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She shook her head vigorously, defiance edging her words as she insisted, ‘Love is essential but I don’t think you can ever be complacent about it. It needs careful nurturing, and it won’t survive if you lose all the other things along the way.’
As the silence stretched she began to feel embarrassed for sounding off like that, for giving such an intense response to a casual question. He was probably wondering how to change the subject.
‘When Roman and I were kids we both vowed that we’d never get married or have kids of our own. I think the kid part scared Roman more than me because he was always afraid that he had more of our father in him and he always said why take the risk passing on tainted genes?’
A little sound of horror that escaped her lips brought his eyes to her face. He sketched a quick smile that left his dark eyes sombre as their gazes met and despite the matter-of-fact delivery she could feel the pain behind his words, the memories that had influenced his young life and still did.
‘So I never thought that Roman would really want to know...’
‘You thought you were protecting him,’ she breathed softly.
He shook his head. ‘Did I? I really don’t know but back then I had no idea, not the faintest concept of what having a child feels like. But now I do and I’ve deprived him of the opportunity of having the same joy.’
The simple sincerity in his words made her eyes fill with tears.
‘Roman always said marriage was a prison and I agreed with him. I should have realised when Marisa said he’d proposed to her that he’d already moved on, had managed to escape the past even if I hadn’t.’ The self-contempt in his voice was corrosive.
‘But my mother’s marriagewasa prison.’
She covered his hand that lay on the table with her own. ‘I think your mother is a very strong person to come through it as happy as she obviously is.’
Rio looked from the small hand on his to her face, and the muscles along his jawline quivered. ‘She is, but she still won’t go back to the house, our estate, even though he’s dead.’
Sympathy softened Gwen’s blue eyes. Jo had given herself and her sons a new life but it had taken courage. She found herself wondering what her life would have been like if her mother had refused to tolerate her father’s infidelities and left him years ago.
Perhaps none of us ever escaped our past, she mused. Certainly these revelations about his childhood explained so much about Rio, especially his avoidance of committed relationships. A deep sadness rose up in her for him and his brother, and an anger and disgust for the parent who had scarred them this way.
‘How old were you?’
‘When they split, twelve, when he died we were twenty. The years in between, or at least until we were eighteen, we had to spend alternate holidays with him. He used to try and get information out of us about Mum, who was she seeing, that sort of thing, and the things he said about her...’
Gwen just nodded and didn’t tell him she already knew about that from Jo. She was touched by the fact he was confiding in her and trying desperately hard not to read too much into it.
‘He wasn’t just toxically jealous—he was coercive and controlling.’ The look of revulsion that crossed his face made her heart twist in her chest with a painful pulse of empathy.
It seemed to her that although their mother had escaped from him, the twins hadn’t. What a terrible thing to use your own children as weapons, though sadly she knew that it was not as rare as it should be.
‘It was a relief.’
She realised he was looking at her as though he expected her condemnation.
‘It was a relief when he died,’ he expanded.
‘Of course it was.’ It seemed to her that guilt was Rio’s factory setting. ‘So when he died you were finally free?’
He hesitated, the direct question resurrecting his hauteur that Gwen recognised now as a defence mechanism to keep people at arm’s length.
Their eyes met and the ice in Rio’s gaze warmed and vanished. There was something about her quiet interest, the total lack of prurience, that made him continue.
‘Free of him but not entirely. Over the years he had used our inheritance as a stick to beat us with, threatening to cut us off so often that we both assumed that he had. We both made our own plans. Roman was in his second year at Oxford, I’d taken the year out and was working on an outback station in the Northern Territory.’
Gwen blinked. ‘I can just see you on horseback.’
He smiled, but it faded almost instantly. ‘Then we found out he’d left us it all anyway, the family estate and the money and also the private equity firm that he had founded. He was a bastard, but a bastard who knew how to make money. So in a way he found a way to control us after all—we had to learn fast.’ He stopped mid-sentence, an arrested, self-conscious expression freezing his features into a shocked frown.
Where had his initial reluctance to explain the skewed dynamic of his definitional family background to her gone? He’d had to fight, to begin with, against the habit of a lifetime to reveal the facts he felt circumstances decreed she should know.
Now here he was, acting as though he were in a therapy session giving her an unrequested tour of his murky childhood and psychological flaws. ‘Sorry, this is not really relevant—you must be a sympathetic listener.’ She was certainly a non-judgemental one, which was a lot more than he deserved.
