“What? I never said anything like that. I haven’t even spoken to Mel in well over a decade.” Christ, she’d written that score when she was still in school. As a favor for a friend who was making an independent film. But it never went anywhere and she’d pretty much forgotten about it. Was he really trying to sell it and using Adrian’s name?

This was a nightmare. His entire family had gathered in a semicircle around the reporter as Adrian kept his body in between her and the reporter. Protecting her when her past was about to rip him apart. Which only made it worse. He was taking care of her, even though they’d fought, even though she knew it would be over in a matter of minutes.

“So it’s true? You wrote a score you never told me about and are trying to sell it?” Adrian turned his head to speak to her.

“No! I mean yes, I wrote a score, but—” He put a hand up to silence her.

“We’ll talk about it later.” He turned back to the journalist. “As you can see, you’re incorrect. Now shove off.”

“Her father is in prison for drugs and for the murder of a sixteen-year-old girl he was shacked up with. A child killer.”

Erin had been standing next to Gillian and she froze. Gillian closed her eyes against helpless tears.

“How do you deal with that, Erin? Your brother’s new squeeze is the daughter of a guy like the one who killed your child. Does it come up at holiday dinners?”

Gillian turned to Erin. “Oh my God, I’m so sorry,” she managed to say before she ran off. She ran and ran and then ran some more. Down through Queen Anne until her lungs burned and she managed to grab a taxi to head to the ferry.

22

Everyone filed wordlessly into Erin’s place. Adrian felt caught between rage at himself and rage at Gillian.

“I can’t believe she never told me!” He slammed his palm against the countertop. He’d fallen in love with a woman with some secrets. And those secrets had blown up in her face.

How long did she think she could get away with not telling him about her father? She had to have known he’d be extra sensitive to that sort of thing after what Erin had endured.

He began to pace as people settled in.

“Cope, take Ella home,” Brody said quietly. “Ella needs to rest and not be upset.”

“I’m not upset! Well, not by what you think I am. I’m not going anywhere.” Ella crossed her arms and Cope sent Brody a look and took the glass of lemon water Ben handed to him for his wife.

“I need to know about this guy shopping this movie using my name.”

“Todd’s on it already. He started looking into it on the way back home,” Ben said.

“She used me. All this time I thought I’d misjudged her but it was all an elaborate ruse. She deliberately didn’t tell me about her father. She knew how I’d react.”

“All those times I was in her house, all those times we were together and I told her about Adele and she never once mentioned it to me. I’m sick over it.” Erin pressed a hand to her stomach and Ben rubbed a hand up and down her back.

“Let’s all just take a f**king chill pill.” Brody accepted the water he’d been handed. “This is getting out of hand. Baby girl”—he looked to Erin—“you need to get yourself calmed down.” He touched her cheek. “It tears me up to see you this way and it’s not going to help.”

“He’s right. I’m sorry Gillian ruined our night. I’m sorry I brought her into our lives like a poison. God, how stupid could I have been?”

That’s when the water hit his face. Tossed from Brody’s glass.

“You, boy, sit your ass down right now before I do it for you.”

Shocked and a little humiliated, Adrian managed to get his butt into a chair as Elise handed him a towel, moving between the two brothers.

She sent her husband a look. “Brody, you take two steps back before this goes into a direction you didn’t intend. I think we’ve seen enough of that tonight, don’t you?”

Brody stepped back and took a deep breath.

Todd came in and looked around. “Do I need to break out the Tasers?”

That broke the tension a little.

“What did you find out?” Adrian asked, though he wasn’t sure what he wanted to hear.

“I didn’t do a lot of looking at her life in England because she was a minor. I knew enough that from what I could see she had no police record or outstanding issues. Her father is some character. Lifetime criminal, looks like. He’s serving a life sentence for the murder of his sixteen-year-old girlfriend. She’d apparently been with him since the age of fourteen.” He shuffled through the papers. “Gillian left England at fifteen, just as she told you. I also surprised this ass**le filmmaker with a phone call at home. She wrote the score for him fifteen years ago, he says. He couldn’t sell it so it’s been in his basement. He saw her picture online and saw that she was your girlfriend and so, as he put it, he used it like anyone else would have.”

“Except Gillian apparently. No.” Brody pointed at Adrian, who’d been about to speak. “I’m talking now. You’ve said enough.”

Adrian bit back his words.

“You too,” he said to Erin. “You both rushed to judge her. No, she didn’t tell you about her father in prison. But if you put together what Todd just said, it means she hasn’t seen her father since she was fifteen. Probably longer than that, as he appears to have been shacked up with some girl instead of Gillian’s mother. She came here with that hanging over her. And she made her own future.”