For the Taking Read Free Page B

phone, and faced the knowledge that “managing” wouldn’t be nearly as easy as she’d claimed. She opened in less than an hour, and still had the salads and sandwich ingredients to set out, the quiche fillings to prepare, the coffee machine to start, the scones to make, the cream to whip….
    And she didn’t care.
    “Show me the photos, Loucan.”
    Coming through the doorway from the kitchen, her bare feet cool on the polished hardwood floor, she found him standing in front of one of the two sets of French doors that opened onto the veranda, in the direction of the sea.
    He was watching the sparkling blue ocean, just the way she always did. Silent, still and totally absorbed. Hungry for it. Listening to its call.
    But he couldn’t hate the power of that call, the way she did.
    He turned at her words, and he wasn’t holding the photos anymore. Where had he hidden them? She couldn’t tell. Not in the T-shirt pocket.
    “I heard your conversation,” he said. “Your help can’t make it today?”
    She shrugged. “It’s okay. I’m worried about them, not me. It seems as if none of them is seriously hurt, fortunately. Please show me the photos of Phoebe and Kai. And—and Saegar, too.” The brother and playmate she’d loved. “Do you have pictures of him?”
    “No, I’m sorry. I don’t.”
    “News about him, then? You told me the other day you were in touch with him.”
    “You didn’t believe me.”
    “I do now. Tell me. Show me.”
    “Not yet. Tell me what’s in it for me, first, Thalassa.” His blue eyes burned with a cool fire, an assessing look she didn’t trust. “Meet me halfway. If I give you what you want, will you listen to me? Will you give me—?”
    “No!” she cried, pressing her palms to her ears. “How can you talk about giving? Your father and his supporters took from me something that can never be replaced. They took my mother’s life with unspeakable violence, and without warning.” She drew a shuddery breath and had to struggle to keep going. “I’m giving you nothing, Loucan!”
    As always, when she thought about her mother’s death, she couldn’t fight the secret, nightmare memory. Cyria—she’d only ever called her guardian Aunt Catherine in public—was the only other person who knew what Lass had witnessed as an eight-year-old child, and now Cyria was dead, too. That death, at least, had been peaceful.
    Her mother’s, Wailele’s, wasn’t.
    Oh, dear God, must I see it in my memory for the rest of my life?
    Still, after twenty-five years, the sight of blood in the water panicked and terrified her, and she had told Cyria time and again that she would never go back to Pacifica, where such violence might happen once more.
    “Then I guess the photos aren’t needed today,” Loucan said, cutting across her relentless unfolding of memory. He still seemed cool and totally in control.
    “How do I even know they’re genuine?” she argued. “I haven’t seen Phoebe or Kai in so long, those couples could be anyone.” She didn’t really believe that. She knew in her heart that they were Phoebe and Kai, and their new husbands. All the same… “I don’t trust you, Loucan!”
    “That’s obvious,” he said. “And I can understand it.”
    “I hope so!”
    “What I can’t understand is that you’d deny yourself the chance to connect with your brother and yoursisters purely because you don’t want to have anything to do with me.”
    “Not so surprising, if you’d think about it a little more.” Deliberately, she kept her voice hard. “You’re apparently willing to blackmail me by keeping me in ignorance of the only family I have left. What that says about your character doesn’t inspire me to get to know you any better. But you’ve given me some facts about Phoebe and Kai and Saegar. Where they’re living. The names they use. I’ll be patient.”
    “You’re saying—”
    “Yes. I’ll track them down myself, or I’ll employ someone to do it. I don’t