“I’m referring to my older brother.”
Her words left a discordant ring in his ears, dragging him from the dangerous precipice of falling into her eyes.
The server brought their wine. Gideon kept his attention fully focused on Adara’s composed expression and contentiously set chin.
“You’re the eldest,” he stated.
She only lifted her wine to sip while a hollow shadow drifted behind her gaze, giving him a thump of uncertainty, even though he knew she only had two brothers, both younger than her twenty-eight years. One was an antisocial accountant who traveled the circuit of their father’s hotel chain auditing ledgers, the other a hellion with a taste for big engines and fast women, chasing skirt the way their father had.
Given her father’s peccadilloes, he shouldn’t be surprised a half sibling had turned up, but older? It didn’t make sense and he wasn’t ready to let go of his suspicions about an affair.
“How did you find out about him? Was there something in the estate papers after your father passed?”
“I’ve always known about him.” She set aside her wine with a frown of distaste. “I think that’s off.”
“Always?” Gideon repeated. “You’ve never mentioned him.”
“We don’t talk, do we?” Golden orbs came back, charged with electric energy that made him jolt as though she’d touched a cattle prod to his internal organs.
No. They didn’t talk. He preferred it that way.
Their server arrived with their meals. Gideon asked for Adara’s wine to be changed out. With much bowing and apologies, a fresh glass was produced. Adara tried it and stated it was fine.
As the server walked away, Adara set down her glass with another grimace.
“Still no good?” Gideon tried it. It was fine, perhaps not as dry as she usually liked, but he asked, “Try again?”
“No. I feel foolish that you sent back the first one.”
That was so like her to not want to make a fuss, but he considered calling back the waiter all the same. Stating that they didn’t talk was an acknowledgment of an elephant. It was the first knock on a door he didn’t want opened.
At the same time, he wanted to know more about this supposed brother of hers. Sharing was a two-way street though and hypocrite that he was, he’d prefer backstory to flow only one way. He glanced at the offending wine, ready to seize it as an excuse to keep things inconsequential between them.
And yet, as Adara picked up her fork and hovered it over her rice, she gave him the impression of being utterly without hope. Forlorn. The hairs rose all over his body as he picked up signals of sadness that he’d never caught an inkling of before.
“Do you want to talk about him?” he asked carefully.
She lifted her shoulder. “I’ve never been allowed to before so I don’t suppose one more day of silence matters.” It was her conciliatory tone, the one that put everything right and allowed them to move past the slightest hiccup in their marriage.
What marriage? She wanted a divorce, he reminded himself.
Instinct warned him this was dangerous ground, but he also sensed he’d never have another chance to understand if he didn’t seize this one. “Who wouldn’t let you talk about him?” he asked gruffly.
A swift glance gave him the answer. Her father, of course. He’d been a hard man of strong opinions and ancient views. His daughter could run a household, but her husband would control the hotels. Her share of the family fortune wasn’t hers to squander as her brothers might, but left in a trust doled out by tightly worded language, the bulk of the money to be held for her children. The male ones.
Gideon frowned, refusing to let himself be sidetracked by the painful subject of heirs.
“I assume this brother was the product of an affair? Something your father didn’t want to be reminded of?”
“He was my mother’s indiscretion.” Adara frowned at her plate, her voice very soft, her expression disturbingly young and bewildered. “He lived with us until he left for school.” She lifted anxious eyes, words pouring out of her in a rush as if she’d held on to them for decades. “My aunt explained years later that my father didn’t know at first that Nico wasn’t his. When he found out, he had him sent to boarding school. It was awful. That’s all they’d tell me, that he’d gone to school. I knew I was starting the next year and I was terrified I’d be forgotten the same way.”
A stitch pulled in his chest. His childhood predisposed him to hate the thought of any child frightened by anything. He felt her confusion and fear at losing her brother mixed with the terror of not knowing what would happen to herself. It made him nauseous.
Her expression eased into something poignant. “But then we saw him at my aunt’s in Katarini over the summer. He was fine. He told me about his school and I couldn’t wait to go myself, to be away from the angry man my father had turned into, make new friends...” Her gaze faded to somewhere in the distance. “But I was sent to day school in New York and we saw Nico only a few more times after that. One day I asked if we would see him, and my father—”
Gideon wouldn’t have known what she failed to say aloud if he had
n’t been watching her so intently, reading her lips because he could barely hear her. Her tongue touched the corner of her mouth where a hairline scar was sometimes visible between her morning shower and her daily application of makeup. She’d told him it had come from a childhood mishap.