by Stacy Gail
“That I had something to hide?” That had to be a joke, and a bad one at that.
He had the grace to wince. “I know now that this first impression I had of you was way off-base.”
“So…” She shook her head, trying to order her thoughts. It didn’t help. “Let me get this straight. When you first approached me with that load-of-crap project idea, you were actually thinking that… that I’d cheated you out of your rightful inheritance by sleeping with a terminally ill man?”
“That makes it sound far worse than what it actually was.”
“No. That sounds like the truth.”
“I had no clue what the truth was. Nor did I know the person you were when I first began to look for answers. If it helps any, I assure you that I am not after any of Frank Bournival’s money. I make my own.”
And the jokes just kept coming. “Oh yeah, sure, that helps. That helps tons.”
Pain etched into his features and he reached out to her. “Look—”
She almost fell, she backed away so quickly. “Don’t.”
With what sounded like a muffled curse, he dropped his arm. “When I approached you, I had no designs on you, I swear it. I was obsessed with one thing only—proving that I am not the spawn of a monster. When I first came to Chicago, all I wanted was to be clean, for the first time in my life. Can you understand that? I have always been vilified, because I was born unclean.”
“Don’t call yourself that.”
“How can I not? For as long as I can remember, I have hated my existence. Part of me believes, to this day, that I deserved to be starved until I broke down and answered to the name Monster.”
“Shut up.” Her voice sounded rusty, as though her throat was trying to seize up. She looked away, but it didn’t stop the tears from burning her eyes. “You think you’re the only one who wishes they’d never been born? Please.”
“Scout—”
“I’ve known countless kids like you growing up in foster care. It was never their fault they were created, and never their fault they were unwanted.”
“Did any of them ever tell you that deep down it feels like a just punishment, being unwanted, for the sins of the father?”
“No. Because that’s a twisted load of shit that’s been fed to you since you could understand words.” Violently she shook her head, still not looking at him. “The evil that happened to create you doesn’t taint you, Ivar. It doesn’t work like that. You’re just you, and your life can be whatever you make of it. You don’t have anything to prove.”
“I do, if only to myself. I need to prove that I am not a monster.”
“This is why your grandmother gave you the name Ivar, a name designed to not fit in with the rest of that so-called noble family tree,” she murmured, at last turning back to him with a dawning look realization. “Right from the beginning she wanted to make sure you knew you weren’t wanted. God, what a bitch.”
“She… is not pleasant.”
“Not pleasant is breaking in a new pair of shoes. This withered-up hag played with your mind from the beginning of your life, twisting it to however she wanted so that you’d wind up jumping whenever she jerked your chain. That’s unforgivable.”
His expression hardened. “I am no longer on that chain.”
“Yeah? Could’ve fooled me.”
“She is now in a nursing home, barely able to speak and unable to reach me in any way. There is no chain on me. Her control has slipped away with time, and she knows it.”
“Bitch,” she muttered again, disgusted. “So, Marcel Dubois… he just magically appeared out of nowhere, on his own volition, to drop this revelation into your lap?”
“Yes.”
“And he led you straight to me, the woman who got his sneaky ass fired for stealing from Frank.” She crossed her arms tightly over her chest, a futile attempt to smother the chaos raging within. “You know you can’t believe a word he says, right?”
He hesitated. “I know not to take him at his word.”
She shook her head. Not good enough. “Okay, forget Dubois. Why not go right to the source? I know your mother’s still alive and living in Montreal. Why not just ask her who your biological father is, rather than try to find answers in this crazy, roundabout way?”
“I have told you that I have never met my mother. She was left in fragile health both emotionally and physically after my birth. So fragile, in fact, that she was forced to retire early from her career as a model. I was told even the sound of my name makes her cry. When I tried to see her shortly after I quit modeling myself, I was turned away. My grandmother later told me that after hearing I had tried to see her, my mother was inspired to take an overdose of sleeping pills. Luckily she survived, but it chilled me to the bone. Only a true monster would continue to torture her by hounding her, so I let it go. The last thing I would ever want to do is bring her more suffering.”
Her eyes narrowed as she tried to piece it all together. “I’m seeing a contradiction here. If you were a product of an affair, rather than a violent event like a rape, why would your mom become suicidal at the prospect of seeing you?”
“That is one of the reasons why I am here now, telling you everything,” he said, and even she could hear the despair in his voice. “I do not know. Perhaps she loved Frank but was forced from his life because their love was forbidden, and she could no longer take it.”
“More of that Romeo and Juliet shit?” Her lip curled in a sneer. “That’s not reality.”
“I have no idea what my reality is. All I know is that my mother’s reaction to my trying to see her is proof that my existence makes her suffer.”
“It’s not proof of anything.” Then she shook her head. “What did you hope to gain by crossing my path? I don’t have any answers for you. How could I? I met Frank long after you were born. And while we were close, this is something Frank never would have shared with me. For crying out loud, I didn’t even know I was in his will. I only found out about it after he died, so how could I know why he chose to put me in his will, while leaving you out?”
“Marcel Dubois said Bournival believed that you would be the one person he could trust to clean up whatever clutter his life had left behind—personal papers, letters, legal documents—documents which might hold the key of where I come from. Organizing those documents was one of the reasons why Bournival left you the penthouse, according to his assistant.”
“The other reason being that I supposedly banged a lonely, dying man to get all that I could out of him.”
“I know this was a lie,” came the flat reply. “Dubois lied right to my face on that, though who knows? In his mind, he probably thinks he is telling the truth. But because he lied, I began to doubt everything he said. I had decided to forget about finding answers through you, and chose instead simply to be grateful Dubois brought us together. Then I saw the file boxes in the storage room, and it was like… like an alcoholic getting a whiff of whiskey. No matter how hard I told myself it no longer mattered, the need to know how I was created sank its teeth back into me. One way or another, I have to know.”
“That’s why you changed so suddenly,” she said, and her folded arms tightened to ward off a chill that came from within. “When you were in the storage room, you saw Frank’s file boxes.”
He nodded. “I started going through them while you were out.”
How sad it was, that she wasn’t even surprised. “Then I came home and caught you at it.”
“You did not catch me at anything. I was waiting for you to come home so I could tell you about this. I have wanted you to know about this for a long time.”
Finally, a joke that made her laugh. “Yeah, right.”
“The night of your foster parents’ anniversary party,” he said suddenly, “you never asked why I had come to your place to see you, did you?”
She simply stared at him. What did that have to do with anything?
“I came here to tell you about this ridiculous mess. Then I was go
ing to ask you if I could take a look at anything of Bournival’s that you might still have in your possession, because I had come to the conclusion that you could be trusted. Instead, before I got the chance to utter a word, I got dragged to a party and wound up sharing the hottest kiss I have ever had in my life. Once that happened, I had no idea then how to tell you about this without jeopardizing what was happening between us.”
Damn it, she hated how that sounded like the truth. “Obviously you’re no longer worried about that.”
“I will not deny that I need to know what is in those boxes. But even more than that, I need for you to know everything there is to know about me, just as I have come to know everything about you.”
“Yeah, you sure as hell have come to know everything about me, haven’t you? After all, I was never hiding anything.” She heard how brittle her voice sounded, and decided it was appropriate. Any second now she would break into a thousand pieces. “You said you’d decided I could be trusted. What does that even mean? What did I do that made you think I was untrustworthy in the first place? You didn’t have to…” Crush me.
No. He hadn’t had to crush her to get his answers.
He’d just chosen to.
She thought his eyes would shutter again, but he seemed to resist the temptation of what came so easily to him—wearing a mask of lies. “You are not going to like the answer.”
“Trust me, it couldn’t suck any more than the last few minutes.”
His eyes flashed with what could have been pain before his jaw clenched. “Now that I know the history between you two, I believe it is safe to say that Dubois was out to get you. He made you out to be a calculating gold-digger who would do anything to make sure she never went back to a poverty-stricken life. I did not relish the idea of showing up as a potential beneficiary of Frank Bournival’s, only to have you shut down every avenue of information that might be available to me. A blood relative, as a beneficiary, has up to twelve years to make a claim on a will, and we are well within that time frame.”
Had he decided to destroy her because of money?
And she’d thought it couldn’t get any worse.
“There was another concern,” he went on, as though he’d read her mind. “Before I met you, it occurred to me that you could choose to hold any pertinent information you might have for ransom. I needed to see what you were like before deciding on a plan of action.”
“Right. Smart.” She nodded like his words weren’t killing her. While she’d been so dazzled that a man like him had even noticed her, he’d been calculating how best to play her for a sucker.
She was such an idiot.
“So when did you decide that seducing me was the way to get what you wanted?”
“Stop.” The force behind the word made her jolt, because there was no mistaking it for the dire warning it was. “I understand this looks bad on the surface, and I get that this is a lot to take in all at once. But I only told one lie—the lie about the art project. It touches nothing between us.”
She stared at him, hardly able to believe her ears. “My God, do you really believe that? Or… wait. Are you angling to get something else out of me, something else I don’t know about? What is it that you want from me now?”
His brows slammed down. “I’m not angling for anything. Damn it, I am trying to be as honest as I can here—”
“A refreshing change, but you said it yourself about that Dubois guy—since he told you one lie, you had trouble believing everything else, right? That’s exactly what I’m dealing with now. What’s more, that lie you told me wasn’t just about the art project. It was the first thing out of your mouth when we met, the first thing I learned about you. It was the foundation of the man I thought you were. That means your so-called one lie taints everything. You’ve left me with nothing to believe in when it comes to you.”
He went statue-still while he processed her words. “You know we are good together—you know what we have is no lie. And I know you have feelings for me, because you said that when I am happy, you are happy.”
That was a lifetime ago, when her heart wasn’t bleeding to death. “So?”
“So, I feel the same way, Scout. Exactly the same. This means I know that you love me. Do not make this any bigger than it is.”
“Don’t make it any bigger than it is?” She could only parrot him as her soul ripped in two diametrically opposed directions. While part of her took giddy flight at the possibility that his words hinted he could actually love her, the reality of his deception was too real to be denied. If you loved someone, you didn’t lie to them. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”
He must have seen the storm rising, because he held up a hand. “Wait—”
“Don’t you lessen the impact of your actions by coming off like I’m the one at fault for overreacting to being made a fool of. I’m not overreacting, Ivar. You lied to me when you met me, then chose to keep that lie in place when you decided to fuck me. There’s no way to make that okay.”
A flare of something fierce and wild shot through his eyes a moment before he grabbed for her hand. “You know what we have is real. You know it, ma trésor.”
“Don’t.” The endearment sliced into her like a razor. She jerked her hand free and hit the elevator button. “I won’t keep you from Frank’s files. I’ll have them messengered to your place so you can look through them at your leisure. So now that you have what you came for, you need to leave.”
“I do not have what I came here for. I came here to be with you.”
Her short laugh hurt as the elevator doors slid open. “Clearly you think I’m a pushover since you fooled me so easily, but I never fall for the same trick twice. Go peddle your load of crap somewhere else. I’m done buying it.”
His head jerked back as if slapped. Furiously she told herself she didn’t care. “I never planned to seduce you to get what I wanted. That thought never even occurred to me. Then I got to know you, and no matter how hard I tried to stop myself from making this situation even more tangled, I could not keep away from you.”
“Not keeping away from me sure won me over, despite my instincts telling me that you were trouble. It really helped that you came off as the dashing Prince Charming swooping in to save the day of this modern-day Cinderella.” Then her eyes widened as a sudden thought occurred. “Did you… did you hire that guy to steal my phone in the hope that it would make you appear more trustworthy?”
“What the hell.” His look of shocked outrage appeared convincing. But then, so had everything else. “That is fucked up.”
“So is this situation.”
He waved that away. “You really think I would do something that would scare the shit out of you like that, or could have potentially hurt you, just to make you lower your guard?”
“I don’t know.” Fiercely she raised her chin and ignored the flash of shame that told her the accusation hit below the belt. “An hour ago I would have said absolutely not. But come to find out, you’re a stranger to me.”
A frustrated growl seethed out of him. “You are the one person in the whole world who knows everything there is to know about me. Everything.”
“No.” Again she shook her head, struggling to hold onto her icy calm when all she wanted to do was rage at him for killing her heart. “I don’t know you.”
“And I know you just as well,” he went on relentlessly, ignoring her. “I was well aware that telling you the truth would make you both angry and hurt, and it guts me that I have made you feel that way. It would have been easier to keep you in the dark, but I know you, Scout. You would rather have the ugly truth than the pretty lie, right? Because of that, I could not keep the truth from you any longer. I respect you too much, care for you too much, to live through one more day of keeping the truth from you. You mean too much to me.”
“Bullshit.” His words punched her in the chest. Just like Ivar himself, those words were too good to be true. “Please, just drop the role you made yourself play
with this little stray, okay? It’s over.”
His eyes narrowed dangerously. “Role?”
“You know what I mean. Fucking people to get what you want is how you were raised to behave, so please just stop trying to make it out to be personal now. You did your job, as always. Well done.”
Silence clogged the atmosphere, an aftershock of the bomb her mouth just dropped. The words poisoned the air between them, releasing a toxicity that killed not people, but hope. In that moment, she suffered a horrible, sinking feeling that she had gone too far.
What have I done?
“Maybe I deserve that,” he said, and it was a cold, empty voice she’d never heard from him before. Her already cracked heart shattered when she saw his eyes were more shuttered than ever in a face that was as lifeless as a stone mask. “But you should know that after the first five years of my life, I have never cared about another human being, until you. I thought of all people, you would know just how difficult it is to let someone close enough to care about them. Somehow I thought you would understand that, and see your way past that one stupid lie I forged before I even knew you. Clearly I was wrong.” With that, he stepped into the elevator and hit the button.
Scout’s gaze clung to him, a thousand words tumbling through her head to lodge in her throat, everything from an abject apology to more bitter reprisals, to pleas for him to stay. But there was too much war going on inside her to figure what she could say to piece together her obliterated world. In the end, she could only watch in a torment of conflicted silence as the elevator doors closed on his beautiful, lying face.
Chapter Twenty-One
