Glimmer (Glimmer and Glow 1) - Page 101

“Alan trusted Dylan to the task,” Sidney said.

“Sidney,” Dylan growled ominously. Sidney seemed quelled.

Alice’s brow quirked at that tense exchange. Sidney had said the words with some weight, and Alice didn’t understand either his gravity or Dylan’s warning. Anxiety flickered in her belly. Not anxiety for her—because the story being told to her didn’t feel personal. It definitely felt a hell of a lot more distant than her long-held fear and shame about being a child of Sissy and one of her uncles. No, the nervousness she felt was for Dylan. She recognized that boy in the photo in some vague sense, certainly more than she identified with that glowing little girl. That girl was cherished and loved, the center of a radiant world that spun happily around her. She was entirely unfamiliar to Alice.

Dylan, though—she experienced a mysterious, charged tendril of connection to that wary, beautiful boy.

“One early morning, I was leading you and Angelfire on a path in the woods. Two men attacked us,” Dylan explained, his tone flat. Terse. He handed the newspaper to her and Alice’s fingers closed around the pages instinctively.

The first thing she saw was a color photo of a tall, handsome man with dark blonde hair and a receding hairline sitting beside a striking woman with shoulder-length auburn hair, large eyes, and a very pretty, delicate face. The couple held the same little girl between them who had been on the pony. They all looked so happy. So blessed.

The headline was a jarring counterpoint to the photo of the handsome family.

DURAND HEIRESS KIDNAPPED

MASSIVE HUNT UNDERWAY

Alice didn’t read the front-page article from the Morgantown Gazette. Her gaze stuck on the cuff bracelet the woman wore. It was made of exquisite filigreed metal depicting interlaced vines and leaves. She searched the woman’s face.

She abruptly handed the newspaper back to Dylan.

“Just tell me what happened to you when these men attacked you in the woods,” she said through a dry throat. “I want to hear your story.”

From the periphery of her vision, she saw Dylan sharply look at Sidney. Sidney nodded.

“That’s a good idea. Alice knows best,” Sidney said enigmatically. “Tell her your story, Dylan. That’s a good place to start.”

DYLAN examined Alice once again, at a loss. She was very pale still, but her large eyes looked clearer than before when she’d passed out. It worried him that he had no idea what she was experiencing on the inside. It was driving him to distraction that he had no ruler, no barometer to gauge what a “healthy” reaction to this situation would be.

Wasn’t a revelation like this by nature a huge blow to the psyche? How could it be healthy?

Even Sidney was cautious, he could tell. He was worried about Dylan telling her the truth. Dylan had reacted purely on instinct, however, when he’d witnessed firsthand the weight of Alice’s shame and anxiety, believing herself to be the child of incest. She’d been cringing, for Christ’s sake. Maybe it’d been wrong of him to tell her at that moment, but Dylan didn’t think so. The idea of Alice believing something so heinous about her origins for so many years didn’t sit well with him.

It didn’t sit well at all.

Still, he’d understood the psychiatrist’s reference just now, and was willing to play along. Sidney was guiding Dylan to follow Alice’s lead. She wasn’t ready to hear Addie Durand and herself referred to as the same person. But she was saying she wanted to learn about him—Dylan’s experience. It was safer for her, perhaps, to hear it from his point of view, to absorb it slowly as if from a distance.

“That stretch of path between the lake and the stables used to be a horse trail,” Dylan began, the words strange on his tongue. He hadn’t spoken much about that life-altering day since he’d been in therapy, and he’d stopped seeing Sidney sixteen years ago. “That was where we were when it happened. You were on Angelfire, and I was leading her. I had you on the lunge, still getting you used to the saddle. Alan and Lynn had talked to my counselor, and they’d all agreed to allow me to teach you after they’d watched us together for a week or so. The kidnappers must have been watching us from the woods for days, maybe weeks beforehand, waiting for their chance.”

“Did you want to do it?” Alice asked. He looked at her bemusedly at her change of topic. “Did you want to teach that little girl how to ride her pony?”

He opened his mouth, but only exhaled at first. He spread his hands, trying to find the words, struggling.

“I was a refugee in this paradise, an outsider. And then one day, I met Alan Durand. I came to respect him more than any other man I’d ever known. He might as well have been a different species than the other people I’d known in my life. He was warm. Wise. His kindness went so deep. Same with Lynn. Both Alan and Lynn treated me like an equal from the first minute I met them. I didn’t get why. But when their attitude held up over three summers—when their trust in me only seemed to grow—I started to believe in it. I started to believe in myself.” He paused, ironing the tension out of his forehead with his fingertips. “One day, Alan trusted me with nothing less than his universe.” He heard Sidney clear his throat and rustle in his chair. He met Alice’s stare. “There were two charges Alan gave me in his life that stand out as life-changing: when he asked me to run his company, and when he trusted me with his little girl. To answer your question? Of course I wanted to teach Addie Durand to ride.”

He saw her throat convulse as she swallowed. She nodded, as if signaling him to continue. For a split second, the memory of that day came back to him in a vivid flash of confused, horrific movement.

“I had my head turned and was instructing Addie and they hit me from behind. I went down, but I wasn’t completely knocked unconscious. I saw them. One of them went to grab Addie off the horse, but she panicked and struggled. She kicked the guy in the face with her riding boot,” Dylan said, a bitter smile tilting his lips at the memory—one impression of grim triumph interspersed with thousands of terrifying images. “He lost hold of her for a second, and Addie fell off Angelfire on the opposite side. I heard her hit the ground, saw she wasn’t moving.”

Dylan saw no spark of memory in Alice’s sapphire eyes when their stares met, but her gaze didn’t skitter away, either. At least she wasn’t afraid, which was something. “One of the kidnappers held Angelfire. As the other guy started to go around the horse to get Addie, I tackled his legs and brought him down. We fought.”

“What happened?” Alice asked.

I failed.

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It was a voice from his past, a child’s voice resurfacing, one he thought he’d silenced forever. The circumstances had unearthed it again.

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