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“Your mother didn’t remarry?”
“No.”
“She never met anyone else?”
“Oh, she met many someone elses,” Chloe whispered gravely. “A different man every week. Sometimes two.” Chloe sighed. “My mother was very beautiful, Raffa.” She bit down on her full, lower lip, but Raffa didn’t notice. His eyes were trained on her face, her anguished, haunted face. “She had no shortage of men who caught her eye, and vice versa. But none of them lasted long. She told me once, after she’d had a bottle of champagne, that there was no one on earth like Diego. My father, she told me, was the only man alive who’d ever made her heart sing.” Chloe rolled her eyes. “And so she drank herself into an early grave, sleeping with whomever took her fancy, never caring for what a sad spectacle she’d made of herself.”
To her surprise, tears had pricked Chloe’s eyes without her notice. It wasn’t until one rolled down her cheek and Raffa reached across the table to pad his thumb over it, catching the moistness on his tip and dragging it sideways, that she recognized her emotional state.
“Sorry,” she murmured. “I make it a rule never to talk about my messed-up family.”
“Why?”
She pulled away from his touch, shaking her head and lifting her own palms to dash at her cheeks. “Because apparently it brings me to tears and I despise crying.”
He laughed again. “Crying is nothing to be ashamed of.”
“Oh, really? When was the last time you cried, your highness?”
He frowned. “It’s different. I’m ...”
“Oh, let me guess? A big, brave, macho man?”
“I was going to say,” he corrected with a grimace, “a man who was raised knowing he would be Sheikh. Tears weren’t tolerated – ever – in my upbringing.”
It was enough of a revelation to have Chloe’s mind changing courses, uncovering the stones of this. Her own upbringing had been lonely, cold, devoid of the kind of family interactions most people took for granted. But what had it been like for Raffa?
“I have a problem with that,” she said, reaching for some cheese and grapes and placing them on her plate.
“Oh?”
“Firstly, I don’t think you would ever have been prone to crying. It’s just not… you. And secondly, you are definitely not the kind of man who, even as a boy, would have been dictated to. In fact, I dare say that had someone urged you to stop crying, you would have carried on for days, just to spite them.”
He dipped his head forward but Chloe was certain she saw the hint of a smile on his face. “I cried,” he said after a moment, “when my mother died. And when your father died.”
“I was angry when he died,” she said with a twist of her lips. “I was angry about the article, angry that it must been the last thing he saw. You know they found him with it in bed? He’d read it, and then he had a heart attack.”
Raffa nodded. “I had heard that. Your brother was similarly furious. Devastated, too. So many revelations that should have stayed private…”
“It was just conjecture,” she brushed it aside. “How could a journalist know the details she claimed to?”
Apollo remained silent, unable to disclose what he knew of the situation – unable to tell his young wife that the article was, indeed, accurate. That the journalist’s source had been correctly quoted: that the source of the article was Apollo himself. He could tell her none of these things, because his friend had sworn him to secrecy, and even now, even with Chloe as his wife in every sense of the word, he couldn’t break the bonds of trust that he and Apollo had forged years earlier.
“I didn’t.” Chloe continued speaking, unaware of the direction of her husband’s thoughts. “Cry when my father died, I mean.” She cleared her throat. “I don’t know why. I just don’t cry often. I was sad, I think – but because of an imagined future I had lost, rather than any special bond we’d shared. Death is sad – always. An old man who’s lived well and fast and long? It’s hard to see grief in that.”
“Will you feel that way when my own father goes?”
Chloe paled, her face instantly rejecting his words.
“So it is not so natural after all?” he prompted, his point well-made.
“Malik is so dynamic. It’s hard to imagine his body turning to dust and memory.”
“Your father was just as much so.”
“Not to me.” She speared a piece of octopus and ate it without tasting its salty sweetness.
“What was he like to you?”
