Free Exquisite Revenge by Abby Green

to cook because my father died when I was twelve and my mother had a breakdown. I had to look after her and my younger sister.’
    He saw Jesse’s face blanch and her eyes grow wide. As if she cared.
    Anger at her response spurred him on. ‘My sister had—
has
special needs. She was deprived of oxygen at birth, and as a result has been mildly brain-damaged all her life. When my father died and my mother became ill she was only eight. She was terrified, so I had to try to keep things as constant as possible. Keeping her routine the same, including her meals, was part of that process. She’s slightly autistic too, so any change in her routine was inordinately more threatening toher than to another person with the same needs … though she’s much better now.’
    Because, Luc reflected, he could now afford the best round-the-clock care and support.
    Jesse’s voice was husky, and it had an immediate effect on Luc’s body. ‘I’m sorry. It must have been a tough time.’
    ‘The toughest,’ he agreed grimly.
    Suddenly he felt very exposed, sitting here and telling Jesse Moriarty, of all people, about the most cataclysmic time of his life, when all his anger and rage had coalesced into a lifelong ambition to see justice meted out.
    ‘So how is it that you
can’t
cook? I take it that burnt toast is just the tip of the iceberg?’

CHAPTER FIVE
    J ESSE felt very vulnerable all of a sudden, and wondered if Luc had just furnished her with a fake story. But then she recalled the intensity on his face and in his eyes and she had to believe him—even though she didn’t like the sympathy he’d evoked within her.
    She looked down at the blackened remains on her plate and found herself saying, ‘My mother died when I was nine. She was a brilliant cook, but she hadn’t started to teach me yet … She kept saying she would but there never seemed to be time. She was so busy …’ Jesse trailed off remembering her harried and stressed mother, whose face would be red and sweaty as she struggled to put together a meal for one of her father’s dinner parties with the usual little or no notice.
    One time when something had gone wrong he’d come downstairs, flushed in the face with drink, and slapped her mother so hard that she’d fallen over the kitchen table, bringing pots and plates to the floor, waking Jesse up.
    Feeling seriously disorientated at having remembered that, Jesse forced it from her mind and said lightly, ‘And then I just never learnt … I was terrible at home economics at school.’
    ‘But brilliant at maths and computer sciences?’
    Jesse glanced at Luc and shrugged minutely. ‘They made more sense to me than sewing or baking.’ She had lost herselfin numbers and algorithms far more easily than the more
nurturing
classes.
    ‘What about your father?’
    Jesse forced her face to stay blank, not to respond. Tightly she said, ‘My mother was a single parent; I never knew my father.’
    She hadn’t really. Not in the traditional sense. She’d always been the unwanted reminder downstairs. Hidden away. Until she’d had the temerity to come out and risk his wrath for the second time in her life. And that had had dire consequences.
    Luc was moving and Jesse glanced up, a little disorientated to find that they’d been conversing so easily. He was heaping leftovers of egg and salmon onto his plate. He glanced at her and she felt breathless.
    ‘Are you sure you don’t want any?’
    Jesse shook her head vigorously, realising that they’d gone way off track, sitting here talking relatively companionably. When Luc came back to sit down Jesse stood up and took her plate over to the sink to wash it. She felt prickly all over and, most betrayingly of all, as if she might cry.
    Without saying anything to Luc she left the kitchen, walking as nonchalantly as she could, horribly aware that he might be looking at her. Only when she was around the corner and had ducked into the empty study that had so incensed him the