“The chauffeur is waiting, isn’t he?” she hazarded as he opened a drawer in search of her corkscrew.
“I pay him very well to do exactly that.”
Of course he did. Nipping the ends off the stems in the arrangement, she set the whole thing into her largest vase and filled it with water.
“How, if you don’t mind my asking? There was an announcement that you’d left Makricosta. Did I get you fired?”
“No, I did that all by myself,” he assured her, opening a cupboard at random, forcing her to point out the correct one. “Actually, it was a mutual parting of ways. I’ve wanted to leave for a while, but didn’t feel right about it.” He carefully positioned two glasses on the table. “I’m starting my own firm, so I can pick the jobs that interest me.” He lifted a dark look at her that was vaguely insulted, but amused, too. “So I’m temporarily unemployed, but I’m not here to couch surf at an old flame’s if that’s what you’re thinking.”
She bit her lips together, suspecting she was being chastised for her man-child remark. “So I shouldn’t feel guilty about the way you left? You and Adara have made up?”
“No,” he said shortly. “I mean, no, you shouldn’t feel guilty. My leaving was a long time coming, and no, my family isn’t speaking to me right now.” He poured and offered her a glass. “But I’m angry with them, too, so the radio silence is also a mutual thing.”
She dried her hands and accepted the glass of chilled, lightly sparkling rosé, glancing up at him with concern.
He offered a blithe smile, uncaring, always trying to pretend he was superficial and lazy, spoiled and arrogant, but he had so much more going on below the surface.
“Demitri...” This would be a massive invasion of privacy, going a lot deeper than any conversation they’d delved into in Europe, but she felt she had to know. It was the reason he’d ended things so abruptly in Switzerland. Searching his eyes, she asked, “What makes you so averse to family? What happened with yours? Why are you so angry?”
His lips thinned, rejecting her question, gearing up to refuse to answer, she thought.
“They kept something from me,” he surprised her by replying. “Until a few years ago, I didn’t know that I—we—have an older brother. Half brother.” He tilted his glass, staring into it so hard it should have sizzled and boiled dry. “Nic Marcussen.”
“Nic... The Nic Marcussen? The media guy? Who owns, like, half the world’s magazines and news channels?”
“Yes.” He sipped, blinking to contain what she sensed were volatile emotions.
“That’s quite a secret big brother.”
“Right?” he challenged, fury creeping like lava under his tone.
“Why didn’t they tell you?”
“I don’t know. But he’s back in our lives—their lives—and I don’t know what the hell I’m supposed to do with that, so I’ve been keeping my distance.” He set aside his glass, pushing his hands into his pants’ pockets broodingly. “Adara seems to think we should all get together in some sort of family reunion . I’ve been resisting, finding other things to do, which annoys her. That’s why she thought I was using you to get at her and Theo, but I’m not that childish. I just don’t want anything to do with him.”
Not all families were as close as she’d been to her mother and brother. She knew that, but it still made her sad for him and his siblings. And keeping such a huge secret was a curious mystery that made her want to quiz him further, but he changed the subject.
“Show me around. Is this flooring maple?”
* * *
Thankfully Natalie could take a hint. She took him upstairs for a brief glance in the three bedrooms, a tidy master just airy and pastel enough to confirm it belonged to a woman.
“Queen,” he commented, eyeing the mattress, thinking it would do.
“Because my daughter sneaks in,” she said with a don’t-even-think-it smile.
He was thinking it. Of course he was. That dress she was wearing was a statement in subtle eroticism, clinging to her curves in a mysterious way that hinted while hiding, driving him insane with desire to press and feel and stroke.
He let her take him along to the princess-themed girl’s room full of stuffed animals and well-stocked bookshelves, and then another bedroom converted to her home office.
His interest in the house had been piqued from his first glimpse. He’d thought it was basic curiosity in things like architecture and workmanship, but he realized he’d really wanted this glimpse into Natalie’s true self. He wanted to know why she held such a grip on him. Despite her sunny nature, she kept a lot of herself private. Her child, for instance.
Her office was as efficient and practical as he knew her to be on the job, but the framed child’s artwork down the stairs and newspaper article above the fireplace congratulating her grandparents on their fiftieth wedding anniversary reflected her less obvious, but very endearing qualities: warmth and sentimentality and hints of a romantic.
“The dining room is a mess. I’ve taken up scrapbooking.” She flicked on the light, but hung back as though she’d rather he didn’t enter.
“You know you can do that sort of thing on computer now?” He purposefully brushed past her through the arched doorway, taking advantage of the movement to graze a light touch on her shoulder and upper arm, liking the way she jumped under his caress.
“I spend all day on computers. I like doing something real. Don’t look. You’re Mr. Marketing and Ad Campaign. I’ll never measure up,” she protested, catching up a handful of crumpled paper in a tight fist.
When they called it scrap, they meant it. The table was covered in bits of colored paper, buttons and ribbons, and novelty stickers, but the chaos was nothing he hadn’t seen on his own desk when he needed a cut-and-paste mock-up.
“You have a good eye for composition,” he said sincerely, taken with a collage of black-and-white snapshots of her grandparents that she’d arranged with silver borders on a sheet of pale green.
“It’s, um—” she edged protectively toward a finished book “—just something to do with all my mom’s boxes of photographs.”
He spied the photo on the front of the finished book, a baby in an incubator. Something in the colors of the snapshot told him it was real, not a print from digital. Older. He set his hand on the book to draw it across the cloth on the table so it was before him. “Gareth,” he read. “Your brother?”
“Yes, it’s...” Her hand wavered as she decided whether to stop him opening the cover. “I wanted something that Zoey could keep, so he’s not forgotten.”
Her voice had gone husky. He could tell she wasn’t comfortable with letting him see, but he couldn’t resist turning the pages, admiring the care she’d taken with designing each page, but more ensnared by the story she told.
Natalie had said her father had left, and there was no evidence of him here. As for her brother, he had spent his life in hospital and sick beds, occasionally a sofa or a picnic blanket. Her wearily smiling mom was usually behind the camera rather than in front of it, capturing her underweight but grinning son and his vibrant, obviously devoted older sister. In the early ones Natalie cuddled and coddled him; as they grew up, she did terrible things to his hair with clips and bows. She made faces at him over a hand of cards, sat with him in front of a bin of building blocks and eventually aligned herself behind a computer screen next to him.
That was where her interest in IT had come from, Demitri would bet. She couldn’t throw a ball with this boy. She would have had to race him in video games.
“You told me your brother had died, but I didn’t realize he’d been sick all his life.” He looked at her with new eyes, amazed by how effervescent she often was after everything her small family must have endured. “What was it?”
“A congenital heart defect, but there were other things that came along with it.”
“Was it...” He could see her shutting down. “You don’t want to talk about it. Too painful?” Of course it was.
She nod-shrugged. “I don’t mind talking about him, but his illness was my whole life for so long... That sounds awful.” She shrugged jerkily. “As if I resent him, and I don’t. But my entire childhood revolved around his appointments and surgeries and recoveries and lack of a future. Everything that needed to be said about his condition was said while he was alive. The only important piece now is that I loved him.”
She stroked his image, her smile brave and crooked, causing something to shift in his chest. It hurt and made him reach out, drawing her in so he could soothe.
“Oh, Nat,” he murmured, setting a hand on her silky hair, tucking her crown under his chin in an unfamiliar need to comfort. “And then you lost your mom.”