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‘Your grandmother, I believe.’
Kat, her eyes wide, glanced at him and then back at the portrait in the heavy gold frame. It was positioned on the far wall lit by several spotlights. She took a step closer to study the woman, one she had never met or even knew existed.
This woman was her grandmother.
The roots she had been longing for all her life, Kat realised, were here. But did she belong? This was all so alien.
‘My grandmother?’
The woman in the painting was wearing a classic shift dress that would have looked fashionable today, the knee-high boots elongated her legs and her dark hair was dressed in a slightly bouffant updo. With her dark eyes outlined by kohl, her rosebud lips pale and her lashes spiky and long, it was an iconic sixties look.
‘She looks like Mum...’ The face that she thought she remembered floated into her head. ‘I think?’
Zach could not see her face, just hear the almost quiver in her voice, but it was the set of her narrow shoulders and the emotions he could feel literally radiating from her that made something twist hard in his chest. Something he refused to recognise as tenderness. An equally unfamiliar impulse to offer comfort made him move forward.
He had been so focused on the solitary figure staring up at the painting that he didn’t realise he wasn’t the only one affected by the poignant image she made, until the housekeeper wrapped her plump arm around the younger woman’s slender shoulders. The touch was brief but enough to draw a smile of warm gratitude from Kat as the older woman moved away.
Spontaneous expressions of support and comfort were not really in Zach’s comfort zone. Far better, he decided, watching the moment, to leave it to those with more experience with touchy-feely stuff. Despite his ineligibility he found the feeling that he’d been cheated out of the feel of her warm skin lingering, digging deep enough to make him ache. Everything between them seemed to come back to one thing: this desire that never quite went away and flared in an unpredictable way. Problematic but not anything he couldn’t deal with—he had never allowed his appetites to rule him.
The housekeeper studied the portrait. ‘She did, more so as she grew up.’
Kat sent her another look of teary gratitude. ‘I don’t have any photos, just what I remember, and I’m not sure how much of that is real,’ she admitted.
Listening, Zach found himself wanting to tell her she was lucky; he wished his own memories of his childhood were open to misinterpretation, but his were all unpleasantly real.
‘This way.’
‘I’ll show her the way,’ he heard himself say.
‘Really?’Selene shook her head and recovered her poise. ‘Of course.’
‘This is a lot for you to take in.’
Kat nodded. ‘Pretty overwhelming. Until now I hadn’t thought of my mother being here, not really.’ She stopped as her throat closed over, not conscious that Zach had slowed to keep pace with her. ‘Do you remember your mother?’
Midway up the sweeping staircase, he stopped. Puzzled by his rigid posture, so did Kat.
‘Yes,’ he said finally, and began to walk again.
‘I wish I remembered more.’
He stopped again, this time at the top of the staircase, and looked down at her, his expression sombre.
‘Be careful what you wish for.’
He remembered;he remembered a once beautiful woman worn down by single parenthood and the two or three jobs she’d needed to pay the rent on their apartment and keep him in clothes. She had always been tired, and Zach remembered promising her that one day she would not have to work. He would have a job that meant she could rest; rest had seemed like the ultimate luxury.
He never got the chance; he was ten when she died. For years he’d assumed it had been the exhaustion that had taken her life, a life that had been a constant, unrelenting grind. Only later he’d learnt by accident when he’d found her death certificate that she had succumbed to pneumonia. In her weakened condition she hadn’t been able to fight the infection that had ravaged her body or afford the medicine that might have saved her.
Unable to explain even to herself this need in her to know more about him, more about the man who wore power so comfortably, she tentatively pushed. ‘After your mother died you went to live with your grandmother, and—?’
‘Dimitri, my uncle.’
The bleakness in his voice was reflected in his face as he continued to speak. She had the impression that he had almost forgotten she was there as he continued.
‘If she could love anyone, she loved him, in her way, though of course that love came a poor second to the bottom of a vodka bottle.’
‘She didn’t love you?’ The question slipped out. She knew it was one she had no right to ask but anger pushed it through her caution.
