One Reckless Decision: Majesty, Mistress...Missing Heir / Katrakis's Last Mistress / Princess From the Past. CAITLIN CREWS
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had taken him hours, and perhaps the sight of her dogged determination to get away from him in order to keep her secrets no matter what the cost to herself, to understand that truth, however uncomfortable it made him.
What kind of man are you?
And could he truly blame her for what she’d done, whatever she’d done? asked a ruthless inner voice. Given what she knew of him back then—a liar, a wastrel—why would she want to share a child with him? It was as his uncle had told him. He had not been a man. He had had nothing to offer any child.
“I need to know what happened,” he said quietly. He did not look at her, watching instead the blurred Parisian buildings and monuments as they sped past.
“So the answer is yes. I am your prisoner.” She let out a breath. “For how long?”
He could have said, for as long as he liked. He could have reminded her that he was a king, that he could have absolute power over her if he wished it. Instead, he turned to her and met her troubled gaze.
“Until you tell me what I want to know,” he said.
“Forever, then,” she said, her voice hollow. “You plan to hold me against my will forever.”
“When have you been held against your will?” he asked, though his voice held no heat. “I do not recall your demands to leave last night. And I did not prevent you from leaving this morning.”
“With no money,” she said bitterly. “Where was I supposed to go?”
“If you are without funds, Jessa,” he replied evenly, “you need only ask.”
“I have my own money, thank you,” she said at once, sharply.
“Then why didn’t you use it?” he asked. She sighed and dropped her gaze to her hands. Again, silence stretched between them, seeming to implicate them both.
“Isn’t this where you threaten me some more?” she asked softly, her attention directed at her lap. Yet somehow her voice seemed to tug at him. To shame him. “That you’ll tear apart my whole life, make it a living hell?”
What kind of man are you?
Tariq expelled a long breath and rubbed at his temples with his fingers. When he spoke, he hardly recognized his own voice.
“You must understand that when I say I am the last of my bloodline, I am not only talking about lines of succession and historical footnotes that will be recorded when I am gone,” he said, not knowing what he meant to say. Not recognizing the gruffness in his own voice. “I was orphaned when I was still a child, Jessa. I was not yet three. I don’t know if the little I remember of my parents is real or if I have internalized photographs and stories told to me by others.”
“Tariq.” She said his name on a sigh, almost as if she hurt for him.
“My uncle’s family was the only family I ever knew,” he said, with an urgency he didn’t entirely understand. She bit her lower lip and worried it between her teeth. “I thought I was the only one left. Until today.”
“I don’t know what you want me to say,” she whispered, her voice thick.
“Do I have a child?” he asked her, appalled at the uncertainty he could hear in his own voice. He didn’t know what he would do if she threw it back at him as he knew she could. “Is my family more than simply me?”
Her eyes squeezed shut, and she made a sound that was much like a sob, though she covered her mouth with her hand. For a long moment they sat in silence, the only sound the watery swish of traffic outside the car, and her ragged breathing. He thought she would not answer. He felt a new bleakness settle upon him. Would he never know what had happened? Would he be condemned to wonder? Was it no more than he deserved for the way he had behaved in his former life, the way he had treated her, the way he had treated himself and his family, his many squandered gifts?
But she turned her head to look at him, her cinnamon eyes bright with a pain he didn’t fully understand.
“I don’t know that I can make you feel any better about this,” she said, her voice thick and rough. “But I will tell you what I know.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
JESSA didn’t know why she had said anything, why his obvious pain had moved her so much that she broke her silence so suddenly. She hadn’t meant to say a word. And then she’d heard the raw agony in his voice and something inside had snapped. Or loosened. She had thought she might cry. Instead, she had spoken words she’d never meant to speak aloud and certainly not to him.
But the truth was, he hadn’t meant to leave her, had he? His uncle had died—his whole family had died. What was he supposed to have done? It had occurred to her, somewhere out in all the cold and wet of the Paris streets, that somewhere along the line it had become important for her to keep blaming him for leaving her because it kept the attention away from what had happened after he left. From the decisions she had made that he had had no part in. Was that what she had been hiding from?
Tariq said nothing. He only looked at her for a long moment, his gaze fathomless, and then nodded once. Definitively. She expected him to demand she tell him everything she could at once, but instead he remained silent for the rest of their short journey to his grand house. Once there, he ushered her back to the suite of rooms on the top floor that she had run from earlier. Was it to be her prison? Jessa felt too raw, too exposed, to give that question the thought she knew she should.
No sign of their long, passionate night remained in the exquisite room. The great bed was returned to its ivory-and-gold splendor, and warm lights glowed from sconces in the wall, setting off the fine moldings and Impressionist art that graced the walls. Jessa stood in the center of the room, deliberately not looking at the bed, deliberately not remembering, and swallowed. Hard.
“You will wish to clean up, I think,” Tariq said, an odd politeness in his tone as if they did not know each other. And yet, he anticipated her needs. He gestured toward the spacious dressing room that was adjacent to the palatial bathroom. “I have taken the liberty of having clothes laid out for you that will, I hope, fit.”
Jessa looked down at the sodden mess of the clothes she wore, and swallowed again, not sure she could speak. She didn’t know how to process his thoughtfulness. Perhaps he was simply tired of looking at her in such a bedraggled state. She was tired of it herself—her shoes so soaked that she could hear her toes squelch into them each time she moved. The room, for all it was large and elegant beyond imagining, seemed too close, too hushed around them. She was afraid to meet his gaze. Afraid she had opened herself up too far, and he would see too much.
Afraid that once she bared herself to him again, he would break her heart as surely and as completely as he had done before.
“There are matters that require my attention,” he said after a long moment, still in that stiff way. As if he was as nervous as she was. “I cannot put them off.”
“I understand,” she managed to say, frowning fiercely at her wet, cold shoes.
“I will return as soon as I can.” He sighed slightly and she risked looking at him. “You will wait here?”
Not run away, he meant. Not continue to keep her secrets. Stay and tell him what she’d said she would.
Share with him what should never have been a secret, what should have been theirs. Together.
“I will.” It was like a vow.
They stared at each other for a long, fraught moment. Jessa could feel her pulse beat in her ears, her throat.
He nodded to her, so stiff and formal it was like a bow, and strode from the room.
It was already evening when a diffident maid in a pressed black uniform led Jessa through the maze of the house to find Tariq. He waited for her in a cozy, richly appointed room that featured a crackling fire in