AllFreeNovel
Share Us
It honestly had not. Not once.
“You don’t understand,” she told him, struggling to keep her upset out of her voice. Because she had thought a lot about this on the long flight over. About what it had been like then, barely twenty-one, back home in California. How could she explain to him what it had been like to go from a small farming town to college in San Francisco? Much less three tumultuous months in a place that had never seemed real, even as she’d walked the streets of Cambridge with her own two feet. And then to have to go back to a San Francisco that had seemed dull and dim in the aftermath of loving him. All thatbeforethat fateful doctor’s appointment where she’d finally faced the truth her body had been shouting at her for months. “To me, those weeks with you were like a fairy tale. The further away I got from them, the more it seemed as if I’d dreamed the whole thing. I had to worry about diapers, notprinces. And I didn’t know how to bridge that gap.”
She blew out a breath when he only stared at her with that same dark affront. “After a while, I stopped worrying abouthowI got pregnant because I was having the baby. And I had to figure out how to keep him alive. How to make money and keep a roof over his head. I was lucky enough that my aunt stepped in and helped out. Over the years, we’ve made it work. We’ve made a happy little family.”
Again, there was nothing but that stare, as if he could not believe shedaredsay these things. Or that she had dared have a whole life out there without notifying him. Madelyn held out her hands, not sure if she was beseeching him or holding him off. “It’s not that Idecidednot to tell you, Paris Apollo. I...didn’t think of you at all.” He stared at her, and she felt her temper ignite.Finally,something in her whispered. “Why would I imagine you’d care?You don’t even remember me!”
But if she thought that would shame him, she was to be dearly disappointed. He only stared back at her as if his own inability to recognize a woman he had once explored so thoroughly that she had written in her diary that he must have tasted every last inch of her body washerfault.
Like everything else.
“How extraordinary,” he said, harsh and dark, in a way that was laughably out of place for the man she’d met long ago but seemed somehow suited to the man he was here. Surrounded by stone and dressed entirely in black, grim and imposing in every respect. “You expect that I should believe that you have been scrabbling about in the wilds of America, struggling to put a roof over your head, yet...never thought about the fact that I have more roofs than I know what to do with. Is that a pathology, Madelyn? Or merely an attempt to get yours back?”
“Troy is a healthy, happy little boy,” Madelyn retorted tightly. “I notice you didn’t ask. You couldn’t make it clearer that I made the right decision.”
Paris Apollo’s turquoise gaze seemed to ignite, then go unreadable.
She thought he might pour himself another drink, but he did not. He studied her for a long moment, and then he turned away again, leveling that gaze on the view outside the narrow windows.
What little view there was on a late afternoon tipping over into evening like this one, with a storm settling in.
And somehow his silence made her feel more ashamed than if he’d continued to question her.
She forced her hands open but then didn’t know what to do with them, so she clasped them together before her. And inside her head, she found herself running through excuses...when, if she was blameless, she shouldn’t need any.
Was he right? Had it truly never occurred to her to tell him simply because their stations were so far apart, as she’d believed? Or had she been an angry, vengeful woman scorned all along?
How could she not know for certain?
Madelyn hated that after all this time, after living her life far away from him and coming to enjoy it on its own merits, it took only this little stretch of time with him before she couldn’t tell.
“You said we met at Cambridge.” He kept his attention trained out the windows. “I met a great many women at Cambridge.”
That spiraling sensation of shame disappeared, swallowed up in a bright, hot surge of temper. And the memory of Annabel’s smirking English-rose face. “Believe me, I am aware.”
“Am I to assume you were a student there?”
“I was there for a semester,” she said, ignoring that insinuation she was sure she could hear in his voice. That she might not have been a student at lofty Cambridge like him, given hercheap shoesand generalcommonness. That she was so below him and his ilk that she must have had some other reason for being there—perhaps in some lowly service job like the one she had now. Thoughts she’d had herself while she was there, even before she’d met him, but it was different to imaginehimthinking them, too. It made her stomach hurt. “It was an exchange program.”
“You said it was an affair, did you not? Therefore not a single night. Is that so?”
“It was several weeks,” she told him stiffly. “And, apparently, wholly unmemorable. Thank you for continuing to dwell on something so unpleasant and embarrassing.”
“What I am trying to discern,” Paris Apollo bit out, quietly but furiously, “is whether or not you knew who I was. By which I mean, Crown Prince Paris Apollo, the heir apparent to the Ilonian throne.”
“Everyone knows who you are. Everyoneknewwho you were.”
“So, truly, you have no excuse for failing to tell me.” His back was so rigid, as if he’d grown even taller than his six feet and at least three inches while they talked. “Any father should be told he has child, but surely it should have dawned upon you that a man with an inevitable throne in his future has more than a mere passing interest in any potential heirs.”
“No,” Madelyn said, with great precision that she hoped masked the great mess within her. “While out of my mind from the lack of sleep, the fact that my parents disowned me, and no idea how I was going to feed my baby, I did not stop and think about the royal line of succession in the country that—and I don’t mean this is an insult—is very rarely mentioned where I come from. Your exploits are one thing. Everyone likes a scandalous rich man, forever behaving atrociously. But the details of who gets to take a throne and when? Not so much.”
Paris Apollo only nodded at that, but not as if he was agreeing. More as if he was simply...taking it on board. Building a picture. No doubt to condemn her even more, she could only imagine.
“Where is the child now?”
She scowled at his back. “At home. Where he belongs. With my aunt, who’s been helping me care for him since he was tiny. I think I told you that already.”
“And where is home? Exactly?”
