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His words tailed off and Leila knew he didn’t want to tell her any more, but she needed to know. And he needed to say it. ‘But what?’
‘I think she meant to tell me,’ he said. ‘But I also think she was terrified of the repercussions. Afraid that she might lose me.’ His mouth twisted. ‘But when I got back from school the next day, she couldn’t tell me anything at all because she was dead.’
Leila’s heart lurched as she stared at him in alarm, not quite believing what he’d just said. ‘Dead?’
For a long moment, there was silence. ‘At first I thought she was just sleeping. I remember thinking that I’d never seen her looking quite so peaceful. And then I saw...I saw the empty pill bottle on the floor.’
Leila’s throat constricted as she struggled to say something, imagining the sight which must have greeted the young boy as he arrived home from school. She stared at him in utter disbelief. ‘She...killed herself?’
‘Yes,’ he said flatly.
Leila felt a terrible sadness wrap itself around her heart. She had wanted to understand more about Gabe Steel and now she did—but she had never imagined this bleak bitterness at the very heart of his life. She could hardly begin to imagine what it must have been like for him. So that was why he had locked it all away, out of sight. That was why he kept himself apart—why he deliberately put distance between himself and other people.
She was stunned by what he had told her. Yet out of his terrible secret came a sudden growing sense of understanding. No longer did it surprise her that he didn’t want to trust or depend on women—because hadn’t the most important woman in his life left him?
And lied to him.
‘Did you blame yourself?’ she asked quietly.
‘What do you think?’ he bit out, his icy facade now completely shattered.
She saw emotion breaking through—real, raw emotion—and it was so rare that instinctively she went to him and he didn’t push her away. He let her hold him. She wrapped her arms around him and hugged him tightly and she could feel his heart beating hard against her breast. Pressing her lips against his ear, she whispered, ‘You mustn’t blame yourself, Gabe.’
‘No?’ He pushed her away, like somebody who had learned never to trust words of comfort. ‘If I hadn’t been so persistent...if I hadn’t been so damned stubborn—then my mother wouldn’t have felt driven to commit such a desperate act. If I hadn’t been so determined to find out about my father, she need never have died. She could have lived a contented old age and been cushioned by the wealth I was to acquire, but which she never got to see.’
For a moment Leila didn’t answer, wondering if she dared even try. Because how could someone like her possibly empathise with Gabe’s rootless childhood and its tragic termination? How could she begin to understand the depths of grief he must have experienced when he was barely out of boyhood? That experience had formed him and, emotionally, it had warped him.
Up until that moment, Leila had often thought herself hard done by. Her parents’ marriage had been awful—everyone at court had known that. Her father had spent most of his time with his harem, while her mother had sat at home heartbroken—too distracted to focus on her only daughter. As if to compensate for that, Leila had been pampered and protected by her royal status but she had felt trapped by it too. She had been isolated and lost during a childhood almost as lonely as Gabe’s.
But his circumstances had been different. He had been left completely on his own. He had lived with his guilt for so long that it had become part of him. ‘Your mother must have been desperate to have taken such a drastic action,’ she said quietly.
His voice was sardonic. ‘I imagine she must have been.’
She stumbled on. ‘And she wouldn’t want you to carry on blaming yourself.’
‘If you say so, Leila.’
She swallowed, because one final piece of the jigsaw was missing. ‘And did you ever find your father? Did you track him down?’
There was a heartbeat of a pause before his mouth hardened. ‘No.’
‘Gabe—’
‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘That’s enough. No more questions, Leila. And no more platitudes either. Aren’t you satisfied now?’
His eyes were blazing, and she wondered if she’d gone too far. If she’d pushed him to a point where he was likely to break. She wondered if he was going to walk out. To put distance between them, so that when they came face to face again he could pretend that this conversation had never happened.
