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Frustration bloomed over anger like a watercolour painting. They had just been getting somewhere. There were things they still needed to say. But now Kyros was twenty minutes away her thoughts had completely scattered.
‘You sound like Lykos.’ Theron’s tone was dark, but not bitter or resentful.
Summer felt seasick. She just wasn’t sure what she should be feeling, where her allegiance should be. With Mariam? Her father? Or the father of her child? The man she knew she was falling in love with. Nerves tickled her soul.
What if Kyros didn’t like her? What if he became angry with her mother? What if she didn’t like him? Theron clearly respected him, loved him even—he’d cared for his wife throughout her illness and part adopted two teenage tearaways. So he couldn’t bebad.
But she couldn’t shake the feeling that meeting her father would cost Theron something. Costthemsomething. No matter what happened, it would definitely alter his relationship with the man who had been like a father to him for longer than his own parents were alive. And Theron had still made the call to Kyros.
For her, she realised. It was a sacrifice he’d made. For her.
‘Theron—’
The sound of a car on the gravel drive turned both their heads towards the window.
‘He’s here,’ Theron announced needlessly, and he looked back at her before leaving. ‘The green dress. You will look beautiful in it.’
Theron made it to the doorway as the sleek racing-green Jeep pulled to a stop in front of the stone steps. He felt numb. As if he’d gone into shock ahead of some great trauma, as if protecting himself from what would come.
Kyros stepped out of the vehicle and straightened his tie. Despite the fact that his hair and beard were shocking white, they were thick and vital. No one ever mistook Kyros for a weak old man. At full height they stood shoulder to shoulder and, despite the immense power he wielded, Kyros had always been quick to laugh and his heart was huge.
But it was a heart that, once wounded, rarely recovered and when Kyros looked Theron straight in the eye, Theron knew. Any hope he might have entertained that they could survive this, that their relationship would survive, was gone.
Kyros looked at the house and for a fleeting moment he seemed scared, before he returned his steely gaze to Theron.
Theron opened his mouth to speak but was cut off.
‘We will speak later. My daughter?’ Kyros demanded, wanting to know she was here.
Theron nodded, but before he took Kyros inside he needed to know. Theron forced the words out through clenched teeth. ‘She is pregnant.’
Kyros’s steely gaze turned glacial. ‘Yours?’
‘Naí.’
With nothing left to say, Theron led Kyros into the house. Summer had said that she’d be in the library and each step towards her felt inexplicably as if it were taking him away from her. He had to put a hand out to steady himself, vertigo hitting him as if he’d entered an Escher painting.
Summer had hastily slipped into the green dress and pinned her hair up, let it down and put it back up again in the time since Theron had left her room. She was in the library now, finally deciding on hair up because she was so hot and flustered she needed it off her neck. To stop herself from pacing she’d sat in the chair, but the moment she heard footsteps in the corridor she lurched up, her hands clasped before her.
Suddenly she wanted to cry. But she fisted her hands, ordering herself to be strong. She was aware that two men stood in the doorway, yet she only had eyes for one. Kyros—her father—looked so familiar she had to sit down. Kyros covered the room in strides as if worried that she was unwell, his arm at her side, ready to support her, which she gratefully took.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, embarrassed by her reaction.
‘There isnothingthat you could be sorry for.’ His reply was strong and sincere, his eyes wide as if he just couldn’t look at her long enough. She knew the feeling because it was exactly how she felt. He pulled up a seat so he could hold her hand. ‘Iam the one who is sorry and I cannot even begin to ask for your forgiveness. I only hope that you believe I truly did not know of your existence.’
Summer smiled through a watery gaze that hungrily consumed every single inch of the man who had fathered her, yet not been her father. ‘I know. Mum always said that you didn’t know.’ She pressed her lips together at the mention of her mother. She didn’t miss the way that Kyros’s blue gaze sparked, but not with anger, something more like surprise before it was quickly mastered.
‘We have so much to talk about,’ Kyros insisted, pulling his chair closer to hers.
‘We have time,’ Summer said, a slight pinprick of hurt cutting deep at her heart, wondering whether the same could be said for her mother. She couldn’t stop staring at him. Her eyes raked over him, wondering that he was really there. Wondering at this strange sense of connection she felt branded into her heart in an instant.
‘Your mother, Mariam. How is she?’ Kyros asked in a way that made Summer think he already knew. Summer turned to the doorway, wanting to see if Theron had said anything, but he wasn’t there.
She frowned, but returned her attention to Kyros and took a deep breath. ‘She is not well.’ Her father seemed to clench his jaw, as if bracing himself. ‘But we are soon going to be able to get her the treatment she needs.’
‘We?’
‘Yes,’ Summer said, her smile wide and full of love. ‘Me and my sisters.’
