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‘But even so, your own father... He was a monster.’
To her astonishment, Zane shook his head. ‘He wasn’t a monster. He was just a man who had been brought up to believe that everything he wanted should be his by divine right. And when he couldn’t have the one thing he wanted the most, his mind became warped.’ He sighed, the sound so hopeless it made Cat’s heart hurt. ‘Eventually I figured out it wasn’t m
e he wanted to hurt,’ he said, his voice hollow. ‘It was her.’
‘Your mother?’ she asked, shocked by the casual revelation.
He nodded. ‘He kept saying to me, over and over again, that she’d had no reason to leave him. Because he’d loved her more than life itself.’ He huffed out a breath. ‘I didn’t get it back then—how toxic their love for each other was. All I knew was that he’d kidnapped me. And I hated him. So I kept running away, which was pretty damn dumb once I knew the consequences.’
She heard it then, the guilt in his voice—that made no sense at all. Cradling his cheek, she forced him to look at her. ‘Of course you ran away. You wanted to go home. It certainly doesn’t mean you deserved to be beaten.’
He covered her hand with his. ‘So fierce,’ he said, his lips tipping up in a wry smile.
Why was he looking at her like that? As if she’d said something cute?
‘I don’t understand why you’re smiling,’ she managed around the boulder of raw emotion in her throat.
‘Do you really want to hear my life story?’
‘Yes, I do, very much.’
He seemed surprised by her eagerness so she tried to dial it down. But it was hard with her heart pummelling her chest. Was he finally going to open up to her, at least a little bit?
‘Why?’ he asked.
Because I care about you.
She stopped herself from blurting out the truth. Whatever was happening between them, she didn’t want to jeopardise it by revealing sentiments he might not return. Sentiments she wasn’t even sure were real.
Was her fierce compassion for that boy just another by-product of the chemistry they shared?
‘You never did give up on the idea of making me the centre of Narabia’s story, did you?’ he said, recalling the conversation they’d had three weeks ago.
Weeks that now felt like a lifetime. She wasn’t sure she even cared about the project any more. Her desire to know more about that boy and what had shaped him wasn’t about that any more, if it ever had been. But he had given her a way out. A means of getting him to talk about his past without her having to reveal how much she cared. And she couldn’t stop herself from using it.
‘I still think it’s the most effective way to tell Narabia’s story, yes,’ she said.
‘You really want the story to be that ugly,’ he replied, but she could see he was considering what she’d said. And that in itself felt like progress.
‘The truth is sometimes ugly,’ she pointed out, even though it made her feel like a fraud. Wasn’t she hiding the truth about how she was starting to feel about him?
Not about you, Cat.
‘Whatever you tell me,’ she continued, ‘you would have an absolute veto on anything I put in the book. Obviously.’
And I would never put anything in there that might hurt you.
She knew she couldn’t say that, even as she lay naked in his arms, her sex still pulsing from the intensity of his lovemaking.
But as he considered her words, she could feel a heavy weight pushing against her chest. The weight of responsibility and trust. Because they both knew, whatever did or didn’t end up in the book, this would be a big step for him, he would be breaking a silence he’d held for a long time. For her. And that felt huge.
‘All right,’ he said at last. He wrapped an arm around her shoulders and tugged her gently off his chest, until she was snuggled against his side—and she couldn’t see his face. Then he began to talk.
His voice sounded far away in the semi-darkness, the picture he painted of his childhood and adolescence so far removed from where they were now she could imagine it must have seemed to him as if he were describing someone else’s life.
‘I didn’t run away when I got here because I wanted to go home so much. My mom wasn’t a regular mom,’ he began. ‘She always liked to party too hard.’ He shifted, his hand settling on her hair, but she bit back the questions already buzzing in her mind like hyperactive bees. She didn’t want to interrupt. And discourage him.
‘That only got worse as I got older. We moved out of the nice condo we had in the Hollywood Hills, and eventually ended up in a rundown apartment on Wilshire Boulevard. By the time I was fourteen, I would spend most nights dragging her out of some dive or other. She’d lost her looks, which meant even if she hadn’t got a reputation for being difficult to work with, no one wanted to employ her any more. I had a job at a Korean grocery, but even working most nights after school, I couldn’t keep up the rent payments.’
