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‘But one thing is still glaringly absent,’ he continued smoothly.
She leaned forward, reaching towards a silver dish of salted almonds. ‘Oh? And what’s that?’
‘So far all the information seems to have been coming from my direction. Isn’t it also time you told me something about your past, Caitlin Fraser?’
CHAPTER SEVEN
CAITLIN, HER HAND hovering over a bowl of almonds, stilled. ‘My past?’ she echoed.
‘That’s right,’ he agreed.
‘And...’ she licked her dry lips, laying the blame on the salty almonds ‘...what do you want to know exactly?’
‘It’s not too difficult. The usual things. Where you were born and how you spent your childhood.’ Kadir shrugged. ‘It has occurred to me that I know practically nothing about the mother of my child.’
She pushed the nuts away and glared at him. ‘Didn’t your spies find out for you when they were tracking me down?’
‘My emissary came back with very little concrete information,’ he admitted. ‘He discovered you were living on a small Scottish island and had borne a son who bore an uncanny resemblance to me, and that your mother had died many years before. Other than that, nothing. There was no mention of a father on your birth certificate.’
‘You looked at my birth certificate?’
‘Why wouldn’t I?’ he questioned coolly. ‘In the same situation, wouldn’t you have endeavoured to gather as much information as possible?’
Caitlin returned the burn of his black gaze, her heart pounding hard beneath her thin tunic. She felt fear and she felt dread, which easily eclipsed her outrage that he had gone poking around in her past. Because everyone had a secret they would prefer the world not to know, and he was about to discover hers.
If she chose to tell him.
She had never talked about it with anyone, mainly because she’d never got close enough to someone to want to confide in them. Or for the layers of her painful past to be peeled away, leaving her exposed and vulnerable. Except for this man, of course. She’d been closer to Kadir than to anyone, but it had only been a very fleeting intimacy and it had only ever been physical. It made her feel a little foolish now to realise just how spiky and unrounded she must be as a human being, that she should have considered the twelve hours she spent with Kadir as the most significant twelve hours of her life. How sad was that?
But those hours had produced a beautiful child. His child. And didn’t that make his question not only understandable, but reasonable? Didn’t he have the right to know something about her, as she did him? And he had already obliged by confiding in her the bitter truth about his marriage.
Nonetheless, it wasn’t easy to address a subject she’d spent much of her life trying to forget, and a moment or two passed before Caitlin was ready to speak. And wasn’t it funny how something could still hurt, even after all these years? It was like poking at a scar you thought had completely healed, only for it to surprise you by starting to bleed again.
‘There was no mention of my father on the birth certificate because my mother didn’t name him,’ she began.
His eyes became shuttered so that all she could see was the ebony gleam which shone from between the thick lashes. ‘Why not?’
She paused. Say it, she told herself. Just say it. It’s not a big deal in this modern world, not like in the old days. But it still felt like a big deal to her. ‘Because he already had a wife and other children and he begged her not to. In fact, he did his best to try to persuade her not to give birth to me in the first place. But fortunately, she chose to ignore his advice and incentives.’ She gave a bitter laugh. ‘It was the one sensible thing she did throughout the whole of my childhood.’
‘Caitlin.’
The shock on his face was almost palpable as he said her name but Caitlin couldn’t resist a dig, even though the comment probably hurt her far more than it could ever hurt him. ‘Perhaps now you’ll understand my shock when I discovered you were married.’
‘I am only just beginning to realise the impact that discovery must have had on you,’ he said gravely, before giving a heavy sigh. ‘So your mother had a brief affair with a married man?’
Just like you.
He didn’t actually come out and say that, but the words hung in the air just as clearly as if he had. Caitlin could feel her cheeks begin to burn, knowing that she didn’t have to justify herself because this wasn’t about her—they were supposed to be talking about her mother. But she went ahead and did it anyway.
‘It was nothing like what happened with us. Because she knew he was married. At least she was given the choice about whether or not she wanted to get involved,’ she retorted, and saw him flinch—but strangely, his obvious discomfiture gave her no pleasure. ‘She used to work for him, until she got pregnant, and then she left, supposedly by mutual agreement, though basically she was told to go or she would get fired. But the affair continued for years, based on a promise my father made that he would divorce his wife and marry my mother. Which he never did, of course.’
Kadir’s eyes narrowed. ‘And did you ever meet him?’
‘Only once, but I was too young to remember much about it, or maybe I just blocked it out. Apparently, he wasn’t exactly thrilled to have a child who had been born out of wedlock—a child with the potential to upset his pampered life as a city boss. And then it all turned sour. My mother started to get needy. She...’ Caitlin swallowed, because this bit she did remember. She wished she could have forgotten it, but the mind could prove remarkably stubborn when it came to selective memory. ‘She started to make demands. Started setting ultimatums, which were never met, so she’d set another one, and then another. Then she threatened to ring his wife and tell her about me...’
‘What happened?’ he questioned, as her words tailed off.
‘He met up with her one day and told her he had already confessed to his wife.’ She vividly remembered the use of the word confession. A word associated with sin. Had that association contributed to Caitlin’s failure to interact successfully with the opposite sex, once she’d come of age? She didn’t know and right now it wasn’t particularly relevant. All she knew was that Kadir was still looking at her with curiosity burning from those ebony eyes—and she was going to finish her story. She had to—because what good would it do if they continued to be strangers to one another? ‘He told her he never wanted to see her again, nor me.’
