Colton Undercover. Marie Ferrarella

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      “For splattering the so-called low points of my life all over the internet, thanks to some lurid blogger?” he cried, outraged. How could his father be taking her side? That angered Thorne almost as much as what he’d just accused Leonor of. “The hell she doesn’t.”

      “Thorne!” Mac shouted. The warning note in the rancher’s voice was clear.

      Unable to take Mac fighting with his son over something that she ultimately was responsible for, Leonor raised her voice to be heard above the two men.

      “Stop!” she pleaded. When both men looked at her, she began by answering Thorne’s question, really hoping she wouldn’t break down in the middle of it. “I thought I could trust him,” Leonor retorted, anger and hurt throbbing in every syllable. She could feel tears forming as she continued. “We were supposed to get married—”

      “Married?” Mac questioned, looking at her. He looked stunned by this addition. “You left that part out,” he told her.

      Leonor inclined her head, as if conceding her error. “Sorry.”

      “You’re going to have to do better than ‘sorry,’” Thorne told her angrily.

      Doggedly, Leonor pushed on with her explanation. “I needed to talk to someone, to get everything I’d been carrying around all this time, like some kind of flesh-eating poison, off my chest.

      “People were as nasty to me as they were to you—” she began, looking at Thorne.

      His laugh was cold and dismissive. “I really doubt that.”

      “Let her finish,” Mac ordered, cutting his son off.

      Thorne scowled, but conceded. “Go ahead,” he told his sister grudgingly.

      “I needed someone to talk to,” Leonor repeated, “and he was there, ready to listen.”

      “And taking notes,” Thorne interjected nastily.

      Leonor sighed. Thorne was right, but that didn’t help anything or change it. “I didn’t know that at the time,” she told him. “I had no idea he’d wind up putting it all in a blog and selling it to the highest bidder. I thought he loved me, but he turned out to be an opportunist.”

      “If you wanted to talk so badly,” Thorne said angrily, not fully ready to accept that as an excuse, “why didn’t you come to me?”

      She looked at him. Was he kidding? They were all at odds when their mother was carted off to prison. Thorne particularly.

      “Maybe you forgot,” Leonor pointed out, “but you weren’t exactly the friendliest audience to turn to these last few years. I couldn’t talk to you.”

      He wasn’t about to let her turn this around and blame him.

      “Maybe that was because I could never understand how you could still love that woman after everything she’d done. She never once thought about how her actions would reflect on us or affect us. Hell, she never once thought about us, period,” he reminded his sister angrily. “Yet you went running off to visit her in prison every chance you got,” he said scornfully.

      Her temper flared. Leonor gritted her teeth together as she ground out an answer to his accusation. “Because nobody else did.”

      “There was a reason for that!” Thorne pointed out in exasperation. “The woman is evil.” Fury had temporarily robbed him of breath. When he got it back, he asked his sister, “Was she grooming you to follow in her footsteps? Was that it, Lennie? Was that why you sold us out like that? Are you helping her now?”

      Stunned, Leonor couldn’t find the words to answer her brother, to defend herself. What hurt most of all was that Thorne felt she had to.

      Mac came to her rescue. “That’s enough, Thorne!” he shouted. “I want you to apologize to your sister.”

      There was cold fury on Thorne’s face. “Why should I?” he demanded.

      Thorne was furious and he felt he had every right to be. His father was blind when it came to Leonor and his other half sisters, but women could be even more evil and deadlier than men. His mother was living proof of that, he thought darkly.

      “Because she doesn’t deserve to be treated so disrespectfully,” Mac informed his son. “Because if it wasn’t for her, neither one of us would be standing here right now!”

      Thorne had no idea what his father was talking about. “What’s that supposed to mean?” he demanded.

      “It’s nothing,” Leonor said quickly. She knew what Mac was going to say and she didn’t want him to. This was a private matter between the two of them, not something she’d done for any sort of credit or recognition.

      But Mac wasn’t about to allow Leonor’s generosity to go unnoted any longer. Thorne needed to know just the sort of person his sister was.

      “It’s not ‘nothing,’” Mac told her. “And it’s about time people knew how you came through.” He shifted his eyes toward his son. “When the bank was breathing down my neck a few years ago, threatening me with foreclosure because I’d had a run of bad luck and missed a few payments, Leonor used her own money to help bail me out. She paid off the bank.” There was gratitude in his eyes when he looked at her. “If she hadn’t done that, it would have gone up for sale.”

      Completely stunned in the face of this information, Thorne could only stare at his father. “You never said anything.”

      “Not the kind of thing a man likes to advertise,” Mac replied flatly. “It wasn’t my finest moment. But it definitely was Leonor’s,” he added, looking significantly at her.

      Thorne blew out a breath, completely caught off guard. It was his turn to look contrite. “I didn’t know,” he said to his sister.

      “You weren’t supposed to know,” Leonor said simply. “I didn’t do it because I wanted people to have something nice to say about me. I did it because your father needed help and this was my small way of paying him back for all the times he was there for all of us. For me,” she added with affection as she looked at the tall, strapping, dark-skinned rancher. “In a way, you’re the parent the rest of us never had,” she told Mac.

      Mac smiled at her. “You made it easy.” And then he turned his attention toward his son. “You want to apologize to her?”

      He made it sound like an option, but Thorne knew that it wasn’t. And, given what he’d just found out, his father was right. He did owe Leonor an apology. Not for being angry about the blog—she hadn’t denied being responsible for that—but for losing his temper with her like that. No matter how angry he was, she didn’t deserve to have him ranting at her like that, especially not after she’d helped his father the way she had.

      Apologies weren’t exactly his specialty and this one was no exception. He went with something positive rather than dwelling on the negative. “Thanks for helping Dad out.”

      “Like I said, it was the least I could do.” Leonor shrugged as if it had been no big deal—because, to her, it hadn’t been. The far bigger deal would have been to just ignore Mac’s plight СКАЧАТЬ