“Never, Kendall.” He stretches across the table and sweeps his lips against mine. “I would never give up on you or on us.” He settles back in his seat. “Tell me what really happened. I want to know.”
So, I do.
51
KENDALL
The waiter brings our main courses to the table while I am filling Vander in on everything that went down back then.
“Jesus, Kendall.” He sets his silverware down and takes my hand again. Pain is etched upon his face. “I can’t believe you went through all of that alone. I’m so upset he did that to you, and I’m ashamed of how I reacted. I should’ve known. I should have trusted you more.”
“Don’t do that. You have apologized, and I don’t want you to blame yourself. You were eighteen, and while you were always more mature than your peers, our relationship was your first, and it was intense. I mostly forgot that because being with you was so natural, but it was a lot to take in. You were on the cusp of fulfilling your dreams. You were trying to protect your mom and me, and that man had put you through hell your entire life. You thought I’d cheated on you with him. You can’t help how you felt or how you reacted. It killed me letting you believe that, but I knew if I told you the truth you’d either kill him or agree to whatever demands he made to protect me from prosecution.”
“I would have,” he says, pushing his dinner aside the same time I do.
“I didn’t want you to throw everything away. I didn’t want you to lose the future you had worked so hard for.”
“A future I had thanks to you.” His eyes shine with love, and my heart melts. “You sacrificed your happiness so I could pursue my dream. I know you secured me the financial aid. I can never repay you for all the ways you have supported me and supported my dreams. Though I look forward to trying.”
There is no hesitation in his tone or his expression, and I want that for us so badly. I just hope he feels the same when he knows everything. “That’s what you do for the person you love more than life itself. I loved you enough to walk away, but it wasn’t easy, Vander. It destroyed me. None of it has been easy.”
“I know, baby.” He rubs his thumb over the back of my hand, and it’s wonderfully soothing. “Jimmy eventually told me about that night. It was my junior year, just after I found out you’d spoken to Yale on my behalf. I called him up. Told him I was going to get you back. None of his usual reasoning placated me. I was determined to speak to you and clear the air, once and for all, until he told me what you said, and the gravity of the situation hit home. I knew then, conclusively, that my father was behind it. I confronted him, but he denied it. Continued to spout the lie. The only way I walked out of there without throttling him with my bare hands was the knowledge you had sacrificed our happiness and walked away from our love because you felt you’d had no choice.”
“He never let me forget the deal. Every year, he sent me an image from his evidence file. It reminded me he could still get me sent down, and it drove the knife into my heart harder. He always chose a picture or a video that was one of our most precious moments. Every year, it threatened to destroy the progress I’d made, but anger and retribution are powerful motivators too, and it only made me more determined to see him brought to his knees.”
“He threatened me as well,” Vander says, topping off our wineglasses and emptying the bottle. The waiter approaches, and he orders another one. “I decided I’d had enough the year after I graduated. I couldn’t go on any longer without you. I got on a flight to Oregon, and when I stepped outside the terminal building, I was ambushed by armed men and taken away in a van with a black bag over my head.”
Shock shuttles through me, and I stare at him with my mouth hanging open. “He could have killed you!”
“Nah.” He continues rubbing circles on the back of my hand as he stops to take a mouthful of his drink. “I was pretty famous for my digital art by then. I’d opened one gallery and was in the process of opening a second. He couldn’t have taken me out without an investigation. If anything had happened to me, he’d be the first person they looked at. I knew he wouldn’t kill me. Beat me to a bloody pulp and threaten your life if I went near you? Yeah. But he wouldn’t murder me.”
“He threatened you to stay away from me?”
“He said he’d kill you and your family, and he scared me enough that I never attempted to visit you again. He was playing us both off against the other. I didn’t know what he was holding over you, and he never alluded to it. He made it seem like this was about me not getting what I wanted from life. His form of a twisted life lesson. He really is a sick son of a bitch.”
“I have never hated anyone as much as I hate your father.”
“I know the feeling though Curtis is a close second.” He smirks. “I see karma kicked him in the ass.”
“It did. He only defrauded his employer because Ingrid placed such demands on him. Then she divorced his ass the second he was arrested. When he got out of jail, she was already remarried, and she’d offloaded their son to Curtis’s parents. He’s forty-four and living back home again because he’s broke, and no one will hire him. He lost everything including his other three kids.”
“West, Stella, and Ridge don’t speak to him?”
I shake my head and curl my fingers around his, needing to feel closer. “He basically cut them out of his life after we moved. I arranged a few visits for Ridge, and Curtis always canceled at the last minute. I blame Ingrid, but he never stood up to her. He never fought for them. West hated him for the cheating, and after he told him about my relationship with you, he broke away from him for good. Curtis said that to hurt West. Sure, he did it to hurt me too, but ultimately it hurt our children. One part of me feels sorry for my kids because it has messed with their heads. West and Ridge in particular. But another part of me is relieved he is out of their lives so he can’t hurt them again.”
“I’m glad my father is finally out of our lives so he can’t interfere anymore.” Lowering his voice, he casts a quick glance around. “After the time I tried to visit you, when he left me bloodied and bruised, I almost hired a hitman to kill him.”
“Why didn’t you? And by the way, I’m not shocked because I’ve had similar thoughts.”
“I didn’t go ahead with it because then I’d be no better than him. I didn’t want my soul carrying a black mark, and I was wary of his criminal contacts. I also didn’t want to risk getting caught and spending my life in jail. My goal was to find a way back to you, not to end up behind bars. I knew the only way to beat him was to find evidence of his crimes and get him put away for it. I was working that angle when I heard rumblings of a case being built against him.” He takes my other hand in his and peers deep into my eyes. “You were behind that, weren’t you?”
I nod. “I came to that conclusion far earlier than you. I had been working that angle from the time I left Colorado. When I first moved here, I worked with my friend Lynette at her law firm. She helped me set things up so I was pulling the strings anonymously in the background. A girl named Tania, who I used to work with at Bentley Law, held the mantle, but I did all the legwork behind the scenes. We identified more women he had harassed and assaulted in other law firms your father worked at over the years and gradually started building a case, but it was slow, painstaking work. A lot of them wouldn’t talk to us; some of them couldn’t because they had signed NDAs.”
I pause to take a sip of water before continuing. “We had enough evidence to go after him, but then we couldn’t get anyone to take on the case. Everyone we approached declined. Gregory’s reputation preceded him, and most firms were too afraid to go up against him because his criminal ties were pretty widely known. That’s the point where I got very depressed,” I admit. “It had been six years, and I was missing you so badly. It all seemed like such an uphill battle. I began to wonder if I could ever defeat him. If I would ever get to see you again.” Tears prick my eyes. “I almost gave up, and then a miracle happened.”
A ginormous smile lights up his face, and I realize now it wasn’t luck or coincidence. “It was you!” I clutch his hands for dear life. “You found Jenna Layton.”
He bobs his head. “When I discovered there was a group working diligently and privately to take my father down, I hired a PI to find Jenna. I knew about her. She was the reason we had to move to Colorado. Greg was obsessed with her to the point he murdered her fiancé when she wouldn’t agree to dump him and start an affair with him instead. Then he raped her and left her half dead. She went to the police, and he was questioned, but they couldn’t prove anything because his mob friends had helped him commit the crime and dispose of the body. No one believed Jenna, or if they did, they refused to help. She disappeared overseas, assumed a new identity, and tried to move on with her life. Until I found her and begged her to help.”
