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Self-contempt thinned his lips as he recalled the pathetic chivalry that had made him fantasise about rescuing her from her abusive husband and becoming a father to her children.
Just as well he hadn’t. Fatherhood and him were not a good fit. He was too selfish. He was, in short, too like his own father. In Ezio’s mind, it was better never to have a child than see that child grow up and feel no connection.
His father—a fully paid-up member of the‘it didn’t do me any harm’school of parenting—had replicated his own father’s parenting style, which had not involved spontaneous displays of physical affection.Hehad started at the bottom, sweeping floors, and nobody had known that he was theboss’sson. He’d wanted to instil the same standards in his own son.
So Ezio had arrived straight from university, just an anonymous office junior. It had never occurred to him to question his anonymity or suspect his identity had been revealed to senior management.
He considered that he had been lucky in his first boss, a woman who’d put on a brave face for the world but had allowed him to see the vulnerability beneath, had let him see her tears.
Hard to believe that he had ever been that stupid, that he had wanted to protect her. The principle that had put a married woman off-limits—back then he had had a lot of principles—had lasted barely a week.
He’d been inlove. Before the self-contempt that always came with the memory could capture him, the sound of Matilda’s sobs dragged him back to the present. Now she was crying softly, making him think of a wounded animal.
‘S-sorry. I’ll be fine in a minute.’
Ezio looked down at her bent head and swore. She looked so fragile, she looked so broken... Something shifted inside him and he swore again.
Then, without knowing what he was about to do, he heard himself growl out, ‘Come here!’
Tilda lifted her head and looked from his face to his arms, extended towards her palms-up. With an inarticulate little cry, she took the two steps that landed her head on his chest. It didn’t at that moment matter who he was, she needed the human contact.
The cry caused something painful he didn’t recognise or enjoy to move in his chest as he looked down at the top of her glossy head, feeling her soft body shaking. Responding to some dormant instinct, his hands came up to her shoulders, even though he held himself rigid while her trembling body curved into his.
When she finally lifted her head, she looked embarrassed and backed away, her eyes anywhere but on him.
‘I’m sorry...so sorry,’ she sniffed. ‘I never cry...well, hardly ever. I must look...’
She made him think of a shivering puppy. ‘Sit down before you fall down,’ he said, his voice roughened with an impatience he didn’t attempt to disguise. What was the point? She could hardly think more badly of him than she evidently did.
It had never crossed his mind to wonder what any of the people he worked with thought of him, but knowing the thoughts that had been in his PA’s head had touched an unexpected exposed nerve.
Tilda’s legs folded as he urged her into a chair, not the designer one, but one of the soft leather swivels.
‘Please don’t be nice,’ she begged, then remembered who she was talking to and laughed, stopping abruptly when she realised that she sounded borderline hysterical. ‘I don’t want to start crying again,’ she explained.
‘Neither do I,’ he said.
His tone made her flush. ‘Sorry, I’ll be fine in a minute, it’s just... You don’t want to know this...’
He probably didn’t. She was so close to disintegration that he could see no harm letting her talk if it calmed her down.
‘It’s therapeutic, so I have heard, and don’t worry—I probably won’t listen.’
The flash of dry humour dragged a small, choked laugh from her aching throat.
He did listen as she began to speak—not to him, really, more to herself, slowly at first, and then as if some sort of dam had broken inside her as it all spilled out.
The story had a lot of unnecessary details, and a vast amount of pointless hair-shirt self-loathing. But, picking out the salient points, the condensed version, even allowing for sisterly exaggeration, seemed to suggest that her brother was some sort of genius who had got in with the wrong crowd...‘Wrong crowd’got mentioned a lot.
‘So everything that has happened to your brother is directly down to you?’ This simplistic view stood out strongly throughout the jumbled narrative.
‘Who else?’ she snapped.
‘Your brother is young but not a child. Don’t you think he should take some responsibility for his own actions?’
‘I knew you wouldn’t understand. I have no idea why I told you any of this.’ She shook her head. ‘Oh, forget it!’ she finished on a note of self-disgust as she got to her feet.
‘So your brother is a genius...?’
