Landis lunged to his feet and charged toward Zandra. Though her knees trembled, she stood her ground, chin raised defiantly.
He stopped just before her, jabbing his finger into her face. “You’d better mind your tongue, little girl.”
“Or what?” Zandra challenged. “You gonna beat me like you did that night just because I screamed at you to stop hitting my mother? You gonna take off your belt now and whip me senseless just because I told you to stop smearing her memory with that ugly word?”
He glared at her, nostrils flaring.
Zandra didn’t back down.
And then suddenly he smiled. A slow, malevolent smile that made ice congeal in her veins. “You’re really feeling yourself today, aren’t you? I wonder how you’re going to feel when I tell you that Mayor Norwood is the one who leaked the story about you to the media.”
Zandra frowned. “Why the hell should that matter to me?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe because your old friend Remington has been digging up dirt on you on behalf of the mayor.”
Zandra’s stomach lurched up into her throat. As the room spun around her, she stared at her father. “What the hell are you talking about?” she whispered faintly.
“Remington has been investigating your escort agency so the mayor can use it against me.”
Zandra’s hand flew to her mouth, but the cry of wounded disbelief had already escaped.
Landis smiled with vicious satisfaction. “That’s right, dear daughter. Your precious childhood hero has been betraying you behind your back.”
“I don’t believe you,” Zandra snarled.
Landis sneered. “Ask him. Ask him why he’s been secretly meeting with Norwood’s top campaign advisor.”
It wasn’t possible, Zandra told herself. Remy would never betray her like this. He couldn’t.
But she suddenly remembered the secret phone call he’d taken that night at her apartment. And she’d never been able to explain his sudden interest in dating her escorts.
Still, she resisted the damning evidence before her. Resisted the inner voice that reminded her she couldn’t trust her heart with any man.
She resisted all those things and lashed out at her father, “You’re a damn liar.”
His expression hardened. “You always think I’m lying to you.”
“Because you always have.”
He glared accusingly at her. “I know you still blame me for your mother’s death. You suspected me of the worst from the moment I called to tell you the news. I still remember the way you carried on when you came home from England. Asking me all those questions about where I found her body, interrogating me like I was a fucking murder suspect. Hell, if that spiteful woman had left a goddamn suicide note, you would have sworn I’d forged it!”
“She did.”
It took a delayed moment for her quiet words to register. When they did, Landis went completely still, his eyes narrowing on her face. “What did you say?”
Zandra calmly met his gaze. “My mother did leave a note. I received it after her funeral.”
It gave her some satisfaction to watch the blood leach out of her father’s face.
He shook his head in stunned denial. “You’re lying.”
“I assure you I’m not.”
“She wouldn’t have done that. She wouldn’t have left me without saying goodbye.”
Zandra sneered, driven to hurt him as much as he’d hurt her. “If she’d wanted to say goodbye, she would have left the note for you instead of me. But why would she have done that when you’re the one she was trying to esc—”
Landis’s hand shot out, delivering a vicious backhand.
Pain exploded across Zandra’s cheek and down her jaw.
Refusing to cry out or show any weakness, she straightened slowly and looked him square in the eye. “Get out.”
Shaken, he stared at her. “Look what you made me do.”