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His eyes locked with hers, his face taut and pale against the shadow of his stubble. ‘Why? Because we’re having sex?’
‘Actually, yes.’ Now she was angry. ‘I don’t just sleep with anyone, Gabriel.’Make that nobody in the last six years.‘I’m sleeping with you because I like you and I care about you, even when we’re not having sex. I thought you felt the same way. Clearly I was wrong.’
‘Clearly.’
There was a brittle, crushing silence.
She stared at him, hurt, angry, disbelieving, her mind jolting against the shock of his words. ‘Why are you being like this? What is wrong with you?’
He spun away and walked towards the window. She stared after him, still angry, but something in the set of his shoulders made it impossible for her to just walk away. There was an ache in her chest, and she pressed her hand against it. Seconds earlier she had told him she cared, and if that was true then she couldn’t walk away. His anger was defensive. She knew that. He was pushing her away to protect himself. Only from what?
She stared at his back, feeling his anger like an uncut diamond scraping over her skin, and at the same time she realised that there was something else—something bigger than his anger. Something like fear, only not fear. It was a gap in him...a hollow that she badly wanted to fill so that he could be whole.
‘You are ready, Gabriel.’
He was shocked. Not at her words, which he couldn’t hear above the pounding of his heart, but at her not leaving. He had wanted her to leave—needed her to leave. So that he could go back to blaming her, hating her. And she should hatehim; he was being cold and cruel. But she was still here, and that was intolerable. Or it should be intolerable. Only it wasn’t. It was a relief.
‘You are ready,’ she said again, and now he heard her.
But he wasn’t.
Blood roaring in his ears, Gabriel stared out at the huge dark peak. He could have stalked over to the other window, that overlooked the sea, but for some reason he was drawn to the mountain. Maybe because, like him, it was the legacy of something intense and unplanned.
Unlike him, it didn’t have to think about what that meant...
The idea of meeting Fenella pressed against a bruise inside him that had never healed.
He could feel Dove’s gaze on his back and he wanted to tell her that she was right. Hehadbeen rude, not blunt, and deliberately so. Because she was there, and he was feeling small enough to need to lash out at someone. Only then he would have to explain why he’d needed to lash out, and that would be a slippery slope.
He had kept so much hidden for so long for a reason.
Keeping his gaze fixed on the mountain, he shrugged as if his heart was beating normally. ‘It’s complicated,’ he said.
For a moment she didn’t respond, and then she took a step towards him, then another ‘So simplify it,’ she said. ‘If you had to sum up the problem with Fenella in three words, what would you say?’
He turned, opening his mouth to tell her another lie, but then he saw her face. Sunlight was illuminating her features and he could see that she was worried.About him.And it was the simplicity of that fact that stunned him into speaking, into telling her the truth.
‘She’s my mother.’
CHAPTER EIGHT
ITWASTHEfirst time he had said those words out loud, and he half expected the world to fall away beneath his feet and that he would slide into the crack. But Dove’s grey eyes steadied him.
‘My birth mother,’ he added, in case she hadn’t understood.
But of course she had.
Only she didn’t know everything.
She probably thought he was upset at having been given up for adoption. She didn’t know that his mother had turned away from him twice.
‘I didn’t know you were adopted.’
‘It never came up.’Obviously.
It had been up to him to share that particular truth, but telling someone when you first met would be weird, and if you didn’t say anything then it got harder and harder to think of a way to just drop it into the conversation. And anyway it had felt disloyal to Luis and Laura, who were his parents in every way that it was possible to be a parent.
‘When did you find out?’ she asked.
