Stepbrother Thief (29 page)

“
Bonjour,
Regina,” Solène says brightly, skipping into the kitchen where I'm sitting with a cup of coffee clutched between my palms. She pauses in a square of sunshine leaking in from the window above the sink, and twirls. Her pink and purple striped skirt spins in a dizzying circle around her, revealing a pair of white leggings stamped in red roses underneath. With a pair of black Doc Martens on her feet and a white sweater with a ghost on it, she's the walking epitome of
fashion
at its finest, far too trendy for me to pick up on, but that's the beauty of the industry, right? “I sewed the skirt myself,” she says, and then points to her top, “and Aveline found this
fantôme
and said she thought of me. I think it's positively perfect with these leggings.” She lifts up a leg and pats it fondly, dropping her boot to the floor with a thump.

The sound reminds me of Gilleon and a chill travels down my spine. I clutch the cup tighter in my hands and try not to think about him. My thoughts have become almost maniacal lately, a spinning, twisting mess where I waffle between two extremes: wanting him out of my life forever and … wanting him back in it.

It might've been nice if he hadn't decided to disappear for three days. I don't know how to work my way through all of this without actually seeing him, talking to him.
Shit.
Seeing him shoot those men should've been the straw that broke the camel's back, the obvious end to any feelings I might've still carried for the man. But it wasn't. When I saw that deadly balance inside of him, all I wanted to do was fix it, shove him as hard as I could towards the light.
I won't be one of those women who try to fix men,
I think to myself, staring down into my coffee before looking back up at my daughter.
She deserves better than that.

“I think you'll be showing at Paris Fashion Week before you turn twenty-one,” I say with a slight smile. Unconsciously, I reach up to touch the diamond pendant at my neck.
I wish you were
here, Mom. Things would be so much easier if you were.

“Good morning,” Cliff says, moving into the kitchen and heading straight for the coffeemaker. I've been avoiding him since that night at the hotel, and he knows it. I take a deep breath and toss back the rest of the coffee in my cup. I know a talk is coming on—I can
feel
it. “Solène,
mon étoile,
could you excuse Regi and me for a few moments to talk?”

Solène wrinkles up her face for a moment and then nods.

“I don't much enjoy gossip anyhow,” she says with a sniff, leaving the room in a whoosh of skirts and the clomping of boots. There's a brief exchange between her and Aveline before I hear the pounding of feet on steps and the slamming of a distant door.

My stomach twists up tight and I find myself standing up for another cup of coffee, anything so that my shaking hands have something to do.

“Don't you look lovely this morning,” Cliff says, pausing to give me a kiss on either cheek. I smile through a face of perfectly applied makeup—a dark chocolate liner with a touch of brown shadow, a nude lip, a gentle kiss of blush. My hair's up in a messy chignon, and I'm completely and utterly overdressed for yet another day spent trapped indoors. My open-front halter top shows way too much cleavage and the high waisted slacks I'm wearing are definitely too chic for an afternoon watching Netflix, but … I need the uniform right now, more than I ever have before. I need to feel polished and put-together. If I keep pretending that I am, the feeling's bound to wear off on me at some point, right?
I look beautiful today,
I tell myself trying to stay confident and in control. Every little sound, every footstep and opening door, it all makes me jump, gives me a serious case of butterflies and goose bumps because I think it's Gill, come home at last.

Only for three days, it hasn't been.

“
Merci
, Papa,” I say setting my cup on the counter next to his. He lifts his own mug to his lips with a very neutral expression hovering on his face. I try to remember that I'm not sixteen, but Cliff's perception of me is so important that sometimes I get worked up over nothing. And this, this is not nothing. “What did you want to talk about?” I ask, trying to get the jump on the conversation before he does.
Control.

“What happened in that hotel was not your fault,” he tells me and I cringe slightly. Someone must've filled him in—probably Aveline.

“I know,” I say, because I do. I didn't make those men come after us, break into our room, and I didn't shoot them either.

“But it's also okay to let yourself be affected by what you saw.” I take a sip of my coffee and slam my cup back down on the counter, a little harder than I intend to. I lift my eyes up and glance left, out the window that looks onto the hedge of trees that line Gill's property.

“Thank you, Cliff, but I'm fine. Really. I knew that signing up to rob a hundred million in jewels could come with consequences.” I try to make a joke out of it, throw a smile onto my face, but Cliff sees right through me. His expression darkens and he moves away to sit at the table.

“Gilleon's a dangerous man, Regina,” he says, and even now it still weirds me out to hear him talk about his own son like that. “And whether he wants to admit it or not, his time with his mother changed him. This last decade of his life, it changed him even more.” Cliff spins in his seat to look at me as I turn around. “Now, you're an adult and I can't tell you what to do, but listen to an old geezer's advice.” I roll my eyes a little because Cliff's been referring to himself as an old man for the last fifteen or so years. “My son is charming, handsome, mysterious.” I laugh but Cliff raises his graying brows at me. “Don't make light of this, Regi.”

“Papa, I'm thirty-one years old,” I remind him, but he just shakes his head and points a finger at me.

“Don't throw your age at me. I'm sixty-five years old, so I've got decades on you. Listen, all I'm trying to say is, once this is over, let Gilleon go. Cut him off and say goodbye. It's the best thing for you, for me, for Solène.”

“He's her father, Cliff,” I say, exasperated, wishing suddenly that I was back in Paris, that I'd looked past those secrets in Gill's eyes, that quiet plea for help, and that I'd walked away. Because I'm just now realizing that no matter what he's hiding from me, whatever real life purpose this heist was supposed to serve for him, the real reason I went along with it all is because I saw it then just like I did a few nights ago at the hotel: Gill is slipping away and he wants to be saved.

And he wants me to do it.

“Yes,” Cliff says with a sigh, “he is, but he's also a coward, and that makes him a very scary person to be around.”

“Glad to see you've got so much faith in me, Dad,” Gill says from the entrance to the kitchen. I jump and slosh hot coffee all over my hands, hissing at the burn as I shove the mug on the counter and rush to the sink for cold water.

“I'm just trying to talk some sense into Regina, Gilleon,” Cliff says as I wash my hands and dry them on a paper towel. Only then do I turn around and look at him, hating the way my heart skips and jumps inside my chest. There's some fear there, yes, but there's also desire, and that horrible little L-word called
love,
that immortal beast that never dies.

I stare into his blue eyes and he stares right back into my brown ones.

“Somehow she's got it into her head that this could still work.”

“What?” I snap, breaking my concentration with Gilleon to stare at the side of his father's head. “I never said that, Cliff.”

“No, but I can see it in your face. You can't save him, Regina. He's beyond that now.”

“Goddamn it, Cliff,” Gill growls, curling his hands into fists. He looks dangerous right now, like his claws are sheathed but only with the utmost effort. A pale blue shirt and shoulder holster, gray army fatigues and a leg holster, and a thick ass pair of steel-toed work boots. Gill's armed and ready to kill right now, just like he was in the hotel. Hot desire, cold fear, all of it swirls around inside of me until I feel like I'm choking. “Are you really gonna sit here and talk shit about me after all you've done?”

“You mean like raise your daughter in your absence?” Cliff says, easy as pie, like the words are nothing to him. I can feel Gill's anger from here, a hot heat that charges the very molecules in the air around us. It's not
me
he blames for Solène and the decisions that were made, not himself, but his dad.

“You don't know the half of what I've been through,” Gill snarls, his face twisting into harsh lines of pain, his blue eyes darkening. Black hair falls across his forehead as he rakes his fingers through it. He's got that perfect five o'clock shadow that looks effortless, but takes a ton of work to keep looking nice. Even though I know that, that he groomed himself for some reason—probably me—it just looks like he's rough around the edges, wild. “You don't write off your family for reasons you don't understand,
Cliff.
”

“You know I love you, Gilleon, just as much as I love Solène and Regina, but as angry as you are with me, you must at least be able to grasp where I'm coming from here.”

“I left, I get it,” Gill says, his voice rising with each word. “I fucking left, and I fucked everything up.”

“Gilleon,” Cliff says, his voice a warning. Aveline peeks her head around the corner and raises her red brows at us. “Calm down, son.”

“Calm down?” Gill asks, his face cracking into a million pieces. “My father's sitting in my kitchen looking at me like I'm the scum of the earth while the love of my life stares at me like I'm a fucking monster. My daughter thinks I'm her goddamn brother, and everything I ever wanted is so far outside my grasp, I might as well be reaching for the moon.”

I swallow hard and shake my head. Seeing him break apart like this, drop the expressionless mask of ice, it's terrifying. I don't want Gilleon to come apart at the seams. Despite everything, I want to sew him back together again.

“I don't think you're a monster, Gill,” I say, but the words don't entirely ring with truth. I've thought that about him before, I have. “But if you won't tell us why you left, then how can we truly understand why you want to come back?”

Gill turns around and walks away without bothering to answer me, his boots hard against the wood floors as he takes the steps two at a time. I set my coffee down and go after him, even though I can hear Cliff behind me.

“Leave him be, Regi,” he says, but I can't. Not right now. I chase Gill up the stairs, my heels loud as I come up against his door and find it unlocked. An invitation that I shouldn't take.

“Gilleon?” I ask, stepping into the room and finding him right there waiting for me.

I pause, my breathing frantic, my heart pounding in my chest. I lean back and use the weight of my body to close the door behind me, flicking the lock with my right hand.

“I'm sorry, Gill,” I say, even though I'm not precisely sure why I'm saying it.

“For what? Taking me at face value? No, I get it. I'm a lowlife, the worst kind, a man who abandons his soon-to-be wife and unborn child. A man who kills other men in cold blood and doesn't bat an eyelash. I know the kind of man I am, Regi.”

Gill stares right back at me, his breathing slowing, his voice surprisingly calm and reasonable, but I can see the tension in his muscles, the way his shirt strains across the tightness in his chest.

“But I can't stand it, seeing that information reflected in your face, in my dad's face. I
know
I'm a bad man, but seeing you both come to that realization, it hurts.”

“I don't think you're a bad person, Gill,” I say as he takes a step forward, effectively pinning me against the door with his presence. He's not touching me, but I couldn't move if I wanted to. I lick my suddenly dry lips and notice Gill's eyes following the movement. His gaze continues downward, to the circle of cleavage revealed by my shirt. When he lifts his hand and traces his finger along the edge of my breast, I find it very hard to breathe, my breath catching sharp in my chest.

“Regi,” he says, and his voice is everything I ever wanted it to be—gentle, affectionate, loving. It's strange, seeing him dressed to the nines to kill, guns everywhere, a knife hilt showing at the top of his boot, and then hearing that soft sound scrape past his lips. “Regi, if I could never tell you another secret, never say a single other word about it, about why I left or why I came back, but I told you that it was all with good reason, would you believe me?”

I wait to answer, my breathing growing heavy in tandem with his, our foreheads close, eyes locked. Gill slides his hand inside my shirt, right underneath the cup of the ridiculous U-plunge bra I had to wear to get into this silly shirt. It has a hole cut right out of the middle of my chest, giving me side boob action and a back covered only in white mesh.

I feel so exposed right now.

I groan as Gill's strong hand caresses my breast, his grip a little tighter than it probably should be. But I don't pull away. I don't
want
to pull away, and that's the problem.

“Gilleon,” I say, reaching up and curling my fingers around his wrist, tugging on his arm until he releases me and takes his hand back. His eyes darken and the skin on his forehead gets tight, but he doesn't say anything, waiting for me to respond. I can't think straight with his rough fingertips grazing my nipple. “If you don't want to tell me why you left, you don't have to. I'm not going to force you to do anything you don't want to do. It won't mean
anything
to me if I have to pry an answer out of you.” I take a deep breath and reach up to adjust my shirt, the memory of Gill's hand still tingling across my skin. I can't help but notice the bulge in his pants, the tightness of the fabric as it pulls across his arousal. Between my legs, I feel an answering heat, a throbbing that refuses to let up, even when I pull my gaze back up to Gill's face.

“Leaving me,” I start and then have to take a big breath to steel myself. “There was no reason good enough, Gill. None. I … I'd love to hear why, so maybe I can understand, but to me, it won't change anything. I can't ever forgive you for that, Gilleon. I can never trust you again.”