She ran her fingertip over the outline of his lips. ‘Please don’t worry about me, Xanthos. I am as modern and as liberal as they come—’
‘And you certainly did come,’ he observed.
‘I’m just not very experienced, that’s all.’
‘I think I managed to work that one out for myself.’ There was a pause. ‘And I’m wondering what the reason is. You’re under no obligation to tell me, of course.’
Bianca hesitated. Whynottell him the truth—especially if this relationship was going to go anywhere? ‘I’ve never really had time for men, that’s why,’ she admitted slowly. ‘I’ve spent most of my life working very hard to make something of myself—’
‘Even though you grew up in the grounds of an actual palace?’
‘Why do people always jump to the same conclusion? The palace was like living in a very fancy rented house! Honestly. We had no real money of our own. Everything we did was dependent on what the King wanted and I knew I didn’t want to live like that. That whatever I wanted to achieve, I was going to have to do without any outside help from anybody else.’ Now it was her turn to study him questioningly. ‘Could you honestly say the same, Xanthos?’
‘You think I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth?’
She shrugged. ‘I don’t know. To be honest, I don’t really know anything about you. Were you?’
Xanthos looked out of the window at the snowy rooftops of Vargmali, recognising that it would be the easiest thing in the world to clam up. To shut down her questions about his formative years with a kiss, because that was what he always did. But on this strange Christmas Eve in this faraway land, the normal rules didn’t seem to apply. They had been thrown together in more ways than one and the bizarre sequence of events had an air of impermanence about it, like the tall tree which glittered in the village square, which would be taken down before the new year was very old.
And maybe his uncharacteristic introspection had something to do with seeing his brother again—because hadn’t that thrown up the kind of questions he would usually have buried? Wasn’t it inevitable he should have started comparing Corso’s upbringing to his—and to have been reminded just how grim his own had been? It would be a mistake to reveal too much of himself to Bianca, of all people—yet his need to talk to someone was stronger than it had ever been. And lawyers were trained to be discreet, weren’t they? So maybe he would give her some of the facts. Just not all of them. Especially not the ones which impacted on her own sister.
‘My mother got married very young when she discovered she was pregnant,’ he said. ‘And for the first sixteen years of my life I knew wealth on a scale which most people can barely imagine.’
He waited for her to come back at him with a triumphant retort. To say something like, ‘So youwererich!’ But she didn’t.
‘And was it a happy childhood?’
‘Is there such a thing?’ he questioned bitterly.
‘Wow.’ The single word was soft. ‘That’s a very cynical thing to say, Xanthos. Cryptic, too.’
‘It might be—but that’s the way I think. It’s one of the reasons I don’t intend having any children of my own.’
She nodded at this, as if storing away the knowledge so she could take it out and look at it later. ‘So it wasn’t happy?’
No need to document the gnawing acknowledgement that there had always been a strange kind of tension around his parents. He’d thought it inevitable, given the huge and often embarrassing age gap. He didn’t mention the way his father used to look at him sometimes—as if he had crawled out from beneath a stone. His mother had looked at him that way too sometimes, hadn’t she? And somehow that had been much, much worse.
‘Oh, I wasn’t beaten or starved,’ he said flippantly. ‘But on my sixteenth birthday, my father decided to give me a highly unconventional present.’
‘Not a car, then?’
‘No, nor a watch. He decided I needed a DNA test.’ He paused. ‘So a doctor came to the house to take blood.’
He saw the consternation which creased her face. ‘But...why?’
‘You’re an intelligent woman, Bianca,’ he prompted silkily. ‘Why do you think?’
‘He suspected he wasn’t your father?’
‘Indeed he did.’ His jaw hardened as he gritted his teeth. ‘And he was right. Because he wasn’t.’
‘Oh, my goodness,’ she breathed. ‘How difficult must that have been? What...what happened?’
Xanthos shifted his position on the bed, his gaze lifting to the silvery moon outside the window as he wondered what was happening to him. Why were all the defences with which he had surrounded himself for as long as he could remember, now threatening to crumble? And even though an insistent voice in his head was urging him to shut down the conversation, he found himself wanting to break the rule of a lifetime and tell her, because he’d never admitted this, not to anyone. ‘What happened was that he gave my mother an ultimatum. He said it was either him, or me. She could stay, but only if I went.’
She gave a slightly nervous laugh. ‘But she chose you, right?’
Xanthos could feel his throat constrict because this was the hardest part of all, even now.Thiswas the reason he had locked it away.Thiswas the shameful part. Because a mother who rejected her only child...