Chapter Eight #2
So baffled that it makes me feel a kind of warmth, everywhere.
“He might. But my stepmother does not like it. She was actively opposed to it from the moment we met.” I force a smile when he lifts a brow. “I was three.”
Taio mutters something I cannot understand, dark and low.
This, too, is warming. Almost soothing.
“I have never told anyone these things because there was no one to tell,” I find myself saying.
“If I am honest, I suppose I have long suspected that there is something about me that caused it all, so it was better to keep myself at a distance from others. In case they all felt the same.” His eyes widen at that.
I laugh. “It sounds sad when I say that out loud, but it doesn’t feel sad. It’s just how it is.”
“This, Annagret,” he says quietly, “is the greatest lie you have ever told.”
“Taio.”
Our gazes slam together, then. And I know why. This is the first time I say his name. Out loud. To him.
And I know how that must feel, because I know how it feels when he says my name.
Every time he says it.
Once again, I remember lying side by side in that dark cottage with that tapestry of recognition and awe wrapped all around us, in ways I could never explain to anyone else. In ways that seemed made up even to me, afterward. One more case of a jilted lover pretending it all meant more than it did.
But I can feel it again now.
I watch him breathe, low and steadying, like he’s as off-balance as I am.
How can I feel what he feels and have made this all up in my head?
For a moment I think he won’t continue. That he will maintain his enigmatic silence the way he has all along.
I realize I don’t have any idea what I will do if he does.
But I hear a scrape of sound, a breath released. He sits back in his chair and props his head up on one hand, as if he’s trying to think of the best way to say what must be said.
I continue to eat, chasing one extraordinary flavor with the next, not exactly surprised that everything tastes so good. Everything about this place seems to demand excellence. Maybe that’s what they spent eighteen generations perfecting.
“My parents had a very cordial marriage,” he tells me after what seems like a very long while, very much as if the words are being torn from him.
I think that if I look at him directly he might stop, so I keep my eyes on the array of plates before me.
“This was my impression when I was young and it did not change once I was older and understood more. When I was eighteen, my father sat me down and explained that a relationship based on mutual interests rather than emotions was preferable for men in our position. That indulging the passions too often leads to disaster and is best avoided. He chose my mother with great deliberation, he told me, because she came from a grand old French family with its own legacy and could therefore understand what was required. I never saw them fight. I never heard a harsh word exchanged between them.”
He shakes his head, slightly, as if attempting to come to grips with something. I want to leap in and say… I don’t know what I want to say. Anything that might help.
But I don’t. Because I already know what I think about what happened. I’ve already put together any number of potential scenarios to explain all of this. I want to hear what he thinks. What he did.
Taio looks over at me. “I tell you all this because it came as such a deep shock to me when that diary was released. It described my parents’ marriage in terms I could not understand.
It suggested that they were people that I had never met.
I assumed that everyone would laugh it off, but that was not what happened.
” He shifts his chair and frowns, though he does not appear to be looking at anything in particular.
“I also expected it all to blow over quickly, but it has not.”
It occurs to me that it’s possible that he has never spoken about these things before either.
That maybe this is a conversation of firsts for the both of us.
I’m certain of it when he rises, but with none of that habitual elegance that I expect from him.
He simply pushes himself out of his seat and then begins to pace back and forth along the study floor.
I would have said he could never be this agitated. I am riveted.
But I don’t want him to see how riveted. I’m afraid he’ll stop.
Though he shows no signs of stopping. “I was always raised to respect my title and this family’s legacy above all things, and I did.
” He shakes his head. “I went to the finest universities in Spain. I did graduate work at Harvard and the London School of Economics, so I could better steward the estate into the future. I have always been mindful of my behavior, knowing since I was small that it does not merely reflect on me.”
Taio lets out that bitter laugh. “I was a paragon, in other words. And I was comfortable in the knowledge that my father was a man of honor before me. Only to find out that the whole world easily and fully believed the opposite of both of us.”
He paces some more, and I can feel the outrage pouring off of him.
“Because if that diary is to be believed, not only am I not worthy to be the heir to the de Luz legacy but my father was not a man of integrity. If the diary is true, he not only seduced a servant but did so with the full knowledge that she was his wife’s closest confidante.
And then he compounded these sins by allowing her to give birth to his child, passing it off as having come from his own marriage, and then banished the poor girl for her trouble. ”
I want to jump in then, to soothe him. To try to comfort him. I want to tell him that it’s the most normal thing in the world for families to be prickly and uncomfortable and sometimes downright destructive.
But somehow, I still can’t seem to speak.
“Years upon years have passed, Annagret.” Taio’s voice is raw, now. Harsh with the years of suppressed emotion. “And still the rumors persist. Yet at the same time I am of an age where I must look to securing the future of this place, if indeed it is mine to secure.”
I watch him rake a hand through his thick, dark hair, an expression of something like agony on his face that makes everything in me…something like itchy.
I have never seen him undone . I’m not certain I like it.
Or maybe what I mean is, it makes me want to rush to his side and soothe him any way I can.
“And what does your mother have to say?” I ask, past that lump in my throat. “Surely she could put an end to all of this.”
He shoots me a look that I can’t quite read. “Asking my mother to submit to some kind of blood test to prove that she is not a part of some intricate lie is the same as accusing her of participating in the squalid affair.”
“What you mean, I think, is that she has not offered to clean this up for you.”
Taio frowns at me. “You have not met my mother. She is an extraordinarily dignified woman. There is no scenario in which I will be the one to take that dignity from her.”
And I realize as I hear him say this that I’m unfamiliar with the emotion that underpins it.
Love.
He loves his mother. He doesn’t want to hurt her and, in fact, wishes to protect her. He will shoulder this forever if it will keep her from harm.
I smooth my palm over my belly again, but this time I can feel the way my own hand trembles.
“I decided I would go about getting to the bottom of this in a more roundabout way,” he tells me, and I do not ask again why he doesn’t ask his mother to take a simple test to find out the truth.
How can I? What do I know about mothers?
I suppose my life has been marked by the absence of mine, but until I got pregnant, I’m not sure I could even begin to glimpse the enormity of the loss.
But he is telling me his story. I focus on that, and not the pressure behind my eyes.
“I happened to be at an event where an acquaintance was bragging quite loudly about the benefits of having his very own private investigator on retainer so that he could immediately look into anyone who approached him. Whether it was a new lover, a business connection, or even a neighbor at one of his properties. Whatever the situation, he told me, he could always dig into their backgrounds and know precisely with whom he was dealing.”
Taio seems several degrees less agitated now, though he still paces. He thrusts his hands into the pockets of yet another perfectly cut suit. So perfectly cut, in fact, that putting his hands in his pockets in no way mars its lines.
It’s a true sartorial feat.
I tell myself that this is neither the time nor the place to admire the elegant, deeply masculine lines of his body. Much less to sit here and remember exactly how I navigated my way around those lines and licked my way—
Focus, I order myself.
“It had never occurred to me to hire an investigator,” he is saying.
“On the contrary, I rather thought that doing so would be an admission of guilt. That has not changed. I knew that if I were to be seen digging into this question, that would be seen as an answer all its own. And so I spent a lot of time researching various investigation firms, hoping that a solution might present itself to me. But all roads seemed to lead back to Miravakia Investigations. And Luc Garnier.”
“We have an excellent reputation,” I manage to say.
His gleaming gaze touches mine and then moves away, but I feel it all the same. All over me, like fire.
“You do,” he agrees, his voice intent. “I thought that what I would do is arrange to meet this Luc Garnier. Not in his offices. Not officially. But all rumors suggested that sooner or later, we would cross paths at some or other gala. Except we never did.”
“This is what made you suspicious?” I ask. “Did it never occur to you that perhaps you were simply at different events?”