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Confusion stirred within her. She knew very little of her husband’s mother, except that she’d died in a car accident many years earlier. “After the accident?” She prompted, taking another step into the ancient building. The ground beneath them was mosaics, though she couldn’t make out any discernible image from the tiles. The only light was cast by the moon, and two lamps on opposing sides of the space.
“Yes.” It was a crisp answer that hid a wealth of information, she knew. There were secrets within him – secrets that she wanted to tease out and know, and she couldn’t have said why.
“Apollo once told me that he’d never seen a man as devastated as your father at the funeral,” she murmured softly, goading him to share, willing him to open a small part of himself to her.
A table had been set in the middle of the floor, but it was low to the ground, with bright orange and purple cushions scattered around it, inviting them to lounge comfortably and eat rather than to sit formally at a dining table.
“Did he?” Raffa waited for Chloe to sit and then took the space opposite her, his long legs stretched out in front of him, one ankle crossed over the other.
He was stalling her; dissuading her from continuing. Well, that might have worked with someone else, but not Chloe. Not now. He’d stirred something to life inside of her – an intimate knowledge of his body, and the knowledge that he had made love to her, that he wanted her with such primal abandon, gave her a confidence he couldn’t erode, no matter what he tried.
“They married for love?” She prompted, cutting to the heart of what she wanted to know.
He expelled an angry breath. “Yes. And it was the undoing of them both.”
He poured two glasses of wine, a rich mulberry purple in colour, but didn’t touch his.
“In what way?”
His eyes lingered on her face for so long that goosebumps danced along her spine. “You want to speak of my parents?” He’d left his hair down, after she’d run her fingers through it, and now he pushed it back from his forehead. A gesture that showed his frustration but didn’t deter her for even a moment.
“They would have been my child’s grandparents,” she held his gaze. “If we’re to bring a baby into this world, don’t you think I should know about his heritage?”
He frowned, and she knew why. That same instinctive understanding she had passed through her once more. It was strange for him – as it was her - to think beyond a pregnancy – to imagine an actual baby and then, one day, a child. An adult. A being that would bind them for all time, that would form a string in the broad, ancient tapestry of Ras el Kidan royalty and rule.
A frisson of wonder ran the length of her spine. This was an ancient kingdom, and their child would one day take up a place on its throne. The job of carrying, birthing and raising that person fell to her. Having a child under any circumstances must be awe-inspiring, but this?
The enormity of what they were doing filled her now with a deep sense of amazement. The beginning of a pregnancy might already be flourishing inside of her! At the very thought, she pressed a flat palm to her stomach, and a clear image of what their baby might look like flooded her mind.
“They married impetuously and against my grandfather’s will. She was engaged to someone else, but then, she met my father. They fell in love.” He said the final sentence with derision, an indictment of such a foolish notion.
“You think there’s something wrong with that?”
His eyes contained raw cynicism as they lifted to clash with her. “Yes.”
She laughed, despite the cool disdain emanating from him. “So love is bad?”
He was watchful now, and he reached for his wine, his long fingers curving around the glass, his eyes not leaving her face. “Surely you’ve had sufficient reasons to form this conclusion yourself?”
Chloe was careful not to react. In truth, it had been a long time since anyone had spoken to her – albeit obliquely – of her parents’ affair, and she found that Raffa’s knowledge of this matter was strangely unsettling. “Sometimes I forget that you’re not just my husband.” Her smile was wry. “You aren’t simply a man I’ve married, nor a stranger who knows nothing about me. You know all my secrets, all my truths, and yet none of them by my own admission.”
“That bothers you?”
“It disadvantages me,” she agreed quietly. “You know that my mother and father were miserable together. That he came to hate her, and me as a result of that. That the older
I got and the more I looked like her the harder he found it to be around me. You know that his hatred made her miserable…” Her voice faltered a little.
“And you?” He asked silkily, the question surprising her.
Chloe guarded the pain fiercely. “Their relationship had nothing to do with me.”
“You’re their child.”
And despite the fact she didn’t easily blush, Chloe felt heat rising into her cheeks and she found it hard to meet his eyes. “We were talking about you.”
His laugh was a jolt of warm treacle into polarized muscles. “Because you find it easier to interrogate me than be interrogated?”
“Do you intend to interrogate me?”
