“Why would you need to speak to her alone?” Eli asked, crossing his arms over his chest.
“It’s fine,” she said quickly, wanting to ease the situation. “I need to speak with Cole.”
“I don’t like it,” Kellan said.
“I’m not going to do anything to her,” Cole said, looking insulted.
“We still don’t know who broke into her place or why,” Eli said. “We don’t like her out of our sight.”
Cole nodded with a slight frown. “I’ll take care of her. And it’s broad daylight with lots of people around.”
She glanced up at her men. There was very little risk here and she wanted to get it over and done with.
“Five minutes,” Kellan stated.
“Five minutes. And we’ll watch Keira and Julian for you,” Eli added.
There was a subtle threat there that Cole certainly didn’t miss. It made her want to groan, but Cole just nodded and they walked behind a couple of temporary buildings. One of them held a spooky house of horrors.
Urgh. Sounded awful.
“You don’t look so good. Are you feeling okay?”
“Um, yes. This was self-inflicted,” she said with a grimace.
His eyes widened. “You were drinking?”
“Yes.” Why was that weird?
“You told me that you didn’t drink,” he pointed out. “The first time we went out.”
“Oh, right. That’s so I wasn’t out of control. I didn’t want to embarrass myself or my father.”
He studied her for a long moment. “You always held yourself so closed off, so in check. Were you always careful of what you did and said? Even at home?”
“Yes. Always. It wasn’t worth the yelling and lectures if I wasn’t. Or the threats against my grandfather.”
Cole blanched. “Threats against your grandfather?”
“My Pop-Pop is in a nursing home. He’s the only family I have who ever really cared about me. Maybe my mom did before my father ran her down into a shell of herself. She overdosed, I think. I’m not really sure since my father never told me. If I didn’t do what he wanted, my father would threaten to remove Pop-Pop from his nursing home. And to stop paying for his medication. He has a heart condition. He wouldn’t have survived. And I’d never had a real job. I was baking and selling my cakes, but it wasn’t enough. Not back then.”
“So that’s why you agreed to marry me? To save your Pop-Pop. You should have told me.”
“And risk you telling my father?” she said.
“I wouldn’t have done that. I’m not that sort of person.”
“But I didn’t know that,” she told him gently. “As I got to know you, I came to realize you weren’t a bad person. That’s when I started to hope.”
“Hope?” Cole asked.
“I hoped that marrying you would get me out from under his thumb. That you might be a good person and help me. It was silly and after you broke things off, I learned not to hope again. Not until . . . not until my business started to take off and I got enough followers for some income to come from my content creation.”
“Oh, God, Arabella. I’m so sorry. If I’d known, I would have helped.”
She smiled, shaking her head. “It wasn’t your responsibility to help me. It was my responsibility to get myself out from underhim. Unfortunately, he found someone else to try and marry me off before I had enough money to escape him.”
“What?” Cole asked.
