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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 mymayordomo, Salma,” Taio says.