The Truth About De Campo(48)
“He’s back tomorrow regardless.”
He nodded. Looked out at the ocean. “Have you talked to Thea today? How’s the foot?”
Quinn grimaced. A fifteen-hundred-pound stallion had stepped on her sister’s left foot yesterday while she was conducting an examination, shattering the bones in multiple places. “She’s at home twiddling her thumbs, cursing that damn horse. You see,” she pointed out, “I was right all along.”
That won her a smile. “That was just bad luck.”
Quinn pushed her roti aside and decided the only way to get him to talk might be to start talking herself. “I’m thinking while I’m making all these radical decisions I might like to get to know my sister in Mississippi.”
“Have you had any contact with your birth family?”
“No.” The hollow feeling that invaded her every time she thought about the parents who had given her away made her chest ache. “I don’t really have anything to say to them. They chose not to keep me. They had another girl. End of story. But my sister—it wasn’t her fault. I just feel like I should know her at some point. Even if we aren’t ever close.”
He lifted a brow. “You don’t think there might be more to your parents’ decision than that?”
She brought her beer to her lips and took a deliberate sip. “They gave me away and had my sister a couple of years later, Matteo. How else can you interpret it?”
He swiveled to face her. “Like maybe they weren’t ready when they had you. Like maybe there are complexities involved you know nothing about. Life isn’t black and white, Quinn, as much as you’d like to think it is. There are a lot of gray areas.”
Gray areas. That’s what you called giving your child up, never to see them again? Marking her defective in the process? “I wouldn’t expect you to understand.”
“Why don’t you try?” he challenged. “There are no prizes for being an island, Quinn.”
She turned to face him, latching on to the opening. “I don’t know about that, Matteo, you are. You pretend to be everyone’s man, but you’re no one’s man really.”
His mouth flattened. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Exactly what I said. You talk, but you don’t really talk.”
He sliced her an even look. “How about we finish with you before we move on to me? How is it you think I cannot understand what you’re going through?”
“Because you have a family who loves you. Who are yours. Your flesh and blood. How could you possibly understand what it’s like to not be wanted? To have Warren and Sile so desperate for a child they adopt me, then months later get everything they ever wanted in Thea? To not be good enough for my old family, and not be needed by my new one?” She blinked against the fire burning the back of her eyes. “It was heartbreaking, Matteo. Heartbreaking to grow up knowing that.”
“And finally we get somewhere...” He pushed his dinner aside, sat back and wrapped his arms around his knees. “You know what I know, Quinn? I saw how much Thea adores you that night at the cocktail party. I heard how much your father respects you when he talked about you. Do you have any idea what I would do to have that same level of acceptance from my father? My family? I have spent my life fighting for it.”
She pushed her beer into the sand, thrown again by another of Matteo’s perspectives that upended her own. Was her frame of reference really so totally off when it came to her family? Was she so colored by the past it distorted all else?
“You live in a family of gladiators,” she finally offered when the silence had stretched taut between them. “Isn’t that what you do? Fight to be the best?”
He gave her a long, gray-eyed stare. “Perhaps.”
She clasped her hands between her legs and looked over at him. “Giancarlo’s father gave you his watch. Why?”
His shoulders stiffened. “I’m sorry,” she murmured, “I was admiring how beautiful it was and I saw the inscription.”
A shutter came down over his eyes. “There is nothing to be gained by talking about Giancarlo. He’s gone. There’s nothing I can do about it.”
“Oh, for God’s sake.” She waved a hand at him. “You accuse me of being an island. You’re so far out there you aren’t even a speck in the ocean.”
His eyes flashed with that lightning-storm intensity that signaled a clash of the elements was on its way. “I was responsible for his death, Quinn. I caused it. Is that what you want to hear me say? Giancarlo’s father gave me that watch so I wouldn’t feel guilty about what I did. Because he knew I would every day for the rest of my life.”