“I don’t like inhibiting my ability to control myself or any given situation.”
“Oh, there’s a surprise!” she said on a bubble of mirth. “You must have given your mother a lot of grief with that attitude.” She stole his glass of wine long enough to tilt a splash into the sauce before she stirred it and began plating their meals.
His silence brought her head up.
“I’m sorry—is your mother alive?” she asked with a skip of compunction. “I didn’t mean—”
“It’s fine,” he dismissed. “Yes, she is. And I don’t believe I was a problem for her until her husband realized I wasn’t his. That’s when I was sent to boarding school. I didn’t see her after that.”
Rowan felt a little shock go through her. Her ears grasped for more, but he didn’t expound. With a little frown she concentrated on quickly fanning slices of beef like a tiny hand of cards on the plates. After arranging the vegetables in a colorful crescent around golden potato croquettes, she zig-zagged sauce across the meat, added an asparagus spear decoratively wrapped with prosciutto, dabbed mustard sauce and tiny slivers of cucumber onto it, then a final garnish of a few sprigs of watercress and a radish flower.
“The dining room is set. Can you get the door?”
He followed and held her chair before seating himself and giving his plate the admiration it deserved. “This looks as good as it smells.”
“Tuck in.” His appreciation suffused her in warmth, but she couldn’t shake the chill from what he’d revealed. As he picked up his cutlery, she ventured, “Nic, I can’t help asking … Are you saying your mother never came to see you at school?”
THE beef melted on his tongue, prepared better than anything any chef he’d ever hired had managed. Nevertheless, it still might have been a slice of his own heart filetted onto the plate, given the way it stuck to the roof of his mouth.
He should have kept his mouth shut. His entire life had been shattered when the truth of his parentage had come to light. It was not something he talked about, and yet it had flowed out uncontrolled with only a sip of red wine to lubricate it. Because he was relaxed by sex? Because physical closeness had fooled him into feeling emotionally comfortable with Rowan?
What to do now? If he refused to speak of it she’d know it was something that still had the power to wring out his insides.
At the same time there was an angry part of him that wanted to take her view of Olief and shake it up, make her see he wasn’t a superhero. He was flawed. Or Nic was. He’d never figured that one out—whether it was his parents’ deficiency or his own.
“Who was she? I mean, how did Olief know her?”
Her curiosity was not the lurid kind. He might have stood that. No, her brow wore a wrinkle of concern. She had never been ignored, so she didn’t understand how any child could be.
Again the deep fear that he was the problem pealed inside him.
“He didn’t know her. Not really,” he said, keeping his tone neutral. “She was an airline hostess. He said it happened as he was coming back from being away in some ugly place.”
“Do you think he did that often? Mum was always terrified he’d cheat on her because he’d cheated on his first wife, but— Wait. Don’t tell me.” Rowan held up a hand, face turning away. “It would kill me to hear that he did.”
“I have no idea,” Nic said flatly. “He didn’t have any other children. I’m quite sure of that. That was the reason he didn’t want his wife knowing about me. They tried their entire marriage to have a baby and she couldn’t conceive.”
The briefest flinch of anguish spasmed across her features, too quick for him to be sure he’d seen it before it dissolved in a frown of incomprehension. “But if he wanted children why didn’t he see you?”
“He was ashamed of me.”
Her eyes widened and her jaw slackened, but she quickly recovered, shaking her head. “You don’t know that.”
“He told me, Rowan. I asked him that exact question and that’s what he said.”
“He was ashamed of himself. If not, he should have been,” she said, with a quick flare of vehement temper.
Her anger, when Olief was like a god to her, surprised him, cracking into and touching an internal place he kept well protected. His breath backed up in his lungs.
“Why didn’t your mother do something? Insist he acknowledge you. Or did she? You said he paid for your education?” Rowan pressed.
“He paid for my schooling, yes.” Nic set two fingertips on the bottom of his wineglass, lining it up with precision against the subtle pattern in the tablecloth. Every word he released seemed to scald all the way up his esophagus. “She didn’t make a fuss because I was her shameful secret, too. She hadn’t told her husband that she was already pregnant when they married. When he found out she took what Olief was willing to give her—tuition at a boarding school so they could all pretend I didn’t exist.”
Rowan had a small appetite at the best of times, but it evaporated completely as she took in the chilling rejection Nic had suffered. He was very much contained within his aloof shell at the moment, his muscles a tense barrier that accentuated what a tough, strong man he’d become, but shades of baffled shame still lingered in his eyes.
Everything in her ached with the longing to rise and wrap her arms around him, to try and repair the damage done, but she was learning. This was why he was always on his guard. He’d been hurt—terribly. Rowan had no trouble believing Olief had wanted to shield his wife, but to hurt a child? His own son?
“How …?” She took a sip of water to clear her thickened throat. “How did the truth come out?” she asked numbly.
Nic pointed at his hair. “My mother and her husband are both Greek, both dark. Babies and toddlers might sometimes have blond hair, but by the time I was entering school and still a towhead, not to mention looking nothing like the man I thought of as my father, it was obvious a goose egg had been hatched with the ducks.”
Rowan dropped her cutlery, unable to fully comprehend what he was saying. “So he supported sending you away? After years of believing he was your father? What sort of relationship do you have with him now?”
“None. Once my mother admitted I wasn’t his he never spoke to me again.” Nic spoke without inflection, his delivery like a newscast.
“You can’t be serious.”
“He was a bastard. It was no loss to me.” He applied himself to his meal.
Rowan cast for something solid to grasp on to as a painful sea of confusion swirled around her. “You can’t tell me that everyone who was supposed to be acting like a parent in your life just stuck you in some horrible boarding school like you were a criminal to be sent to prison.”
With eyes half-closed in a laconic, flinty stare, he took a deep swallow of wine. “I didn’t mind boarding school. I had the brains and the brawn that allowed a person to succeed there, and I realized quickly that I was on my own so I’d better seize the opportunity. What’s in this sauce besides wine? It’s very good.”
Rowan soaked in the tub, still reeling under the blows Nic had been dealt as a child. He’d barely said another word after his stunning revelations, only cleaned his plate and excused himself