The Bridesmaid's Gifts. Gina Wilkins
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is this?”
For just a moment she thought he wasn’t going to answer. And then he muttered, “That’s Kyle. I assume you already know he died when he was almost two.”
“Can you tell me what happened?”
He crossed his arms over his chest, making the muscles bulge just a little. If he was trying to look intimidating, he succeeded. Of course, he also looked sexy as all get-out, but she couldn’t think about that right now.
“Why do you want to know?”
“Please, Ethan. Just humor me for a few minutes. I know this must be difficult for you.”
“It happened a long time ago,” he said with a slight shrug. “I hardly remember him.”
It took no special ability at all for her to know that he was lying. She looked at him without responding.
After a moment he shook his head and spoke curtly. “He drowned. It happened during the aftermath of a tropical storm. There had been a lot of flooding, a lot of local destruction, and even though the weather was still bad, Mom had gone out with one of her charity groups to try to help some of the people who had suffered the most damage to their homes. Dad was at his office, making sure everything there was okay. They left Joel with the nanny who took care of us while Mom was busy with her volunteer work, which was pretty often back then.”
“And there was an accident?”
He nodded. “Joel and I were spending the week with our maternal grandparents in Tennessee, as we did every summer while they were living. Mom thought Kyle was still too small to be gone for that long. Anyway, for some reason, the nanny took him out during that heavy rain. No one knows why they left the house. They were in her car, a cheapie little compact.”
He cleared his throat, then continued, “Apparently she hydroplaned, went off the road and was swept into a flooding river. The car was found a few days later, overturned in very deep water, but it was empty. Several other people drowned during that same tropical storm and resulting flood. There was another man whose body wasn’t recovered for several months, but neither the nanny’s body nor my brother’s was ever found.”
There was no identifiable emotion in his tone, though his eyes looked darker than usual. He obviously believed every word of the sad story he had just told her. The story that had been told to him.
She moistened her lips again. “It isn’t true,” she whispered.
He frowned more deeply at her. “What isn’t true?”
“Any of it. I mean, I know that’s what you think happened. What you all believe. But…”
Ethan’s arms dropped to his sides, the fists clenched. He took a step toward her, making her instinctively move backward. “If you’re going to try to feed me a load of crap about how you’ve been talking to my dead brother…”
“No!” She shook her head forcefully. “It’s not like that, Ethan. I’m not a medium. And even if I were, it wouldn’t apply in this case.”
“And just what is that supposed to mean?”
She drew a deep breath, then blurted out the words before she could lose her nerve. “Kyle isn’t dead.”
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