He rolled over onto his side and stretched an arm out so that it was resting across my middle. His fingers curled around the side of my hip and dug into the gentle swell of flesh. My hand ended up curled around his ribs, trapped by his weight and the mattress underneath.
“Tell me about your sister. Tell me why you think it was your job to save her and avenge her. Tell me why you would risk everything for her.”
I tilted my head on the pillow so we were looking at each other. I exhaled and he parted his lips and breathed the sound in. It was probably the most intimate act I’d ever been a part of.
“She was my little sister. Isn’t that enough?” I’d always done my best to take care of her even when I wasn’t taking care of myself.
“It’s enough…for most people. But for you to feel like you had to come all this way on the limited information you had when you are clearly a smart and capable woman, I’m sure there is more to it than familial obligation.”
He thought I was smart and capable.
If I could have moved, I would have rolled toward him and crawled all over that big body, leaving no inch of taut, toned skin untouched. He had no idea how much those words meant to me. How hard I had worked to be that woman.
“Xanthe was always a little different; hell, we all were. Horatio was born to find peace and harmony in everything, Xanthe was born to make everyone smile, and I was created to bring chaos and disruption. My brother and sister were always easy kids. Warm, loving, kind. I was none of those things and my parents never let me forget it. As my brother and sister got older, Horatio came into his own, found a balance between his ideals and the real world, but Xanthe didn’t. She lived in a fantasy world where everyone was as nice as she was, where no one would ever hurt anyone else. It made her a target.”
Without realizing it, my whole body tightened and tensed.
“Men took advantage of her because she was pretty and sweet. She didn’t understand boundaries and that what she was giving away, she wouldn’t get back. She handed her heart over to whoever smiled at her and was crushed when she figured out they weren’t interested in forever. She went from as high as anyone could be, to the lowest of the low in the blink of an eye. Once I got my head out of my ass and focused on what was happening around me, I started looking into what could cause those kind of mood swings. She’d always been delicate, fragile, but my parents wrote it off as nothing more than her being temperamental.” I inhaled a sharp breath through my nose and dug my fingers into his side as memories rose up and threatened to choke me.
“She cut herself. All through high school, she took razor blades to her skin. She bounced from activity to activity and tended to be even more promiscuous than I was. I’m pretty sure if we had taken her to a doctor, if my parents hadn’t been so willing to turn a blind eye to how dangerous her behavior was, she would have been diagnosed as bipolar. She needed more help than I could give her. When she moved in with me, I thought I could convince her to go, but just like me, she spent her childhood hearing she was one thing and that’s what she believed. She wasn’t sick; she was special.”
“How did she end up in the path of one of the MacKenzies?” His voice was low and soothing. It settled some of my jangling nerves.
“She worked at one of the coffee shops at the airport. She came home one day and told me she’d met the man of her dreams. Granted, she said that a lot, so initially I ignored her. If I had been paying attention, I would have noticed she was becoming manic, focused, obsessed in a scary way. She didn’t even know the guy’s first name, but he smiled at her and she was convinced he was in the airport so often just to see her. She had a wedding dress picked out and names for the kids ready to go.” I sighed and wiggled my hand free from his weight so I could push on my tired eyes. “She followed him one day to his gate and came home so she could start researching everything about Surrender. It sounds so crazy when I talk about it. I should have been able to stop it.”
He offered up a grunt in response that gave no indication as to what he was thinking.
“He came back through the airport after missing a few months and he was wearing a wedding ring. God, Xanthe was inconsolable after that. She was crushed. She cried for weeks, stopped going to work, quit eating and bathing. I tried to talk to her, tried to convince her to let me help, but she totally shut down. My parents told me to ride it out, that it was just a phase, but I knew better. She was off, she was going down, she was slipping off the edge, and I wasn’t fast enough or strong enough to catch her. I should have forced her to get help, but I was scared she would resent me, hate me, the way my parents always have. I didn’t want to lose her; she was the only one that never let me get totally lost. I always had to find my way back to take care of her. But I lost her anyway. I came home from work one day and found her in the bathtub. She took a handful of sleeping pills and drifted away.”