Sweet Adelaides were a Durand bestseller. Along with Jingdots, they were Alice’s longtime favorite sweets. Alice had recently learned that Marie, Dylan’s cook, kept a huge jar filled with various Durand candies on the counter in the castle kitchen. She felt shy but happy, too at Dylan’s little gift. Which was stupid, of course. She opened the box and poured a few of the caramel, peanut, and chocolate candies into her hand, giving Dylan a sideways smile.
“You really must love me if you’re willing to feed my chocolate addiction.”
He sat down on the cushion next to her and leaned back, draping one arm across the back of the couch. Alice paused in the process of popping the candies in her mouth, her hand stilling several inches below her chin. His T-shirt stretched over his wide muscular chest and lean torso. His strong, jean-covered spread thighs were a distraction, too, but it was what she read in his dark eyes that snagged her attention.
“I do.”
She’d been attempting to be light, but suddenly everything seemed dead serious. She felt her cheeks warming.
He smiled. “I know you come by the love of chocolate honestly. It’s in your genes.”
A tingling sensation went through her forearms. Slowly, she opened her palm and stared at the chocolates she held there. She’d looked at similar candies hundreds of times.
She’d never seen them until now.
A shiver tore through her. “Oh my God,” she whispered, shuddering.
“What?”
“Sweet Adelaides. Alan Durand named them after his daughter.”
“Yes,” Dylan said with the air of someone confirming she did indeed have a cobra poised at the back of her neck. “I thought you realized it the day we told you about Addie. Sidney mentioned that Alan used to tease that his daughter was usually a Sweet Adelaide but could occasionally be a Sour Citrus—” He broke off when she just stared at him blankly. He leaned toward her. “Alice?” he asked tensely.
“It’s okay,” she mumbled. Why hadn’t she made that incredible charged connection until now? Yes, Sidney had made that statement, but it’d bounced right off her like many things had that fateful afternoon.
To a casual observer of the facts, the truth must have been obvious. But Alice was no casual witness. She was so deeply immersed in this situation, she was blinded. Defenseless. That truth now rang in her ears and pulsed in her blood. It was like two electrical circuits had abruptly joined, sizzling with power and lighting up her brain, fusing together a small part of her—Alice’s—childhood to Addie Durand’s.
All this, from the seemingly innocuous stimulus of a common drugstore candy.
Slowly, deliberately, she raised her hand to her mouth and placed a chocolate on her tongue. One. She didn’t toss all of them in there at once, chew, and reach for the next handful even before she swallowed, like she usually did. She closed her mouth and eyelids, letting the sweet flavor and velvety consistency of the chocolate fill her.
Her life didn’t flash before her eyes, like they said of drowning victims. That would be far too dramatic of a representation of what happened to her in that moment. But because she allowed it, because she squeezed every ounce of meaning out of that little piece of candy that she possibly could, threads from her life that she’d formally thought of as inconsequential background noise, suddenly knitted together with the Present-Day Alice.
She swallowed.
“Alice?” Dylan repeated.
She blinked, coming out of her trance. It finally hit her how anxious he looked.
“Uncle Al would bring me Sweet Adelaides and Jingdots every once in a rare while. I told you how Al was my favorite uncle,” she prompted, holding Dylan’s stare. He nodded. “It’d be like Christmas for me, every time he held out that plastic bag of candy. Sissy would start yowling at him, accusing him of spoiling me after I’d just mouthed off to her, or committing whatever sin I’d just committed. But Uncle Al would ignore her. And on a few occasions when she screamed too loud, he’d blaze up at her and say, ‘She deserves that candy, Sis, that and a whole hell of a lot more! Are you forgetting that?’”
Alice shook her head. “I never got before why she’d shut up after that,” she said hoarsely. The nerves in her hands and feet tingled. She blinked and started back, like she’d just taken an invisible slap.
“They knew,” she whispered to herself. The candies she still held fell from her hand heedlessly to her knee, rolling to the carpet. Dylan reached out and grasped her upper arm. Alice appreciated his touch. It steadied her.
“Why?” she asked him. “Why did they keep me? Why did they keep it all a secret? Who knew? All of them? How much did they know?” The questions spilled out of her in a pressured rush even as more formed on her tongue. How could she not have wondered about the Reeds before? It was like a defensive dam had crashed and she was being pummeled by roaring, crashing anxiety. “Dylan?” she demanded desperately.