tough. It was her idea for Tate to go to Linc, her decision to abandon her daughter, just like she’d abandoned her son. Kari could shove her jealousy and her what’s-mine-is-mine-and-what’s-yours-is-mine attitude straight up her—
“Whoa, I can practically see steam coming out of your ears,” Linc said. “And you’re squeezing the hell out of my fingers.”
Tate winced and sent him an apologetic look. “Sorry. Thinking about my sister sends my blood pressure skyrocketing.”
“I can relate,” Linc stated bitterly.
She gave his fingers a gentle squeeze. “I really am sorry for what she did to you and Shaw, Linc. I was out of the country, but I was furious with her. Nothing I said could change her mind. I tried to talk some sense into her, I promise.”
Linc nodded his head, a fine mist on his dark hair. “I appreciate that. I can forgive her for leaving me, God knows that I’m not perfect, but leaving Shaw? Bailing on our son is what I can’t forgive. I can’t abide people who don’t, or won’t, shoulder their responsibilities.”
Tate heard a note in his voice that suggested Kari wasn’t the first person in his life who’d disappointed him. “Who else bailed on you?”
Surprise followed by annoyance flashed across Linc’s handsome face. Bingo, Tate thought. “You don’t have to answer the question if you don’t want to. I was just being nosy.”
“It was a long time ago, Tate. BC.”
“BC?”
“Before Connor.”
“That was a long time ago,” Tate commented. “It had to have been a hard knock because I can tell it still hurts.”
Tate fell quiet, not wanting to push him where he didn’t want to go. Not that she could push Linc Ballantyne. She didn’t have that much power over him.
Or any at all.“My dad walked out on my mom and me when I was five,” Linc said, staring straight ahead. His voice deepened when he was upset, Tate realized. Or when he was feeling emotional. “We’d been Christmas shopping. We bought him a pair of golfing gloves.” He choked out a small laugh. “Funny the things you remember.”
“You came home from Christmas shopping...” Tate prompted, wanting him to finish the story.
“And he was gone. He cleared out their joint bank account and his clothes and vanished. Never to be heard from again.”
Tate grimaced. “Your mom couldn’t track him down?”
“Tracking someone down takes money and, pre-Connor, there wasn’t that much floating around.”
He had so much, yet he still remembered how it felt to be poor, Tate thought, amazed. Needing to thank him for opening up, she decided to repay him by doing a little of the same. “I can, sort of, relate. My parents divorced, and my dad faded from my life, and he seemed to forget about me when his new wife got pregnant. After my half brother’s birth, I ceased to exist.”
Linc pulled his hand from hers to run it through his hair. “One hundred and one ways to screw up your kids.”
“You seem to be doing a great job with Shaw,” Tate murmured, blowing air into her hands. Linc noticed and pulled her hand back into his pocket.
“Thanks to Connor and Jo.”
His tone suggested that he was done with this conversation, so Tate decided to switch gears. “Getting back to Kari, she’s always been...” Tate hesitated.
“Selfish? Narcissistic? Self-involved?”
“All of the above,” Tate admitted. “I was eight when she came to live with us—”
“Because her mom died?” Linc interjected. He shrugged, and Ellie moved up and down his chest. “Kari didn’t talk about her past and would never discuss the future. It was one of the many things that drove me nuts.”
She and Kari were alike in that way. Tate rarely opened up about her childhood and torturous teenage years, and as for the future? She didn’t make plans beyond the next year or two. That was a Harper trait.
But Linc deserved an explanation. He needed to know who Kari really was, what drove her and why she acted like she did. One day he would have to explain to Shaw why his mom left him, and she never wanted Shaw or Linc to think that they were at fault.
Tate explained how Kari ended up with them and about her aunt’s death. “My mom and her twin were exceptionally close, and when she passed away my mom turned all her energy onto Kari, nursing her through her mom’s death.”
“And where were you in all this?” Linc asked gruffly. Tate jerked her head back, surprised that he’d asked. She’d told this story a few times and most people immediately and, rightfully so, empathized with Kari losing her parent at such a young age.
But Tate also lost her mother at the same time; she’d moved from being Tate’s mom to Kari’s.
“Lost,” Tate quietly admitted. “Kari lost Lauren and I lost Lane. Everything changed that autumn.”
Linc’s fingers tightened against hers, and in that small gesture she felt comfort and sympathy. It gave her the courage and strength she needed to continue. “My mom created a monster in Kari, something she would never admit. I had to toe the line, but Kari, because she’d lost her mom, was given a free pass. At eleven she was a brat, by thirteen she was uncontrollable and at sixteen, she dropped out of school and moved in with her twenty-four-year-old boyfriend.”
“I never knew any of that. I thought she went to college, studied art.” He shrugged, his eyes bleak. “I met her at an art gallery.”
Tate stopped to look up at Linc, and she felt the frown between her eyes. “Do me a favor? Whatever Kari told you, take it with a very small pinch of salt.”
“Did she travel to Europe? Spend some time modeling in Paris? Did she work in Hong Kong in the marketing department of an upmarket clothing company?”
Tate didn’t answer. Of course she hadn’t, and Linc knew it. Instead of answering, Tate shoved her hands back into the pockets of her parka and shrugged. “In her defense, she probably believed in every lie she told you. For a while, until her attention was caught by something or someone more interesting than you—and by interesting I mean edgier, dangerous, illegal—she bought into her own lies.”
“Yeah, what do they call people like that?” Linc muttered as he snapped his fingers, pretending to think. “Oh, yeah...sociopaths.”
“I just want you to know that it wasn’t anything you did or said. Or what you didn’t do or say,” Tate explained. “Kari isn’t the type to stick around.”
Linc’s steel-gray gaze pinned her to the spot. “Are you the type that sticks?”
Tate bit her lip and looked down the wet street. Was she the type to stick? No, thanks to her tumultuous past, she’d shut down and retreated into her own world. She was intensely wary of commitment, of risking her heart. And, like her mom and sister, she wasn’t good with routine, with traditions, with rules and regulations. That was why she’d chosen
