Rafe put an arm around her shoulders and pulled her close to his chest. He was warm and strong. He held her tight, stroking her hair, waiting for her to calm down, and then he loosened his grip. “Have you spoken to Thom about this?”
She nodded jerkily. Canceling the wedding at this stage would be a disaster. Her mom would flip. So would Thom’s parents. As for Thom, he’d made his feelings perfectly clear that morning.
“This morning,” Elana murmured. “At least, I tried to broach it, but he wasn’t what you’d call receptive.”
“Of course he wasn’t,” Rafe said with a hint of reproach. “He loves you. He proposed to you. And you guys have gone and invited pretty much everyone on the Forbes rich list, and all their friends. I think it’s a done deal now.”
“That’s not helping,” she muttered, shaking her head.
Rafe jammed his hands in his pockets, and Elana could see that the conversation was making him uncomfortable. She was pretty sure she could guess why, too. How many times had she failed to meet their family’s expectations? In fact, it was pretty much the only thing she was good at. Here she’d gone and done something no one had expected—she’d landed a sexy, gorgeous, wealthy, socially comparable bachelor as her fiancé and she wanted to bolt.
“I’m not going to do anything stupid,” she promised. “I just wondered if maybe we should wait a bit. Until we know what’s going on with Dad.”
Rafe kicked the toe of his loafer into the graveled drive. “Yeah, well, what if he never wakes up? You can’t put your life on hold forever.”
Elana paled visibly. It was almost exactly what Thom had said. “Jesus Christ. Forgive me for not being able to be so cavalier about my dad’s possible death.”
“He’s my dad, too,” Rafe pointed out with infuriating calm. “I’m not being cavalier about it.” He expelled a sigh. “I just feel like there’s something else going on here.”
Elana opened her mouth and then closed it again. Her eyes didn’t quite meet Rafe’s. “You’re paranoid,” she said finally, weakly. “I’m still reeling from all this. His life is literally hanging in the balance and I’m supposed to be staring down the barrel of festivity central? I’m just not there.”
“I don’t know if I’ve ever seen Dad happier than when you and Thom got engaged,” Rafe murmured.
“So?” Elana’s one-word response was the definition of stubborn.
“So—” Rafe’s smile seemed forced “—do you think he’d want you to put the whole thing off?”
Elana spun around and pressed her back to the sun-warmed sedan. Standing shoulder to shoulder with Rafe, she felt more estranged than she had in a long time. “I don’t know.”
“Yes, you do,” he said gently, bumping his shoulder to hers.
“God. Why are you so damned fired up for this wedding to go ahead?”
Elana sliced her gaze to his face and could have sworn she saw something like guilt dance in his eyes. Only for a second, and then it was gone.
When Rafe spoke, it was with an apparently relaxed demeanor. “I just don’t want you to make a mistake because you’re upset.”
A mistake? When Elana thought about marrying Thom, she had the same sensation as if she’d been dropped off the edge of a cliff and was in free fall. Splatting against the sidewalk was inevitable. Was it a mistake to ignore that intuition?
“We’re all on edge right now. If you ask me, this is a time to stay the course and stick to what we know is right.”
There was something in the way Rafe spoke that made her feel that she wasn’t quite seeing the entire picture. Rafe was the brother who listened to her. The guy who didn’t judge her for not being cut from the same dependable cloth as he and Luc were. So why wasn’t he listening now?
“I want you to be happy,” he said, as if reading her thoughts. “I just think... Thom’s a great guy.”
Thom was a great guy. Elana knew that. He just wasn’t necessarily the guy for her. She let out a small frown and shook her head slowly from side to side. “I think this whole thing’s just got me shaken up.”
“We’re all worried about Dad—”
“I don’t just mean Dad,” Elana interrupted. “I mean, of course, he’s right there at the top of my list. But what about all this other stuff? How can he have had this Fixer person running things, behind our backs?”
“I’ve been thinking about that, too,” Rafe said softly. “It doesn’t seem like him to keep secrets.”
“But he did. And big ones.”
“Even Mom seemed blindsided,” Rafe agreed.
“Poor Mom.” It was such a ludicrous description of the strong, fearsome Mariella Santiago-Marshall that they both laughed. It felt great to release steam. Elana put a hand on Rafe’s arm and shook her head, her eyes meeting his. “You know what I mean.”
He sobered. Of course he did. “She worked so closely with Dad. How could he have kept this, even from her?”
“I worked closely with him, too.” Elana winced. “I work closely with him. I think we should stick to present tense, don’t you?”
He nodded, a sense of urgency pushing him to confront the issue rather than grammar. “And? Did you ever notice anything?”
She bit down on her lower lip, the deep red lipstick cushioning against her teeth. “I don’t know.” She shrugged her slim shoulders, and a sea breeze rustled past, lifting a wisp of her dark hair over her shoulder. She pushed it back distractedly. “At the time, no, but now that I think about it?”
“Like what?” Rafe’s breath caught in his throat.
“He’s always really secretive about his office. I used to think it was just because he liked his privacy, but now? I don’t know.”
“You don’t think it was because you sprayed his office with Bollinger after your high school graduation?”
She laughed, because she knew it was expected of her, but Elana couldn’t stand being reminded of her past faults. All the many, many missteps she’d taken in her short life. She’d been drunk at the time, and it had seemed funny. But it had also been a long time ago. Elana wasn’t the only one who saw marrying Thom as a new start for her. She was certain that her family thought her irresponsible behavior would end the very second she said ‘I do.’
“That was ages ago,” she said, trying not to sound as defensive as she felt. “And he didn’t like you going in there, either.”
“No,” Rafe murmured, his eyes narrowing. “Dad was good at keeping me at a distance.”
Elana nodded, sympathy squeezing out her own sense of hurt. “Okay, Luc then,” she muttered. “The whole family was kept out of his office, and we never questioned that.”
“Because we trusted him,” Rafe said simply. “As did Mom.”
“She must be freaking out,” Elana said with a shake of her dark head.
“I have to believe this is all a misunderstanding,” Rafe said after a moment of quiet reflection had passed. “Dad’s a good guy. He loves us, loves this family. If he’s involved in business with the Fixer, he must have thought it was the right thing to do...”
“So why keep him or her a secret? Even from Mom?”
“I don’t know,” Rafe said. “Let’s just hope he wakes up soon so we can ask him.”
Elana might not have been as academic as her siblings, but when it came to people, she had an innate talent