No Longer Forbidden(15)

“Not that I hated her for forcing me into it,” Rowan mumbled, trying to recant. “I understood. She was my age when she had me. All she knew was performing, and that sort of career doesn’t wait around while you raise a child. She didn’t have any support. Her family disowned her when she left to become—gasp!—an actress. You have to be an opportunist to survive in that business, and that’s what she was trying to do. Survive.”

She risked a glance upward and saw that Nic didn’t exactly look sympathetic. He was closing off completely to what she was saying, his lip curling in cynical understanding of words like “opportunist” and “survivor.”

Rowan clenched her teeth, thinking she would be calling on all the skills Cassandra O’Brien had ever taught her when it came to surviving. That had been the real source of animosity between mother and daughter: the things Cassandra had done to keep them both fed and clothed. The men she’d brought into their home—the homes she’d brought Rowan into. The pressure for Rowan to ‘make it’ so they had a fallback position if things went south. The fact that when it came right down to it Cassandra had been most concerned about her own survival at the expense of her daughter’s happiness, and had alternately been threatened by and quick to exploit her daughter’s youth and beauty.

The tenderness of pressure on a cut pulled Rowan back to Nic pressing a bandage into place on the bottom of her foot.

“What are you going to do now?” he asked.

“That’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it? I’m not exactly brimming with marketable skills.”

“Perhaps you should have addressed that as soon as you left school, rather than making a spectacle of yourself with the rest of the Euro-trash.”

Ouch. Although a tiny bit justified. She hadn’t seen how truly shallow most of her friends were until she’d tried to rely on them as she dealt with everything—not least of which was this utterly directionless feeling of not knowing who she was or where she was going. Her friends had coaxed her to drink her way out of her funk. Something she’d briefly been led into before realizing how quickly she could turn into her father. That had scared her back onto the straight and narrow, but she couldn’t believe Nic’s attitude toward her bad turn after all she’d told him.

“I had to go somewhere when I was kicked out of residence. I wasn’t ready to face this empty house so I stayed with friends. Where else was I supposed to go? To you, big brother?”

The warning that flashed in his icy blue eyes spoke of retribution for that label. She took notice, clamping her teeth together and leaning back an inch, not willing to get into a kissing contest again.

His nod was barely perceptible, but it was there, approving of her smart and hasty retreat. That irritated her. She didn’t want to be afraid of him and she wasn’t. She was afraid of herself and how weak he made her feel.

Sitting straighter, she said defensively, “Perhaps it wasn’t the best coping strategy, but I had a lot to deal with.”

“It’s always about you, isn’t it, Rowan?” Nic stood and took his time turning over the end on the surgical tape before setting it aside.

Rowan clamped shut the mouth that had dropped open. Had he not just seen with his own eyes how thoroughly she’d been living her mother’s life? Fueled by righteousness, she rose hastily—then lost some of her dignity as she had to grapple for her towel. Every point on her body twinged, making her wince.

She braced herself on the wall and demanded, “You really see me as nothing more than a total narcissist, don’t you?” It was so unfair.

His eyelids came down to a circumspect half-mast as he pointed out flatly, “Well, you just had to have a week in St. Moritz for your birthday last year, didn’t you?”

Because she hadn’t had the courage to come home and risk facing him after the fiasco the year before—which only added to the colossal self-blame eating her alive.

“And my broken leg put my mother and your father on the plane. Is the storm my fault too?” she asked through lips that were going numb. “Should I have checked the weather on the Med before I let that drunken snowboarder mow me down?”

Nic heard the tortured regret in her tone and recognized it as sincere, but the shriveled, underfed raisin where his heart was supposed to be didn’t want to soften toward her. He couldn’t afford to let it soften at all. That way led to madness and pain.

He turned away from her, and the tumult she was inciting inside him. His version of Rowan as an immature egocentric needed to stand firm against this more complex vision that was emerging, otherwise he’d be forced to reexamine himself, her, and everything that had transpired between them since day one.