His jaw tightened. Maybe he should tell her the truth. Let her understand the kind of man he really was—and why. Let her know that his emotional coldness wasn’t something he’d just invented to pass the time. It had been ground into him from the start—embedded too deeply for him to be any other way. Maybe knowing that would nip any rosy dreams she was in danger of nurturing. Show her why the barriers he’d erected around himself were impenetrable. And why he wouldn’t want them any other way.
‘There were no custody visits or vacations,’ he said. ‘For a long time, I knew nothing about my mother. Or indeed, any mother. When you grow up without something, you don’t even realise you’re missing it. Her name was never mentioned in front of me, and the only women I knew were my father’s whores.’
She flinched at his use of the word and he saw her compose her face into an expression of understanding. ‘It’s perfectly reasonable not to like the women who supplanted your mother—’
‘Oh, please. Quit the amateur psychology,’ he interrupted, pushing his fingers impatiently through his hair. ‘I’m not making a prudish judgement because it makes me feel better. They were whores. They looked like whores and acted like whores. He paid them for sex. They were the only women I came in contact with. I grew up thinking that all females caked their face in make-up and wore skirts short enough for you to see their knickers.’ And one in particular who had invited a boy of twelve to take her knickers down so that she could show him a good time.
Did she believe him now? Was that why she was biting her lip? He could almost see her mind working overtime as she searched for something to say—as if trying to find a positive spin to put on what he’d just told her. He could have saved her the trouble and told her there was none.
‘But...you must have had friends,’ she said, a touch of desperation in her voice now. ‘You must have looked at their mothers, and wondered what had happened to yours.’
‘I had no friends,’ he said flatly. ‘My life was carefully controlled. I might as well have had a prison as a house. I saw no one except for the servants—my father liked childless, unmarried servants who could devote all their time to him. And if you have nothing with which to compare, then no comparisons can be made. His island was remote and inaccessible. He ran everything and owned everything. I lived in a vast complex which was more like a palace and I was tutored at home. I didn’t find out anything about my mother until I was seven years old and when I did—the boy who told me was beaten.’
He stared into space. Should he tell her that the boy’s injuries had been so bad that he’d been airlifted to the hospital on the mainland and had never returned? And that the boy’s parents—even though they had been extremely poor—had threatened to go to the police? Alek had only been young but he remembered the panic which had swirled around the complex as a result. He remembered the fearful faces of his father’s aides, as if the old man really had overstepped the mark this time. But he’d wriggled out of it, just as he always did. Money had been offered, and accepted. Money got you whatever it was you wanted. It bought silence as well as sex—and another catastrophe had been averted. And hadn’t he done that, too? Hadn’t he paid off Ellie’s contract with the Irishwoman with the same ruthlessness which his father would have employed?
He saw the distress on her face and tried to imagine how this must sound through her ears. Incredible, probably. Like one of those porn films his father’s bodyguards used to watch, late into the night. He wondered if he stopped the story now, whether it would be enough to make her understand why he was not like other men. But she had demanded the truth and perhaps she would continue to demand it. To niggle away at it, as women invariably did. He realised that for the first time in his life he couldn’t just block her out, or refuse to take her calls. To fade her into the background as if she had never existed, which was what he’d always done before. Whether he liked it or not, he was stuck with Ellie Brooks, or Ellie Sarantos as she was now. And maybe she ought to learn that it was better not to ask questions in case you didn’t like the answers.
‘Anything else you want to know?’ he demanded. ‘Any other stone you’ve left unturned?’
‘What did the boy tell you about your mother?’
‘He told me the truth. That she’d left in the middle of the night with one of the island’s fishermen.’ He leant back against the intricate wrought-iron tracings of the balustrade. Somewhere in the distance he could hear a woman call out in Italian and a child answered. ‘It was convenient that she chose a lover with his own boat, for there would have been no other way of her leaving the island without my father knowing about it. But I guess her main achievement was in managing to conduct an affair right under his nose, without the old man finding out. And the fact that she was prepared to risk his rage.’ His mouth twisted. ‘She must have been quite some woman.’