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He hated this, too.
“I don’t know what she thinks about anything,” Madelyn said after a long moment, when the wind picked up and shot around the courtyard, slicing into him as if it was still winter. “She’s far too hard to read.”
“But...?”
“But.” She took a breath, then let it go. And somehow seemed to grow another inch or two as she stood there, gazing back at him. “Well. It’s about Troy.”
“Troy,” he repeated flatly. Disappointed that she was continuing to play games. “The myth? Should I view you as the personification of the Trojan horse? Is that why you came here—to sack my walls from within?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
She ran her tongue over her teeth, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to know what words she was holding back. He wasn’t sure it would do either one of them any good if he found he really could read her. How would that change the past? Or the future?
He should have let her leave.
“Troy is my son,” Madelyn said.
Paris Apollo blinked, not sure he was following this. Or why he felt a kind of unpleasant shift at the notion of the woman he had never forgotten the way he should, with her kind face and wary eyes, as the mother of some other man’s son. “Why should one of Ilonia’s most decorated ministers concern herself with an American mother? Or better still, deliver her to me?”
“It’s more the father of my son that concerns her, I expect.”
“And who might the lucky man be?” Paris Apollo asked, already bored with the topic—
But the look on Madelyn’s face was like a slap.
And, of course, there was no reason he could conceive of that Angelique Silvestri would bring a random mother to Paris Apollo’s attention even if he hadn’t been this far up Mount Crotho for two years.
No reason at all.
Save one.
“You?” he demanded, his voice a low growl. “Youare the mother of my son?”
CHAPTER THREE
THELASTTHINGMadelyn wanted to do was tell this man about Troy.
But stubborn as she might have been—and for good or ill, she knew too well that she was terribly stubborn, or she might have attempted to make peace with her parents in the years since Troy had been born instead of imagining various versions of a life-well-lived revenge—she hoped she wasn’t acompleteidiot. There was no way he wouldn’t find out everything there was about her son eventually. She was faintly surprised Angelique Silvestri hadn’t sent him a dossier already.
Maybe she did and this is a test,she thought then.
Yet even if it was, she’d reasoned that offering him the information of her own volition instead of waiting for it to be dragged out of her might give hersomeedge in this impossible situation.
She regretted the impulse immediately.
And she did not like the tone Paris Apollo took with her. She did not like it one bit.
“I can’t tell,” she replied, somehow managing to sound cool when everything inside her was at a fever pitch and rising higher by the second, “if you’re upset to discover that you have a child...or only that you have a child withme.”
Those unfathomable green eyes glittered. “Must I choose between the unacceptable and the impossible?”
He sounded...forbidding.
It made Madelyn entirely too aware, in a sudden rush, of the precariousness of her situation here. She wasn’t sure how it had escaped her before—except, perhaps, that she had been more focused on the fact that she had not expected she would ever see him again. That she had long ago come to terms with the fact he was a dream she’d had that was forever lost to her.
Or she thought she’d come to terms with it—right up until the moment she’d seen him again.
She hadn’t been prepared for that. She could still feel her reaction, skittering all over her skin like a terrible rash.
