“He never married?”

She sighed. “Yes, he did, years and years ago. She died of pneumonia. He never got over it.”

He laughed shortly. “The world is full of women,” he said. “Surely he could find somebody else.”

She turned, frowning. “Haven’t you ever been in love?” she asked, stunned.

“Not really,” he said, searching her eyes. “I’ve had my share of lovers, I guess.”

“It isn’t the same thing,” she returned.

“And how would you know that?” he asked sarcastically.

She averted her eyes. “I was in love once, when I was sixteen,” she said quietly. “I would have died for him.” She wrapped another piecrust in plastic wrap. “My mother noticed how crazy I was about him and she seduced him. Then she came home and told me about it, and she laughed. He was so ashamed that he couldn’t even talk to me anymore.”

Anger flashed in his pale brown eyes. “What a hell of a thing to do.”

“That was my mother,” she said simply. “Anything I cared about was fair game. I wouldn’t even pet a stray cat, because I knew if I did, she’d kill it or have one of her lovers carry it off.”

He winced. “Why?” he asked.

She sighed. “I’ve been asking myself that for years and years,” she confessed. “I don’t know.”

“Was she like that, before your father left?”

She thought back to her childhood. She remembered her mother hitting her, slapping her, when she was just starting in grammar school. She remembered being cursed and belittled, anytime she was alone with her mother.

“Yes,” she said. “All my life.”

He frowned. It didn’t make sense that a parent would be that cruel to a helpless child. He wondered what she looked like when she was small. He could almost picture her in a frilly dress, with her long hair down around her shoulders and a bow holding it out of her eyes. She would have been a precious child. Odd, how that thought made him wish he had a little girl of his own…

“Your mother cared about you, didn’t she?” she asked as she finished the last piecrust.

“She loved all of us,” he said, remembering with sadness those last days she was in the hospital before she died. Cash had stayed with her. Cort had been too young. He sighed. “One of my older brothers was with her in the hospital. Dad couldn’t stand to watch it. He’d gone off with the model he later married. It sounds heartless—maybe it was. But he loved our mother. I always thought it was a defensive thing, hiding his head in the sand with another woman to keep the pain from killing him.”

“If I had a spouse that I loved in the hospital, that’s where I’d be, right until the bitter end,” she said, her dark eyes catching his.

“So would I,” he said softly. “My father isn’t like the rest of us. He doesn’t feel things as deeply as we do.” He sighed. “He was never around when we were kids.” He stopped himself just in time from telling her about the yacht races his father loved, the sporting events he haunted, the jet-setting reputation his father had.