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Because when they were in the same room together, it had always been about that passion. About that need. He could feel it inside him, bright and greedy.
Outside, he’d intended to indulge in that passion. That greed. To use it to prove what he already knew. That she was his—whatever that meant. And that whatever happened, she certainly wasn’t going to marry a lascivious old tosser like Julian Browning-Case. He had felt certain that the best way to make his point was by reminding her exactly how good it was between them. As acrobatically as possible.
But he hadn’t gotten where he was by being unable to read a room. It was obvious to him that Timoney believed he wasn’t capable of talking. That this was a challenge.
And Crete had never backed down from a challenge.
He wasn’t about to start now.
“I do not disagree with you,” he said after a moment. “After all, I was cast out into the world at eighteen myself. No one seemed concerned about whether or not I felt ready. I was expected to be a man, therefore I was.” He lifted a shoulder, then dropped it. “But my mother had been very sheltered up until that point. She was not prepared.”
He said that with authority, though all he knew about his mother had come to him secondhand. Some of what he knew had come from the very articles he disliked, because his mother’s family had allowed reporters access they had always refused him.
Until he became so infamous the world over that they’d changed their tune. Which had allowed him to refuse them all in turn. The circle of life was a circle of spite, he had always believed. And he had never been afraid to prove it.
But somehow he did not want to express it in quite that way to this magical creature, who, unlike everyone else, never looked at him as if he was an alien. Crete normally did not care how others regarded him. He often encouraged them to imagine he was not quite human.
It was different to imagine Timoney doing the same. The notion made him...feel.
And it was an unpleasant feeling. He preferred her to regard him as if he might, in fact, be the sun.
He had come to depend on it.
“You lost her when you were two years old,” Timoney said, and though it was a statement, he could see the question in her blue gaze.
“Do you wish to tell me my own story?” he asked her. “Or are you waiting for me to tell you things it seems you already know?”
He hated that her gaze turned...sympathetic. “Do I know the real story, Crete? Does anyone?”
Crete found himself rubbing at his chest, and dropped his hand like it was lit on fire. He didn’t understand why he was indulging her like this. A challenge, yes. But as much as he didn’t walk away from challenges, he was also justly famous for changing rules he didn’t like to suit himself. What he knew was that he didn’t want her to marry tomorrow.
But why was he subjecting himself to...this?
It wasn’t that he didn’t spend his time chatting with women. Crete didn’t spend any time chatting. With anyone. At all. He knew that other men had friends. Warmer associations with others. The odd golf buddy. But he had never seen the allure in such connections.
And he didn’t particularly care for the fact that this woman had seemed to zero right in on thewhyof it.
Crete had always taken such pride in the idea that nobody knew him at all.
“I don’t remember her,” he told Timoney now. Because the only thing worse, to his mind, than telling her his personal details was the idea that she might think he was afraid to do it. When he was afraid of nothing. Not even the sad truth of the end of his mother’s life. Abandoned by her lover, then her family. Unable to care for her child when she was little more than a child herself. Was it any wonder she had chosen despair and drink? A slower suicide than some, but a suicide all the same. “That seems monstrous, perhaps, but as you say, she died when I was two. Her parents had disowned her when she fell pregnant.”
Timoney made a soft noise. It sounded like distress. Possibly...for him?
Crete did not attempt to parse that, or why it echoed in him like a kind of pain. He also did not permit his hand to rise again to his chest. “The legend goes like this. After burying his only daughter, my grandfather took her son to the doorstep of the man he blamed for his daughter’s dark spiral, and left him there.”
“You mean you,” Timoney said softly. “He left you there.”
“I am told this is a sad tale, but for me, I have always liked it.” Crete shrugged. “It is like the ancient Spartans, is it not? He laid me out to see if the wolves would take me. Perhaps he expected me to die. But instead, I thrived.”
As he always did. As he always would.
“Did he really leave you on a doorstep in Oslo?”
“He did.” Crete was uncomfortable. Stiff. When he had learned over time that others usually displayed signs of discomfort when he told stories about himself. It was why he’d stopped doing it a long time ago. But she had asked, had she not? Even if she looked...well. Not as uncomfortable as he felt. “Luckily it was summer. My father’s wife found me. And who can say how long I was there? I’ve heard it told many ways. An hour, perhaps, in one reckoning. Overnight, according to another. But however long it was, my father’s wife opened the door eventually. And saw before her a toddler with jet black hair and her husband’s eyes. She knew at once who I must be. And it would have been so easy to turn away, but she did not. She took me in.”
“Who would turn away from an abandoned toddler on their doorstep?” Timoney asked, shaking her head as if he’d said something funny. “I have heard you give this version of events before, you know, and I cannot understand it. As if your father’s wife was some kind of saint for...not leaving you to die.”
“Was she not? To take in her husband’s bastard? Who else would do such a thing?”
