His Defiant Desert Queen(57)

“No.”

“No?”

His jaw tightened. “I took her to coffee and told her I couldn’t help her, that she’d created this situation by leaving my father. I told her there was nothing I could do.” Mikael averted his face, staring off across the courtyard, his features set. “She didn’t cry. She didn’t beg. She just folded up her papers and slipped them back into her purse, then kissed me, and left.”

Jemma’s eyes burned. “You were young.”

“I wasn’t young. I was angry.” He turned to look at her, expression fierce. “I wanted to punish her for leaving me all those years ago, for leaving me with a father who barely remembered me because he had so many wives and sons and daughters, all clamoring for his attention. So I rejected her, wanting her to hurt as I had hurt.”

Silence stretched.

He drew a deep, rough breath. “I never did help her with her investments, even though I had degrees in finance and economics. Even though I worked in London as an institutional investor until I was nearly thirty.” Mikael shifted restlessly. “I knew money. I knew how to make money. And I could have aided her, protected her, but I didn’t. So she went to your father and trusted him, and we all know how that turned out.”

“But she didn’t go to my father until after Morgan’s wedding. At least, that’s what I thought you said.”

“Yes. But she went to him because she’d made some bad investments earlier, and your father promised he could do impossible things with what capital she had left. He could get her an incredible return on her investment with him, and so she gave him everything. Everything. And he stole it all.”

Jemma winced, sickened all over again by her father’s betrayal. “That’s on his head, not yours.”

Mikael turned his head, looked at her from beneath his dense black lashes. “My mother should have died of old age, comfortable in her American home. But she lost her home, along with her nest egg. Heartbroken, and terrified, she took her life. Hung herself in the hall of her home the day she was to be evicted.”

Jemma stared at him, aghast. “She killed herself?”

He nodded. His jaw worked, and he ran a hand down his throat, as if trying to find the words. “She was just fifty-four,” he said when he could finally speak again. “But she’d lost her home...again. She knew she couldn’t go to my father. She was afraid to come to me. We were still rebuilding our relationship and she was afraid I’d be disappointed in her, so she panicked. She did what she thought was the best answer for all.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“I still have that last note, the note she left, saying she was sorry, and begging me to forgive her for being stupid and weak.”

He turned his head abruptly but not before Jemma saw the suffering in his eyes.

For several moments there was just silence, an endless, impossible silence heavy with grief.

Jemma reached out and placed her hand over his. “People make mistakes,” she whispered.

“It’s my fault she died,” he said. “At first I blamed my father, and your father, but I am the one responsible for this. I did this to her. I rejected her. Refused her. I left her no hope—”

“Would you have helped her if she came to you about her house, Mikael?” she interrupted, leaving her seat and moving around the table to kneel before him. “If she’d told you her situation, that she had nowhere to go, and no way to pay her bills, would you have taken care of her?”

“Yes.”

“Are you sure? Or is that what you say now?”

He stiffened, shoulders squaring. His dark eyes burned down at her. “You don’t think I would?”

“I know you would,” she said, taking his hands, holding them tightly. “But do you? That’s the important question. Because until you believe you would have helped her, you won’t be able to forgive...you, her, or your father.”





CHAPTER FOURTEEN

MIKAEL WAS DONE TALKING. He’d said far more than he’d intended to say but he was glad he’d told Jemma the truth. Glad she knew now who he was, and what he was. Better for her to know on the fourth day than the eighth. Better to give her all the facts up front, instead of blindsiding her at the end.

He rose from the table, drew her up to her feet. “I cannot think anymore, or talk anymore. I am talked out. I need diversion. What about you?”

“What do you have in mind?”

“You’ll see.”

She followed him back into the Crimson Chamber. The satin sheets had been changed, and freshly made, the bed lined with stacks of ruby-hued pillows.