On the other hand, if he didn’t tell her, now that he knew how she felt, wasn’t he going to be guilty of an even less excusable offence? One which in the long term would cause even more damage to their relationship because it would inflict a wound that would fester? They needed to be able to trust one another if the love Max was sure they felt for one another was going to be able to grow and flourish.
His only excuse for his omissions and failures was that he had never loved before, and that therefore everything he was learning was new. No matter how careful he was, no matter how much he wanted her happiness before anything else, he was fallible and liable to make mistakes.
Right now what they needed more than anything else was the two things they did not have: privacy and time. He looked round the hall; the ebb and flow of everyday life was going on around them but at that moment they were in some sense isolated from it in this shadowy corner of the great hall. The time was far from perfect, but Max admitted to himself that he couldn’t trust himself to endure another night of the torture of sharing a bed with her—knowing that she was so close and yet at the same time so very far away from him, without reaching for her. He might not know much about love, but he did know that breaking down Ionanthe’s barriers so that they could share the intimacy of sex without telling her that he was Veritas would be unforgivable.
He had to tell her now. He couldn’t endure another day of cool silence, during which he was deprived of those small, sometimes silent exchanges of mutual awareness to which he had become accustomed without knowing it until the intimacy was denied him. He had misjudged her, and without meaning to he had also misled her.
When she made to pull away from him a second time, Max bent his head and begged in a low voice, ‘Wait. There’s something I have to say to you.’
Ionanthe’s heart lifted. Hope swelled and rose inside her. He was going to tell her that he loved and needed her more than life itself. He was going to apologise and beg her forgiveness.
She looked over his shoulder. Although the great hall was busy with people, none of them were paying them any particular attention. The hope that he was going to say the words she most longed to hear grew inside her and took wing—only to crash to earth to die painfully when he said, ‘You won’t like it, I know, but it has to be said.’
The words were enough to
send an icy trickle of despair down her spine. She couldn’t, she mustn’t let him see how she really felt.
‘If you’re going to make more accusations,’ she threw back at him, rallying her pride to her defence, ‘then I dare say I shan’t.’
Max shook his head.
‘No, I’m not going to accuse you of anything. The truth is…’
His voice died away as he struggled to find the right words. He was still holding her hand, and now he played with her fingers, stroking them and holding them, his actions such that, had he been a different kind of man, Ionanthe might have thought they betrayed uncertainty. But Max was never uncertain—about anything, she decided bitterly.
‘The truth is what?’ she pressed him.
‘You may remember that you mentioned the Veritas Foundation to me?’
Ionanthe nodded her head, although she couldn’t imagine what her praise of Veritas had to do with Max telling her something she wasn’t going to like hearing.
‘You said how much you admired the…the man who runs it?’
‘Yes, I did,’ Ionanthe agreed, her eyes darkening with anger. ‘You want me to retract what I said because if offends your pride? Is that it?’ she guessed.
‘No.’ Max’s voice was terse. His fingers interlaced with her own. ‘The truth is—’
‘Yes?’
‘I should have told you this before, but at the time I didn’t think there was any need. It never occurred to me that you’d even heard of Veritas, never mind…’He said the words. ‘The Veritas Foundation was originally set up by my father. I inherited it from him.’
‘No…’ Ionanthe protested, but somehow she knew that Max was telling her the truth.
‘I’m sorry. I never imagined…If I’d known…’
This was so humiliating, so shaming. Hot blood forced its way up under her skin, but she couldn’t afford to give way to the chagrin she was feeling. She had made a fool of herself, but Max surely had made even more of a fool of her. Her pride stung, as though it had received a thousand savage cuts.
‘You never imagined what?’ she demanded angrily. ‘You never imagined that I might be someone who admired everything I believed Veritas and the man in charge of it stood for?’
Red flags of angry pride might be burning in Ionanthe’s face, but because he loved her Max knew that what she was really feeling was pain—the same pain he himself would have felt had their situation been reversed. More than anything he longed to hold her and to take that pain from her.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘For what? Misjudging me? Destroying my illusions? Believing that I wasn’t good enough to know the truth? That I wasn’t worthy of sharing your ideals?’
‘Ionanthe, don’t—please…’
He’d hurt her, and she was justifiably angry. Max understood that, but there was something he still had to tell her. ‘I was a fool for not realising that you—’