‘It’s worse.’ He gave a rueful grimace. ‘And it involves the conversation you heard a part of last Sunday at the hospital.’
‘Ah.’ Andy had wondered if he would ever talk to her more fully about that. She had wondered this week if he would ever talk to her again!
Darius nodded grimly. ‘In particular, my bastard of a father.’
Andy was aware of Xander’s distress last Sunday, regarding Lomax Sterne, and she had also realised that Catherine’s marriage to the man hadn’t exactly been a happy one. She just wasn’t sure that Catherine or Xander would thank Darius for discussing that husband, or father, with someone outside their family.
At the same time as she knew that if Darius wanted to talk to her about his father then she would gladly listen.
How could she not?
Darius was a very private man, to the point of obsession. Not cold, as Andy had originally thought him to be—she would never think of him as being cold again, after the way the two of them had made love together so heatedly the previous weekend!—but nevertheless he was a man who kept himself totally self-contained, and he did that by placing a barrier about his emotions.
A barrier that seemed to crumble, and be about to fall, the more time the two of them spent together.
A barrier he now seemed to be willing to drop completely in order to share something from his past with her.
A barrier that she now realised had come into existence because of that past?
How could Andy not listen if it gave her an insight into why Darius was the way that he was?
She settled back on the sofa, waiting patiently as she watched Darius gather his thoughts together before he began speaking.
‘I took your advice last Sunday evening and made Xander tell me everything. I now realise...’ He paused, shaking his head. ‘I should really start at the beginning, not the end.’ He sighed. ‘My mother and father met at some business conference: he was CEO of his own company; she was PA to one of the other men attending the business conference. The attraction was instant, and the two of them had a brief week-long relationship. Two months later my mother had to go to him and tell him that she was pregnant with Xander and me. My father had forgotten to mention that he was already engaged to marry someone else at the time, the only daughter of a close business associate, so he wasn’t exactly overjoyed at the news of Catherine’s pregnancy.’
No, Andy could see that might have been a bit awkward.
‘My mother refused to have the abortion Lomax instantly offered to pay for,’ Darius continued harshly. ‘And Lomax refused to marry her. But he did offer, in exchange for her silence, to pay her off. His intention being, I suppose, to carry on with his engagement and marriage. Except pregnancies, especially twins, have a way of showing themselves.’ He grimaced. ‘The fiancée’s father was also a friend of the man my mother worked for and— Well, I’m sure you can guess the rest. The father found out what sort of man Lomax Sterne was, the daughter broke off the engagement, and my father decided to marry my mother after all.’
Andy hadn’t realised she had been holding her breath until she had to draw air deeply into her lungs before she could manage to speak. ‘Because he had realised he loved her?’
‘Because he wanted to make her life and the lives of her two sons a living hell for having screwed up his own life!’
Andy’s stomach gave a sickening lurch. ‘And did he manage to do that?’
‘Oh, yes,’ Darius confirmed grimly. ‘He really was bad news. By the time my mother realised her mistake she was already married to him and too frightened of him and what he might do to Xander and I to even think of daring to leave him. I look a lot like him, you know,’ he added bleakly.
Andy had guessed that Darius must favour his father in looks; after all Catherine was extremely fair, and Xander had his mother’s colouring, so Darius had to have got his dark hair and those mesmerising topaz eyes from someone else.
He sighed. ‘To cut a long and miserable story short, on the night my father died Xander was once again in hospital. He was being kept in overnight, and my mother was staying with him. He had a broken collarbone and concussion, after supposedly falling off his horse.’
Andy’s lips felt numb. ‘Xander didn’t fall off his horse?’
Darius gave a shake of his head. ‘My father had beaten him.’ He drew in a ragged breath. ‘Maybe if he had laid into me a few times he wouldn’t have made my mother’s and Xander’s lives such hell. And I would gladly have taken some of those beatings in Xander’s stead.’
Andy could hear a wealth of guilt behind his words. The same guilt she had heard in his voice the previous Sunday when he had spoken so unguardedly with Xander.
‘Instead, I think,’ Darius continued heavily, ‘because I looked like him, my father thought I was like him too, and that he could mould me into his own image.’
‘He didn’t succeed,’ Andy assured him forcefully.
‘No.’ Darius’s smile was bleak. ‘I may have looked like him, but my nature is much more like my mother’s; she has the same ability to shut people out, to present a cold and unemotional front to the world. Whereas Xander looks like my mother, but...’
‘I’ve only met Xander twice, both briefly, but even that was enough to tell me he isn’t in the least cruel or physically violent.’ Andy frowned; there was no way the easily charming man she had met at the charity dinner was anything like the monster Darius was describing as his father.
‘You’re right, he isn’t.’ Darius looked at her approvingly. ‘The problem is that he thinks he is. Or, perhaps a better way of describing it is that he now fears that he might become like him.’
‘You can convince him that he won’t,’ Andy said with certainty.
‘Once again, I appreciate your confidence in my abilities,’ Darius drawled. ‘And I’m doing my best to do that, I assure you.’
Andy looked up at him searchingly. ‘There’s more, isn’t there...?’ she guessed softly.
He nodded grimly. ‘What I didn’t realise, until Xander made that comment last Sunday evening, was that all these years my mother and Xander have believed that I pushed my father down the stairs the night he died, rather than that he fell down them in a drunken stupor. Which is not to say I hadn’t thought of it—many times, in fact—for the way he treated my mother and Xander,’ he acknowledged bleakly. ‘But something always stopped me from following through on the idea.’
‘Because you are nothing like your father,’ Andy said with certainty. ‘Because you simply aren’t capable of the violence that he so obviously was.’
Darius drew in a sharp breath, even as he looked down at her searchingly, and saw only sincerity in the clear green of her eyes as she gazed back at him unflinchingly. ‘Thank you for that,’ he breathed huskily.
‘It was never in question,’ she assured him firmly. ‘We inherit our genes from our parents, yes, but that isn’t all that we are. A lot of what we are we make of ourselves. Look at me; no one else in my family was ever interested in ballet, or becoming a dancer of any kind. My sister is an accountant, for goodness’ sake!’
‘Your sister who doesn’t approve of me,’ Darius drawled ruefully.
‘She doesn’t know you,’ Andy dismissed. ‘Do Xander and your mother know the truth now?’ she added softly.
‘About my father’s death twenty years ago? Yes, I’ve talked to both of them on the subject this week,’ he confirmed as she nodded.
‘And has it helped to heal the breach between you and your mother?’
He