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‘We went way beyond that last night. Answer my question, unless you wish me to demonstrate our revised positions?’
Her lips parted on a tiny gasp that made him want to plunge his tongue between them but he restrained himself. For once, the need to see beneath the surface of Brianna Moneypenny trumped everything else.
‘I...I’ve already told you I didn’t grow up in the best of circumstances. Because of her drug habit we...lived on the street from when I was about four until I was ten. Sometimes I went for days without a proper meal.’
Shock slammed through Sakis. For several moments he was unable to reconcile the woman who stood before him, poised and breathtakingly stunning, with the bedraggled, haunted image she portrayed.
‘How... Why?’ he demanded, cursing silently when he saw her pale face.
Bruised eyes finally met his. ‘She couldn’t hold down a job for longer than a couple of weeks but she was cunning enough to evade the authorities for the better part of six years. But finally her luck—if you can call it that—ran out. Social Services took me away from her when I was ten. I found her when I turned eighteen.’
Another bolt of shock went through him. ‘You found her? After what she did to you, you went to look for her?’
Her eyes darkened with pain. When his hands slid down her arms to hers, she gripped him tight. But he knew her mind was firmly in the past.
‘She was my mother. Don’t get me wrong, I hated her for a long time, but I had to eventually accept the fact that she was also a human being caught in the grip of an addiction that almost ruined her life,’ she said.
Sakis saw her raw pain, clenched his jaw and silently cursed the woman who’d done this to her. More than anything, he wanted to obliterate her pain.
Theos, what the hell was happening to him?
Wait... ‘Almost?’
She gave a jerky nod. ‘She got it together in the end. In the eight years we were apart, she beat her addiction and got her act together. I...can’t help but think I was the one who was holding her back.’
His growled curse made her jump. Leaning down, he kissed her hard and fast.
‘She never made an effort to kick her habit when I was around. And she would get this look in her eyes whenever she looked at me—like she hated me.’
Sakis wanted to swear again, but he bit his tongue. ‘No child should ever be blamed for being born. She had a duty to look after you. She failed. So she got herself better, then what?’
‘She remarried and had another child.’
‘So, it was a happy ending for her?’ He couldn’t stop a hint of bitterness from spilling out. He and his brothers hadn’t been granted a happy ending. And his mother continued to live a hollow existence, a shadow of the vibrant woman she’d been for the first decade of his life. ‘But she cut you from her life?’
‘Yes; I suppose she didn’t want the reminder,’ she answered lightly; a little too breezily.
Sakis knew she was glossing over her pain. Wasn’t it the same way he’d glossed over his for years? But something else struck him, made him reel all over again.
She’d had a mother who had done her wrong in the most fundamental of ways—she’d failed to look after her daughter when she was young and helpless and needed her most. And yet, Brianna had gone out of her way to find her after she was grown and on her own two feet.
The depth of compassion behind such forgiveness rocked him to his soul. ‘I never forgave my father for what he did to us, and especially what he did to my mother. Hell, sometimes I think he purposefully died of a heart attack in her arms just to twist the knife in further, because she sure as hell almost died mourning him.’
She touched his cheek with fingers that trembled. ‘Don’t be too hard on her. She had her heart broken the same way yours was.’
But then he’d had his brothers and the myriad cousins, aunts and uncles who’d rallied round when the going had got tough. Even in his darkest days, there’d always been s
omeone around and, although he’d never been one to reach out, deep down he’d known there was someone around.
Whereas, Brianna had had nobody.
His insides clenched with the same emotion he’d experienced earlier. Like a magnet drawn to her irresistible presence, he pulled her closer.
‘You’re amazing, do you know that?’ he murmured against her hair, satisfied for the moment to just hold her close like this.
‘I am?’ Her delicate eyelids fluttered as she looked up at him.
‘Yes. You have a unique way of holding up a mirror to some of my deeply held beliefs that make me question them.’
