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“You’ve run the company ever since?”
He nodded. “Dad was an only child—no aunts or uncles to step in. My sisters weren’t interested. My mother just wanted the money to keep coming in so she could continue to support her latest husband in the style to which he’d become accustomed.”
An unkind word crossed her mind about Damien’s mother, but Viv didn’t voice it.
Damien wasn’t finished. “In my house.”
“What?”
“She got a lot of money from my dad, but the estate where I grew up technically belonged to my grandfather. He left big cash settlements to my sisters, but left the island just to me. My mother was living there at the time...and still is.”
Viv managed to not goggle at the word island, and focused instead on what he was saying. He’d lost his beloved father, and his grandfather. Meanwhile his mother—with whom he had a strained relationship—had remarried, maybe more than once, and was supporting a succession of husbands in Damien’s house.
Ouch. Talk about the lifestyles of the rich and shameless.
But at least everything began to make sense to her now, why he lived out of hotels, why he was in no hurry to get “home.” She understood why he lived a vagabond’s life, so quick to set up an office in a hotel room. Of course he didn’t mind eating out every meal, or that there wasn’t a picture on the wall or a pillow he could call his own when he laid his head down at night. Damien Black, one of the richest men in the country, was, for all intents and purposes, homeless.
“Why don’t you get a new place?”
“Because it’s my dad’s childhood home. My childhood home.” He breathed deeply, the subject obviously a sore one. “I mean, I have a condo on the beach, on the top floor of the flagship hotel. That’s where I usually stay. But even that is just too close. I prefer to steer clear of south Florida altogether.”
“I get it,” she whispered. And she did. He didn’t want to live there—couldn’t possibly live there now—but he couldn’t just let go of the home he so closely associated with his own childhood, with his father, with his grandfather. Even though she sensed his relationship with his mother was strained, he probably also held on to it for her sake, not wanting to take away the home she’d lived in for decades.
He wouldn’t appreciate her saying it out loud, but he was a fine man. “I’m sorry about everything that happened to you, Damien,” she murmured, pressing a kiss onto his shoulder. She dropped her hand across his waist and gently squeezed him closer. “Life can be so unfair.”
“Don’t cry for the poor little rich boy,” he said, his tone droll. “My fifty-foot yacht and private jet are pretty decent consolation prizes.”
Viv couldn’t help gasping at that, though, of course, she knew Damien was filthy rich—private island, remember?
He’d never flaunted his wealth, but there’d been no denying it, either. At first, whenever they walked by a high-end store, he’d wanted to buy her something. She’d refused diamonds and clothes, even ignoring the ones he’d already bought, leaving them to hang in the penthouse closet. All because she hadn’t wanted him to put her in that category—as the kind of woman who’d take what she could get while she could get it. Not when what she most wanted to take, while she could get it, was him.
That was why she hadn’t worn the clothes, and hadn’t let him buy her another thing. Well, there had been one thing. Last weekend when they’d walked through a farmers market, he’d bought her a fresh, delicious peach. As the juice had dribbled down her cheeks, she’d assured him it was the best present anybody had ever given her. He’d looked at her as if she was crazy, and then kissed the nectar off her lips, afterward agreeing that it had been a damn fine peach.
That had been a turning point, when he’d finally stopped offering, accepting the fact that she didn’t want any goodies.
He wasn’t finished. “And I do have penthouse apartments in every major city in the world, whenever I want them.”
“They’re nice,” she replied with a shrug.
“Nice?” He drew her closer, and she slid a bare thigh between his legs, curling into him as though they were two strands of the same vine.
“Not very homey.”
“In my opinion, home is defined by the people who remain behind the front door when it closes at night.”
She heard something in his voice—something intense. As if he was admitting that here, with her, over the past couple of weeks, had been as much a home to him as anyplace.
