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The uneasy flow of words cut off as he took several deep breaths; she could hear the guilt in his voice when he continued.
‘I knew my old man was a big deal. A sheikh or a king or something. Because when she was really drunk she’d talk about him and Narabia, and the golden palace, about being a queen. How I was his heir and entitled to a fortune. And I’d checked out as much as I could about him online. I didn’t believe all of it, it all seemed too freaky, but I figured even if he only had a bit of dough he could help us out. And by that summer I was desperate. We had tons of fights. I said all sorts of crazy stuff about how I hated her. How I’d be better off without her. I was fourteen and sick of the responsibility. I didn’t want her weighing me down any more. We had a really big fight. I was so mad I poured every drop of liquor she had hidden round the apartment down the drain. She was crying and carrying on, telling me I was as much of a tyrant as my dad. I laughed in her face and said I’d rather live with a tyrant who had money than some broken-down nobody like her.’
Cat could feel the tension in his body, so she placed her hand on his heart, trying to ease the bitter memories. ‘You don’t have to continue.’
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I do.’ He paused, his hand covering hers, his thumb absently caressing the skin as he told her the rest.
‘The next morning, she had the mother of all hangovers and a bad case of the DTs. But she was relatively sober for the first time in months, maybe years—she cried, she told me how sorry she was, for...’ He paused, his body tensing. She could hear the deep draw of his breathing as his pain tightened like a vice around her own ribs. ‘For messing everything up,’ he said eventually. ‘But I was still mad. So I left for school without even saying goodbye. My father’s bodyguards snatched me off the street that afternoon and I never saw her again. She was dead two months later—an accidental overdose. My father showed me the newspaper article. And that’s when I stopped trying to run away.’
He paused, the silence engulfing them both.
‘Things got better after that, once I was willing to do what I was told. He wasn’t what you’d call a loving father. But I’ve never had to worry about money again. So I figured I’d got what I wanted. My mom was the one who really suffered. Not me.’
She lifted her head. His blue eyes met hers, shadowed by shame and remorse.
Then he frowned. ‘Hey, why are you crying?’ he asked, touching the moisture on her cheek with his thumb. Moisture she hadn’t even known was there.
She brushed the tear away with her fist, desperately trying to keep it together. Emotion pressed against her throat, making it hard for her to breathe, let alone speak.
‘It’s just such a sad story.’ Although it wasn’t a story, it was real. And it hurt her to think he still blamed himself for what had happened to his mother after he’d left. But she didn’t know how to tell him that, without blowing her cover to smithereens.
‘I told you it was ugly,’ he said.
It wasn’t ugly, she thought. It was desperately sad. Whatever had happened to pull his parents apart, to turn what had been a great love into a toxic relationship had left him caught in the middle—through no fault of his own. But she could see simply telling him that wasn’t going to get through to him, because he’d lived with the shame and the guilt of his mother’s death for a very long time.
‘Would it be cr
ossing a line if I told you something about myself, Zane?’ she asked, hoping he would give her this opening, because for all her inexperience, and her naivety about relationships, there was one thing she did understand. What it was like to be a child, and blame yourself for something that had always been beyond your control.
The smile that tugged at his lips made him look so handsome. And so alone. ‘You’re naked in my bed, Catherine. I think we can say we’ve already crossed that line.’
She nodded, stupidly pleased by the humour in his voice.
‘When I was six years old, my mother left my dad for another man. One of the many men she’d had affairs with. We never saw her again. And my father was devastated. It broke him in many ways.’
Zane’s eyebrows rose up his forehead. Then he lifted his hand, and cupped her cheek. ‘Hell, Catherine, I’m sorry. I didn’t know that.’
She leaned into the gentle caress. ‘It’s okay. It was a long time ago now.’
‘Yes, but... You were so young.’
And so were you, she wanted to shout at him. But she held back and began to talk instead, so he could understand he wasn’t the only person who had made the mistake of thinking they were responsible for someone else’s choices. That they could fix something—or someone—who had already been broken beyond repair.
‘The thing is, Zane, I blamed myself. Because I’d told my dad about the man she was seeing. I didn’t know it was an affair at the time. I just knew this guy was “Mummy’s special friend”, because that’s what she called him when he came to the house when my father was at work. She told me not to tell my father. That it would be our secret. But I told him anyway. They had an enormous fight and then she left. And that’s the last time I ever saw her.’
And ever since she’d blamed herself, not just for her mother’s departure, but for her father’s pain. Even if she’d never consciously admitted it to herself, the guilt had always been there. Why else would she have found it so hard to ever let herself be physically intimate with a man? Her attraction for Zane had been so overpowering she hadn’t been able to deny it. But she could see now she’d always held herself back from sex because, in some childish, immature corner of her heart, she didn’t want to be like her mother.
‘That’s about the dumbest thing I ever heard,’ he said, cradling her face in his palms. ‘You were six, Catherine. You couldn’t have known what the hell was going on.’
She could smell soap on him and the scent of the sex they’d shared, and feel his heart pounding in strong steady beats beneath her cheek. He caressed her hair, cupping the back of her head—comforting her in the way she’d meant to comfort him.
She forced herself to draw away and look up into his face.
‘I know. But I can see now for years I used what happened then as an excuse to be a coward in every area of my life.’ Until I made the decision to come to Narabia with you. ‘But if what happened with my mother wasn’t my fault, how could what happened to your mother be your fault?’
‘I’m not sure how the two are related,’ he said, but he didn’t look guilty any more, he just looked shattered. ‘I was fourteen going on thirty with enough life experience to know better. You were just a little kid.’
His lips tilted in a devastating smile and his hand roamed up her thigh and squeezed her butt, sending delicious tendrils of heat skidding back into her sex.
