in touch.”
“Goodbye, Mr. Stone.”
I watch him acknowledge Charlotte and make his way towards the lift. I turn to look at her, noticing she is craning her neck, watching him walk away.
When she sees me looking she rights herself, places her fingers on her keyboard and begins typing. On her desk is a model of the Eiffel Tower. It’s an inexpensive gift, but it appears to have found a home by her left hand.
“Where did the Eiffel Tower come from?” I ask, as if I don’t know.
“Mack brought it back from Paris,” she says, carrying on typing. “It’s a paperweight.” She takes hold of it and lifts her hand up and down, demonstrating its heaviness.
“Ah! So it is.” I leave her to finish her typing and return to the boardroom.
When I open the double doors, it’s with no small amount of trepidation. Being in possession of this knowledge puts me in a difficult position. Do I tell the authorities—if so, who? Or do I keep it as a bartering tool?
In Monsieur Duvall’s world, everything has a price.
AYDEN CAME HOME FROM work a little earlier than usual this afternoon and caught me by surprise preparing dinner; mid song he spun me around and took me in his arms like a long lost lover. I held my hands in the air not wanting to stain his jacket, and there we stood together, silently, for at least a minute.
“A bad day at the office, dear?” I enquired, in response to a long, drawn out kiss.
He sniggered. “You have no idea.”
He was right, I had absolutely no idea.
We ate dinner and talked about incidentals—my latest Internet purchases and lunch with Charlie—hoping to brighten his mood. I failed miserably. He was distracted the entire time, itching to leave the table.
Now we’re about to slip beneath the duvet a couple of hours earlier than usual, and it has nothing to do with my libido.
Something is wrong.
Maybe when we are curled up together he’ll feel more relaxed and want to talk through whatever it is he’s wrestling with
I fold myself into him, rest my hand on his heart, and bury my fingers in soft chest hair. Beneath them his chest rises and falls, interspersed with fluttering, anxious breaths.
The moment his grip tightens around me, I know he’s ready to disclose what it is that’s creating this vacuum between us—this silent, empty space.
“Are you awake?” he asks, resting his lips on my hair.
“Yes. And ready to listen.”
His breath lifts wayward strands of my hair. “You know me so well…”
“I know when you’re worried and restless.” I nestle into his chest. “Talk to me.”
He takes another anxious breath. “You know I’ve been trying to find out about my parents for most of my life. It’s been like a quest, and now that it’s ended I’m having trouble dealing with some of the revelations. I wasn’t expecting riches or royal blood, or for a red carpet to be rolled out for me—just to know the truth. That’s all I wanted.”
He raises his head, scanning the room. “We have our home and each other, and babies on the way, and none of this matters. So I don’t want you to worry or think that it will impact on our life together. None of this changes what we have.”
I tip up my head wanting to mirror the love in his cloudy sapphire eyes with my own. “I know. We’re indestructible.”
“We are.” Our lips touch, and we become a single force of nature—our unbreakable bond, written in the stars and made real here on earth, reinstated and reinforced.
“Yesterday, my mother told me a lot of things about my birth, and I don’t want to go into them now… What did come out of it all is that Monsieur Duvall isn’t my father—he has been the furthest from a father figure as you could ever imagine, not only for me, but for Sofia too.”
I gasp. “My God!”
“To look at her, you’d think she’d had the perfect life up there on the hill, but she didn’t.”
I listen intently. “What do you mean? She had more things than you and I put together…”
“Yes, but things aren’t what you need when you’re a kid.” I give him the time he needs to compose his thoughts. “She was sent away to boarding school when she was really young and, even when she came home they were seldom there, even for birthdays.”
“That’s awful.”
“It’s not the half of it. At least we have some kind of connection, but I had absolutely