‘Let him.’ The words flew out of her mouth Serena-style—that was before she could think better of it or lessen the blow. One of her not-so-good traits that landed her in trouble more often than not…
‘You don’t mean that,’ he said, with the curt ring of a reprimand.
Closing her eyes, she breathed through the maelstrom of emotions warring in her chest. No, she didn’t mean that. She might not like the man, but she didn’t want anything bad to happen to him. Much.
‘What’s more, I refuse to lose another boy in this lifetime.’
The hot air circling behind her ribs gushed past her lips and her shoulders slumped. Then, for the first time since she’d barged in here twenty minutes ago, she took a good look at Michael Scott—a real look. Her dad might be all kinds of a playboy himself, but she’d missed him terribly.
Inspecting the grey shadows beneath his eyes, Serena almost asked how he was coping with the loss of his only son. Almost asked if he’d missed her while she’d been gone. But Serena and her father didn’t go deep. Never had, never would. So she stuffed the love and the hurt right back down, behind the invisible walls she’d designed and built with the fierce power of a youthful mind.
Yeah, she was the tough cookie in the brood. She didn’t grieve from her sleeve or wail at the world for the unfairness of it all. Truly, what was the point? She was this man’s daughter, raised as one of the pack. No room for mushy emotions or feminine sentimentality spilling all over the place.
So, even though she now had a Tom-sized hole in her heart, she had to deal with it like a man—get up, get busy, move on.
It was a pity that plan wasn’t working out so well. Some days her heart ached so badly she was barely holding it together. Don’t be ridiculous, Serena, you can hold up the world with one hand. Snap out of it!
‘Anyway, you can’t stay in London all season, fiddling with the prototype. I thought it was ready.’
‘It is. We’re just running through the final testing this week.’
‘Good, because I need you here. The design team can finish the trials.’
I need you. Wily—that was what he was. He knew exactly what to say and when.
‘No. You need me to try and control your wild boy. Problem is I have absolutely no wish to ever set eyes on him again.’
‘It wasn’t his fault, Serena,’ he said wearily.
‘So you keep saying.’
But exactly which part of Finn taking Tom to Singapore on a bender and Finn coming back first-class on his twenty-million-pound jet whilst her brother returned in a box wasn’t his fault? Which part of Finn taking him out on a boat when Tom couldn’t swim and subsequently drowned wasn’t his fault? He hadn’t even had the decency to attend the funeral!
But she didn’t bother to rehash old arguments that only led her down the rocky road to nowhere.
‘So you want me to…what? Forgive him? Not a chance in hell. Make him feel better? I don’t. So why should he?’
‘Because this team is going down. Do you really want that?’
She let loose a sigh. ‘You know I don’t.’ Team Scott Lansing was her family. Her entire life. A colourful, vibrant rabble of friends and adoptive uncles and she’d missed them all. But the entire scene just brought back too many memories she was ill-equipped to handle right now.
‘So think of the bigger picture. Read my lips when I say, for the final time, it wasn’t Finn’s fault. It was an accident. Let it go. You are doing no one any favours quibbling about it—least of all me.’
He pinched the bridge of his nose as if to stem one of his killer migraines and guilt fisted her heart.
He was suffering. They were all suffering. In silence. Let it go…
But why was it every time they spoke of that tragic day, when the phone had shrilled ominously through their trailer, she was slapped with the perfidious feeling she was being kept in the dark? And she loathed the dark.
It didn’t matter how many times she asked her father to elucidate he was forever cutting her off.
‘Tom wouldn’t want to see you like this,’ he said, irritation inching his volume a decibel higher. ‘Blaming Finn. Doing your moonlit flit routine. Holing up in London. Burying your head in work. You’ve done all you can at base—now it’s time to get back in the field. Quit running and stop hiding.’
‘I haven’t been hiding!’
He snorted in disbelief.
Okay, maybe she’d been hiding. Licking her wounds was best attempted in peace, as far as she was concerned. But honestly…? How far was solitude getting her on the heart-healing scale?
Serena’s heavy lids shuttered. God, she was tired.
She’d lost her brother, her best friend, and she kept forgetting she was supposed to carry on regardless. This was tough love and she’d been reared on it. Admittedly the vast majority of the time she’d appreciated Michael Scott’s particular method of parentage. You needed skin as thick as cowhide to trail the world for ten months of the year in the company of men. Not the best way to raise two children, but she’d genuinely loved her life. Honest.
If she’d often stared at other children with their mothers, wondering what it would be like to have one of her own, to live in a normal house and walk to an actual brick-built, other-children-present school every morning, she’d just reminded herself that her life was exciting. And if she’d prayed for a mum all those years ago when her adolescence had been shattered, leaving her broken and torn, she’d comforted herself that she had Tom. Tom had been her rock.
But now he was gone. Nothing was exciting any more and there was no one to hold her hand in the dead of night when the shadows loomed. You don’t need your hand held. You’re stronger than that. Snap out of it!
She swallowed around the lump in her throat, forcing the overwhelming knot of grief to plunge into her chest. Buried so deep her stomach ached.
‘If what you say is true and there is a problem,’ she said dubiously, ‘how can I possibly help?’
‘Get him to take an interest in the prototype or work on your latest designs… I don’t know—just get him to focus on something other than women or the bottom of a bottle.’
Impossible.
‘I’m a woman.’
‘Only in the technical sense.’
‘Gee, thanks.’ As if she needed reminding.
Then again, the last thing she wanted was to be like one of Finn’s regulars. They were the skirt to Serena’s jeans. The buxom bombshells to Serena’s boyish figure. The strappy sandals to Serena’s biker boots. The super-soft, twice-conditioned spiralling blonde locks to Serena’s wild mane of a hue so bizarre it defied all colour charts.
Which was wonderful. Inordinately satisfying. Exactly the way she liked it.
‘The last thing he needs is another bedmate,’ he muttered wryly. ‘He needs a kick up the backside. A challenge. And, let’s face it, you two create enough spark to fire a twin-stroke. Therefore I am asking—no, you know what…? I am telling you to help. You’re on my payroll. You move back in here and you chip in.’
Tough love.
Then his graphite gaze turned speculative. Calculating. An expression she didn’t care for