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Feminine.
From the long, slender arch of her throat, to the collarbones that I could fit my thumb in. She had a tiny waist, slim hips, but her tits? In the modest camisole she wore, I knew they were fake. They had to be. No way could such a slim woman have that kind of rack.
More than that, beneath the straps of the magenta cami, there was no sign of a bra, but her tits, as well as the rest of her, were terminally perky.
She was, quite frankly, a walking porn star with the face of a princess.
Jesus.
How was this the first time I cast eyes on her?
“What kind of memories?” I rasped, trying to keep my focus on the matter at hand and not the semi triggered by the mental image of those tits of hers bobbing around my cock.
“I remembered her wearing it and touching it with a smile.” Her eyes were stormy, more gray than green, as her gaze turned distant with thoughts of her turbulent past. “Knew that who’d gifted her it made her happy. She wasn’t happy with Father. He can’t make himself that, never mind anyone else.
“Then there’s the fact that he’d never have given her anything like this. It’s platinum, and the emeralds are real, but it’s too discreet for him. He always wants to show off his power, his position. That’s why half her jewels need to stay in a vault... This one stood out among her things because it didn’t belong.
“Nobody would give her something this pricey outside of the family, and I was too young to gift her anything like that, so I knew it had to be a lover.
“The value as well as the memory of her smiling when she touched it led me on a hunt in the attics. I wish I’d read her diaries after she died, but it was too painful to even contemplate looking at them back then. That was why I hid them up there.” A soft, sorrowful laugh escaped her. “She wrote in French, just like she taught us, and that was where I learned about hermeelyi.”
My jaw tensed as I recalled that endearment, something I hadn’t heard in a long time. Something I hadn’t wanted to hear either.
Mariska was, in my mind, locked away under the label ‘big, fat mistake.’
Worse than that time I’d tried ecstasy and had almost died.
If she’d been clinging on to that necklace, it only confirmed how right I’d been to break things off when I had. If she could spend years pining for something that had amounted to an affair, I didn’t need Camille to ram home how miserable her mother’s marriage had been.
“She named me?” I whispered, rage making my voice quiet.
Her eyes were sad. “She did. In the last few passages. I recognized your name, not just because of Eoghan, but because you’re in the papers a lot.”
Guessed that explained how she’d recognized me when we’d never met before. A sharp hiss still gusted from my lips at Mariska’s idiocy. “That was a stupid thing to do.” No wonder she’d gotten her ass killed.
Tension filtered into her frame. “Everything about your affair was stupid. Dangerous. Still, it made her happy even if it killed her.”
Mouth tight, I rasped, “You don’t know that.”
“Oh, I know it helped,” she argued softly. “Those last few passages revealed she was aware Father knew she’d cheated on him at one point.” Her brow puckered. “She should never have had Victoria. It put her life at risk. I didn’t know until I read her journals, but she couldn’t have any more children, which meant her usefulness to Father had dried up. He’d still wanted an heir, and she couldn’t give it to him.
“That was why she urged you into that promise... because she knew he’d kill her when he found out—which he did. Years later, but she was right. And here’s me, standing in front of you, hoping that you’re the man of honor she painted you as.”
If she’d have used any other fucking word but that one,honor, I’d have walked away. Promise or not, leverage was something I wielded, not something that was used against me.
Had Mariska been suicidal? Naming me in her goddamn diary? Did Vasov know one of the O’Donnellys had been boning his missus? What the fuck was our alliance about if he did?
This changed everything.
A few, fucking stupid diary entries tilted this already precarious situation on its head.
I scrubbed a hand over my face, before reaching down to massage the back of my neck.
Honor.
It was the one thing I tried to live by.
Big fat mistakes weren’t the only things that littered my past. I’d taken a lot of missteps along the way, and the older I got, the more I survived, the deeper the desire had been to adhere to a set of standards that were of my own making.
