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‘That’s different.’
‘Is it?’
She bit her lip, hating the tension in his face. The coiled-up pain of his birth mother’s rejection was visible in the taut set of his shoulders and the bunching of muscles beneath his shirt. He could barely hold it in. But the acquisition would only be a temporary fix. A Band-Aid, she thought, her stomach knotting around the word.
But a sticking plaster was only for cuts and grazes. It couldn’t fix a mother’s rejection. Or a doomed marriage.
‘I know you’re angry, and hurt, and you have every right to be. Your mother was wrong to do what she did—but it was seven years ago. Things are different now.You’redifferent now. Maybe if you talk to her...say what you want to say—’
‘I tried that once before, remember?’
There was no softness to his beautiful face. He looked like an angel carved of stone...stern, unforgiving, locked in with his anger and misery for eternity.
‘And what? You can’t try again? Give her a second chance?’
‘I don’t do second chances.’ There was a hard edge to his voice.
She lifted her chin. ‘You gave me one.’
‘That’s different,’ he said again.
‘But it isn’t.’
Her heart was pounding fast, as if she was running, and she wished that she was. But there was nowhere left to run from the truth. His or hers.
‘I know it’s hard to let go, but believe me—whatever punishment you think you’re meting out to Fenella Ogilvy won’t be enough,’ she said flatly. ‘It wasn’t enough for my parents. You’ll just end up punishing yourself.’
Her ribs tightened as his blazing blue eyes lifted to hers.
‘I thought your parents loved one another,’ he said.
She felt suddenly fragile. That was what she had told him all those years ago, out of necessity and fear and shame. But after everything he had told her she couldn’t pretend any longer.
‘I lied to you. I didn’t mean to. I thought I could tell you the truth. But then you showed me that photo of your family at Christmas. You all looked so happy, and your dad was looking at your mum as if they were unconquerable—’
Her throat felt hot and heavy, and she knew that it was full of all the tears she had never cried. For him. For her parents. For herself.
‘Nobody I’ve ever known feels like that—certainly not my parents. Maybe they were in love right at the beginning, but then I think my mother realised that what my father really loved was her inheritance. When she found that out she punished him by keeping him short of money. So he punished her by having countless affairs with her friends.’
Gabriel was staring at her, his beautiful face blank of expression, but she knew how it sounded.
‘Where did you fit in?’ he asked.
‘Me?’
She knew her mouth had moved to curve into a smile, but her voice sounded raw and tight, as if it hurt to speak.
‘I was the Band-Aid baby. One last attempt to make things work. And it did for a bit. And then it didn’t.’
Her lips were aching now.
‘Sometimes they would be okay for a day or two, and then my dad would goad my mum and it would all kick off. My mother would go so far, but Oscar would always go further.Toofar. And I knew it was my fault. I knew they were only together because of me. So I’d try to head things off. That was my job. To find ways to defuse the tension and smooth things over.’
‘Problem-solving...’ he said slowly.
Remembering the conversation they’d had onThe Argentum, about why she had chosen corporate law, she nodded. It was why she lived her life as she had, coolly distant from intimacy and any kind of dependency.
Until Gabriel.
