AllFreeNovel
Share Us
he man was a natural-born nurturer, despite all his big talk about being a workaholic. The care and attention he paid to her during sex matched the care and attention he paid whenever she spoke to him. She’d had to be fairly careful the day before, when they’d been having the evening meal they’d put together from the leftovers in his fridge on the roof of the barge, not to spill any secrets. He listened, and asked questions, as if he were genuinely interested in the answers. And her. Luckily though, she had been cautious, managing to steer him away from anything other than the vaguest of conversations about her modeling career and her reasons for leaving. And it hadn’t been too hard to distract him with sex.
But it occurred to her now, that while she’d been distracting him, he’d also been distracting her. And she was wildly curious now, to return to the topic of his family. She’d always been so fascinated by Faith’s closeness to her brothers and her pop. While she and Faith had the connection of shared grief, she’d always felt that Faith had this bedrock of support which Zelda had always lacked. So it fascinated her now to realize Ty seemed to have a much less rose-tinted view of his childhood. The problem was, he also seemed as reluctant to talk about it as she was to talk about her family life. Which of course just made her all the more curious.
“How old was I when I started doing the breakfast shift?” He shrugged, stacking the last of the pancakes and transferring the plate to the table. “Around seven, I guess.”
“That’s young,” she said as she forked up a pancake from the stack and smothered in it maple syrup. “To be handling a frying pan on your own.”
“The first couple of attempts weren’t too pretty. I’m not a natural when it comes to kitchen chores. But I wanted to do something to help my mom out, so I kept working at it till I had it.” He smiled, but his gaze remained focused on his plate.
Had she embarrassed him? She tried to erase the thought. Before the melting sensation got any more gooey.
“The effort paid off. These are delicious.” She hummed with pleasure. “Why was it so important to you to help your mother out?”
He jerked his shoulder, the shrug carefully nonchalant this time. But the flags of color hit his cheeks. She had embarrassed him. How intriguing.
“She worked so hard for all of us and she was always so exhausted, especially after the…” He stopped, the smile on his face flatlining as he concentrated on dousing his own pancake.
“After the what?” Zelda probed.
He swallowed, before his gaze finally met hers. “She had a miscarriage the summer I was seven. I was the only one there. Faith was asleep in her basinet and my brothers were out in the yard playing baseball. I came in to grab some lemonade for us all and went to take a leak. And there she was in the bathroom, sitting on the floor, with tears on her cheeks, her teeth gritted against the pain.” His voice had become so low, Zelda almost couldn’t hear it. “I’d never seen her cry before. And then I noticed the blood, spreading over the linoleum. She was six months gone, already big with the baby, but I knew it was way too soon.”
“That must have been hideous.” And terrifying, she realized, for a seven-year-old to see his mother in that much distress.
“I thought she was dying. She gripped my hand so hard the bones ground together. After the contraction finished she told me to call Pop. But I knew there was nothing he could do, so I disobeyed her for the first time in my life and called the paramedics instead.”
“Surely your father would have called an ambulance?” she asked, surprised by the edge in his voice. The same edge she’d heard two days ago on the beach when he was talking about the pub.
“I guess so, but I didn’t want to leave it to him.”
“Why not?”
He looked up from his plate, his expression neutral. “Because I figured it was his fault she was so tired all the time. They had to work such long hours to keep that damn place going.”
She heard the raw resentment in his tone. So that was where his dislike of the pub came from? Borne out of a little boy’s fear for his mother.
“And I knew it was his fault that she kept having babies.” He added. “Because he wouldn’t leave her alone.”
“Wait a minute; you knew about the facts of life when you were seven?” She asked, unable to hide her shock.
She’d loved her parents both a great deal. But they had always been so unattainable, more like celebrity icons than parents—glamorous and ethereal and so perfect. She and Sebastian would get a few precious hours with them each evening, after high tea in the ambassador’s residence, before her parents would be whisked off to another charity gala or diplomatic soiree. Her father would look handsome and debonair in his tux, her mother stunningly beautiful in some gorgeous designer gown, while Zelda would be ushered to bed by the nanny and Sebastian would either go to his room to read or head out for the evening with his friends.
What she’d always thought of as a fairytale childhood, though, suddenly seemed very sheltered, and carefully orchestrated, in comparison to Ty’s.
His mouth hitched up on one side in a lopsided grin. “I had three little brothers and a baby sister, and we lived in a three-room apartment. What I didn’t know, I had pretty much figured out by the time I was seven. My parents were both demonstrative people and they loved sex. Hence the five kids. And there wasn’t a heck of a lot of privacy in that apartment.” He leaned back in his chair, smiling now. “Damn, don’t tell me that I’ve shocked the unshockable Zelda Madison.”
“I’m not shocked, just…” She paused, suddenly realizing she sounded hopelessly prissy. Worse, she actually felt a little prissy. Which hadn’t happened since she was about seven herself. “Surprised. I don’t think I ever even saw my parents kiss.”
They had been far too polite and well-bred for public displays of affection, especially in front of their own children. This was the first time though, it had occurred to her that polite might be a euphemism for passionless. She had always idolized her parents, probably because of the shockingly sudden way in which she’d lost them. But she could see now maybe they hadn’t been quite as perfect as she had always believed.
“Count yourself lucky,” he said wryly. “My parents couldn’t keep their damn hands off each other. When you’re twelve years old and just starting to figure out how much you like girls, there’s nothing more horrifying than catching your father necking with your mom over a barrel of Guinness a half hour before opening time.”
Zelda snorted out a laugh. “So if they both enjoyed sex so much, why did you blame him for all the pregnancies? It sounds like they were both to blame.”
He shrugged, looking suddenly sheepish. “I guess you’re right. I was a kid. If you know anything about Irish boys and their mammies, you’ll know that my mom meant the world to me. I wanted to look after her and protect her, because as far as I was concerned, she was the next best thing to the Virgin Mother… So, of course, I blamed him.”
“How very Oedipal of you.”
“Oedipus had nothing to do with it. I was a good Catholic boy with a healthy terror of sex drummed into me by the nuns at St. Patrick’s. It’s a miracle I’ve turned out so well-adjusted.”
