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Madelyn felt a rush of reaction inside her then. It took her a breath or two to understand that it was that stubbornness of hers she knew all too well. And possibly a bit of panic, besides.
She didn’t want to tell him how old Troy was. She didn’t want him to know a single thing abouther son. She wanted to run, screaming, off this mountain and keep Troy to herself.
But she reminded herself—with some heat—that everything she did here this evening was about being as practical as she’d had to be these last years. Being realistic, no matter what.
And she needed to tread carefully because there was no way to tell how this was going to go, and it didn’t matter how she felt about it. It couldn’t matter.
Only Troy mattered.
Ever since she’d found out she was carrying him, he was all that mattered.
“Five,” she made herself say, in a voice as near to polite as she could manage, and it was a close thing. “He’s five years old.”
Paris Apollo picked up the glass that had been meant to be hers and tossed that back, too. Then set it back down, theclickof crystal against stone as loud as a gunshot. “I expected you to say two years. Or even one. That would make sense, Madelyn. Because I have been unreachable during that time. Before that, however, I believe I had the reputation as the most approachable royal in all of Europe.”
Madelyn could see those doors again, shut tight at the top of the stairs in that Cambridge house. She could see the pitying yet unmoving expressions on the faces of his guards. She could see Annabel’s noxious pity. “You have only ever been as approachable as you wish to be, Paris Apollo, which is not necessarily approachable at all. Whether you remember me or not, let’s not pretend otherwise.”
He stayed where he was, there on the other end of the room, but she didn’t mistake that for anything but what it was—a show of almost unimaginable restraint and, therefore, power. Because she could see the fury crackle all over him. She could taste it in her mouth again. She thought she could even see his muscles shake with the force of all he held inside.
As if she really had dealt him a terrible cruelty here, when that had never been her intention.
The part of her that felt badly for him was no good to her now, she lectured herself then. None of this was his fault, perhaps. But it wasn’t hers, either.
When he claimed he didn’t evenknow who she was.
“Setting aside the past two years, that leaves three since he was born.” He did the math out loud, an obvious challenge. Or a slap. Madelyn stood straighter. “I believe that makes three years and nine preceding months during which you chose not to tell me about this child. Or were you, by any chance, of late in a coma? Unable to use any or all of the time-honored ways of contacting another? A letter. A phone call. An email or text. A bit of skywriting, even. Failing all else, there is always an indiscreet tabloid article.”
Madelyn shook her head, astonished to find that she felt a little shaky. Maybe more than a little. “It...never occurred to me to try.”
She would have sworn to anyone who would listen that he could never look as dark as he did then, in the way he stared at her. As if she was a monster. “Explain yourself.”
Then again, she would also have sworn that he would always be too lazy, too indolent in all ways, to issue orders like that. So fierce and so like akingit made her whole body snap to attention, even as that same stubbornness reared its head again inside her.
But she fought it off. Because an explanation was owed to him, like it or not. Madelyn could accept that was true, however little she might like it.
“I was nothing to you.” She was distressed to find that was much harder to say out loud than it should have been, all these years later, and the fact he looked almost...surprised to see it made it worse. But she pushed on. “Our affair lasted only a very few weeks. I have no idea what you thought about it, or if you thought about it at all, but I only knew it had ended when your guards barred me from entering your room in Cambridge. When it was very clear that you were otherwise engaged inside.”
Words made it seem so...sanitized. A story anyone could tell and likely would, over drinks. The way people liked to do, sharingdating storiesas if they were badges of dubious honor and funnier the more they were told. Madelyn had heard these stories a thousand times. Her friends—back when she’d had time to spend time with them—had loved nothing more than telling tales like this to amuse each other.
But it had felt as if she was dying.
Something in her haddiedon that landing as surely as if one of the guards had struck her down. She had never been the same, even in those strange months she’d moved through her old life like a ghost, unaware that there was a new life inside of her.
As if the dawning of that hideous understanding of what she and Paris Apollo really were to each other—no matter how deeply she had loved him—really had killed her where she stood.
“So you mean to tell me that it was pettiness, nothing more.” His voice was a black ribbon of sound, and it hurt to hear. “The wounded feelings of a jilted lover. This, you felt, was sufficient reason to hide from me the existence of a son forfive years.”
Madelyn felt small and ashamed—but then, nothing she had ever felt about this man waspetty. Her hands curled into fists, but she made herself carry on.
“I didn’t know I was pregnant until I was in the third trimester,” she told him quietly, choosing every word with care. “Maybe I didn’t want to know.” Or maybe she had been little more than a zombie, shuffling through a life that felt like a coffin without him—but she wasn’t about to tell him that. That she’d felt ill and unlike herself, certainly, but then again, she’d been deeply depressed. “And once I knew, once I couldn’t pretend it was a long flu dragging on or some other ailment, I had other things to think about.”
“What else could there possibly be to think about?” he demanded, sounding outraged anew.
“Little things like becoming a single mother,” she shot back at him. “My parents wanted me to give up the child for adoption so I could finish college and go on with my life and pretend I was still the dutiful daughter they wanted me to be. When I refused, they washed their hands of me entirely. That meant I had to figure out where I was going to live. How I was going to survive. Oddly enough, those practical considerations consumed me a whole lot more than trying to hunt down a man who’d never really wanted me.”
For a moment she thought she heard him growl, all the way from across the room. She told herself that was her guilt talking.
But he looked as if he could happily chew glass all the same. “Did it escape your notice that I’m one of the wealthiest men alive? Did it never occur to you that a single phone call could have solved all your problems?”
