The Kincaids: Southern Seduction: Sex, Lies and the Southern Belle. Kathie DeNosky

the door for her. “Give me your key,” he said as he helped her from the vehicle.

      “Really, I’ll be fine.” She shook her head. “You don’t have to see me in.”

      “What kind of gentleman would I be if I didn’t see you safely inside?” he asked, smiling.

      For the first time since running into her in the law office, she looked him directly in the eye. “Give me a break, Mr. Addison. It’s midmorning and I seriously doubt that there’s a safety issue for you to be concerned with.”

      He reached up to trail his index finger along her creamy cheek. “So now it’s Mr. Addison? I thought we were a lot closer than that, sweetheart.”

      “I … uh, at one time … I suppose we were,” she said, clearly uncomfortable with his observation.

      Daniel had heard about someone looking as if they were a deer caught in headlights, but until that moment he hadn’t seen it for himself. But that was the only way to describe the expression on Lily’s pretty face. She looked trapped and desperate.

      The question was, why? What had made her so clearly uncomfortable about being in his presence?

      Unfortunately, he was going to have to bide his time until she was feeling a little more in control before he got to the bottom of what was going on with her and why she had ended their affair. The past few days had been a nightmare for her and her family and he wasn’t going to add more stress by interrogating her as to what had changed between them.

      Placing his hand at the small of her back, he felt a slight tremor course through her and instinctively knew it had nothing to do with the mild winter weather Charleston was experiencing. Good. At least she hadn’t developed a complete immunity to him.

      “I know that all this has been extremely hard on you, Lily,” he said, meaning it. “For my own peace of mind, I want to see that you’re all right before I leave.”

      “There’s nothing I can say that’s going to dissuade you, is there?” she asked, sighing heavily.

      “No.”

      She looked more tired and world-weary than he had ever seen her and he hated that the events of the past several days had suppressed her fun-loving, free spirit. Whether she realized it or not, Lily needed someone to help her get through one of the toughest times in her life and he had every intention of being the one she turned to.

      “Why don’t you sit down and put your feet up while I make coffee?” he said when they walked into the living room and he helped her out of her coat.

      “No caffeine for me.” Her long wavy hair swayed as she shook her head. “I, um, haven’t been sleeping well.”

      “I can understand that.” He nodded as he removed his overcoat, then guided her to the couch. “You’ve been through a lot in the past few days, sweetheart.”

      “You have no idea,” she said as she sank onto the cushions. Tears filled her pretty blue eyes as she looked up at him. “Why did he do it?”

      If the account of Reginald’s death in the newspaper had been correct, the man had used one of the antique guns in his collection to take his own life. Daniel knew for a fact that Lily and her father had been very close and his apparent suicide had to have been extremely difficult for her to cope with.

      “I can’t tell you why things happened the way they did, Lily,” he said, sitting down beside her to take her into his arms. “It might never be clear why your dad felt compelled to end things in such a drastic way. But once the shock has worn off, I’m sure you’ll be able to put this behind you and look back at the good times you shared together.”

      She stubbornly shook her head. “I’m not so sure. Not when everything I thought I knew about my father has turned out to be a total lie.”

      He had meant to console her, not upset her further. “Give yourself some time. Right now your emotions are still too raw to see things clearly.”

      “You don’t understand, Daniel.” She pulled away from him to meet his gaze head-on. “I mean literally—everything about Daddy was a lie.”

      Something about her impassioned statement told him there was a lot more to the story than what the media had reported and she needed to get it out or risk going into emotional meltdown. “What leads you to believe that, Lily?”

      She hesitated for a moment as first one tear, then another, spilled down her cheeks. “I might as well tell you. It’s going to be the talk of Charleston by the end of the week.”

      “I’m listening.”

      “Did you notice that older blonde woman and the two men with her that sat just behind my family at the funeral?” she asked.

      He nodded. “Are they relatives from out of town?”

      “No. Yes.” She swiped at her tears with the back of her hand. “To tell you the truth, I’m not sure what I should call them.”

      “Slow down, Lily.” He didn’t like that she was becoming more agitated. “Who are they?”

      “That was my father’s second family,” she said as if the words tasted bitter. “For the past thirty years, all of his out-of-town business trips were nothing more than excuses to travel up to Greenville to spend time with that woman and her two sons.”

      Of all the things Lily could have told him about Reginald Kincaid, that was the last thing Daniel expected. “Let me get this straight,” he said slowly, trying to digest the revelation. “Your father had another wife and two kids up in Greenville that you’re just finding out about?”

      Lily nodded. “Actually, Angela Sinclair was my father’s first love and her oldest son, Jack, is my half brother. Her youngest son, Alan, belonged to her late husband.”

      “Jack Sinclair is your half brother?” He had heard of the man and the resounding success Sinclair had made of his start-up company, Carolina Shipping, but Daniel hadn’t had the opportunity to meet the man or do business with him. “But didn’t you just say he was the oldest? How could his younger brother belong to another man?”

      “My dad and Angela were involved when they were very young, but my grandparents didn’t think she was the right type of girl for him,” Lily explained, rising to pace the floor. “The way I understand it, my grandfather was building his shipping business into what The Kincaid Group is today. He and my grandmother wanted my father to marry someone who could further their standing with the social set of Charleston.”

      Daniel knew all too well how the bastions of Southern high society worked. His mother came from old money and was well-entrenched in the ranks of the social elite. She and her so-called friends looked down on anyone whose fortune didn’t go back at least four generations, or whose family tree didn’t include at least one or two officers from the Civil War.

      “As an act of rebellion, Daddy joined the army to escape their matchmaking and since he was in a Special Ops unit, there were months at a time that no one could communicate with him,” Lily went on. “From what was said yesterday at the funeral, Angela tried to get word to him that she was expecting his child, but by the time Daddy was wounded and sent back here, Angela had seemingly dropped off the face of the earth. He thought she got tired of waiting for him and moved on.”

      “So when he couldn’t find her, he gave in to his parents and married your mother?” Daniel guessed.

      Lily nodded. “The Winthrops were an old, well-established family in Charleston, but by the mid-seventies their fortune had dwindled to almost nothing and they were desperate to maintain their lifestyle and place within their social circle.”

      Although Daniel hated the snobbery and pretentiousness of it all, it was the social order he had been born into and knew exactly how it worked. He had seen many of the old Southern families swallow their pride and encourage their sons or daughters to marry one of the nouveau riche. If they didn’t, their lack of means effectively ostracized