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“I did not,” she agreed.
And he did not care for the solemn way she looked at him then.
Crete wanted to go to her. He wanted to show her exactly how possessive he was ofthiswoman, anyway. But there was something in the cool, steady way she was regarding him that told him she expected him to do just that.
And he intensely disliked the idea that he was in any way predictable. Especially to her.
He moved away from the well-loved books toward the selection of colorful pots arranged over a thickly tiled table set before one of the great windows. The pots were all empty and the window was cold enough that he could feel it from several feet away, as if the winter was pressed against the glass. And he could not have said why it was that the sight of so many pots, empty of their supposed herbs and occasional plucky blooms, made him ache.
Crete would have claimed, before tonight, that he was incapable ofaching.
“Why don’t you tell me my story, then,” he said, his voice as dark as the thick Christmas Eve outside. Because he could see her reflection in the glass before him, and the ache in him only grew. “You know it better than I do, apparently. But I must warn you, Timoney. When you’re finished, I might just return the favor.”
“I think you’re lonely,” she said, and for all her voice was soft, the words still stung. “I think your father’s wife made certain you were never comfortable in her home. She made sure you were always made to feel different. Always her charity case. Always expected to be grateful for the crumbs of her affection.”
“You are mistaken.” His gaze was on the collection of empty pots before him. A blue one in particular, with leftover dirt clinging to the clay. And he reminded himself that he was relaying facts, that was all. Only the facts. “There were no such crumbs. There was no affection.”
“She strikes me as a deeply bitter woman who kept you so she might better punish her straying husband. And it’s striking to me that you never speak of him. The man who abandoned your mother, did not claim you until he had no other option, and was happy enough to see the back of you when his wife determined that she had done enough of her duty.”
“He is a weak man, yes.” He ran a finger over the raised edge of the pot’s wide mouth. Once. Again. He did not think of his tall, blond, disinterested father. Because what point was there in it? “But surely that goes without saying. Look at what he did.”
“But how does itfeel, Crete?” Timoney asked in the same devastatingly quiet way. “You’re a grown man now. You’ve gone to such trouble to make your way in the world. And I know it’s a story you tell, but how does it feel? How did it feel when you were just a kid and treated differently than your half siblings?”
He turned toward her then, incredulous. “What does it matter how it felt? Feelings don’t change anything.”
They had never changed anything. Not his cold childhood, always given less than his brother and sister. Not nothing, but less. So that no one could ever forget that he was not the same as them.
Their father had never intervened. He had never spoken to Crete at all, if he could help it. And whatever his wife did or said, he supported it.
Crete had felt a great deal about all of that, at the time. And those feelings had done nothing but make his misery the worse.
It was when he’d ignored what he felt and concentrated on what he coulddothat everything had changed. Not his situation. Not his tormentors. But his reactions to them.
Change yourself and you change the world, he liked to tell himself.
He was living proof.
“Feeling is who we are,” Timoney was saying, her voice...intense.
“I prefer facts.”
“All facts tell us is what happened,” she retorted. “Not what it was like.”
“I do not wish to remember what it was like.” And the words seemed to come from somewhere inside him he would have sworn wasn’t there. Because he’d torn it out a lifetime ago and filled it with other, better things, like the infinite pleasures of the flesh. Still, he kept his distance from Timoney, with her elfin face and too much wisdom in her eyes like the sea. “Why would I want to remember such things? I already lived through it once.”
She only waited, and he didn’t understand what was happening. The woman he’d taken as his mistress had given him her innocence, and everything after that had been an exercise in yielding. The softness and sweetness of it, all her smiles and surrenders.
Had she always been this way underneath? How had he failed to notice it before now?
Crete wanted to go. Now. If he was king of anything, it was a well-timed retreat before coming back harder. Stronger.
He had the strangest sensation that he was out of his depth here, with her—
But he refused to indulge such nonsense.
He refused to indulge any of this nonsense.
“It is as you say,” he told her, his voice rougher than before. “My father’s wife used me to bludgeon him. An effective weapon, I think, as there is no evidence he ever strayed again. Meanwhile, my mother’s grim legend of a father died when I was ten. And any notion I might have nurtured, that the other members of my mother’s family might take a softer approach to my existence, was quickly extinguished. For they blamed me as much for his death as for hers.”
