AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“I think it’s very human to wish to help a child.” Timoney studied him, frowning slightly, and he chose not to wonder what she saw. “And did she actually take you in?”
“That is where I lived for the next sixteen years.”
“That is where you lived, yes. And from where you were summarily ejected on your eighteenth birthday, never to return. Isn’t that right?”
He found that his jaw was so tight it actually hurt. “Yes.”
Timoney nodded as if he’d confirmed her worst fears. “Did your father’s wife take you in out of the goodness of her heart? Because she is some sainted creature? Or did she do it to rub your father’s nose in what he did?” When he didn’t respond, she blew out a breath. “A less saintly motivation, I think. And not particularly kind to the child caught in the crossfire.”
Crete did not often permit himself to descend into memories of his childhood. Because he already knew that nothing good waited there. And perhaps because of that, he had always been focused on the only thing that was ever his. His future.
“What interests me, Timoney,” he said now. And with intent. “Is that you asked me to tell you my story, did you not? And yet you are now arguing with me about it.”
“I’ve read great many articles about you.” Another woman might have flushed at that admission. But not Timoney. She kept her gaze trained on his in a manner he would have called challenging if it was anyone else. Anyone at all but this woman, who had only ever melted in his arms. He could not quite see her in any other way. He did not wish to. “And they all hit the same notes. Callous grandparents. Lost mother. The long-suffering wife who overlooked her husband’s infidelity to raise you almost as her own.”
“They all tell that story because it’s true.” She didn’t shift her gaze away at his fierce tone. Something in him thudded. Hard. “Are you suggesting that I have lied about my own history?”
And it said something—though nothing he wished to acknowledge—that he questioned himself for a moment. That she sat there looking like moonlight and the Mediterranean, and he wondered, if only for a moment, if she knew more about his childhood than he did.
“I don’t think you’re a liar,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean I think you’re telling the truth, either.”
All of this was settling on him in a way Crete could only call uncomfortable. It was because she didn’t look dazed or dizzy at the sight of him, the way she always had before. It was because she wasn’t flushed and prettily begging for his touch. Nor did she look crushed, the way she had that last night.
Instead, Timoney was looking at him coolly, as if examining a specimen.
He couldn’t say he cared for that at all.
And not only because he could not recall anyone looking at him like that in a very long while. Certainly not since he had become the Crete Asgar the world liked to whisper about in tones of awe behind the very hands they held out to him.
“Am I not?” he asked, though he didn’t want to know. But he didn’t want her to see how very little he wanted to know.
“You are closed off in every way,” she replied, her gaze intent and her voice quiet. And had she sat up straighter, like some oracle delivering bad news? “Locked up tight. If you have any emotions at all, you only let them out by having sex. Everything else is off-limits. You make money and you make love, though I doubt very much you would call it that. And that’s it. You act as if there’s nothing else to you. And that cannot be, can it? No one is so stark or uncomplicated. Especially those that pretend otherwise.”
He found he was more tense than he should have been. When normally he laughed off attempts to attack him or psychoanalyze him in turn, because his foes might as well throw stones at the moon. Yet she was not a foe. And it felt too much like her stones were landing. “You seem to believe that simple truths about me are accusations, Timoney. When perhaps what they are is a bit of wishful thinking on the part of a scorned woman, no?”
That was not exactly the smart way to play this, but the words seemed to come out of him of their own accord. As if he had somehow lost the control that had always defined him.
But instead of reacting badly to being called a scorned woman, Timoney only smiled.
As if she, elfin and unearthly, was the one in control here. An insupportable notion, but Crete did nothing to challenge it. Almost as if he...didn’t want to challenge it.
“No one is that compartmentalized,” she said after a moment.
As if she, too, expected him to do something. To challenge her, maybe. Or to do what he had always done when she’d lived with him—cross the room and get his hands on her, forestalling any possibility of a discussion. Almost as if he’d done it deliberately.
Had he?
But there was no time to answer that, thankfully, because she was considering him much too closely from her perch on the small sofa. “And if you think that you are, in fact, precisely that uncomplicated, then there’s no reason at all for you to be here. Is there? Because interfering in an ex-lover’s wedding is, I think you’ll find, the very definition ofmessy.”
Crete straightened from the bookshelf, but slowly. He did not take his eyes off Timoney, who was still sitting there looking innocent and unruffled as if she hadn’t set a trap and walked him right into it.
He really should have been impressed. Instead of...tense.
“I am as possessive of my money as I am about my women,” he growled at her. “If that is what you mean.”
“We both knowthatis not true.” She tilted her head to one side, her eyes bright. Very, very bright. “One thing I think the whole world knows about you and your many women is that you are the very opposite of possessive. Or so a great many of them have complained. In the tabloids. Repeatedly.”
“You did not.”
