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If he thought about it, he could still remember the constant sensation of fear. Of looking over his shoulder. Of being told never to give anything away to any stranger he might meet. He had quickly learnt how to appear impenetrable to those he met.
And hadn’t the surveillance and masquerade skills he’d acquired stood him in good stead for his future career? He had discovered that the world of advertising was the world of illusion. That what you saw was never quite what you got. The masks he had perfected to keep his identity hidden had been invaluable in his role as a powerful executive. They were what had provided him with his chameleon-like reputation. As careers went, his background had been a perfect fit.
‘My mother took what jobs she could,’ he said. ‘But it was difficult to juggle poorly paid work around childcare and I pretty much brought myself up. I soon learnt to look after myself. To rewire dodgy electrics and to shop for cheap food when the supermarkets were about to close.’
Leila blinked in surprise, because the image he painted was about as far away from the sophisticated billionaire she’d married as it was possible to imagine. But she still thought there was something he wasn’t telling her. Some dark secret which was lurking just out of sight. I need to know this for my baby, she thought fiercely. For our baby.
‘And?’
His mouth hardened. She saw the flash of something bleak in the depths of his eyes before it was gone again.
‘I used to feel indignant that my father had never bothered to look us up. I wondered why he didn’t seem to care how his son was doing—or why he’d never once offered to help out financially. It became something of an obsession with me. I used to ask my mother what he was like, but she never wanted to talk about him. And the more she refused to tell me, the more frustrating I found it.’
His words tailed off, and for a moment he said nothing. Leila held her breath but didn’t speak, not wanting to break his concentration.
‘As I grew older, I became more determined to find out something about him,’ he continued. ‘I didn’t necessarily want to be with him—I just wanted to know.’
‘Of course you did,’ she said.
Their eyes met, and Gabe suddenly got a painful flash of insight. Maybe he’d wanted to know for exactly the same reasons that Leila wanted to know about him. Maybe everybody had a fundamental desire to learn about their roots. Or the roots of the child they carried...
‘But my mother was scared,’ he said. ‘I can see that now. She was scared that I would run to a man she feared. That I would choose him over her.’ He gave a bitter laugh. ‘Of course, I only discovered this afterwards.’
‘Afterwards?’ she echoed as some grim ending glinted as darkly as thick blotting paper held over the beam of a flashlight.
He nodded, and the way he swallowed made Leila think of barbed wire; of something jagged and sharp lodging in his throat and making his words sound painful and distorted.
‘It was the eve of my sixteenth birthday,’ he said. ‘We were living in this tiny hole of place. It was small and dark and I started wondering what kind of life my father had. Whether he was wealthy. Or whether he was reduced to eating food which was past its sell-by date and shivering like us, because it was the coldest spring in nearly thirty years. So I asked my mother the same question I’d been asking ever since I could remember. Did she have any idea where he was or what he did? And as always, she told me no.’
‘And you believed her?’ questioned Leila tentatively.
He shrugged. ‘I didn’t know what to believe, but I was on the brink of adulthood and I couldn’t tolerate being fobbed off with evasive answers any more. I told her that the best birthday present she could give me would be to tell me the truth. That either she provided me with some simple facts about my parentage—or I would go and seek my father out myself. And that she should be under no illusion that I would find him. I was probably harsher than I should have been, but I had the arrogance of youth and the certainty that what I was doing was right.’
There was complete silence, and Leila’s heart pounded painfully as she looked at him, for she had never seen an expression on a man’s face like that before. Not even when her brother had returned from that terrible battle with insurgents in Port D’Leo and his two most senior commanders had been slain in front of him. There was a helplessness and a hopelessness glinting in Gabe’s eyes which was almost unbearable to observe.
‘She said she would tell me the next day, on my birthday. But...’
