AllFreeNovel
Share Us
‘It isn’t relevant,’ he said again.
‘It is,’ she argued. ‘We can’t just keep burying our heads in the sand and pretending this isn’t happening, because it is. We’re going to have a baby, Gabe. A baby which needs to be cared for. Not just cared for. Loved,’ she said, her voice faltering a little.
‘Don’t look to me for love, Leila,’ he said tonelessly. ‘I thought I’d made that clear from the beginning.’
‘Oh, you did. You made it very clear, and I wouldn’t dream of expecting you to love me,’ she said. ‘But surely our baby has the right to expect it. If you can’t show our baby love—and believe me when I tell you I’m not judging you if that’s the case—then don’t I at least have the right to know why?’
For a moment there was silence while Gabe looked at the set of her shoulders and the steady blue gaze which didn’t falter beneath his own deliberately forbidding stare. He knew what she wanted. What women always wanted. To find out why he didn’t show emotion or even feel it. It was something he’d come up against time and time again—and women were the most tenacious of creatures. Countless numbers had tried—and failed—to work him out. Powerful women, rich women, successful women—they all wanted the one thing which eluded them. They saw his cold heart as a challenge; his emotional isolation as something they wished to triumph over.
Yet Leila’s question had not been tinged with ambition—rather with the simple desire to understand. She was the mother of their baby and maybe what she said was true. Maybe she did have the right to know what had made him the person he was. But wasn’t he scared to let her close? Scared of what might happen if he did?
He surveyed her from between half-shuttered eyes. ‘What do you want me to tell you?’
Leila was so surprised at his sudden change of heart that it took a moment before she could speak, and all the time her head was telling her to go easy. Not to scare him off with a fierce interrogation.
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she said softly. ‘All the usual things. Like, where you were born. I don’t even know that.’
For a moment, there was silence. It reminded her of the moment before the start of a play, when the whole theatre was quiet and prepared for revelation. And then he began to speak.
‘I was born in the south of France. But we moved back to England when I was a baby—to a place called Brighton.’
‘Yes, Brighton. I’ve heard of it.’ Leila nodded and began reciting, as if she were reading from a geographical textbook. ‘It’s a seaside town on the south coast. Is it very beautiful—this Brighton?’
In spite of everything, Gabe gave a glimmer of a smile. At times she seemed so foreign and so naive but of course, in many ways, she was. Maybe she thought he came from a background like hers and telling her that he had been born on the French Riviera would only feed into that fantasy.
The truth, he reminded himself. She needed to know the truth.
‘Anywhere by the sea has the potential to be beautiful,’ he said. ‘But, like any town, there are rough parts—and those were the places we lived. Not that we stayed anywhere very long.’
‘We?’
‘My mother and me.’
‘Your father wasn’t around?’
Gabe could taste the sudden bitterness in his mouth. He wanted to stop this unwanted interrogation right now, but he realised that these questions were never going to go away unless he answered them.
And wasn’t it time he told someone?
‘No, my father wasn’t around,’ he said. ‘He and my mother split up before I was born. Things ended badly and she brought me back to England, but she had no family of her own and no money. When she met my father, she’d been working as a waitress—and that was all she was qualified to do.’
‘So, was your father French?’ questioned Leila, thinking that he didn’t look French.
He shook his head. ‘No. He was Russian.’
Slowly, she nodded, because that made sense. Much more sense. The high, chiselled cheekbones, which made his face look so autocratic and proud. The icy grey eyes. The hair, which looked like dark, molten gold. ‘So what kind of childhood did you have?’ she asked quietly.
He shrugged, as if it didn’t matter. ‘It was largely characterised by subterfuge. My mother was always afraid that my father would try to find me and so we were always on the move. Always living just below the radar. Our life was spent running. And hiding.’
