The flare of his temper was as unwelcome as the realization that he wasn’t entirely in control—of himself or the situation.
It was a novel experience.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked, pleased with his low and even tone.
Anger danced in her eyes. “Why should I be surprised that a man like you thinks he’s somehow above everyone around him, that the air he breathes is so rarified that it gives him the right to make decisions for everyone around him?”
His eyes narrowed, his glare warning her to quit while she was ahead.
She didn’t back down. “Why should I be surprised when I have known that man my whole life?”
He didn’t explode, though his anger at being compared to her father by her was as deep and thick as the molten lava waiting to burst forth from below the earth.
With the words out, unable to be taken back, she eyed him warily with an expression that he would have said was tinged with sadness had it graced any face other than hers. She burned too hot for something so cold and wet as regret.
He returned her regard from a remove, a distance that was entirely invisible separating them, and separating him from what he said.
“He’d be dead and gone if you didn’t work so hard to keep his memory alive, Helene. He died years ago and yet you talk to him like he’s alive. In fact, Helene, he is. You keep him alive with every breath you take. You look in the mirror and deep in your eyes, you know the person who looks back is him, and no matter what you do to offset his evil in the world it won’t matter because as long as you exist to do battle with him, he lives.” And if his words applied to himself, too, it didn’t matter, because he had scored his point.
Pain lanced her expression, but the tears that glistened in her eyes did not fall. Instead, she jutted out her chin at a stubborn angle and he was instantly sent back, the image of her now superimposed over the dusty memories his mind had stored of her from when they’d been children together.
Coltish even as a young child, Helene, he recalled, had been nonstop energy from sunup to sundown, absolutely determined to keep up with her older playmate. Absolutely determined that no one—certainly not a twelve-year-old boy—would dominate her.
He felt an undeniable déjà vu comparing his images of the child Helene to the woman who stood before him.
“I said I’d give you seven days, but I’ve made my mind up already. I will not be a part of your plot. I will not be your pawn. I promised myself on the steps of the academy that I would never let a man like my father control me, ever again. I meant it. Not him, and certainly not you. Take me back to Cyrano. I want to go home now.”
His eyes blazed rage at her, impotent as it was, as the plan he’d waited thirty years for went up in flames, laced with an even sharper pain, an underlying and relentless acid ache that started in his chest and radiated outward, as if his heart was being slowly eaten alive. And it was worse since there had been more than mere revenge between them, because, whether she knew it or not, the potential for something real existed between them.
Like a child with no thought to the devastation of her words, she carelessly compared him to his greatest nemesis while simultaneously tearing at the new, dangerous and delicate thing that beat in his chest, the thing that wanted to please her.
He smiled, though the expression felt as dry and brittle as a barking cough. “Certainly,” he said. He kept his voice firm and cool, though for the life of him, he could not recall words cutting his mouth so sharply on the way out.
He had trusted her. Trusted her to keep her word, to go along with his crazy idea, and the sting he felt at her betrayal was stronger than anything he’d felt since discovering his father’s suicide or his mother’s cancer, or even what he’d felt as he held Yancy as he’d died. When she’d given herself to him, she’d agreed, she’d taken his hand and he’d dared to hope.
She had given him her body, and he’d mistaken it for something more, trusting the breaking of her vow to speak for her. Replaying the events, it was obvious trusting was where he had gone wrong. Who knew better than he that even the most reliable constants could abandon you when you most needed them?
He didn’t know what he was doing anymore. That much was clear. He couldn’t trust people—not with his thoughts, not with his emotions and certainly not with his hopes and dreams. Trust was a luxury of the privileged, and even then, only few.
But he would not take back his words. He’d meant what he said when he told her he didn’t force women. When one made it a policy to only speak the truth, there was nothing to ever take back.
Once again he looked out over the Mediterranean, squinting against the bright sun shining on the bright white sand and bright cerulean sea, the wheels of his crystalline mind turning.
Following the shoreline, observing the palm trees swaying gently in the breeze that were rooted atop small grassy dunes dotting the swaths of almost antiseptically white sand, it occurred to him that she might be right.
Perhaps he was like her father, as ravenously hungry and driven by greed. He had everything and more that a hard-scrapping poor boy could dream of, and he had the strength and resilience he would have been denied had the silver spoon he was born with not been ripped from his mouth.
Recognizing it did nothing to soothe the roar inside, but it underscored Helene’s point.
He was used to the abyss, had grown comfortable with its unceasing demand for nothing less than the total annihilation of his enemies.
It wasn’t her black hole to bear. Was even, his conscience warned as it threaded its way to the surface of his mind to remind him, wrong to ask of her.
To insist that a daughter—rebellious or not—actively plot to destroy her father. How far away from Dominic d’Tierrza was that, really?
The fact that he didn’t have an answer for the question didn’t sit well with him.
Nor had it settled any better later, after he’d shut down Yancy Grove and led her back to the dock.