Unthinking, his feet had turned in the direction of the chateau, had led him down hallways and up staircases that led to the room he knew his great-aunt had put Skye in. The entire time, the small object in his pocket had found its way into his palm, then onto the tip of his finger. He pulled his hand from his pocket now to knock on the door, inexplicably desperate to see her, unbelievably hopeful that somehow she’d soothe the raging beast within him.
When he heard no answer Benoit turned the handle and opened the door, but his mind couldn’t quite work out what he was seeing. Skye’s travel case was on the bed but, rather than her taking clothes out of it, she seemed to be in the middle of putting them back in. The rage he’d only just managed to suppress built within him.
‘What are you doing?’
Skye looked up, shocked to see him standing in the doorway, filling it completely. She wanted to curse, to scream and cry out. She hadn’t wanted him to catch her running away. She hadn’t even wanted to run away. Not really. She had given him her word and that meant something to her. But her sisters came first. They always did and they always would.
The moment she’d got to the room, excitement coursing through her veins at finally having found the map, she couldn’t wait to speak to her sisters. It was as if she’d jumped from the top of the waterfall all over again. She’d called them instantly and Summer had been just as excited, squealing in delight.
But when Skye had asked about Star, Summer had gone very quiet...
‘It’s not what you think. I came back to my room and called my sisters and... I can’t stay,’ she said. ‘I have to go. Star has run off to some desert kingdom in the Middle East, chasing down the key to the room where the jewels are hidden, and she’s just not equipped to handle that. She’s too innocent, naïve. I can’t let her...’ There were no words left. She couldn’t put them up fast enough as a barrier between herself and the man staring at her with an intensity and emotion she didn’t want to name. ‘It’s only for a few days.’
‘Really? A few days? Come on, Skye,’ he said as if he really wondered whether she was lying to herself as much as him. Perhaps she was. ‘Once you’re there you’ll find a way to convince yourself that your sisters need your help, that they’re unable to do what needs to be done. Because for some reason you don’t think that they’re capable of coping without you. You’re going to rush back to England so that you can...what? Fly off to the Middle East instead of Star? Arrange for the sale of the house instead of Summer?’
Every single one of his words hurt, sliced into the thin excuses she had drawn about herself like a cloak.
‘No! I just need to find out what’s going on. And then I’ll come back,’ she said, her voice weak to her own ears.
‘We both know that’s a lie.’
He let the accusation stand between them and finally she tossed the shirt she had gripped and scrunched in her hands into the travel case.
‘Were you even going to say goodbye?’ he demanded.
‘Of course I was,’ Skye replied, barely managing to choke past the lie that fell so easily from her lips.
‘There’s no of course about it. My mother didn’t.’
CHAPTER TEN
THERE WAS AN awful matter-of-factness about his tone that pulled Skye up short.
‘Benoit—’
‘I saw her that night,’ he said, staring at some distant point in time just over her shoulder. ‘I was eight when she left. I’d gone to her room because there had been a horrible storm and I’d woken up from a nightmare. I just didn’t realise that I’d gone from one to another.’
Skye’s heart lurched in her chest. She knew that there was only one way this story ended but she wasn’t sure that she was ready to hear it. But Benoit pressed on.
‘Usually her door was locked, which was why I was so surprised, why I entered the room.’ Benoit shook his head against the memory, as if wondering at his own actions that night.
‘Just like I came into this room just now,’ he scoffed angrily. ‘She looked almost exactly as you did. A half-packed suitcase on the bed, something in her hands and a guilty-as-sin look on her face.’ He couldn’t stem the tide of acidic bitterness.
‘I knew, even as I asked my mother the question, I knew. That she was leaving my father, leaving us. I begged her, begged to take me with her. Pleaded and cried like the little child I was. And do you know what the worst thing was? In that moment I would have left Xander behind. I would have abandoned my brother,’ Benoit spat, hating the memories of that night, how cowardly he had been, how desperately he had begged his mother to take him with her, to love him enough to want to.
‘I told her that I hated my father, and that I just wanted to be with her. That I didn’t care about Xander. But she kept shaking her head. Kept saying that it was something she had to do. That she couldn’t take me with her. And then she made me promise not to tell anyone that I’d seen her. Not to say a word to anyone—my father, Xander or Anaïs. Not to cry in case it alerted one of the staff. I was to show no sign that I’d seen her that evening at all.’
Skye’s heart was breaking for the little boy who’d not only watched his mother leave, but asked, begged her to take him with her and been refused. She felt fury on his behalf, even knowing that she had nearly done the same thing to him.
‘She had no right to ask you to make that promise,’ she said to Benoit.
‘But I did. And it was the last time I saw her. I went back to my room and waited for the sun to come up, I waited for someone else to make the same discovery I had, but if I’d known that it would have been Xander I...
‘I heard him calling for her when he couldn’t find her.’ He’d watched as Xander tore through the whole house looking for someone who wasn’t there any more. He’d watched as Xander’s heart had broken. Their father hadn’t even looked up from his morning newspaper and coffee, but Xander? He’d cried for two whole weeks.
‘I’m so sorry, Benoit.’
‘I’m not. It taught me a very valuable lesson. That when it comes down to it, Skye, we all become selfish. We all take what it is that we need. So believe me when I say I’m not surprised by your actions. You have the map and you might even be able to find the jewels and do whatever the hell you want with them. But for me? The company is all I have left. And I’m going to make damn sure that I get it.