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What did he want?
Then she was finally getting the chance to find out.
After dinner, her mother and sister insisted she and Richard retire to the living room while they cleaned up. Mauri agreed to stay behind only after Richard promised a drawing session afterward.
The moment they were out of earshot, she pounced. “Any explanation for...all of this?”
A smile that should be banned by a maximum-penalty law dawned on his face. It was different from what he’d flooded her family and house with all evening. A mixture of wickedness and provocation. One of those would have been more than enough for her to handle. Together, as with everything about him, they were overkill.
He only answered after he sat. “Your family invited me, remember?”
“And since when do you answer anyone’s invitations?”
“You have no idea what I’ve had to do in the past months with Rafael’s marriage. Then Raiden, another of the Black Castle blokes, the Japanese-by-birth guy I mentioned, followed suit. Both their weddings had me putting up with human beings all the time. Then came Numair’s. That one rewrote the fundamental rules of existence for me. He was the one I thought would be the last man on earth to succumb to the frailties of our species or fall into the trap of matrimony. Nothing was sacred after that, and I’ve been open to anything ever since. Even cooking dinner from a minitribe of women and children.”
So all his friends had married. Was that what was making him dip his foot in the land of domesticity? To see if it was for him? And he thought her household was the most convenient testing ground, since he already had a son and a lover there? Did he think she’d let him experiment on them?
Gritting her teeth, she sat beside him. “You said you’d leave my family alone.”
“That was only in return for leaving mine alone.”
“But you now know your concern for Rose is misplaced.”
“I do. I no longer want you to stay away from Rose.”
“Well, I want you to stay away from my family.”
“I no longer want to do that, either.”
“Why? You only involved my family as a pressure card.”
“I did?” He cocked his head at the grinding of her teeth. “By ‘family’ you mean Mauricio. You want me to leave him alone.”
“Who else?”
At her exasperated answer, he shrugged. “I don’t want to do that, either.”
“Why?” she snapped. “What’s new? You didn’t bat a lid when I told you he was your son.”
“I didn’t because I’ve already been immunized against the shock, having contracted it full-force the day before. I knew he was my son the moment I saw him.”
“No way you knew that. He looks nothing like you.”
He produced a picture from his inner pocket, handed it to her. If she wasn’t certain Mauri never had clothes like that, and this photo was in a place they’d never been and looked from another era, she would have sworn it was him.
“That’s my younger brother, Robert. He looked exactly like our mother. I took after my father. Rose was a mix of the two.”
Stunned, she raised her eyes, a memory rushing in. “Rose once told me Mauri so reminded her of one of her dead brothers. I didn’t make anything of it, as it never occurred to me to tie you to her.”
His face darkened. “So she believed I was dead.”
She swallowed. “She did only because it was the only thing to explain why you didn’t search for her.”
His jaw muscles bunched. She winced at the pain she felt for both Rose and him. This wasn’t right. That he’d deprived Rose of knowing he was alive. Rose suffered the loss of her biological family even now. And he might have suffered even more watching her from afar.
“But she didn’t hesitate to identify you, which means she’s been clinging to the hope that you’re alive. You probably look very much like she remembers you.”
“I was sixteen. I looked nothing like this.” He lowered his gaze, as if remembering those moments they’d all been frozen with shock, each for their own reasons. “Did she ask you about me again?”
