His laugh was a soft rumble. ‘No wonder you never met a boy you liked,’ he teased. ‘Who could live up to me?’
It was a joke, but Emmeline was falling back in time, her mind tripping over those painful years in her life.
She covered the direction of her thoughts with a flippant response. ‘Who indeed?’
‘I thought at the time that it was strange you were still at school. Your mother had just passed away, and yet you were carrying on with your life...’
‘People handle grief in different ways,’ she said softly. ‘I needed to be around friends. The familiar. Sophie was a godsend.’
‘How come you’ve never told your father what you know about Patrice’s death?’
She looked up at him, her eyes awash with emotions. A part of him—the part of him that wanted his wife to be happy and at ease—felt he should back off. But the rest of him—the part that so desperately needed answers—pushed on with his line of enquiry.
‘He thinks you believe she simply crashed.’
‘She did crash.’ Emmeline’s smile was tight, her tone dismissive.
‘But she drove into that tree on purpose.’
‘Probably drunk,’ Emmeline said, with the anger she tried so hard to keep a tight rein on taking over for a moment.
She stepped away from Pietro, pacing towards the window that overlooked the city. Her eyes studied its beautiful glow but she hardly saw it.
‘Why do you say that?’
‘Because she was always drunk at the end.’ Emmeline bit down on her lip but the words were bubbling out of her almost against her will.
Pietro frowned. ‘Your father has never mentioned that. There was no hint of it in the media.’
‘Of course there wasn’t,’ Emmeline said wearily. ‘Daddy controls the local press, for the most part. And the coroner’s office.’
Emmeline spun around to face Pietro, bracing her back against the glass window behind her.
‘If she’d hit another car, hurt someone, then I don’t think even Daddy would have been able to keep it hushed up. But as it was only Mom died, and no one could have gained anything from seeing our family name disgraced.’ She swallowed, her throat a slender pale column that was somehow so vulnerable Pietro ached.
‘How do you know about her drinking?’ Pietro murmured.
Emmeline swallowed, looking away. Years of silence kept her lips glued shut even now.
‘How do you know?’ he insisted, staring at her lowered face, waiting for her to speak.
‘Because she couldn’t hide it towards the end. She was a drunk. A mean drunk,’ she added quietly.
Pietro’s eyes narrowed. ‘Mean, how?’
Emmeline expelled a shaking sigh. ‘Just mean.’
‘To you?’ he prompted.
‘Of course. With Daddy away at the Capitol for much of the time, I was the only one around to be mean to. Well, other than the servants—but they were paid well and put up with it.’ Emmeline swallowed back the sting of tears and pressed her palms to her eyes. ‘I could never do anything right by her.’
She shook her head angrily.
‘Everything about me offended her. Especially as I got older. I remember there was one dinner and Congressman Nantuckan made some throwaway comment about how beautiful I was, that I was going to be every bit as pretty as my mom when I grew up. I must have been all of twelve. He was probably just being kind,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘But Mom was furious. Furious. As though I’d planned some elaborate betrayal and laced her dinner with cyanide.’
A dark and displeasing image was forming for Pietro, but he took care not to react visibly. ‘What did she do?’
‘Nothing. Not straight away, anyhow. Mom would never show her hand publicly. But once everyone left she pulled all the clothes out of my wardrobe. She told me I was on the right track to becoming an A-grade whore if I didn’t watch out. She—’
Emmeline gasped as a sob escaped her, and lifted a hand to her mouth to block it.
‘I’m so sorry,’ she said, shaking her head desperately. ‘I never talk about this! But I’ve ripped off the Band-Aid and I don’t seem able to stop...’
‘I don’t want you to stop,’ he assured her, fighting the urge to close the distance between them. He wanted to comfort her, but he suspected that it would cause her to stop sharing, and he desperately wanted to understand more about her life.
She nodded, but her hands were shaking, and finally Pietro gave up on maintaining his distance. He walked to the bar and poured a stiff measure of Scotch, then carried it to his wife. She curled her fingers around it, sniffed it before taking a tiny sip. Her face contorted with disgust and she passed the glass straight back.
‘Yuck.’
His smile was indulgent, but impatience burned inside him. ‘You were twelve, and on the cusp of changing from a girl into a young woman...?’ he prompted.
She nodded, pulling at the necklace she always wore.
‘She couldn’t stand that. When I was young she was such an attentive, affectionate mother. We were very close. But from around ten or eleven, as I shot up and started to develop a more mature body... Mom saw it as some kind of act of defiance. She started to see me as competition, hated the time I spent with Daddy. When people came to the house she’d send me to my room. I wasn’t allowed to wear anything that drew attention to myself. Cosmetics were forbidden. So was dying my hair or having it cut into a style.’
‘Yet you were still beautiful,’ he said softly. ‘And anyone would have been able to see that.’
Emmeline’s eyes met his with mockery. ‘You didn’t. You specifically told me that I didn’t look good enough to be your wife.’
He groaned—a sound of deep regret. He had said that. ‘Emmeline, I saw you as a teenager. I wasn’t thinking straight the night you came to my office. And, if anything, I suppose I was...annoyed.’
‘Annoyed?’ she prompted.
‘Si. Annoyed that you went to
