Secret Sins Read Online Free PDF

that sat by her chair. “You and I should let John
     and her father handle this.”
    Lisa rose to her feet and Anna noticed her mother’s hands shaking.
    “Yes, run away, Momma. This is, of course, the Middle Ages rather than the twenty-first
     century and I’m certain none of your business,” Anna retorted painfully.
    “Have some respect for your mother, Anna,” her grandfather snapped, slapping her emotions
     with the brutal chastisement. “I raised you better than that.”
    “Did you, Grandfather?” Straightening her shoulders and lifting her chin in determination,
     she faced him squarely. She hadn’t called him Gran’pop for several years now, for
     a reason. “You raised me to stand up for myself until I was nine, then you shipped
     me off and never did more than let me know which exotic location we’d be vacationing
     in during my breaks, despite my pleas that I be allowed to come home, just for a little
     while.”
    “And here you are! Just look how you’ve repaid me for that,” he accused her, his tone
     forbidding and bleak.
    “Anna,” her father snapped. “Stop acting like a spoiled brat. You will return to school
     today.”
    “No, Father, I won’t. I’ve had the dean’s letters to the ranch collected before they
     ever left the school for the past three years. You’ve only been sent what I wanted
     you to see. I graduated before showing up here last week. I won’t be going back. If
     you and Grandfather won’t let me work with you here on the ranch, then I’ll find a
     job in town.”
    “No one will hire you,” her father promised her.
    It wasn’t just anger that made her father’s voice hoarse, vibrating with a rough,
     dark emotion. It was indeed fear, just as it had been in her mother’s eyes.
    “They already have,” she stated quietly, clasping her hands in front of her. “I’ve
     been hired as assistant to Mikhail Resnova at the Sweetrock offices of Brute Force.”
    She could have cut the tension in the room with a butter knife as pure terror seemed
     to flash in her father’s eyes.
    Brute Force was her cousins’ business. Rafer, Logan, and Crowe Callahan were equal
     partners along with Ivan and Mikhail Resnova in the security venture.
    “What are you scared of, Dad?” Forcing the question past her lips was one of the hardest
     things she had ever done. And she wouldn’t have asked if it weren’t for the fact that
     she knew he was frightened of something.
    “Of your determination to ruin your life and your future,” he stated, his voice still
     hoarse. “I can’t believe you pulled this, Anna.”
    But there was more. She knew there was more. She could see it in his eyes. Just as
     she could see the fear and desperation in his expression.
    Anna shook her head. “Working on the family ranch, or for my cousins in town, is not
     the destruction of my life or my future,” she informed them. “And neither will any
     other dream I have. Dreams I deserve, Dad. I don’t deserve to be locked up in a college
     for wayward children, nor have I deserved to be separated from my family since I was
     nine years old.”
    She’d hated that. She still couldn’t forget it. Nothing could ever hurt her as much
     as being taken from her family had broken her heart.
    She’d been jerked from the home and the family she loved, and placed in private schools.
     She had called home when her fear of the dark had overwhelmed her, and they had refused
     to come get her.
    She had cried, she had begged, she had demanded, and still they had refused.
    “I’m tired of begging,” she told them when neither man spoke. “I’m not going back,
     and I refuse to beg further. I haven’t been a part of this family since I was nine
     years old, and I refuse to give you the courtesy of having any say in my future any
     longer. I’m staying in Corbin County, whether you like it or not.”
    “No, you will not.” It was her grandfather who rose to his feet. “Fine, you’ve graduated
     without