Page 25 of Culmination
My gaze darts away from hers for a split second and I anxiously tap my index finger on my thigh. Then I sigh. “I’m not proud of the things I’ve had to do. But I had to act the part. Play the role. You must understand. My father was always watching. He always had people watching me. Believe me. Moving forward, I will fix this, Gabriella. All of it.”
“Why? After everything that’s happened, why do you care?”
I pause for a moment before releasing a breath. “Did I ever tell you about my mother?” I ask, and she wrinkles her brow, perhaps searching her memory for mention of the woman I’ve not seen in nearly three decades.
She shakes her head. “You never wanted to talk about her.”
I nod then let out a small laugh. “I only have very early memories of my mother, but from what I remember, she was a lovely woman. Unlike my father, she was warm and gentle.” I smile as a fuzzy picture of my mother swims in my mind. “When I was a young boy, she’d tuck me into bed every night. Instead of reading from picture books, Mother would tell me stories of her as a little girl in far-off lands where she grew up poor, until one day when her own mother fell in love with a prince. She promised to take me there one day. If Father permitted. When my mother met Theo Morningstar, she thought she’d met her very own prince. It wasn’t long before she realized that he wasn’t so; he was her captor.”
Gabriella’s brilliant sea-colored eyes shimmer with tears, her lips parting in disbelief. “What?”
“I fear my father wishes to do the same to you as he did to her. This is all my doing, Gabriella, and I must keep you safe. I will not allow you to end up like my mother. Or for your child to end up like me.”
“What… What happened to her?”
Emotions I’ve kept stamped down for so long suddenly rise to the surface. Anger. Frustration. Powerless. Longing. Anger at her abandonment. Frustration at my father’s unwillingness to be honest about the situation. Powerless to stop her from leaving. And longing. Longing for the mother I remember in my dreams.
These feelings… They’re all so foreign to me. I don’t know if it’s this discussion or the fact that Gabriella is pregnant, but thoughts of my mother hurt more than I expected.
“I fear I’ll never know. One night, she was telling me about taking me away, visiting her homeland, some island across the world. The next day, Father said she was gone. That’d she’d decided to go home, without me.”
Gabriella gasps.
“I no longer believe his story. A few weeks ago, I discovered divorce documents that my mother had filed, asking for sole custody of me—and the unborn child she was carrying. The paperwork was filed two weeks before she left. Somehow, my father had the paperwork thrown out due to her abandonment of me, and while he’d hired the best private investigators, they found no trace of her.”
“That means…”
“I have a mother and a sibling somewhere. Or, at least, I once did.”
“Did you confront him about it?” she asks.
“I did. He told me to back off. Be thankful I was his sole heir, and if I continued my ‘insolence’ I’d end up like them.”
“Do you think he had something to do with her disappearance?” she asks grimly.
“Nothing would shock me about Theo Morningstar anymore. And that is why I have—need—to protect you, Gabriella. I will not allow you to end up like her.”
God, it’s been ages since I’ve thought of my mother. Although thinking of her as such wasn’t quite how Father wished for me to remember her. To him, she was the whore who fell pregnant by another man and took off, leaving me with him, motherless, without a second glance.
But I had my memories. I was young when she left. Three, maybe four, and experts will say you can’t remember details from such a young age. But I do, and they’re vivid.
My mother was petite, beautiful, with a melodic laugh and she loved me with everything in her. I knew it then, and as much as Father railed on about how she’d abandoned me, didn’t care for me, I knew he was a liar. In my dreams, I see her. She’s holding my hand as we stroll through the garden on Father’s estate. She takes me to watch the hummingbirds flitting about, their wings flapping a thousand beats per minute. We run through the field of sunflowers, hand in hand, and sometimes I let go, begging her to chase me. In every single dream, she catches me.
Until she falls pregnant.
There was one thing, however, that struck me as a child. Father was insistent that, no matter how great of a mother she had seemed, she’d chosen her new baby, her new life, over me. Why else would she have left me? According to him, she could’ve taken me with her. He wouldn’t have fought. Of course, that sentiment did wonders on my confidence growing up. Neither parent wanted me. I hated that faceless baby. No matter how innocent the child was, it was still its fault my mother was gone. Its fault my father no longer loved me, if he ever had at all.
So I became the man Theo Morningstar wished his son to be: cold, unfeeling, dark-hearted. I threw myself into my work—or, well, my father’s work—and I did everything he ever asked me to.
Including following Gabriella.
Making contact was the first time I’d ever done something for myself. Because that day, watching the tears pour down like rain on her pale cheeks, I had the urge to move forward and wipe them away. Her dark hair, swept up in a sleek French twist, beckoned for me to release the locks, wrap my hand in them, and pull her close so I could her until every sob finished racking her petite body.
Everything about her that day called to me. She was a dainty little lamb that needed someone to protect her. To love her.
I decided, then and there, that man would be me.
Damn my father’s plans all to Hell, I thought. For once in my life, I was doing whatIwanted.
