Breathless (Steel Brothers Saga #10)(68)

“I just said I don’t—”

“You said you don’t blame Jade. What about Talon? What about Joe? What about what your father tried to do to him?”

“I stopped that.”

“As you should have. But he’s still up to something, and you’re going to tell us what it is.”





Chapter Forty–Four





Bryce





“Please, Bryce,” Frankie said through my phone. “I just want to see him.”

“No,” I said for the third time. “It’s not going to happen. You relinquished your parental rights, and I owe you nothing.”

“I know that. I just thought, since I was in town—”

“You thought wrong. You have no idea what’s going on in my life right now, and you’ve upset my mother. I can’t have that. Henry is fine. He’s a happy, healthy toddler. You’ll just have to take my word for it.”

“But I—”

“This conversation is over, Frankie. Don’t call here again.” I pushed End so violently that my mother’s phone slipped from my hand and clattered to the floor.

Had I been too harsh? I couldn’t bring myself to care. Too much else cluttered my mind.

My son. My mother. The Steels. My new position. Ted Morse.

And Marjorie.

At the top of the heap was Marjorie Steel.

I had to get her out of my system.

Just thinking of her had my groin tightening, despite the nerve-racking phone call I’d just completed. Despite my mother wringing her hands a few yards away from me.

“It’s taken care of,” I told her. “If she calls again, don’t answer.”

She nodded and walked toward Henry’s nursery, presumably to check on him.

Since my father’s death, my mother had let me be in charge of major decisions. She’d been a housewife her whole life, leaving such things to my father. Those days were over, and she was going to have to learn to stand on her own two feet. Would she be able to do that living with me on the Steel ranch? I didn’t know, and I couldn’t dwell on it. For the time being, I needed her help with Henry, and the two of them needed each other. I’d always be there for her, but she also needed to be an individual who didn’t depend solely on another person.

I gazed around the house. Only furniture remained. Most of the little things that made the house a home—photos and paintings on the walls, books on the shelves, my mother’s collectible cherubs on the mantel—had all been packed up and were probably on a truck somewhere, waiting to arrive at the Steel guesthouse.

I continued toward the kitchen to get a glass of water when a lone picture frame caught my eye. It sat on the floor in the corner of the small nook in our foyer. The glass had been broken and the photo scratched.

My mother and father’s wedding photo.

It had stayed in place after my father’s death. Many times I’d thought about trashing it, but it wasn’t mine to trash. I hadn’t existed when the photo had been taken. It was my mother’s to do with as she pleased, and she hadn’t moved it.

The other photos that had sat in that nook—a few of my baby pictures, one of Henry, and a couple other family photos—were all gone, presumably packed up.

But this one…

I bent down and retrieved it. I was always amazed at how much I resembled my father. In this wedding pic, he was young, blond, blue-eyed, and handsome. He looked genuinely happy. Genuinely normal.

My mother was radiant in her wedding gown, her hair glowing around her shoulders. She was beautiful. She still was, with silver hair and light-brown eyes.

But she’d aged so much in the past year.

We all had.

I looked again at my father’s image.

Was he already messed up then? What had caused him to become what he was?

Thanks to the Steels’ investigation and the information that had come out when arrests were made, I knew he’d been corrupted by power and money, beginning when he was in high school. Had he already done heinous things by the time he’d wed my mother? Joe would know. The Steels hadn’t told me everything they’d found, at my own request. I’d needed to keep my sanity.

But sanity be damned.

If I was to truly make sure I didn’t become my father, I needed to know everything there was to know about him—what he’d done and why.

What could make a good man turn bad? Could anything? Or was he never a good man to begin with?

With the photo in hand, I headed into the nursery. My mother was standing at the crib, gazing down at a sleeping Henry.

“Mom?”

She turned. “He looks so much like you when you were a baby.”

“I don’t know about that.” I smiled. “He’s so beautiful.”

“So were you. Just gorgeous. Just like…” She looked upward wistfully.

…your father.

The two words she didn’t say.

I’d been told all my life how much I resembled my father. Even his mother—my grandmother, may she rest in peace—had said the same thing, said how much I looked like my father at every age. She’d been gone over a decade now. Thank God she never knew who her son really was.

I cleared my throat and held up the wedding photo. “I found this on the floor in the foyer.”