The Bride He Stole For Christmas by Caitlin Crews
CHAPTER FOUR
ITTOOK CRETEa moment or two to process that question.
He stopped moving around the graceful room she’d led him into. It gave the sense of genteel clutter and faded glory, from the arched glass windows that curved up overhead to the battered old carpets tossed this way and that across the floor. Betraying the sort of carelessness that went along with generational wealth, he thought.
It was only when your great-grandfather had carted that rug back from the mystical lands where he’d found it, and your grandmother had used it in her dressing room, that you might carry on and fling it on the floor beneath a great mess of planters.
Still, he couldn’t work up his usual disdain for these people who thought the world had been built for their pleasure. Because the books on the overstuffed shelves that lined the back wall were not the fancy hardbacks with gold embossing on the spines that he always thought looked fake. They seemed to be popular in the supposed libraries a certain sort of man always seemed to have scattered about the old stately home, though Crete had never been able to imagine a person actually using such a place for anything but attempting to intimidate.
But this room was different. It felt like Timoney.
“Is this your room?” he asked, because it had her air, somehow. Did he actually smell wildflower honey, or was he imagining it? All the books on the shelves were well read. He could see the swollen, cracked spines of thick, fat paperbacks. He picked up a battered hardcover at random and found the pages worn from turning.
This was like a view inside of her, and he had avoided that. Had gone out of his way to avoid that, in point of fact. This was an intimacy. And Crete had always preferred that his intimacies remain only and ever physical.
“My mother used to grow her favorite plants here,” Timoney told him, a distant sort of look in her eyes, as if she was looking off into a beloved past. That, too, seemed like an intimate moment. Or maybe it was that he, personally, had no experience with any past that wasn’t harsh. So much so that, any time she had attempted to talk about the parents she so clearly loved, he had prevented her. Usually by stoking the fires between them as he would have dearly liked to do now. But he did not. Because if she wished to discuss her mother, he would grit his teeth and allow her to make her mother real for him. No matter how uncomfortable it made him. “She was no gardener, but she liked to putter about with the odd herb and an occasional hardy geranium. She would play with potting soil and seeds in the sunlight and I would read.”
The look on her face was so open then. So naked. Something seized in his chest at the sight, and he told himself it was concern for her, that was all. That she should show such softness to another. That she would allow herself such recklessness and let it infect the whole of her face.
That she should let anyone see her feelings like this. Even him. Especially him.
She sniffed as she regarded him, her expression suddenly much less soft. “You haven’t answered the question.”
He looked at the shelves of books again, a vast selection of all genres with colorful covers and yellowing pages, trying to imagine Timoney here. As a small child, as young girl, as a sulky teenager. And with a mother who wanted to spend time with her—or, at least, did not actively avoid it.
The notion was like folklore. He dismissed it.
“Why am I like what?” he asked. Coolly.
He turned to face her again, and they were indoors now. This room was far brighter than the moonlight out in the garden. The lamps she’d turned on as she entered, finding them so easily in the dark that he should have known precisely how comfortable she was here, cast a buttery light all around. He had told himself, in that moment before she’d switched on the first light, that the spell would be broken. That the creature he’d seen out there in the dark was not the enchantress she’d seemed in that swirling red cloak, as much mist as moon.
But of course, in the light, it was worse.
She made his mouth go dry.
Timoney still wore her cloak, swirled around her like some kind of blanket. She pulled her feet up beneath her and she should have looked like a child, sitting there on that little couch of hers while she gazed up at him with her blue eyes so solemn.
Almost accusatory.
But she did not look like a little girl at all. Even inside, she looked as if the moon was in her hair. She was elfin, unworldly. Her blond hair was silvery as it fell about her shoulders, cascading down from two pearlescent combs. Her chin was pointed just enough to make her face the shape of a heart. And there was that perfect bow of a mouth of hers, generous and sensual, that he had tasted a thousand times. Yet he still wanted more.
He had accepted that truth, uncomfortable as it was, out there in the dark.
Or he had stopped fighting it. Surely that was the same thing.
“Everybody knows your story,” Timoney said after a moment. In a careful sort of way, as if she was choosing her words with precision. As if he required such handling.
He bristled at that notion. “Do they indeed? Am I so easily digested, then?”
“What you tell of your story, anyway,” she amended, a considering sort of look on her face. “Your mother met your father when she was very young and he was on a business trip to Athens.”
Crete would never understand why the everyday squalid details of his parents’ lives were a subject of such fascination to other people. When what mattered, to his mind, was never the hand he’d been dealt but what games he’d learned to play—and win—with those cards.
“My father had the affair,” he said now. Perhaps too brusquely. “He was married. My mother was foolish perhaps, but all she did was follow her heart. She was eighteen. He was thirty-four. I tell you this only because their age gap is always mentioned, as if it alone is what caused all the trouble.”
Timoney looked almost dreamy. “I think many people forget that eighteen feels quite worldly and grown up. To the person experiencing it.”
Crete found himself leaning back against the nearest bookshelf and thrusting his hands deep in the pockets of his trousers, because it was that hard to keep them to himself. He tried to remember other times that he and Timoney had sat about talking, but none came to mind.
Because when they were in the same room together, it had always been about that passion. About that need. He could feel it inside him, bright and greedy.
Outside, he’d intended to indulge in that passion. That greed. To use it to prove what he already knew. That she was his—whatever that meant. And that whatever happened, she certainly wasn’t going to marry a lascivious old tosser like Julian Browning-Case. He had felt certain that the best way to make his point was by reminding her exactly how good it was between them. As acrobatically as possible.
But he hadn’t gotten where he was by being unable to read a room. It was obvious to him that Timoney believed he wasn’t capable of talking. That this was a challenge.
And Crete had never backed down from a challenge.
He wasn’t about to start now.
“I do not disagree with you,” he said after a moment. “After all, I was cast out into the world at eighteen myself. No one seemed concerned about whether or not I felt ready. I was expected to be a man, therefore I was.” He lifted a shoulder, then dropped it. “But my mother had been very sheltered up until that point. She was not prepared.”
He said that with authority, though all he knew about his mother had come to him secondhand. Some of what he knew had come from the very articles he disliked, because his mother’s family had allowed reporters access they had always refused him.
Until he became so infamous the world over that they’d changed their tune. Which had allowed him to refuse them all in turn. The circle of life was a circle of spite, he had always believed. And he had never been afraid to prove it.
But somehow he did not want to express it in quite that way to this magical creature, who, unlike everyone else, never looked at him as if he was an alien. Crete normally did not care how others regarded him. He often encouraged them to imagine he was not quite human.
It was different to imagine Timoney doing the same. The notion made him...feel.
And it was an unpleasant feeling. He preferred her to regard him as if he might, in fact, be the sun.
He had come to depend on it.
“You lost her when you were two years old,” Timoney said, and though it was a statement, he could see the question in her blue gaze.
“Do you wish to tell me my own story?” he asked her. “Or are you waiting for me to tell you things it seems you already know?”
He hated that her gaze turned...sympathetic. “Do I know the real story, Crete? Does anyone?”
Crete found himself rubbing at his chest, and dropped his hand like it was lit on fire. He didn’t understand why he was indulging her like this. A challenge, yes. But as much as he didn’t walk away from challenges, he was also justly famous for changing rules he didn’t like to suit himself. What he knew was that he didn’t want her to marry tomorrow.
But why was he subjecting himself to...this?
It wasn’t that he didn’t spend his time chatting with women. Crete didn’t spend any time chatting. With anyone. At all. He knew that other men had friends. Warmer associations with others. The odd golf buddy. But he had never seen the allure in such connections.
And he didn’t particularly care for the fact that this woman had seemed to zero right in on the why of it.
Crete had always taken such pride in the idea that nobody knew him at all.
“I don’t remember her,” he told Timoney now. Because the only thing worse, to his mind, than telling her his personal details was the idea that she might think he was afraid to do it. When he was afraid of nothing. Not even the sad truth of the end of his mother’s life. Abandoned by her lover, then her family. Unable to care for her child when she was little more than a child herself. Was it any wonder she had chosen despair and drink? A slower suicide than some, but a suicide all the same. “That seems monstrous, perhaps, but as you say, she died when I was two. Her parents had disowned her when she fell pregnant.”
Timoney made a soft noise. It sounded like distress. Possibly...for him?
Crete did not attempt to parse that, or why it echoed in him like a kind of pain. He also did not permit his hand to rise again to his chest. “The legend goes like this. After burying his only daughter, my grandfather took her son to the doorstep of the man he blamed for his daughter’s dark spiral, and left him there.”
“You mean you,” Timoney said softly. “He left you there.”
“I am told this is a sad tale, but for me, I have always liked it.” Crete shrugged. “It is like the ancient Spartans, is it not? He laid me out to see if the wolves would take me. Perhaps he expected me to die. But instead, I thrived.”
As he always did. As he always would.
“Did he really leave you on a doorstep in Oslo?”
“He did.” Crete was uncomfortable. Stiff. When he had learned over time that others usually displayed signs of discomfort when he told stories about himself. It was why he’d stopped doing it a long time ago. But she had asked, had she not? Even if she looked...well. Not as uncomfortable as he felt. “Luckily it was summer. My father’s wife found me. And who can say how long I was there? I’ve heard it told many ways. An hour, perhaps, in one reckoning. Overnight, according to another. But however long it was, my father’s wife opened the door eventually. And saw before her a toddler with jet black hair and her husband’s eyes. She knew at once who I must be. And it would have been so easy to turn away, but she did not. She took me in.”
“Who would turn away from an abandoned toddler on their doorstep?” Timoney asked, shaking her head as if he’d said something funny. “I have heard you give this version of events before, you know, and I cannot understand it. As if your father’s wife was some kind of saint for...not leaving you to die.”
“Was she not? To take in her husband’s bastard? Who else would do such a thing?”
“I think it’s very human to wish to help a child.” Timoney studied him, frowning slightly, and he chose not to wonder what she saw. “And did she actually take you in?”
“That is where I lived for the next sixteen years.”
“That is where you lived, yes. And from where you were summarily ejected on your eighteenth birthday, never to return. Isn’t that right?”
He found that his jaw was so tight it actually hurt. “Yes.”
Timoney nodded as if he’d confirmed her worst fears. “Did your father’s wife take you in out of the goodness of her heart? Because she is some sainted creature? Or did she do it to rub your father’s nose in what he did?” When he didn’t respond, she blew out a breath. “A less saintly motivation, I think. And not particularly kind to the child caught in the crossfire.”
Crete did not often permit himself to descend into memories of his childhood. Because he already knew that nothing good waited there. And perhaps because of that, he had always been focused on the only thing that was ever his. His future.
“What interests me, Timoney,” he said now. And with intent. “Is that you asked me to tell you my story, did you not? And yet you are now arguing with me about it.”
“I’ve read great many articles about you.” Another woman might have flushed at that admission. But not Timoney. She kept her gaze trained on his in a manner he would have called challenging if it was anyone else. Anyone at all but this woman, who had only ever melted in his arms. He could not quite see her in any other way. He did not wish to. “And they all hit the same notes. Callous grandparents. Lost mother. The long-suffering wife who overlooked her husband’s infidelity to raise you almost as her own.”
“They all tell that story because it’s true.” She didn’t shift her gaze away at his fierce tone. Something in him thudded. Hard. “Are you suggesting that I have lied about my own history?”
And it said something—though nothing he wished to acknowledge—that he questioned himself for a moment. That she sat there looking like moonlight and the Mediterranean, and he wondered, if only for a moment, if she knew more about his childhood than he did.
“I don’t think you’re a liar,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean I think you’re telling the truth, either.”
All of this was settling on him in a way Crete could only call uncomfortable. It was because she didn’t look dazed or dizzy at the sight of him, the way she always had before. It was because she wasn’t flushed and prettily begging for his touch. Nor did she look crushed, the way she had that last night.
Instead, Timoney was looking at him coolly, as if examining a specimen.
He couldn’t say he cared for that at all.
And not only because he could not recall anyone looking at him like that in a very long while. Certainly not since he had become the Crete Asgar the world liked to whisper about in tones of awe behind the very hands they held out to him.
“Am I not?” he asked, though he didn’t want to know. But he didn’t want her to see how very little he wanted to know.
“You are closed off in every way,” she replied, her gaze intent and her voice quiet. And had she sat up straighter, like some oracle delivering bad news? “Locked up tight. If you have any emotions at all, you only let them out by having sex. Everything else is off-limits. You make money and you make love, though I doubt very much you would call it that. And that’s it. You act as if there’s nothing else to you. And that cannot be, can it? No one is so stark or uncomplicated. Especially those that pretend otherwise.”
He found he was more tense than he should have been. When normally he laughed off attempts to attack him or psychoanalyze him in turn, because his foes might as well throw stones at the moon. Yet she was not a foe. And it felt too much like her stones were landing. “You seem to believe that simple truths about me are accusations, Timoney. When perhaps what they are is a bit of wishful thinking on the part of a scorned woman, no?”
That was not exactly the smart way to play this, but the words seemed to come out of him of their own accord. As if he had somehow lost the control that had always defined him.
But instead of reacting badly to being called a scorned woman, Timoney only smiled.
As if she, elfin and unearthly, was the one in control here. An insupportable notion, but Crete did nothing to challenge it. Almost as if he...didn’t want to challenge it.
“No one is that compartmentalized,” she said after a moment.
As if she, too, expected him to do something. To challenge her, maybe. Or to do what he had always done when she’d lived with him—cross the room and get his hands on her, forestalling any possibility of a discussion. Almost as if he’d done it deliberately.
Had he?
But there was no time to answer that, thankfully, because she was considering him much too closely from her perch on the small sofa. “And if you think that you are, in fact, precisely that uncomplicated, then there’s no reason at all for you to be here. Is there? Because interfering in an ex-lover’s wedding is, I think you’ll find, the very definition of messy.”
Crete straightened from the bookshelf, but slowly. He did not take his eyes off Timoney, who was still sitting there looking innocent and unruffled as if she hadn’t set a trap and walked him right into it.
He really should have been impressed. Instead of...tense.
“I am as possessive of my money as I am about my women,” he growled at her. “If that is what you mean.”
“We both know that is not true.” She tilted her head to one side, her eyes bright. Very, very bright. “One thing I think the whole world knows about you and your many women is that you are the very opposite of possessive. Or so a great many of them have complained. In the tabloids. Repeatedly.”
“You did not.”
“I did not,” she agreed.
And he did not care for the solemn way she looked at him then.
Crete wanted to go to her. He wanted to show her exactly how possessive he was of this woman, anyway. But there was something in the cool, steady way she was regarding him that told him she expected him to do just that.
And he intensely disliked the idea that he was in any way predictable. Especially to her.
He moved away from the well-loved books toward the selection of colorful pots arranged over a thickly tiled table set before one of the great windows. The pots were all empty and the window was cold enough that he could feel it from several feet away, as if the winter was pressed against the glass. And he could not have said why it was that the sight of so many pots, empty of their supposed herbs and occasional plucky blooms, made him ache.
Crete would have claimed, before tonight, that he was incapable of aching.
“Why don’t you tell me my story, then,” he said, his voice as dark as the thick Christmas Eve outside. Because he could see her reflection in the glass before him, and the ache in him only grew. “You know it better than I do, apparently. But I must warn you, Timoney. When you’re finished, I might just return the favor.”
“I think you’re lonely,” she said, and for all her voice was soft, the words still stung. “I think your father’s wife made certain you were never comfortable in her home. She made sure you were always made to feel different. Always her charity case. Always expected to be grateful for the crumbs of her affection.”
“You are mistaken.” His gaze was on the collection of empty pots before him. A blue one in particular, with leftover dirt clinging to the clay. And he reminded himself that he was relaying facts, that was all. Only the facts. “There were no such crumbs. There was no affection.”
“She strikes me as a deeply bitter woman who kept you so she might better punish her straying husband. And it’s striking to me that you never speak of him. The man who abandoned your mother, did not claim you until he had no other option, and was happy enough to see the back of you when his wife determined that she had done enough of her duty.”
“He is a weak man, yes.” He ran a finger over the raised edge of the pot’s wide mouth. Once. Again. He did not think of his tall, blond, disinterested father. Because what point was there in it? “But surely that goes without saying. Look at what he did.”
“But how does it feel, Crete?” Timoney asked in the same devastatingly quiet way. “You’re a grown man now. You’ve gone to such trouble to make your way in the world. And I know it’s a story you tell, but how does it feel? How did it feel when you were just a kid and treated differently than your half siblings?”
He turned toward her then, incredulous. “What does it matter how it felt? Feelings don’t change anything.”
They had never changed anything. Not his cold childhood, always given less than his brother and sister. Not nothing, but less. So that no one could ever forget that he was not the same as them.
Their father had never intervened. He had never spoken to Crete at all, if he could help it. And whatever his wife did or said, he supported it.
Crete had felt a great deal about all of that, at the time. And those feelings had done nothing but make his misery the worse.
It was when he’d ignored what he felt and concentrated on what he could do that everything had changed. Not his situation. Not his tormentors. But his reactions to them.
Change yourself and you change the world, he liked to tell himself.
He was living proof.
“Feeling is who we are,” Timoney was saying, her voice...intense.
“I prefer facts.”
“All facts tell us is what happened,” she retorted. “Not what it was like.”
“I do not wish to remember what it was like.” And the words seemed to come from somewhere inside him he would have sworn wasn’t there. Because he’d torn it out a lifetime ago and filled it with other, better things, like the infinite pleasures of the flesh. Still, he kept his distance from Timoney, with her elfin face and too much wisdom in her eyes like the sea. “Why would I want to remember such things? I already lived through it once.”
She only waited, and he didn’t understand what was happening. The woman he’d taken as his mistress had given him her innocence, and everything after that had been an exercise in yielding. The softness and sweetness of it, all her smiles and surrenders.
Had she always been this way underneath? How had he failed to notice it before now?
Crete wanted to go. Now. If he was king of anything, it was a well-timed retreat before coming back harder. Stronger.
He had the strangest sensation that he was out of his depth here, with her—
But he refused to indulge such nonsense.
He refused to indulge any of this nonsense.
“It is as you say,” he told her, his voice rougher than before. “My father’s wife used me to bludgeon him. An effective weapon, I think, as there is no evidence he ever strayed again. Meanwhile, my mother’s grim legend of a father died when I was ten. And any notion I might have nurtured, that the other members of my mother’s family might take a softer approach to my existence, was quickly extinguished. For they blamed me as much for his death as for hers.”
She breathed something. He thought it was his name.
“Do you wish me to tell you that it was a bitter childhood? Lonely years spiced up only by disdain and contempt?” He laughed, and jerked his chin to take in this room they stood in, still warm from the very different childhood she’d had. “Unlike you, I have nothing to compare it to. And those years made me who I am today, Timoney. How can I resent them?”
“But you do,” she said quietly, frowning at him. “Deeply, I think.”
“You’re mistaken.”
He didn’t mean to move. He didn’t know it when he did. All Crete knew was that one moment he’d been across the room and the next he stood above her, staring down at where she sat—looking as wildly innocent as the night he’d first touched her.
Maybe he should have known then that she would be a terrible problem.
“This is why I do not tell the real story of how it was,” he gritted down at her. At that lovely face of hers that had haunted him across two full months. And half a year before that. “This is what happens. Softhearted, emotional people like yourself imagine that they must infuse it all with pathos. With incurable grief. While for me, those years were an opportunity. A crucible, if you will. I survived them, I became me, and if anything, I am grateful to my father and his wife and even my bitter old grandfather, for making certain that I never, ever succumb to the petty emotions of the human heart.”
But as he watched too much emotion fill her blue gaze, then, nothing about it felt petty at all.
“And the only reason you could possibly be here is that you don’t like sharing your toys, is that what you’re trying to tell me?” Her voice was little more than a whisper, her sea-colored eyes luminous. “That’s not a very good reason, is it?”
He wanted to rage at her that she was no toy. That if she was a mere toy, he would have forgotten her as surely and as quickly as the rest.
“We’ll get to that in due time,” Crete promised her, grimly. But inside him, a different kind of storm brewed. Electric and more than a little mad. “But first, little one, let us speak of you.”