Innocent Hostage by Vonnie Hughes

to their standards. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t read until I was eight, and it wasn’t my parents who taught me to read, but Natasha, our cleaning lady. I wasn’t musical and I sure as hell couldn’t recite, so I couldn’t do party tricks for my parents’ little ‘evenings.’ As I grew older I realized I was a sort of social experiment for them, a control platform on which to base their educational theories. And I failed them.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Ingrid’s voice grew harsh. “Do you know how fortunate you were to have two parents who cared about you? Who wanted you to succeed? In their first book they mention their son and praise his achievements. They describe how they’ve used the same techniques they used on you for other people’s children. How can you denigrate them?”
“If you only knew, Ingrid. How do you measure success? What about happiness?” His heart pounding, he knew he sounded neurotic but he couldn’t stop. All those years of trying to shake free of their bloody tentacles and they were still ruining his life.
“Success and happiness are two different things, Breck.”
He turned away from her. “On that we agree. Remember that when you’re following their tenets. Good night.”
He still had the presence of mind to snib the lock before he shut the door behind him. Before he shut out the image of Ingrid, hands on hips, staring at him. Before he shut out what might have been.

Chapter Nine
Ingrid stared at the closed door. What had just happened? One moment they were sharing a momentous kiss, the likes of which she’d never felt before. The next he was simmering with anger over—what?
Sick to her stomach, she stood in the middle of the living room feeling like a fool. All she’d done was mention how fortunate he was to have such caring parents and wham! He’d gone up in smoke. A slow anger simmered inside her. Who the hell would want to pursue a relationship with such a touchy guy? Everyone had issues, but Breck Marchant was the king of issues. Huh!
She stalked over to the table and picked up one of the textbooks. Checking inside the front cover she could see no dedications, no photos. What did A & J Marchant look like?
The foreword in the first book referred to their son in a humorous way, saying that at first he was the only child they’d had available to test out their formative ideas on so that their conclusions had been largely subjective. In the second book they acknowledged various public and private schools that had submitted selected groups of children for them to study, to help advance their theories and methods to the next stage. Ingrid raised her eyebrows. Inadvertently they sounded as if they were studying specimens in a zoo. The conclusions at the end of that book were impartial and detached, but that might just be their writing style.
Lord, they’d taught Ingrid her craft. She believed in them. Stuff Breck Marchant. He had her doubting the people who’d been the basis of her training, the experts she referred to even now when she struck a sticky problem.
She flicked to the foreword on the third book. Here she discovered that Anna and Jeremy Marchant were conducting further control ‘experiments’ on larger groups of children, but by now they were fixated on the ‘products’ of private schooling only. Why? Had the public school children not come up to scratch? “Listen to yourself,” she scolded. “He’s got you imagining things that don’t exist.” Just because Breck seemed less than thrilled with his upbringing, didn’t mean there was anything wrong with his parents or their methods of research.
So why did Breck react so badly to the mention of his upbringing? What had happened? She sank down on the carpet and flicked through the third book. This was the one her lecturers at university had mainly used. It was full of techno jargon that the Marchants’ had devised.
She got up and sat in front of the computer to do a Google search. This