‘If you’re into labels, he ticked all the boxes of a narcissist, a malignant narcissist.’ He offered up the information in a curiously emotionless voice. ‘He was an expert at manipulation. He became incredibly vindictive whenever he felt threatened by literally any decision my mother made without him. He took it as a personal affront and he responded by belittling her, and undermining her confidence until she was utterly dependent on him. His jealousy was totally toxic—’
‘Coercive control,’ she said, remembering an article she had read about the subject.
His dark brows lifted. ‘I believe that is the term, yes.’
‘But your mother escaped.’
‘Yes, she escaped love, but she is a remarkably strong woman and not everyone would have been so lucky.’
Did he even realise what he had said? she wondered. Did he know how revealing his choice of words was? For Roman love was clearly something you escaped from, a trap. That seemed very sad to her, as did the suspicion that her own deception had probably played some part in setting this view of his in concrete.
As she struggled against a fresh wave of guilt she became belatedly aware that while he spoke she had turned towards him until she now faced him, her legs still tucked underneath her, the arm she placed along the back of the sofa stretched out so that her position mirrored his, their fingertips almost touching.
As surreptitiously as she could manage she slowly retracted her arm at the same time as she unfolded her legs and placed her bare feet on the floor, and she swivelled around so that she sat shoulder to shoulder against him.
‘A pity that there is no DNA test for being a bad father. Some men should not have children.’
His pronouncement had a hard uncompromising note in it that made her twist back towards him. His earlier comments about being more like his father than his brother floated to the surface in her memory and she realised that he was really talking about himself, that it was Roman’s inner fear that he would hurt those he loved as his father had.
A hundred images flashed through her mind before she accepted the truth—he did love Jamie. He might be the most aggravating, stubborn, difficult man she had ever met but Roman was no monster.
‘You are nothing like the man you have described to me.’ She caught the flash of some emotion in his face as their eyes connected and consciously lowered the tone of her voice before she added carefully, but firmly, ‘If you were I wouldn’t be here. I’ve already told you that if I thought you being around Jamie would harm him, I would build a fifty-foot-high wall to keep you out.
‘I was close to my father,’ she volunteered, not aware that her own expression softened as she spoke. ‘But there were only the two of us.’
‘Your mother died?’
‘My mother walked out on us soon after I was born,’ she revealed with a casualness that to Roman’s watchful eyes seemed too contrived. As if she still carried the invisible scars of the rejection but would die before she’d show it. ‘She didn’t like being a mother because she felt it “crushed her vitality”.’
He didn’t need to see quotation marks painted in the air to know she was directly quoting her mother. They were words that should have had a crushing impact, but her expression was serene. True, there was a sadness in her smile, but there was no discernible resentment that he could detect.
He thought about the extensive file headed ‘Marisa Rayner’ that remained unopened on his laptop.
Why commission something and not make use of it? He had fully intended to but in the short intervening time between requesting an in-depth report on Marisa’s life and it dropping into his email inbox something had changed.
He had been reluctant to admit it. He’d told himself that he was too busy to read it, that he wasn’t in the right frame of mind to view it objectively, he was too angry or too tired... But his inventive powers had eventually deserted him and he was left with only the truth, which was that he still wanted to know all about her, but he wanted her to volunteer the information.
‘She actually said that to you?’
‘Gracious, no...’ She flashed him a small smile, and in the semi-light her eyes made him think of pools of liquid gold.
‘Well, I suppose she might have,’ Marisa conceded, oblivious to his discomfort. ‘But as I was two months old the last time we met in person, I don’t really recall.’
Did the joking response hide a multitude of hurt, he wondered, or was she really as all right with being rejected as she sounded?
‘Actually she wrote me a letter when she left, for me to read when Dad thought I was old enough.’ It wasn’t the letter that had hurt, it was what she had discovered when she’d wanted to find out more about her mother, when her seventeen-year-old self had wondered if perhaps they could be friends as adults.
When she had found her mother online she had discovered that the woman who’d felt unable to be her mother was now remarried and was the mother to three step-children as well as a child of her own, Marisa’s half-sister.
No, they could never be friends.
She levelled her clear gaze on Roman’s face and thought about the demons he would never reveal, let alone allow her near enough to help him move past. And she wanted to help him, she wanted... Shock filtered into her eyes as she stilled, and everything inside her seemed to stop as the truth hit her.
She loved Roman; she had when he’d proposed to her, but she had taken refuge from the truth, telling herself it was just physical because the reality was too painful to own—the fact that she’d had to walk away from the only man she had ever
