He brought her hand to his lips and pressed a slow kiss to her knuckles. To the ring she wore on her right hand. “No reason to be sorry. If he’d been less determined to forge me in a fire of his choosing, we would have had something resembling a normal relationship.” His tone took on a wistful note. “We both loved her. There was no damn reason that I had to be left squirreling away evidence of her existence in that house like a damn smuggler. We should have been able to remember her together—to have a bond because of shared loss.” Beckett shook his head. “But that’s a child’s plea. It doesn’t matter anymore.”
She stared at the seat in front of them. The white leather was stitched together with gold thread, a reminder that Lydia was a King, and had been raised with the same playbook Nathaniel had. There was such a thing as a bad egg, but Samara wasn’t blind enough to her boss’s faults to assume that was the case in this situation.
She very determinedly set thoughts of Lydia aside and focused on the here and now. “I never got the chance to know my father.”
“I’m sorry.”
She pressed her lips together. “Oh, he’s not dead. He lives in Dallas with his wife and three daughters.”
Beckett’s thumb paused before it resumed its path on the back of her hand. “Ah.”
Samara had expected his sympathy to sting, to feel like pity, but there was a deep understanding in that single word. A kinship. It was enough to keep her talking, digging into the past and that soul wound she’d never quite gotten to the other side of despite so many years of trying. “He and my amma met in college. He was handsome and rich and from a prominent Indian family with a long and honorable history. It was love, at least on her side of things.” She glanced down at the ring on her right hand. “Maybe it was even love on his side as well. He proposed—a secret engagement that they didn’t tell either of their families about. But love has never been enough. I don’t know which version of the story is more tragic—that he played my amma and as soon as she got pregnant he lost interest in the game and moved on. Or that he really loved her, but was too weak to stand up to his family when they demanded he break off the engagement.”
“Shit, Samara.”
She kept going because to stop now was to leave the story unfinished. If she didn’t keep talking, she might never start again. “Her family disowned her when they found out she was pregnant. Spurned by the blessed Patel family and pregnant with a bastard child? Unacceptable.” Some days she put serious thought into tracking down her amma’s parents just to prove to them what horrible people they were for leaving their daughter to hang in the wind. Ultimately, though, they didn’t matter any more than her sperm donor did.
She laced her fingers through Beckett’s, not looking at him because even if he understood, she couldn’t risk seeing pity in his eyes. “She gave up her future so that I could have one. She worked her ass off under god-awful conditions to make sure I never went without. This…” She motioned at everything and nothing. “I can’t fail, because if I fail then I’m failing her.”
“And the ring?”
Of course he’d noticed the ring. She stared at it, at the simple gold band and the shiny emerald that she’d always loved as much as she’d hated. “My amma kept the ring he proposed with. She let me take it when I graduated. I think she wanted it to be an apology of sorts, even if it wasn’t my father doing the apologizing. I wear it because it’s a reminder of what’s at stake.”
“Have you ever thought about trying to meet him?”
She shook her head even as her stomach dropped. “No. He hasn’t shown any interest in my life up to this point. Even if I could forgive him for what he did to my amma—and I can’t—then what respect do I have for a man who hasn’t been there for thirty-two years? No.” She shook her head again, more firmly this time. “He’s not worth the time we took for this conversation, let alone the effort it would require to attempt a meeting.”
“Monster fathers and saintly mothers.” He squeezed her hand. “See, I told you we had plenty in common.”
Samara loved him, just a little, in that moment. For dispelling the tension, for taking her messy past without pointing out all the holes in her ambition. For just…being there. If she didn’t think too hard about it, she could lean on this man when the world became too heavy to bear.
They could lean on each other.
Dangerous, tempting thoughts.
For the first time, she didn’t shove them away as soon as they entered her mind. Instead, she turned them over, examining them from every angle. Beckett wasn’t her father—he wasn’t his father, either. Samara was most definitely not a college student with no power of her own. Were they equals in the world’s eyes? No. Definitely not.
But if they were equals—really equals—when they were together, then who cared what anyone else’s opinion was?
“Take me out tonight, Beckett.”
He shifted to face her, still holding her hand. “Anywhere you want to go.”
“I don’t want to pick. Surprise me. A real date.”
His slow grin had her stomach doing a somersault. “Consider it done—on one condition.”
Give him the benefit of the doubt. She took a steadying breath. “Okay. What condition?”
“For the night, we’re not Samara Mallick and Beckett King. It’s you and me as we are—none of the other bullshit.”
It wasn’t as easy as that, but the picture he presented was still so incredibly attractive. She
