Beside him, Sophie sighed and tunneled her fingers through her hair, dragging the strands away from her face and offering him an even more unencumbered view of her clean, elegant profile. A small frown wrinkled the smooth skin between her eyebrows.
“Deserve?” she mused almost to herself. She shook her head. “I don’t agree with that. While I do believe in the truth and that people have the right to be aware of events that affect their welfare and lives, they aren’t owed pieces of a person’s security, peace or soul. Each of us should have the right to privacy, and we don’t need anyone’s permission to covet it or request it. And this is from a reporter.” She lightly snorted, again shaking her head. Pausing, she took another swipe of the ice cream, and her tone became more thoughtful than irritated. “My parents divorced when I was almost thirteen, and it was... Well, unpleasant would be an understatement. The nasty arguing and name-calling had been bad enough. But they saw me as an ally to be wooed, a prize to be won in a contest. And they attempted this by competing in who could tell me the foulest, most humiliating things about the other. How my father cheated or how my mother had sent them to the poorhouse with her spending. So many things a child shouldn’t be privy to, especially about her parents.
“But they twisted the truth about each other in this acrimonious and desperate need to make the other appear as horrible as possible. Never realizing how they were slowly picking me apart ugly word by ugly word. Because all I heard was how it was my fault they were divorcing. My father cheated. That just meant he was so unhappy at home with me for not doing better in school or being a pest at home that he went somewhere else to find happiness. Or if my mother spent too much money, it was on me because I asked for too much.”
She inhaled a breath, and he caught the slight tightening of her hold on the cone. After several seconds, she released a trembling but self-deprecating chuckle.
“Sophie...”
But she interrupted him with a wave of her hand. “No, I know none of that is true. Now, anyway. But back then...” Her voice trailed off, but seconds later, she lifted a slim shoulder in a half shrug. “They made my teenage years hell, but I should thank them. Because of all that, plus the shuffling back and forth to different homes, never feeling truly rooted or secure, I made sure that I would be able to stand on my own two feet as an adult. That no one would ever have the power or ability to ever rip the rug out from under me again. They also directed me on the path to my career. They fueled my desire to filter facts from half-truths or fiction. And, when it was called for, to shield the innocent from it.”
He digested that in silence. “Which is why you didn’t print the rumors about me having a daughter in the article,” he added.
She nodded, not looking at him. “Yes. I know what you think of me, Joshua, but I wouldn’t deliberately smear someone’s name or hurt them. Not without all the facts that can be backed up and confirmed beyond doubt. Am I perfect? No. But I try to be.”
He licked the melting ice cream in his hand, warring within himself about how much he could share with Sophie. Why he shouldn’t share. But after her baring some of her chaotic childhood, he owed her. Still...
“Off the record?” he murmured.
She jerked her gaze to him, and in the dove-gray depths he easily caught the surprise. And the flicker of irritation. As if annoyed that he’d ask. But as lovely as she was, as honest as she’d been with him, he couldn’t forget who she was. What she was.
“Of course,” she said, none of the contrasting emotions in her eyes reflected in her voice.
“Of course,” he repeated softly, staring down at her. What the hell are you doing? he silently questioned his sanity, but then said, “I deserve their censure because of my life before my father decided to screw us all six ways to Sunday. Mine was charmed. I won’t say perfect, because in hindsight, it wasn’t. Nothing is. But for me, it was close. My brothers and I—we didn’t have to want for anything. Not material, financial or emotional. Dad was always busy building Black Crescent into one of the foremost hedge funds, but Mom? She’d been there, attentive, supportive, loving. We weren’t raised by an army of servants, even though we did have them. But Mom—and even Dad to an extent—had been involved. We attended one of the most exclusive and premier prep schools in the country and, later, Ivy League universities. I knew who I was and what I wanted to be. I never had doubts back then. I held the world in my palm and harbored no insecurities or fears that I could have it all.”
“I always wondered about that,” Sophie said, that intuitive and insightful gaze roaming his face. “If you faced any backlash or disapproval from your father for choosing art over the family business.”
Why the hell am I talking about this? He never discussed his art or his career ambitions. A pit gaped in his chest, stretching and threatening to swallow him whole with the grief, disillusionment and sense of failure that poured out. Those dreams were dead and buried with a headstone to mark the grave.
Forcing the memories and the words past his tightening throat, he barely paused next to a garbage can and pitched his cone into it. He couldn’t talk about this and even consider eating. Not with his gut forming a rebellion at just the unlocking of the past.
“From my mother, no. Like I said, she supported me from the very first. When I was a child, she enrolled
