by Dani Collins
“Well, aren’t you charmingly naive?” Val’s mother had been Nikolai Mylonas’s long-suffering mistress right up until the day Niko had married Paloma. Val didn’t know if she had poked holes in condoms or if his father had misjudged her desire to preserve her figure, but Evelina had turned up pregnant about the time Nikolai’s bride had conceived. Val had been a deliberate effort on Evelina’s part to stake a claim on Niko’s fortune, but Niko had had two sons by two different women two days apart.
The war over rights of succession had raged ever since.
“Your mother said that my having your baby would ruin your life as well as my own and that I should never contact her again,” Kiara said somberly. “But she must have called Niko because Scarlett called me a few hours later and turned up the next day. She talked me into coming to Greece to meet him.”
Ah, Scarlett. His father’s infinitely polite and pathologically single-minded enforcer.
“Niko was in treatment and said both his sons had turned his back on him. He wanted an heir and said your child would do nicely. He offered to build me a studio. It was an offer I didn’t want to resist, but the most compelling reason I stayed was simply that he was Aurelia’s family. I wanted to give her that. I won’t say he was doting or openly loving, but he was proud of her in his way. It seemed like the right thing to do.”
“You thought it was morally correct to let him into her life even though he kept you from telling me. Her father.”
“For all I knew, you knew and didn’t care!” she said with a spark of temper. “The way you’ve reacted so far has only reinforced that Niko was right. You would have pressured me to take sides.”
“You did take a side. His.”
“I see it as taking turns.” Her strident tone came down a few notches. “Niko’s time was finite. Having Aurelia in his life brought him a sense of peace in his last days.”
“How nice for him.”
“You knew he was sick! You could have come at any time and would have learned you had a daughter.”
“Is that his oversimplified rationalization or yours? Dad knew I wouldn’t come and so did Scarlett. That logic doesn’t wash.”
“Why did you hate him so much?” she asked with bafflement.
He might have withstood the comparisons to his brother, the harsh punishments and the constant demands for good, better, best. What Val could never forgive was Niko overriding the complaint Val had made against the school’s administration. Niko had had the entire thing dismissed as ‘troublemaking’ on Val’s part so it was swept under the rug.
Val had never felt so helpless and furious in his life. So abandoned. Out of sheer desperation, he’d begun a campaign of unrelenting fighting and pranks and drinking until the school had had to throw him out for good.
“Why the hell did you like him? Why did you think he deserved time with my daughter more than I did?” It incensed him to imagine his father basking in the satisfaction of stealing those moments and milestones from Val.
“He was dying.” Her voice softened to a plea. “He was diagnosed right before... Venice. I know he didn’t tell you that at the time. When I met him, though, he was quite sick. Weak and scared. I didn’t plan to stay in Greece, but I couldn’t leave.”
“I’m sure it was a difficult choice.”
“It wasn’t greed,” she cried.
“Oh, I don’t blame you for taking whatever incentives he offered,” he assured her. “If he hadn’t gotten you with the honey of money, he would have moved on to more aggressive and oppressive methods.” He moved behind the bar to select a bottle of whiskey. “That’s the sort of man I remember and I know he was. Controlling. Demanding.”
If you leave, you’re taking your mother with you. I won’t support her. That will be up to you so button your lip and appreciate the education you’re being given.
“I rejected his fortune, so I didn’t have to bow to him the way you have. You think I don’t see him in all of this?” He drew a circle around the conservative ensemble and the way she was justifying actions that were unjustifiable. “He kept you on the island like a goat in a petting zoo.”
“That’s not the way it was!”
From a man who had compared his sons—and women!—the way a horse breeder spoke of stallions?
“It was. It’s adorable you think his interest was his grandchild, but he was getting back at me for marrying Tina against his wishes. Any ‘peace’ he was exhibiting in his last days was the gloating knowledge of the kick in the shorts he would deliver to me today.”
“How is this a kick in the shorts? You didn’t want his money.”
“I don’t.” Val’s best day ever had been his final one at boarding school, when suspension had finally turned to expulsion. He had told his father to stuff his fortune and had sought out Javiero for a final, Have it all. You need it more than I do.
Javiero had needed it. His mother’s family had been in dire straits, and resolving their issues had fallen on Javiero’s young shoulders. But Javiero possessed his own set of faults and one of them was pride. Val had known it would grate on his brother to win by default. It would soil any sense of achievement for him that Val had forfeited.
True to form, Javiero hadn’t been able to stand it. He had subsequently rejected Niko’s support and clawed his way to the top under his own steam, proving some point that escaped Val, but he had never expended much energy trying to work out what it could be.
“Niko told me once that he regretted how he handled things with your mothers,” Kiara said in a conciliatory tone. “He wished he had fought harder for a better relationship with you both.”
The top of his head nearly came off, but Val ignored the fresh knife into an old wound.
“If he had wanted a better relationship with us, he shouldn’t have used his last act to set us at odds yet again.” In the absence of being able to express his disgust at a dead man, he pointed accusingly at Kiara. “And you shouldn’t have stood by him and kept me in the dark all this time.”
“What do you want? An apology? You were married. As far as I can tell, you left me in your bed to go propose to your future wife.” Her hand flung out with agitation.
“I spoke to her father.” He dismissed that with a roll of his shoulder.
“Either way, it was clear you and I didn’t have a future.” Angry hurt flashed into her expression. “Being paid for my services didn’t make me think, Gee, I bet he can’t wait to raise a child with me. I’d better tell him straightaway. Your mother—”
“Wait. Stop.” He held up a hand. “I left you money for the sketch I took.”
“Sure. All right.” Her jaw was clenched, but offset. She turned away to hide what might have been a frown of insult. Humiliation?
A lurching sensation in his chest pulled a sickening roil from the bottom of his stomach. His conscience was so small he barely wore it at all anymore, but there were some lines he didn’t cross. Sex was very much a freely-given-or-not-at-all thing for him.
“You knew I wanted that sketch,” he reminded her harshly. “How did my leaving money for it turn into you thinking I was paying you for sex?”
Her face darkened as she flung around to confront him. “I told you I usually got thirty or forty euros. You left me five hundred.” Her eyes glittered with shame. “For something you probably threw away a week later.”
“That’s why you didn’t take the money? You didn’t think you were worth that much?”
He was talking about her work, but a flash of stark vulnerability seemed to hollow out her soul before she crossed her arms and turned back to the window.
“Obviously, I came to regret that,” she muttered.
When? Before or after she had become beholden to his father?
He poured the whiskey he’d mostly forgotten, moodily trying to assimilate this new information.
“How m
uch are you getting these days? For your artwork,” he clarified when she stiffened.
Silence, then a reluctant, “A few hundred, but they’re fully finished oils. The one in the lobby was nearly two thousand, but that was nepotism on Niko’s part. Most haven’t sold yet. They’ve gone to my agent for my show.”
“At a gallery? Where?”
“Paris. In three weeks.” She mentioned the name, watching him for a reaction as he approached with the drinks. “My agent booked it ages ago,” she added as she took the glass he offered. “When we thought Niko had more time and before Scarlett—Right.” She shifted to set aside her glass. “I can’t drink. Scarlett might need me. In fact, I should keep my phone out so I don’t miss another call.”
* * *
Kiara used the search for her phone as an excuse to put distance between her and Val, still taking in that he hadn’t paid her for sex. It was yet another brick in her wall of defenses that had crumbled to powder, leaving her feeling in the wrong, but what choices had been right back then?
Her phone was annoyingly empty of notifications, not that she typically had many. On Niko’s request, she had closed her social media accounts when she had moved to Greece. Aside from emails from her agent, she typically only exchanged a few texts with Scarlett or the nannies and only when she was too lazy to walk from her studio back into the villa.
“That’s a good gallery.” Val poured her rejected drink into his own before he took up her spot by the window. “Who’s your agent?”
She told him and told herself she was only gazing on his male form as an artist, but seriously, the way his jeans hugged his butt was sublime.
“Dad really came through for you,” Val said derisively as he sipped.
She squirmed internally. Niko had, and his leg up contributed to her feeling like a fraud, not that she wanted to hand that weapon to Val.
She looked at the shoes Niko had bought her. She hadn’t liked taking all these things. She hadn’t felt entitled to live like royalty and had been aware that doing so put her in a beholden state to Niko’s implacable wishes.
The studio and agent and standard of living had all been cherries, though. The real draw had been the connection to her child’s family. Val had been out of reach and his mother hadn’t wanted her grandchild to exist, but Niko had wanted his granddaughter to be part of his life.
Kiara hadn’t been able to turn her back on that request, not when she’d spent almost her whole life without any blood ties of her own.
As for Aurelia...
“Sit on your high horse if you like, Val, but when Niko learned I was pregnant, his first reaction was to offer support. Yours was to call me a gold digger and say you didn’t want to hear your own child’s name. Do you want to be a father?” She brought her head up, never comfortable in confrontation, but she refused to be cast as a villain. “Or do you just want to judge me for the choices I’ve made as a mother? Does all this anger you’re spewing have anything to do with me and Aurelia? Or is it actually unresolved issues with a man who is dead?”
Val might have stiffened, but a dark smile of warning crept across his face. “Do you really want to psychoanalyze me, Kiara? You’ll be swimming with sea monsters.”
“I really want to know.” She picked up a cushion and hugged it, running her fingers over the silky tassels, dimly aware of the betraying body language in using it as a shield, hugging it the way Aurelia hugged her bear, but she needed something to bolster her. “Would you like me better if I’d relied on your money all this time instead of your father’s? Should I have scraped by in low-end jobs to prove that I’m, what? Above needing help? Would noble suffering on my part neutralize your disgust in me?”
“It would be a start.” So disparaging and sanctimonious.
“Do you know what disgusts me?” She threw the cushion back onto the leather sofa. “That you had the luxury of rejecting your father and his money and did. Is your mother difficult to live with? Mine’s dead. Try hearing that at nine years old.”
She hadn’t meant to reveal that. It was her own very deep, very private anguish, but she refused to be slotted into his pigeonhole of “greedy sycophant.”
“I was given a bed in a room with three other girls and a single drawer to hold what I’d been allowed to take from my home. For the rest of my childhood, I wore used clothes from a box that arrived four times a year. I wasn’t good in school and I’m terrible at sports. I’m not outgoing, I don’t sing well and I didn’t put out. The few friends I made were as miserable as I was and moved on as soon as they could, distancing themselves from everything about that life, including me.”
He wasn’t moving, not even drinking, only watching her as though weighing every word, turning each one over, inspecting it for lies.
“But I had my art.” Her voice shook with the emotion she couldn’t suppress. “Charcoal doesn’t care if you stink like a deep-fat fryer. I worked awful jobs for awful people and lived in squalor and it never mattered because my sketch pad was my door to a better world. When you left me that money, I stared at it for a full thirty minutes before I decided it was a line I couldn’t uncross.”
“It was for the sketch,” he reiterated, swirling his drink before he took a gulp.
“When I found out I was pregnant, I didn’t care what you had paid me for,” she admitted. “I just wished I’d taken it.” She hugged herself as she recalled those bleak days as she had tried to figure out a future that wouldn’t result in being labeled an unfit mother. “My life had always been hard. I knew I would plod along one way or another, maybe see what I could get for those sketches I had of you, but your father made me an offer that meant I could give Aurelia the kind of future that would never include bedbugs and pervy landlords. If I died, she would always have something. Doesn’t your daughter deserve to live comfortably? Am I really a villain for giving her the very best start in life that was available to me?”
She was shaking and he was only staring at her with that cynical curl of disdain at the corner of his mouth.
* * *
“If you knew how many sob stories and rationalizations I’ve heard out of my mother in my lifetime,” Val drawled, throwing a healthy sting of whiskey into the back of his throat. He was trying to keep himself from swallowing all that she’d said. “The bit about wanting what’s best for your child? I’ve seen that episode more times than I can count.”
Kiara sucked in a pained breath as if he had physically struck her. She blinked. Rapidly. She had already been looking shaken enough to make it seem as though relaying the story of her deprived childhood had been difficult. And real. Now her eyes welled.
“I need the ladies’ room,” she choked.
Val frowned as she rushed away.
Tears were meant to be displayed, to sell him on how hurtful he’d been with his scathing dismissal so he would believe she’d been pouring real heartache onto the floor. That’s what his mother would have done.
Something wobbled in his chest as he watched her go, especially when she didn’t add an enticing roll of her hips, as some women might, to cloud his head.
He tried to loosen his tie only to discover he wasn’t wearing one.
Don’t fall for it, he warned himself. She was the enemy. Exactly like the rest of the people he called “family.”
Then why had she left the money that night?
He kept coming back to that, especially in light of what she’d said a few minutes ago.
At the time, he’d seen her leaving the money as a charming gesture, as though she had gifted him with the memory of their night by letting him have the sketch without payment.
Of course, he had fully expected her to be compensated once she sold his nudes, but as far as he could tell, she never had. Not even to support their child—although that would likely have revealed to the public her child was his, so he could see why she might have balked.
I stared at it for a full thirty minutes before I decided it was a line I couldn’t uncross.
If she was as mercenary as his mother, and as cold-bloodedly intent on advancing her own interests as his father, why hadn’t she taken the money he’d left and why hadn’t she come back for more?
She had taken money, of course. Later. From his father.
After trying to reach him.
She hadn’t reached out to his father. His mother had brought about that alliance.
Why did it bother him so much that she had let herself become reliant on Niko? Was he obsessed with gaining the upper hand over a man who was already dead?
If Niko and his fortune had never existed, neither would Val. Maybe the old man’s footprints weren’t the pair he wished had never trod this earth, Val thought darkly. Maybe he wished his own hadn’t.
Kiara came back, not looking at him as she found her clutch. She had washed the makeup off her face. Her hair was damp at her hairline and there were a few water spots on the front of her dress.