“One who played baseball really well and was kind of adopted by my coach.” If half of what Cassie said was true—and I believed her 100 percent—then I owed my sanity to my little league coach.
I watched understanding fill Gia’s expression. “That was why Cassie broke down. Why she started college so late.”
“She hit a crisis and tried to kill herself.” I still thanked God that I had been the one to find her that day. That I’d had the money to get her into therapy. And that I had seen enough of my older sister’s dark side to realize that Cassie wasn’t lying about any of it.
“You got her through?”
“She got herself through. I helped as much as I could.”
“And Sophia?”
“She went crazy and started to say things about Cassie—that she was a drug addict, that her boyfriends had raped her, or that Cassie had been part of a pornography ring. She offered enough details to even make Cassie’s therapist believe her, at least for a little bit.”
She nodded slowly. “But you didn’t buy it. You’d seen the mess Cassie was in.”
“I didn’t want to believe either side. It was too twisted. Did I accept that Cassie could be a troubled drug addict? Or that my substitute mother, Sophia, was responsible for making Cassie want to take her own life? Why? What could she gain from it?”
“Attention. Sympathy. Power.”
I looked at Gia and saw the darkness in her eyes. She usually hid it beneath her perky exterior, but I could see that she had no problem believing the evil inside my older sister. But it hadn’t been that simple. So I told her the one thing that kept me from walking away from Sophia outright.
“Back then, we wouldn’t have gotten through without Sophia. You don’t understand what it was like when my mom got sick. My dad spent every moment he could at the hospital. It was like he wasn’t even here. And after Mom’s death, he didn’t get out of bed. We had no one—no one but Sophia.”
Gia squeezed my fingers. When had I taken her hand? It didn’t matter. I gripped it tightly. “She could have done a good thing back then and still be poisonous now.”
I looked past Gia to the wall. “I thought it was just a sibling thing. That she had it in for Cassie.”
“And now she’s focused on me. Because she knows about us.”
“No!” But then I forced myself to admit the truth. “She saw us kiss.”
“New Year’s Eve.” And I saw the same wistfully happy expression on her face that I always got when I thought of that night. “She was the one who interrupted us.”
“Yeah.” And she’d told me that Gia wasn’t for me, that I had to focus on baseball. I touched Gia’s face. “You need to stay away from her. At least until I talk with her.”
Gia shrugged as if to let me know she could handle Sophia, but that wasn’t her job. It was mine. Meanwhile, Gia shifted her legs. The feel of her there against me—solid and womanly—made my dick throb. But more than that, she soothed the ragged edges inside me.
“Gia, I’m going to talk to Joe. He’ll know the ideas were yours. I’ll make sure—”
“Why are you letting Sophia do this to you? Why would you have her represent you?” Suddenly her eyes widened. “You hated doing that calendar, didn’t you? But you let her take those pictures. You let her sell them. You’ve let her—”
I slapped my hand over her mouth. It wasn’t a hard movement, but it was quick, and it startled her enough that she stopped talking. More importantly, she stopped figuring things out.
“You need to hear me, Gia. You need to listen, okay?”
She nodded, and I pulled my hand back. There were so many other things I wanted to do to her mouth that covering it like that had felt like sacrilege. But she needed to hear me, and so I stressed every word to make my position very clear.
“Sophia is my publicist. She makes a lot of money off of me. Her entire firm trades off my fame.”
“So she’s using you.”
I winced, but it was the truth. “And I’m letting her so that I can control her. If she pisses me off, she’ll lose everything, and she knows it.”
“And so, while she destroys your career…”
I arched a brow. Sophia wasn’t a nice person, but she definitely had skill in publicity. She might lie and manipulate, but that was marketing and she did it for my benefit. Sure, I hated the way she did things. I was definitely going to have words with her about taking credit for things she hadn’t done. But no one could say she was destroying my career. In fact, she’d done quite a bit to boost it.
And even Gia knew it. She grimaced.
