Explosive Engagement by LISA CHILDS Page A

expected her to freely admit it—not when she clung so stubbornly to the illusion of her father’s innocence. Stunned by her admission, he’d driven in silence to his brother’s house.
    “Is this it?” she asked doubtfully as he pulled up to the traditional two-story brick Colonial. “This doesn’t look like a place your brother would live...”
    “He claims he won it in a poker game,” Logan said with a slight chuckle. He suspected his brother used the four-bedroom house to lure women into thinking that he might secretly want a wife and kids someday. But he doubted the playboy Payne would ever wed—no matter how much Mom tried to coerce him into getting married.
    She shrugged. “Sometimes I wonder how well we really know our families...”
    If she hadn’t had doubts about her brothers, she wouldn’t have acted on his mother’s marriage suggestion. But hearing her actually admit it had disappointment causing a twinge of pain in his chest. Even while her blind devotion to her father had frustrated him, he’d also admired her loyalty to her family.
    “No,” she said, as if realizing he’d misconstrued her comments. “That’s not what I meant.”
    “You weren’t talking about your brothers?”
    Silence was her telling reply.
    “You told me earlier that they killed for you before,” he reminded her. And he’d been so stunned that he hadn’t uttered a single word the entire drive to Parker’s house.
    Her body bristling with defensiveness, she replied, “I didn’t tell them to—”
    “But they killed for you.”
    “To protect me,” she said.
    He tensed now. “Protect you? Has someone tried to kill you before?”
    Her teeth sank so deeply into her bottom lip that she probably almost drew blood, and she shook her head.
    So they hadn’t killed in order to save her life. What other excuse was there for taking a life? “What were they protecting you from, then?”
    She shuddered with such revulsion and horror that he regretted ever bringing up what had obviously been a painful experience for her. As if sensing her pain and feeling it, too, the dog whined and rubbed his head against hers, tousling her streaky blond-brown hair.
    “Stacy...” He was going to tell her that she didn’t have to tell him, that he didn’t need to know. But he realized that he did—that he suddenly needed to know everything there was to know about his fake fiancée.
    She drew in a shuddery breath, as if bracing herself, before she continued. “When my father went to prison, we had to go live with my mother again and my—my stepfather.”
    Outrage coursed through Logan as realization dawned. “Did he...”
    She shook her head. “He was trying to...but my brothers broke down the bedroom door. They saved me...but our stepfather died.”
    If Logan had been the one to break down that door, the bastard wouldn’t have survived his wrath, either. For once he respected her brothers. “Which one did it?”
    “I don’t know,” she said. “I blacked out. And when I woke up, they were both hurt badly and he was dead.”
    “They never told you?”
    She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter which one of them did it. They both saved me, and they both went to jail for it.”
    And knowing that cemented Logan’s certainty that they would never risk hurting her—not even to protect themselves. They might be trying to kill him, but someone else was trying to kill her. “But if they were both badly beaten, they shouldn’t have been charged with anything. It was self-defense.”
    It had at least been defense—of their sister.
    She nodded. “It should have been, but my mother testified otherwise.”
    “She testified against her own children?” Now he was the one horrified. His mother would have killed the man herself if he’d ever tried to touch one of her children.
    “She said that I told them to do it.” Her voice cracked with emotion. “Because I was mad that he rejected my advances.”
    That must have been the twisted