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He reached out, touching her face gently. ‘You would do the same in my place, I think. Because you want to help people too, don’t you? Your sister, for example. There aren’t many people who’d gatecrash a party in order to sell their virginity to a complete stranger, and all for someone else’s benefit.’
Glory lifted a shoulder. ‘Annabel and I lost our parents when we were young and she ended up having to look after me. She had to make a lot of sacrifices and then she got breast cancer and her fertility was affected. So I...just wanted to do something to help her.’
‘Lift your arms for me,’ he murmured. She did so, and he shook out the shirt of soft dark blue linen that he was holding and slid her outstretched arms into the sleeves. ‘How old were you when you lost your parents?’
He wasn’t looking at her, which somehow made it easier to talk about, even though she would have sworn it wasn’t actually hard. ‘Ten.’ She swallowed. ‘Annabel was eighteen.’
‘That must have been hard.’ He pulled the shirt up around her shoulders, his attention falling to the buttons.
The linen felt silky against her skin and it smelled of him. She found it comforting. ‘Yes. It was. And certainly for her.’
‘I see.’ He began to do up the buttons on the shirt. ‘But not for you?’
She’d never spoken about it with anyone—mainly because no one had asked—and she really didn’t like talking about it, but for some reason, with him, the words were easy to say. ‘I missed my parents, of course. But it was Annabel who had to do the hard stuff. She dropped out of school to work so we had enough money to live on.’
Castor said nothing, still apparently involved in doing up the last couple of buttons.
But his silence felt...welcoming somehow, as if he was giving her space in which to speak.
‘She had to make lots of sacrifices for me,’ Glory went on, because now she’d started, it seemed she couldn’t stop. ‘She had to give up her education so we could survive. And then she got cancer, which didn’t seem fair after everything she’d sacrificed, because she really wanted a family.’
Annabel, so tired after a full day working at the supermarket checkout.
Annabel, changing into her waitress uniform for her second job at the café, still looking exhausted.
Annabel, crying at night after she’d thought Glory had gone to sleep.
But Glory hadn’t gone to sleep. She’d heard her sister weeping, heard her talking to a friend on the phone about how it was so hard and how she didn’t know how she was going to keep Glory fed and clothed or give her the opportunities she deserved.
Glory, whose presence had made Annabel’s life such a misery.
‘It wasn’t easy for an eighteen-year-old to bring up a kid,’ Glory said softly, keeping her hands in her lap. ‘And I was impulsive and a bit of a dreamer. I tried to make thing easier for her by behaving myself, doing my homework and staying quiet, and not being too demanding. But...’ She stopped, feeling vulnerable all of a sudden. She’d never said any of this stuff out loud before and it was oddly exposing.
A finger caught her beneath the chin, gently tilting her head back so she had to meet his gaze. ‘But?’ he prompted.
You can tell him. You can tell him anything.
She didn’t know where the thought came from, but instinctively she knew it was true. And she’d told him half of it anyway...
‘But I knew I was a burden to her all the same,’ she said starkly. ‘It didn’t matter how good I was or how quiet, my very existence was the issue. She never said anything to me and she never complained, but I could hear her crying at night. She was always so tired, always so worried about money. Annabel didn’t choose me. I wasn’t her child, only her little sister. She got stuck with me. She had to make all these sacrifices for me and then she got cancer and I...’ Glory stopped, the secret fear she’d never actually spoken of suddenly right there in her mouth.
‘You what?’ Castor prompted gently.
And she found herself saying, ‘I wonder sometimes if her life would have been easier if I hadn’t been in it.’
Glory’s eyes were full of unshed tears, making them look even more liquid and dark, and Castor felt a primitive, fierce emotion gather inside him in response. He knew what it was like not to have his little sister in his life, he lived it every day, and it had damn near ruined him.
‘No,’ he said fiercely, gripping her. ‘No, it wouldnotbe easier if you hadn’t been in it. Why on earth would you think that?’
Glory tried to pull away, but he didn’t release her. Instead her lashes fell, veiling her gaze. ‘She didn’t choose me. I wasn’t her kid. I was only her sister. I wasn’t anyone special. I didn’t do anything to—’
‘Glory,’ he cut her off roughly. ‘You didn’t have to do anything. You were her sister, that’s enough.’
Her lashes rose, droplets of tears sparkling on the ends. Yet a certain anger glowed there too along with the pain. ‘How would you know? You weren’t there and you don’t know Annabel. You didn’t see how tired she was. How she had to drop out of school to look after me. You didn’t hear her crying at night or talking to a friend about how she didn’t know how she was going to feed us for the next week. And you weren’t there when she got sick, and all I could think about was how maybe her getting sick was my fault. If she hadn’t worked herself into the ground trying to look after me, she might not have got cancer, and then she might have had the baby—’
Castor lifted his thumb and pressed it against her soft mouth, stopping the flood of words. He hadn’t wanted to talk about Ismena, but the pain in Glory’s eyes was too much to bear. He hated her thinking she was a burden, that somehow she wasn’t the special woman he knew her to be. Warm and empathetic and giving. No wonder Annabel had made sacrifices for her. Who wouldn’t?
Ismena had been the same, and he would have moved mountains for her.
