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She breathed something. He thought it was his name.
“Do you wish me to tell you that it was a bitter childhood? Lonely years spiced up only by disdain and contempt?” He laughed, and jerked his chin to take in this room they stood in, still warm from the very different childhood she’d had. “Unlike you, I have nothing to compare it to. And those years made me who I am today, Timoney. How can I resent them?”
“But you do,” she said quietly, frowning at him. “Deeply, I think.”
“You’re mistaken.”
He didn’t mean to move. He didn’t know it when he did. All Crete knew was that one moment he’d been across the room and the next he stood above her, staring down at where she sat—looking as wildly innocent as the night he’d first touched her.
Maybe he should have known then that she would be a terrible problem.
“This is why I do not tell the real story of how it was,” he gritted down at her. At that lovely face of hers that had haunted him across two full months. And half a year before that. “This is what happens. Softhearted, emotional people like yourself imagine that they must infuse it all with pathos. With incurable grief. While for me, those years were an opportunity. A crucible, if you will. I survived them, I became me, and if anything, I am grateful to my father and his wife and even my bitter old grandfather, for making certain that I never, ever succumb to the petty emotions of the human heart.”
But as he watched too much emotion fill her blue gaze, then, nothing about it felt petty at all.
“And the only reason you could possibly be here is that you don’t like sharing your toys, is that what you’re trying to tell me?” Her voice was little more than a whisper, her sea-colored eyes luminous. “That’s not a very good reason, is it?”
He wanted to rage at her that she was no toy. That if she was a mere toy, he would have forgotten her as surely and as quickly as the rest.
“We’ll get to that in due time,” Crete promised her, grimly. But inside him, a different kind of storm brewed. Electric and more than a little mad. “But first, little one, let us speak of you.”
