Sinclair had absolutely no idea where Remy was going with these questions. Except the earnest expression on her face told him it was important that he put his anger aside and answer her.

  She was right, they wouldn’t survive as a couple if he didn’t trust her. And after last night, Sinclair wanted them to survive. He wanted that more than he wanted anything, including his next breath.

  Which meant he had to get over these feelings of jealousy. Remy was uniquely herself, no one else, and if he wanted to keep her, he needed to take a few steps back and listen to what she was saying rather than jumping to assumptions.

  “We don’t actually have keys,” he answered briskly. “We have cards, and codes to verify those cards.”

  “Like when you use a credit card?”

  “Yes.”

  “And does anyone else have a copy of your card and know those codes? In case you lose your card or forget the code?”

  “I’m not senile yet.”

  “Something I’m well aware of after last night,” Remy confirmed impatiently. “Will you please just quit giving me sarcasm and answer the damn question?”

  After last night.

  It had been an incredible night. One where he and Remy had made love for hours, exploring, loving, claiming, until they fell into an exhausted sleep wrapped in each other’s arms. A night when Sinclair knew Remy had given herself to him completely, leaving him in absolutely no doubt that her feelings for him were very real.

  Only for Sinclair to react like an idiot this morning when Remy said the intruder into her apartment had used a key to let himself in. But if that man wasn’t her lover, and Sinclair knew that he wasn’t, then he had to be someone else close enough to her for her to have given him a spare key to her apartment.

  Sinclair straightened as the truth of the situation started to become clear to him. “Casper keeps a copy and list of all the cards and codes for our apartments.”

  She nodded. “Because he’s family.” Her eyes glistened with unshed tears.

  “Yes,” Sinclair confirmed on an exhale. “In the same way your mother and father are your family. Is this the reason their house was broken into three nights ago?” He frowned. “Because the intruder was looking for the spare key to your apartment?”

  She didn’t answer him. Instead, the tears balancing on her dark lashes now began to fall down her cheeks.

  “Remy…?”

  “The body they found is my mother,” she choked, sobbing harder now.

  Sinclair stepped forward to pull her trembling body into his arms. “We won’t know that for certain until the police—”

  “I know it’s her,” Remy wailed.

  “How can you be so sure?”

  She pulled back. “Because it can’t be him!” She glared at the image on the screen.

  Sinclair turned to look at that image.

  He saw a man approximately six feet tall, with wide shoulders and a slender build. The balaclava and gloves made it impossible to see his face or hands and make a positive identification—

  Holy shit!

  The gloves the man was wearing weren’t thin leather or cotton, but those thin latex gloves that doctors and nurses wore.

  That surgeons wore.

  That Ralph Mitchell, Remy’s father wore, when he was operating on his patients.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  “Remy, a man wearing a pair of latex gloves isn’t proof of anything,” Sinclair reasoned. “Hell, everyone wore them during the pandemic. Some people still do.”

  Remy knew that. Of course, she did. But it wasn’t only the latex gloves. “Look at the image again, Sinclair.” She waited until he’d done as she asked. “See the way the man tilts his head to the right? My father always did that when he was angry. And the man destroying everything that’s mine is definitely angry, wouldn’t you say?”

  Sinclair continued to look at the image for several long seconds more before turning back to her. “He has the same build as Ralph, I’ll give you that. There’s also the head tilt, and the latex gloves. But I don’t believe it’s enough to leap to the conclusion you have.”

  “Which conclusion is that?” she prompted emotionally. “The one where my father might have killed two other people in order to fake his own death, one of them his own wife and my mother, and the other one an innocent helicopter pilot? Is that the conclusion you’re referring to?”

  He winced as her voice became angrier and angrier. “Remy—”

  “Don’t!” She flinched away and drew back as he would have touched her. “I’m convinced the man on the screen, systematically destroying everything I own, is my father. Believe me, I know what he looks like when he’s angry, and that there”—she pointed a finger at the screen—“is my father when he’s very, very angry.”

  Sinclair stilled. “You’ve seen him like that before?”

  She shuddered. “Many times.”

  “Fucking hell. Did he ever physically hurt you or your mother?” Sinclair rasped.

  “Not physically, but we certainly never wanted to push him far enough that he went into one of his terrible rages.”

  “‘Street angel, house devil,’” Sinclair quoted softly.

  “Exactly.” Remy shivered. “The last time he really lost it with Mama and me was on my birthday, the night before they went away to Wales.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he’d specifically told my mother not to get me the new laptop I was saving up to buy. She did it anyway.”

  “And he didn’t like that?”

  “My father didn’t like anything that allowed my mother to act independently of him. Working in the library gave her some of that independence, but then an elderly aunt of hers, my grandmother’s sister, died in Italy a couple of months ago and left Mama a small inheritance. She bought my laptop with some of it.” Remy winced. “My father was furious with her.”

  Sinclair shook his head. “I never knew any of this. None of us did.”

  She smiled sadly. “My mother would have done everything she could to ensure you didn’t. She didn’t want anyone to know what he was truly like. She was proud that way.”

  “Why the hell didn’t she leave him?”

  “I asked her that once. She reminded me she was a Catholic and didn’t believe in divorce.”

  “And do you think that’s the only reason she stayed?”

  Remy looked at him, recognizing the compassion in his expression and knowing the reason for it. “I’m guessing when I was a child, I had something to do with her decision. But I begged her to leave him once it came time for me to go away at uni. For a while I thought she would go through with it, but then the kidnapping happened, and Cathy was killed. Mama told me she couldn’t leave my father when his sister had just been murdered.”

  Sinclair’s jaw tightened. “Gina was always so kind to everyone.”

  “She was.” Remy swallowed. “After I’d lived in Halls of Residence for a few months, she told me not to worry, that things were better between them now. I thought maybe me no longer living at home had helped with that. That perhaps his anger all boiled down to jealousy, even over his own daughter.”

  “But now you don’t think the situation was better after all?”

  She closed her eyes briefly before opening them again. “I didn’t go home much, I have to admit. Mama and I usually met in town for lunch or a day’s shopping while my father was at work. But she told me everything was okay.” She shook her head. “I should have known better. When he was the ‘angel,’ he was good fun and very loving, but when the ‘devil’ showed his face, he became vindictive and vicious.” She glanced at the screen again before looking back at Sinclair. “Right there, he’s the devil incarnate.” Her chin rose. “So what did he do to you that you wanted nothing more to do with him after Cathy died?”

  Sinclair was still dealing with the overload of information about a man he really hadn’t liked even without knowing what an absolutely bastard he’d been to his wife and daughter.

  Such a bastard, it seemed, that Remy now believed Ralph was capable of having actually murdered Gina and an innocent helicopter pilot.

  Sinclair knew Ralph was selfish and egotistical, with a penchant for wanting to live beyond his financial and social means. But the other man mainly did that by visiting and gambling in the casinos in London, most of which were now owned and run by the Russian bratva.

  None of those things were crimes in themselves.

  Until that weakness endangered other people.

  If Remy was right and that was Ralph destroying her apartment, then it was possible the other man was once again in debt to the Russians. As he’d been five years ago.

  Sinclair looked at Remy, wondering how much more she could take. Her face was already deathly white, and there were dark shadows beneath her haunted blue eyes.

  Because she believed her father might be responsible for the death of her mother and an innocent pilot.

  Sinclair had to admit, the circumstantial evidence—the fact that Ralph might still be alive after the crash and hadn’t declared himself as such—was pretty damning. But Sinclair still held back from putting the other man on his shit—hit!—list. Yet.

  Even if the thought of that bastard terrorizing Gina and Remy with his temper for years was enough to make him feel murderous!

  Why hadn’t any of them known about it?

  Sinclair knew the answer to that only too well. Many abused people didn’t even recognize they were being abused until it was too late, and then they were too afraid to do anything about it.

  Had Cathy known what sort of man her brother was?

  No, because if she had, she would have done something about it.

  Knowing about it now, it was going to take a while for Sinclair to be able to live with his own ignorance on the subject.

  But that was for him to deal with. Right now, he needed to give Remy an honest answer. To tell her the things he’d omitted the previous evening. “Ralph was the reason Cathy was kidnapped and a demand was sent to me to pay a ransom of five million pounds for her safe release.”

  Remy looked horrified as she swayed on her feet. “What…?”

  Sinclair helped her to sit down in Casper’s chair before he began to pace the room. “Your father was in debt to the Russians who own the casinos in London. Not for a few hundred pounds, but for hundreds of thousands. Ralph had somehow convinced the bratva to give him credit, but they eventually demanded full payment, or someone was going to die. Your father was given two weeks to pay the debt. As it turned out, he’d already remortgaged the house, so there was no money to be had there. Instead of asking anyone for help, he decided to hire three men to kidnap his own sister and then sent a ransom note to me with the demand for five million pounds if I wanted my wife returned unharmed.”

  Sinclair was pretty sure that part of the reason Ralph had chosen to target Sinclair for a ransom was because the two men had never really liked each other. Cathy had become collateral damage in that dislike.

  Remy frowned. “But hadn’t Cathy already asked you for a divorce?”

  “No one else knew about that, including Ralph. Besides, I would never have let anyone hurt Cathy. I wished we hadn’t both wasted all those years on a hollow marriage, but I would never have wished her any harm.”

  “I know you paid the ransom, but Cathy was still murdered, and the money was never returned to you.”

  “It was the men who took her who made the decision to kill her, not your father.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Very,” he confirmed grimly. “Believe me, if I’d thought he had anything to do with her death, he would have met the same fate they eventually did.”

  “But he hired them in the first place.”

  “To kidnap, not kill.”

  She swallowed. “What happened to the ransom money.”

  “A million for each of the three men and two for your father.”

  She gasped. “He still took his share of the money even though those men had killed his sister?”

  “Yes.” He sighed. “I’m pretty sure there won’t be any of that money left now either.”

  She gave a dazed shake of her head. “You could still have had my father arrested, once you knew he was responsible for hiring those three men to kidnap, if not kill, Cathy.”

  “Now that I know what I do about his abuse of you and Gina, you have no idea how much I wish that I had done exactly that.” Sinclair’s jaw was tightly clenched. “Instead, I made a conscious decision not to.”

  “Because of Mama and me?”

  “Yes.” He sighed. “I didn’t want to hurt either of you by revealing Ralph’s involvement in Cathy’s kidnapping. He only wanted the money. He never intended for his sister to be murdered.”

  “He still took his share of the ransom money afterward!”

  He nodded. “We had a brief conversation, our last, once I’d discovered Ralph’s involvement in the kidnapping, at least. As I said, I didn’t want to hurt you and Gina by destroying your family. Instead, I warned Ralph never to come near me or any of my family again and left it at that.”

  “Which meant you never came near me again either.”

  Sinclair winced as he heard the hurt in her voice. “For which I am truly sorry.”

  She shook her head. “My father is to blame for all of this, not you.”

  Remy had known her father could be selfish and unkind, ruthless when he was in a temper, but this…

  Dear God, this was a whole different level to what she’d thought him capable of doing.

  Admittedly, Sinclair didn’t believe Ralph had known that the men he’d hired to kidnap his sister and basically steal five million pounds from Sinclair would actually kill her. But her father had to know they couldn’t be trusted when they accepted payment for kidnapping Cathy. He’d also taken his share of the ransom after those men had murdered his own sister.

  If it turned out that her father had somehow engineered the crash of the helicopter in which two other people were killed, one of them Remy’s mother, then he truly was a monster, and she wanted him to suffer for those crimes. Nothing could bring Cathy, her mama, or the pilot back, but she wanted her father to pay for his involvement in each of those crimes

  She raised her chin as she looked at Sinclair. “I want him found, arrested, and charged with being complicit in Cathy’s kidnapping and murder and the murder of my mother and the helicopter pilot.”

  “Remy—”

  “That’s what I want, Sinclair,” she stated firmly. “If you can’t give me that, then I’ll find someone else who will.”

  He scowled. “Such as who?”

  “I know from the way Malachi inclined his head at me before he left the room that he also knows that is my father.” She nodded toward the computer screen. “Knowing Malachi, he might have already started looking for him. I want him found, Sinclair. Found and punished.”

  “You really are something else,” he said admiringly.

  She shook her head. “I just want justice for my mother. The sort of justice where my father doesn’t die, but is instead locked away for the rest of his miserable life.”

  “Then I’ll make sure you have it,” Sinclair promised.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The next three days were excruciating for Remy.

  She’d continued to sleep in Sinclair’s bed. Unfortunately, he wasn’t there to share it with her. He was gone most of the time, and when he was home, he was totally distracted or shut away in Casper’s tech room with his brothers, discussing what they were going to do next.

  She thought she’d felt the comfort of his arms around her in bed one night, but when she woke the following morning, there was no Sinclair, just an indentation in the pillow beside her own. The only times she’d actually seen Sinclair was out the window as he was leaving or arriving back at the estate after following useless lead after lead trying to find Ralph Mitchell.

  Remy hadn’t changed her mind in the slightest in regard to the fate of her father. If anything, she’d become even more resolved after the police had confirmed, as she had known they would, that the body the fishermen had taken out of the water was indeed Remy’s mother. She’d shed more than a few heartbroken tears over that, while at the same time increasing her vow of vengeance on her father.

  It was on the fourth day, while sitting in Casper’s tech room, watching the recording over and over again of her father destroying her apartment, that she realized something about that destruction she hadn’t noticed before.

  Casper obviously sensed her sudden tension. “What is it?”

  She rose to her feet. “Is Sinclair around?”

  “He said he’d be back at the house in an hour or so.”

  She nodded. “Could you ask him if he would come and talk to me once he is? I’ll be in his suite.”

  “Of course.” Casper looked at her searchingly. “Is it anything I can help you with?”

  “No, but thanks for offering.”

  Remy’s thoughts continued to churn once she was back in the sitting room of Sinclair’s suite. She still had no idea what her father was looking for, but she believed she might have discovered the answer to another part of the puzzle.

  Sinclair was functioning on a short fuse. A very short fuse, after three frustrating days and nights of trying to keep his promise to Remy.

  Wherever Ralph Mitchell was, he had no intention of being found. Casper had a facial recognition program running day and night, but so far, there hadn’t been a single sighting of the other man on any security footage nationwide.

  It was now beyond being frustrating for Sinclair.

  Because until he could give Remy what she’d asked of him, he thought it best to keep his distance. For her sake, not his. They’d spent one night together, and it had been beyond perfect, but he wanted to give Remy closure before any decisions were made about them having a future together.

  He admitted to sleeping beside her one of the past three nights. It was the one after Remy had been told that the body in the morgue was, in fact, her mother. Even after she’d fallen into an exhausted sleep, she’d continued to give little choked sobs throughout the night, and Sinclair had held her through all of them.