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Her gaze trailed the jagged line of the scar, and she recognised the tattoo on his arm as the emblem of the French Foreign Legion. Had the awful things he’d seen been the horrors of war? Of course. They must have been. Soldiers who served in conflict zones witnessed first-hand the worst of mankind’s atrocities.
‘Why did you join the Legion?’
She grimaced as soon as the words were out of her mouth. She hadn’t meant to speak them aloud. She opened her mouth to retract the question—but he spoke first.
‘Because I was eighteen and full of testosterone and didn’t know what else to do with my life.’
Nico kept his eyes closed as he spoke. He’d surprised himself by answering her question. Normally he shut down conversations that ventured too far into personal territory, but right then he figured talking was the lesser of two evils. The greater evil—the dark, sexual desire prowling through him—couldn’t be unleashed. Not on Marietta.
He realised that now.
Belatedly.
Hell. What had he been thinking? She wasn’t one of the easy, vacuous, forgettable women with whom he occasionally hooked up for the sole purpose of satisfying his physical needs. She was Marietta, his friend’s sister—a woman he respected. A woman who was unforgettable.
He had told himself she was no ingénue, and she wasn’t. No innocent would have goaded him last night without understanding where such provocation could lead. What she was inviting. And yet as they’d sat there on the sand, sharing food and idle small talk—the kind of simple pleasure his late wife would have loved—he’d looked at Marietta and thought about the incident at the bistro, her concern for the young couple. And he’d realised that after everything this woman had been through, she was still pure. She still had compassion in her heart. Still cared about others.
How could he touch her and not taint her with his darkness? He had nothing to give her. Nothing to offer beyond the pleasures of the flesh.
‘Did your parents not object?’
He slid his right hand under the back of his head and continued to keep his eyes closed. She’d taken her tee shirt off after they’d eaten, and seeing her in that yellow bikini top only inflamed his libido.
‘I didn’t have parents,’ he said.
‘Oh... I... I’m sorry, Nico.’ She fell silent a moment. ‘Did you lose them when you were young?’
‘My mother died of a stroke when I was six,’ he said, surprising himself yet again. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d spoken of his childhood. Couldn’t remember the last time someone had shown an interest, aside from Julia. ‘She was a solo parent—I never knew my father.’
He heard Marietta shift, felt the weight of her gaze on him.
‘Did you live with relatives after your mother passed away?’
‘My mother didn’t have any relatives. I became a ward of the state and spent the remainder of my childhood in children’s homes and foster care.’
‘Oh, Nico... That must have been difficult.’
It hadn’t been a walk in the park. His mother had been a good woman, a loving maman, and he’d missed her. But he’d survived. Years of being shuffled around in an indifferent welfare system had thickened his skin.
‘Don’t go all sympathetic on me, Marietta. Every second person out there has had a difficult childhood.’ He opened his eyes, turned his head to look at her. ‘I understand you and Leo lost your mother young—and your father a few years later?’
‘Si. And I missed my mother desperately—which is probably why I acted out as a teenager. But Leo and I had each other. You...’ Her voice grew husky. ‘You had no one.’
And he hadn’t needed anyone. Certainly hadn’t wanted to get close to anyone. Why bother? he’d thought as a boy. Why attach yourself to someone just so they could leave you or die.
It was a pity he hadn’t remembered that lesson before he’d married Julia. Instead he’d let life teach it to him all over again—only much more brutally the second time around.
He shrugged, looked up at the awning shielding them from the sun. ‘There are worse things in life than being alone.’
‘Like going to war?’ She touched him then, trailing the tip of one finger over his scar. ‘Did you get this when you were in the Legion?’
He sat up, forcing her hand to fall away. ‘Oui.’
‘How?’
Mon Dieu. Did her curiosity know no limits?
‘It’s a shrapnel wound,’ he told her, because maybe if he shared something ugly with her she’d see the damaged man he was and realise she didn’t want him. Not the way she thought she did.
