Ice Baron (Ice Chronicles, Book One (science fiction romance)) by Jennette Green

jealous of me, and all I
would become. He wanted to be Baron of Tarim Territory, but he didn’t have the
guts to kill me for it. So he took my Rachel.”
    Anya bit her tongue. Rachel had
hardly been Richert’s.
    “The night before she was to
leave, Rachel came to me in tears. She said her mother and Jason had come to an
agreement. She had to marry Jason, but it wasn’t by her choice.” Richert’s face
gentled. “She said she loved me, and didn’t want to leave me. But she also didn’t
want me to lose my future, either, as I would if I married her. All the same, I
asked her to marry me, and she said, ‘Yes.’”
    Richert’s voice grew quieter, and
he looked into the distance, as if into the past. The true past? Or one he had
reengineered for his own comfort? “I was ecstatic. I figured I could get my
father to overlook my transgression, eventually. After all, he didn’t have any
more sons to become baron. It seemed like all of my dreams were about to come
true. I should have known.”
    “Known what?” Anya said, beginning
to feel impatient with the story that Richert clearly wove from figments of his
imagination. She had to bite her tongue to keep from asserting that her mother
had loved her father , not Richert.
    “I should have known when she gave
herself to me that night, that something wasn’t right. Waiting until marriage
was ingrained into Rachel’s character. But I was a fool, and took her for my
own. When I woke up, she was gone. So was my brother.”
    Richert sat silently for a long
time. “She married him. I waited like a fool, hoping she’d be miserable and
leave him. Finally, I wrote to her, begging her to return to me. My brother
wrote back. He said he’d kill me if I wrote another letter like that to his
wife. Rachel was his, forever. Rachel wrote a note, too, saying that she’d
never loved me. Later, I believed it. But not then. And then you were born.”
Richert spared a brief glance for Anya.
    The full implication hit, and she
gasped.
    “Don’t worry,” Richert snapped. “DNA
proved you were his. Plus, you were born too late, in May.”
    Anya had been born in March.
Joshua met her gaze and held it, but Anya said nothing to put the delusional
old man straight. As Richert had said, DNA had proven that she was her father’s
child. And her mother had loved her father. Anya had seen it in the way she had
kissed him goodbye in the morning, or smoothed his collar. The way she’d given
him five children. Bitterness had bent this old man’s mind and warped his body.
Anya would provide no more fuel for his twisted fantasies. It was time for
peace. Time to put the past to rest.
    “So you started a bloody war, all
in the name of love,” she summed up.
    Color rushed to Richert’s face. “I
started the bloody war because Jason stole her. Then he held her prisoner. The
first skirmishes were to try to steal her back.” He waved a bony hand. “Matters
escalated from there.”
    Anya gasped. “Thousands of people
died! Your jealousy has caused heartbreak for…”
    “Anya,” Joshua said.
    Joshua was right, of course. What
did she hope to accomplish? Richert would never see the truth. He had given his
entire life to pursuing “justice.” What were the chances that he’d admit to
being wrong all this time? That he’d wasted his entire life, as well as the
lives of thousands of young men, on a war spawned by his crushed pride and jealousy?
    The old baron glowered at her, his
black brows beetling over burning black eyes. Did she want to start another war
right now, when Joshua had just negotiated peace? When Richert had just “magnanimously”
agreed to help her?
    “I’m sorry if I spoke out of turn,”
she managed.
    “You’re damn well not sorry,”
Richert snapped. “Don’t lie to me, like your mother did.”
    In a flash of understanding, Anya
guessed that this was what had hurt Richert most of all. Rightly or wrongly, he
had given his heart to her mother. She had betrayed his