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‘Yes. For a while.’
Summer frowned, sensing his hesitancy but not the reason why.
Theron took a breath. ‘Lykos was two years older than me, so he had gone to work for Kyros before I joined the company. But when I was eighteen, Lykos turned up and told me he was leaving.’
‘Why?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know.’ Summer didn’t know whether he’d realised his hand had tightened around hers, but she soothed her thumb over the back of his hand and his grip loosened. ‘He never told me. We had an argument and...we have only spoken once since that day.’
His jaw was clenched so hard that Summer could see the flare of his muscle. She thought he was done, but he surprised her by carrying on.
‘He wouldn’t tell me why he was leaving, but he wanted me to go with him. I said that we couldn’t. That we’d promised to work with him after school. Lykos accused me of choosing Kyros over him and... I couldn’t deny it.’
He turned to her, his eyes filled with hurt and pain, warring with that decision all over again.
‘I remember every word he said. “It’s not real, you know. This little family you’ve created in your mind from Sunday dinners with Kyros and Althaia. You’ll never be part of their real family. You’ll be the dog that they feed scraps to for the rest of your life. Because you’ll never find a way to repay that debt of yours, will you?I’myour family, not them. Come with me”.’
‘I’m sure he didn’t mean it,’ Summer said.
‘He did,’ Theron said, looking out at the sea, the stoicism in his expression heartbreaking for her to see. ‘But all I knew was that I had somewhere I felt safe. Somewhere I felt I belonged.’ He turned to Summer and she knew, even if he didn’t say it. With Kyros he’d found a home. A family. ‘I owe Kyros my life. I know what happened to some of the boys at the orphanage. I know what some of them did, what they had to do and where they ended up because of it.’
He lifted the veil holding back his feelings then and she could see it. See it all. The honesty, the fear that it could have been him, the dread of truly horrible things that she could barely conceive of. She might not have had Kyros in her life, but she’d had her mother, her sisters, a roof over her head and a sense of constant security. She understood the awfulness of his childhood, the shock of losing his parents, of being placed in an orphanage—and then being presented with what Kyros was offering. She could see so clearly how impossible it would have been for Theron to have left with Lykos.
‘My debt to him will never be repaid.’
Something inside her curled in on itself, as if it recognised something final, something horribly conclusive. She pushed past it to try to see what he wanted her to see.
‘Is that why you sent me away in Greece? Because you were trying to pay your debt?’ she asked.
‘I am in charge of his security. Summer, you’re not the first person to claim to be the illegitimate child of a very rich man.’
‘He looked right at me—’
‘Summer—’ he said, as if about to defend him.
‘He looked at me and saw nothing.’ The words hurt as they poured out of her, her throat thickening with pain.
Theron took a breath. ‘He doesn’t know about you,’ he said simply, with horrifying ease. ‘He’s not looking for you in young women around him because he doesn’tknowto look. If you were to take a DNA test you could prove it to him. It’s a mouth swab. It won’t hurt the baby.’
‘But it could hurtme!’ she cried, remembering the pain she’d felt when he’d dismissed her with a glance.Or you, she thought, already beginning to see how precarious his position was with Kyros. If she proved herself to be Kyros’s child, she couldn’t see how that could be any kind of good for Theron. Not with how things stood.
That thought, that realisation, made her frown. ‘Is that why you proposed?’ Nausea swirled in her stomach.
‘Is what why I proposed?’
‘Because I’m his daughter. Because—’ she shook her head ‘—I can’t imagine how getting your mentor’s illegitimate daughter pregnant with an illegitimate child would go down particularly well.’
‘I proposed because family is everything. I learned that from him. I cannot allow you to have our child, unmarried.’
‘My mother was unmarried when she had me, so don’t you dare—’
He held his hands up in surrender.
She shook her head in disgust. ‘Kyros might have taught you about family, but my mother taught me about love. And love isn’t a debt you can repay.’ Her heart ached, her soul felt heavy and her tongue thick with grief. ‘Don’t ask me again to marry you,’ she ordered, before storming off down the beach.
He’d felt it. For just a moment, the softening between them. He’d hardly dared to ease into it, a softness that felt both strange but familiar. Like a half-forgotten song. Until she’d asked why he’d proposed.
Love isn’t a debt you can repay.
