Page 49 of Stolen By the Billionaire
Blaze didn’t add, Yeah, figures.
Sarah was still staring at the lake when she lifted her hand. “I only know what I was told. I was a kid, a little kid. I wasn’t allowed downstairs after eight.”
“And you didn’t try to find him?”
“I looked in the barn the next morning, but I wasn’t allowed to go farther than that because I was seven. My mom still walked me to the school bus every morning because the stop was a mile down the road.”
“How old are you now?” he asked her.
Sarah frowned. “Twenty-three.”
“Have you ever looked for him? Did you know if he was even alive before I told you?”
“The way my father talked about him, I assumed he was alive. Dad said that if Logan called, I wasn’t to talk to him because he’d broken up the family.”
“And yet, when you were in danger, Logan sent me to rescue you.”
“I didn’t ask him to do that. My parents said he wasn’t my brother anymore. I didn’t know anything more about him other than what you told me.”
“He was a kid,” Blaze said, standing and gathering the first aid supplies. “He was a little kid who hadn’t even had his growth spurt yet. He walked out of that farmhouse with nothing but the clothes on his back, and his family didn’t even look for him. At least my parents had the excuse that they were dead.”
Sarah turned her head. “You’re an orphan?”
“I don’t think of myself like that,” Blaze said, walking back to the kitchen and looking ahead of him at the cabinets, not back at her. “I’m a grown man. If you’re lucky, you get to raise your kids to adulthood, and you die before them. My parents got one out of two, and I finished their other job.”
Even if their deaths were his father’s fault.
“But you don’t have your parents in your life, and you haven’t for a long time,” she said.
“Neither did Logan,” Blaze said.
He placed the first aid supplies carefully in the kitchen drawer, taking an extra minute to arrange the detritus that was in with them, lining up needle-nose pliers and glue with the ointment tube and gauze spools so they wouldn’t roll around, and he tapped the drawer to shut it.
The drawer slowly retracted on its spring.
He asked her, “Do you want supper or not?”
Sarah had turned around entirely, putting her back to the lake, and was watching him. “Sure.”
“You don’t know what’s in the fridge yet.”
She shrugged. “I can eat whatever.”
“Good luck with that,” Blaze said. “Julieta, my housekeeper, is from Sonora, Mexico. She likes her chili peppers.”
In the far distance, thunder rumbled.
Blaze looked toward the front of the house that faced west, listening to the rising storm.
Hopefully, the clouds would blow over by morning so Sarah could see the sunrise over Lake Michigan from the balcony.
And yet, Sarah was part of the problem of his and Logan’s lonely childhoods, not an innocent victim.
Maybe she didn’t deserve the sunrise over the lake.
And she sure as heck didn’t deserve Blaze taking bullet wounds and putting his life on the line for her protection, but he couldn’t just dump her for the hitmen to find and murder, either.
Sarah Bell was his responsibility now.
