Griff was genuinely baffled. “Hang out?”
“You know, a few red carpet events. Maybe a pool party with some half-naked babes.” Matthew grimaced, his gaze darting over Griff ’s shoulder to the nearby door. “Clearly, I caught you at a bad time. So if you’ll just remove your fingers from my throat I’ll be on my way.”
Griff muttered a curse. Was he an idiot? Griff would rather gouge out his eyes than waste one second of his life “hanging out” with this shallow jerk. Or was this all some elaborate trap.
Only one way to find out.
“Carmen is missing,” he abruptly said.
Matthew blinked. He looked genuinely baffled. “Missing? Missing from where?”
Griff ignored the question. “I want you to take me to the warehouse.”
“Look, man. I just—”
Griff tightened his grip until Matthew’s eyes threatened to pop out of his head.
“Now.”
“Yeah.” Matthew made a gagging sound. “Great idea.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Carmen knew that she’d blacked out from Ronnie’s vicious slap. What she didn’t know was how long she’d been out. Certainly long enough for Ronnie to have moved so he was crouching next to her.
There was a strange expression on his scarred face as he watched her. Like a snake who’d just bit a mouse and was watching in pleasure as the venom spread through her body.
It was creepy enough that she pressed her hands to the cement floor and pushed herself to a seated position. Jagged pain shot from her jaw to the back of her head, wrenching a low groan out of her.
Crap. Her head was spinning like she’d been on a three-day drinking spree and her mouth was throbbing.
Reaching up, she cautiously touched her lower lip. It was swollen twice its normal size and so tender she wondered if she needed stitches. With a grimace, she pulled her hand away to study the blood that stained the tips of her fingers.
Ronnie abruptly broke the thick silence. “You shouldn’t anger me.”
“I didn’t mean to,” she breathed, resisting the urge to try to find a way to placate her captor.
He was clearly unstable. Which meant there was no way to guess what might or might not trigger a burst of violence. Right now, all she could do was try to stay alive long enough to hope that help was on its way.
The pale eyes held a hectic light as he glared at her. “Why won’t you accept the truth?” he demanded. “I showed you the letters.”
She scooted back, using the need to rest her aching head against the wall as an excuse to put some space between her and Ronnie. It might be her imagination, but it felt like an evil aura was pulsing around the man.
She didn’t want to be tainted.
“The handwriting doesn’t look right,” she told him.
Ronnie abruptly straightened, his hands curling into tight fists of frustration.
“You sound just like our father.”
“What do you mean?”
“I waited for years to earn the right to be claimed as a Jacobs.” He paced across the bay, nearly reaching the forklift before he turned to pace back toward her. “I was the perfect son. Always helping my mother around the house and offering to run errands. I would even follow him when he went on his evening walk. I thought if we could be alone together, he would feel more comfortable confessing where we couldn’t be overheard by your mother.” He released a sharp, humorless laugh. “He pretended as if he didn’t even see me.”
Carmen shivered. She’d always thought that Ronnie was sneaky, but she hadn’t realized he’d been stalking her father.
She pointed out the obvious. “Maybe he didn’t tell you because he didn’t believe you were his son.”
In three long strides he was back at her side, his hand raised in warning.
“Don’t say that.”
She cringed, turning her head to the side. “Sorry.”
Long seconds passed as he tried to regain command of his volatile temper. He sucked in a deep breath, his expression defiant.
“Do you think I didn’t try to convince myself that he ignored me because my mother had never told him that I was his son?” he demanded. “But then I saw the letters.”
Her gaze shifted toward the letters, which were scattered a few feet away. In the gloom they looked like bits of discarded trash. A tangible reminder of broken dreams.
“They didn’t say anything about a child,” she said in confusion.
He clicked his tongue. As if she was being incredibly stupid.
“No, but they proved that my mother hadn’t been just a quickie in the pantry,” he insisted, a fleck of spit collecting at the corner of his mouth. “They had a relationship. He loved her.”
She once again glanced toward the scattered letters. Did she tell him that they were exact copies of letters that had been sent to her mother?
No. She might not be able to predict what would set him off, but she was pretty sure he wasn’t prepared to accept that someone had found the letters that had been written to her own mother and simply copied them. He wanted to believe his mother had been special to his father. Whoever that might be.
“Okay,” she forced herself to mutter.
His narrow face hardened, but he accepted her pretense of agreement.
“The letters show they were in a relationship. There was no way he wouldn’t have realized that his lover was pregnant and that the baby was his.” He pivoted away, resuming his pacing. A manic tension hummed in the air around him. “He was deliberately denying my rightful inheritance.”
Carmen jerked, watching him pace toward the forklift at the end of the bay and back again. Had Griff been right in the first place? Was all this horror and blood about money?
“You want an inheritance?”
He waved a hand, annoyed by her inability to understand what he was saying.
“I want what was denied me,” he insisted, lifting his hand to point an accusing finger in her direction. “What you had.”
She furrowed her brow. “What did I have?”
“Parents who loved you.”
She shrugged. She couldn’t argue with that. Whatever had been going on between her parents, it had never lessened their affection for her. She’d spent her childhood confident in the belief that she was a treasured member of her family. Something she’d taken for granted until it had been snatched away from her.
Still, she’d seen how Ellen had been with her only son. She might have been a stern woman, but she’d been devoted to Ronnie. In fact, now that Carmen was older, she could look back and see that the woman had kept him close to her side. Almost as if she didn’t want him out of her sight.
“Your mother loved you,” she said.
Ronnie slashed his hand through the air. “I wanted the right to my true name,” he rasped. “Can you imagine what it feels like to be the one cleaning up dog shit from the yard, or taking out the trash, while the princess is flouncing around in her new dress with a bunch of her snotty friends?”
The animosity spilled out of him, like an infected wound that was suddenly lanced. Clearly, he’d been hoarding his resentment for years.
“If you want my share of the inheritance, I’m happy to give it to you,” she said. “You said that I should have three million dollars from my parents’ insurance policy. You can have it all.”
“I don’t want money, I want respect,” he snapped. “I want my father to look me in the eye and tell me that he’s proud of me.”
An unexpected regret sliced through her heart. She’d spent the past fourteen years refusing to think about her father. It was too painful to try to reconcile the man she’d loved with the man who could murder her own mother. It wasn’t until she’d been discussing the past with Griff that she realized she’d locked away the good memories along with the bad. Which wasn’t fair to her father. Or her.
“It’s too late for that,” she breathed.