My laugh was hard and hollow. “Bishop’s Landing is the wealthiest strip of land in the country. I doubt I’ll be mugged on the sidewalk, Wally.”
Still, he looked worried. “Let me talk to Tiernan before you leave.”
I shrugged, already jogging up the right curved staircase to my room. I had no intention of waiting for Tiernan to “sanction” my desire to go for a jog. I was seventeen for God’s sake and I’d taken care of a seven-year-old boy for most of my life. I was responsible enough to go for a run and not get myself killed.
I shucked my uniform quickly, trading it for black spandex shorts and a sports bra Tilda had forced me to buy because apparently my ratty old tees weren’t acceptable now that I was a makeshift McTiernan. I grabbed my earbuds from my school bag and raced back through the hall and down the staircase, pushing through the door just as Walcott appeared at the mouth to the other hall, calling after me.
The door slammed shut on my name and I was off like it was the firing shot at the starting line.
I realized as I sprinted through the small pedestrian gate in the massive walls guarding Lion Court that I hadn’t yet explored the perfectly landscaped scope of Bishop’s Landing beyond Tiernan’s gothic manor. I took a left out the gates and started down the road along the curve of the ocean, passing massive lots filled with expensive homes, manicured lawns, tennis courts and heated pools wafting hot mist into the cool spring evening.
Music pumped through my earbuds, the echoing melancholic strains of Imogen Heap filling my ears as the sentiment echoed through my heart. I was running away from Tiernan, from the calamity of emotions he beat out of my chest with each passing day. I’d spent the last few weeks wondering why a cruel man like Tiernan would take in two orphans and I knew it wasn’t simply out of the ‘goodness of his heart.’ He was guarded and rude, clearly out to get something from Brando and me, maybe something to do with Aida, but more likely, something to do with my father.
Only, Lane hadn’t left us anything to find.
No money, no assets, no last letter filled with love.
Only a locket he’d given me that Tiernan had stolen and a brother I’d love and protect until the end of time.
I pushed myself harder, sweat beading across my forehead, chest heaving.
Tiernan was our guardian because he’d chosen to be, for whatever reasons, though I doubted it was because he couldn’t stand to see Aida’s children left out in the cold. It was more obvious now than it ever had been before that he’d never loved my mother. It panged in me that I’d loved her for being my mom, but that the loss of her didn’t echo painfully through the days of my life. She’d already been gone more often than not when she was alive, barely contributing to our family life unless she had just broken up with a boyfriend or felt unusually tender toward us.
Still, I’d hooked up with my mom’s ex-boyfriend.
Shame snapped at my heels like a rabid dog.
Which reminded me of Picasso, making Brando laugh back at Lion Court. Making him safe because Tiernan had gone out and blown a wad of money on the best service dog he could find.
So, not heartless, at least, not enough to write him off entirely which was dangerous.
Not for my safety, per se, but my heart.
Which clanged as I ran too hard, Tiernan’s name a question called out with each beat.
Who was he?
Monster or man?
Could he be both?
Could I be drawn to both sides of him, the dark and light with little space in between? He wasn’t so much a spectrum as two sides of a coin pressed back-to-back, one or the other. It was a coin toss every day, each moment, to see which side he’d land on.
But I could admit that I liked the risk.
The meanness stirred my blood and made it heat.
The kindness…well, the kindness blew the walls around my heart to smithereens.
It was utterly wrong to want him the way I did. He was my guardian, my mother’s ex-boyfriend, twelve and a half years older than my seventeen. Taboo didn’t even begin to cover our relationship.
It didn’t matter.
Now that I’d had a bite, I couldn’t seem to forget the taste of that forbidden fruit.
I was so mired in my thoughts, Tiernan’s scarred face and sun-bleached jade eyes in the forefront of my mind, that I didn’t notice the car pulling into a palatial driveaway until it was too late.
The impact wasn’t as terrible as it could have been, the car crawling forward as the gates yawned open, but it was enough to send my body rolling up the hood of the car to crash hard against the windshield.
My breath exploded from between my lips, lungs clenched so tightly no oxygen remained in the tissues. The right side of my body throbbed dully as I lay still, desperately trying to drag in air.
Indistinct noises filled my ears beneath the roar of blood rushing through them and then someone was gently peeling me off the windshield, helping me to sit up on the hood.
“Bianca?” a familiar voice cried out, drawing closer.
The person in front of me, probably the driver, swam in my vision, then was replaced by the newcomer.
“Bianca.” I squeezed my eyes shut, then tried to refocus. Elias’s handsome face rearranged itself like a kaleidoscope in my vision. “Holy shit, are you okay?”
“Um….” I hummed, trying to take stock of my pounding head and throbbing side. There was nothing too damaging, just a knock that would leave me bruised and a ringing in my brain that was already starting to mellow. “I think so.”
“What the hell were you doing? We could have killed you,” he demanded, squeezing my shoulders like he wanted to shake me.
“Out for a run,” I mumbled, blinking slowly as I checked in with my body. “I needed some air.”
“You need more than air,” a cool, elegant voice inserted. “Clearly you don’t have a lick of sense if you go barreling around the streets without looking where you are going. It would have served you right if you were more seriously injured.” Then a pause. “Though it would have been inconvenient to get the car detailed if you bled all over it.”
“Aunt Caroline, what the hell?” Elias almost growled, stepping slightly to my side as if to block me from the woman.
Everything in me halted.
Breath, pain, heartbeat.
Caroline.
Caroline Constantine?
I turned my head slowly, almost scared to finally land eyes on the woman my father had married, the woman he wouldn’t leave for my mother no matter how much he claimed to love Aida.
What breath I’d collected into my ravaged lungs leaked out my mouth like a puncture wound when my gaze met the glacial blues eyes of the Constantine matriarch.
She was, in short, utterly exquisite.
Her pale blonde hair was collected into a chic chignon at the back of her neck, not a lock out of place, showcasing a high, elegant forehead hardly creased despite her middle age. I knew with the trained eye of an art lover that her features, classically beautiful, were perfectly symmetrical on an oval face that could have been staring out at me from a Rembrandt or Da Vinci painting. Dressed in an ivory suit that brought out the pale shade of blue in her gaze, she looked every inch the Queen of Bishop’s Landing.
I was so in awe of her grace that it took me a moment to see the faint sneer tucked in her cold expression, eyes slightly narrowed, mouth pressed into a tight line but curled disdainfully at the edges.