Chapter Eight
CHAPTER EIGHT
He ushers me out of that room and the music he played seems to hang about us in the bright sunlight that pours in through the arches and paints the courtyards we pass in gold.
There is something thunderous about the way he strides through the house, though I get the impression that he is keeping an eye out for something as we go.
Perhaps someone .
A terrible suspicion begins to take root inside of me.
I read about him. I read every article I could find, though many were in translation. One thing I’m certain was never mentioned in any of them was a wife.
But then, this man is not like some other noble families I’ve encountered. They come complete with PR teams, social media managers, and a robust internet presence. Everything I read about Taio suggests that he prefers the family name to carry the weight.
Meaning, I realize with a sickening feeling of dread deep inside of me, he could absolutely be married. With twenty children, for all I know.
For the first time in a long, long while—since I lived in my stepmother’s house, to be precise—I feel something like shame wash over me.
And I am more shaken than I would like as he leads me into a book-lined study and shuts the door behind us. Tightly.
“You should be off your feet,” he mutters at me, and herds me into a deep leather chair.
I would object, but I can’t seem to find the words.
“Are you married?” I demand instead, before the wondering eats me alive.
He stops still in the center of the room, halfway to the seat opposite me. He turns and stares down at me with something like amazement. “Am I married ?”
There is a kind of fury in his tone. It feels like a lash, but I can’t let that deter me.
“You heard me. Are you married? Do you have children?” That one hurts, but I don’t back down. “Are you a cheater in addition to being a liar and a con man?”
Taio lets out a sound that is technically a laugh, but I do not mistake the bitterness in it for anything like humor.
“No.” He bites off the word. “I am not married. How could you think—”
He slashes a hand through the air, cutting himself off, and I find myself holding my breath at the look of outrage on his face. And something in his eyes that almost makes me think that I’ve deeply offended him.
I don’t understand, but I can taste the urge to apologize on the tip of my tongue. I don’t know how I keep myself from it.
He continues to the chair across from me and throws himself into it, and I’m convinced that he looks…wounded, somehow. For there is something hollow and raw in the way he looks at me, and it fuses with that ache inside me, and I worry for a wild moment that I might actually burst into tears.
I don’t. Somehow I don’t.
Taio slumps in his chair, as if my appearance here has taken the starch out of his spine.
I can’t decide if I should feel jubilant or sad, but what I find I can’t bear is the silence that seems to get wider and heavier by the moment.
“Well.” I clear my throat. “I suppose it’s nice to meet you at last.”
He has the grace to wince at that. “Yes,” he says after a moment, his gaze too dark as he regards me. “I am Taio de Luz. I have a great many other names, but they are all for show. And I’m afraid that the deception was necessary.”
“You’re trying to find out whether or not you are the legitimate heir to all of this,” I say coolly, and there’s something satisfying in watching him take on board that I discovered his secret.
He doesn’t look surprised. It’s something more like resigned. “You found that card.”
“You left it,” I reply. “Perhaps if you hadn’t gone sneaking around in the dark and then run away like a coward, you could have retained your secrets. Mr. Garnier. ”
And he inclines his head at that, but there’s a different sort of gleam in his gaze now. As if I extended a challenge and he intends to meet it.
“I’m happy to say that the time for fiction has passed,” he tells me, and he no longer looks as if his spine has given up on him.
He stretches out his legs and suddenly, he is every inch the aristocrat.
As if even his bones dare not defy him. As if his expectation is that I won’t, either. “What else have you discovered?”
I quash the urge to sit straighter, because that might tell him that he’s getting to me and I can’t have that. “Is it not enough that I found you? And know why you foisted yourself upon me in the first place?”
“That all depends, Annagret.”
Before I can jump on that, he shakes his head and pulls his mobile from his pocket.
He taps on it, puts it to his ear, and then begins speaking in a stream of what I realize at once is smooth, upper-class Spanish.
It sounds not unlike the music he played, and it has the same effect on me.
It seems to wrap all around me, like gossamer and heat, so I’m almost tempted to slide off this chair and roll around in it…
Somehow, I control myself. But it’s close.
“You must be famished,” he says, his eyes hot as he slips the mobile back into his pocket.
As if he knows exactly what I’m imagining. My cheeks feel red, and I can only hope they are not bright with that heat—though something about the way he studies me tells me they are.
“I’m actually relieved to discover that I’m pregnant,” I tell him. “For some while I simply thought that I was fattening myself up as if I planned to sacrifice myself at the first opportunity. To what, I can only imagine.”
He takes his time shifting his gaze from the heat on my cheeks. “How fortunate that such a grizzly end was averted.”
And then we just…sit there. In the silence that seems to shimmer between us like its own light, its own heat.
I have spent months not only thinking of things I’d like to say to this man, but practicing them in mirrors. In my head. In my dreams.
I have shouted at him. I have delivered stinging monologues. I’ve torn him apart in every possible way, over and over again.
Yet here, now, sitting in this lovely little room with him, I can’t seem to remember a single word.
Because something about being near him feels like a balm for my poor battered heart, and I might hate that something like this can be true, given what has happened between us so far. But that doesn’t make it any less real.
When his gaze moves from mine I follow it, and realize that I am pressing a hand against my heart.
If I drop it now I feel like that will give too much away, so I don’t.
And I can feel the heat of my own palm there, now. I think instead of his, and this is not remotely helpful.
Gradually, I become aware of a ticking clock. At first I think it’s my heart, overtaking not just me but the whole room. But then I spy the grandfather clock against one wall, counting out the time. Filling this silence for us.
And somehow, that, too, makes me feel easier.
The look on Taio’s face is not easy at all.
“Annagret,” he begins, in as anguished a voice as I’ve ever heard, I’m sure of it—
But the same woman who dressed me, who hustled me onto that plane to go home, is here. She inclines her head in my direction, nods at Taio, and then pulls a trolley inside, laden with food.
“I believe you know my mayordomo , Salma,” Taio says.
“A pleasure to see you again, Madam,” the woman says in that same voice, so calm and unruffled I can’t tell if I’m soothed or triggered.
“Yes,” I agree. “An absolute delight. This time, will you drug me and throw me in the back of a car before you whisk me off somewhere else?”
Triggered it is.
Salma the mayordomo does not respond. But Taio has that thread of laughter in his gaze again. “Only if I decide you’ve become too mouthy,” he says.
The two of them exchange a look. Then he nods, and she bows out of the room.
And I watch, something like amazed, as this man who has taken on a number of roles already in my presence, takes on a new one. This time, of a nurturer.
He transfers the plates from the gleaming trolley to the low table between us.
And I can only stare as he does it, because it is getting harder and harder to believe this is real.
I think of everything that’s happened. What these past four and a half months have been like, and now we are just… Here?
Having a snack?
Though in fairness, it’s really more of a banquet of small plates.
I want to refuse any sustenance at all, like some kind of Victorian heroine, but pregnancy really gets in the way of sustained theatrics. Because I’m hungry. Really hungry, and the baby comes first.
“This is very kind of you,” I say. I lean forward and load up my plate with savory tapas and bright pieces of fruit. “But maybe you can take this opportunity to tell me what, exactly, all of this was about.”
“It seems you know already. Since you, after all, are the real Luc Garnier.”
I have wanted to have this conversation for a long time. I dreamed of having this conversation. Of the two of us admitting what is fact and what is fiction. Of saying these things out loud.
But the reality of this moment, of him saying such a thing to me with his whole chest, is another humming inside of me. I can’t tell if it is agony or relief to have it out there, in the air between us, at last.
“I had to create Luc Garnier,” I tell him, as I have told no one, ever.
I tell him the story of how I started, how no one would hire me, how they only came to me when they thought I had male oversight.
“It was that or crawl back to my stepmother’s house, hat in hand, and that was not possible.
It is still not possible. Even if she would let me in, it would kill me. ”
He studies me for a moment. “Is she your only family?”
“She is married to my father.” I try to smile. “But I would not call either one of them family. I’m not sure either one would call me that, either.”
And there is something about the way he frowns at that, as if he cannot comprehend what I’m telling him. As if it makes no sense. “Your own father does not consider you family?”
He sounds…baffled.