Then she turned, her beautiful eyes haunted, defeated. “It doesn’t matter if you believe me anymore,” she whispered. “You wouldn’t believe me when it mattered. He tried to rape me. He assaulted me. He touched me. He hurt me. And when I fought him off and told him that I would tell you what he’d done, he told me he’d make sure you never believed a word of any of it.

“And you know what the funny thing is? I told him he was wrong. I told him that you l-loved me and that you would make him pay for hurting me.”

She broke off as another sob racked her.

Oh God. Oh God. What had he done? He remembered the phone call from his brother as though it was yesterday. He hadn’t believed him. At first. Not until Kelly had arrived in an agitated state telling him the exact same story that Jarrod had just told him over the phone.

“He told you the truth,” Kelly said scornfully as if she’d plucked the thoughts right out of his head. “He told you exactly what happened, only he said that it was all a lie, that I made it up because I didn’t want you to know what really supposedly happened. He wanted to make sure that when I ran to you and told you what happened that you wouldn’t believe a word. And how better to do that than to tell you that I would claim to be attacked, that I’d claim he tried to rape me.”

Ryan stared at her in horror as the realization of what had really happened that day hit him.

“And sure enough. I run straight to you and tell you that your precious brother just tried to rape me and you look at me with those cold eyes and call me a liar. All because he told you that’s what I’d say.”

“Did he?” Ryan asked in a near whisper. “Did he rape you, Kelly?”

“He touched me. He touched me in a way that only you were allowed to touch me. He hit me. He bruised me. Isn’t that enough?” she asked in a hysterical voice. “The irony in all of this is that you were so worried I was pregnant with his baby. We never had sex though God knows he tried.”

She broke off again and buried her face in her hands. He wanted to go to her, take her in his arms, but he was afraid that just as he’d rejected her before, so would she reject him now.

She yanked her hands down, her face ragged and ravaged by grief, the same grief that was tearing through him.

“I should have been able to come to you,” she whispered. “Of all the people in the world, you should have been the one to believe in me. And I just can’t get past that. You should have been the one to hold me and tell me it would be all right. I was so excited that day. I took a pregnancy test that morning and found out I was pregnant. I was so excited and nervous. So worried about how you’d react. But so thrilled that I was pregnant with your child.”