharp intelligence burning in his green eyes.
“Why do you hate me, Elena?” he asked. His voice, deep and soft, lifted the hair on the nape of her neck. His wicked grin never slipped, amusement lightening his eyes.
Damn him, he knew. She wanted to but couldn’t quite hate him, no matter how much she tried. She opened her mouth, ready to list the reasons, some she’d vented before, like his subordinates sending her husband away on business too much. But that had been more help than hardship. She’d realized that absence hadn’t made her heart grow fonder, only Kirk more faithless. She couldn’t blame Joseph for that, since Kirk didn’t work directly under him. She couldn’t even blame Joseph for the dreams.
All she could do was ask, “Why do you work for her?”
Was it blackmail? Like what kept Elena in this house, the threat of her grandmother using the considerable means at her disposal to take away what mattered most to Elena, her daughter? What was Thora holding over Joseph Dolce? What mattered most to this man?
He shrugged, and his arm moved against hers, wool scraping against silk. “Money. She pays me well.”
“To do her dirty work,” Elena scoffed, inexplicably disappointed that he wasn’t being coerced, too. This was why she had to hate him, why she could never trust him. He was just as soulless and manipulative as his employer, willing to do whatever necessary for money and power. “I hope it’s enough.”
His dark head nodded, but his green eyes dimmed, the amusement gone. “It’s a lot of money, more than I ever really thought a kid who grew up like I did could make.” Wistfulness deepened his voice. “I used to dream about the fast cars, big houses and fancy—” the wicked grin flashed a brief appearance as he stared down at her “—women.”
He considered her a fancy woman? On the outside, she might look the part of an heiress, with the silk clothes and sleek hairdo and manicured nails. Inside, she was still that little girl who’d grown up in the back of a truck camper, eating cold canned food and wishing for a hot shower and a soft bed, one she hadn’t had to share with younger sisters who kicked and flailed