In truth, he’d always believed in “letting sleeping dogs lie” where his own history was concerned, having trusted that his father and grandparents had told him the truth about what had happened in the past. He’d been too young to remember his mother, though once, in the farmhouse attic, he’d come across a family album tucked between old books and bedding. Inside, he’d found a black-and-white photo of a wedding. His father, dressed in a dark, western-cut suit, stood next to a soulful-eyed girl in a white lace dress and veil. Their hands were clasped, rings evident as they stood under a simple altar.

Jase, being a rambunctious boy who accepted what grown-ups told him as fact and later, as a teenager who was always in trouble, had never really had too many questions about his mother or, for that matter, the brother who had died in Texas. He’d been too caught up in himself. It had seemed odd that Marian Selby Bridges, purportedly heartbroken at the loss of a son, had deserted her husband and two boys, leaving them to fend for themselves. However, his occasional questions about his mother had always evoked anger from his father or anguish from his grandmother. As an adult, he’d sided with his father in the belief that any woman who’d abandoned her kids and never once contacted them didn’t deserve the title of mother, and she certainly didn’t need to be located. He’d made a couple of lame-ass attempts to find her in his late twenties, but when the job had been more involved than he’d wanted, he’d let it go.

Was she alive? Dead? He’d been interested, yes. Hell, any kid would have questions about the woman who had given birth to him. But he hadn’t felt the urge to dig up any of the family dirt. Who knew what he would find? His mother’s rejection only confirmed that he didn’t need a woman who would walk out on him in a heartbeat, a woman who might require the same kind of care and attention that his father was now demanding.

Truth be told, Marian Bridges didn’t deserve to know the kids she’d left.

And then there had come the time when he’d met Arianna Hayward. From that point forward, his life had been turned upside down and inside out. His own secrets had crippled him emotionally, he figured. Deep down he was scared of the truth because he knew how dark, how innocently evil it could be.

No more.

Today, things changed.

With the speed of the Internet, his connections at the newspaper, a few phone calls, and some incredible search engines, he’d dug deeper than before, deeper than he probably should have.