“Your mother, you were mad at her because she left you as a baby?” Her own eyes were yet bruised from the ugly memories of her teenage years, but her voice was painfully gentle, as if she was afraid of hurting him.
Fuck, what the hell was he going to do about this? Because no damn way was he walking away from Molly. “That was the best thing she ever did for me,” he said. “My mother was young, couldn’t handle a child.” He shrugged. “Gramps and Grammy might’ve been old-fashioned, not overly expressive, but I was safe, healthy, happy.”
One of his earliest memories of his mother was of her telling him to “Behave,” because his grandparents had been very good about putting off their retirement plans to look after him. So he’d always known he wasn’t a choice his grandparents had made—but that hadn’t mattered. Not when they’d never treated him as if he was just a responsibility.
“My mother used to come by now and then.” His muscles tensed, anger a dark burn beneath his skin. “She’d bring me gifts, play a game or two, then be gone.” For days afterward, her perfume—floral and rich—would linger in the house. That was how he knew she came to visit other times, too, while he was at school or with friends. He hadn’t been jealous about that. “I knew she was my mother,” he told Molly, “but to me, she felt more like a distant aunt, so I never felt neglected or treated unfairly. Gramps and Grammy were my parents.”
Molly pressed a gentle kiss to his cheek, her hands stroking his nape—as if she knew what was coming was going to be bad.
Holding her close, he opened the doorway to the echoes of a lost little boy’s grief. “When I was seven, my grandmother died, and my grandfather followed three weeks later.” It had destroyed his world.
Molly hugged him tight, her tears quiet. Burying his face against her neck, he breathed in the warm, sweet scent of her and told her the rest. “I went to live with my mother and her family.”
Molly sucked in a breath.
“Yeah,” he said with a twist of his lips, “she’d pulled herself together a couple of years after she had me, married into money and had another child, a girl three years younger than me.” He clenched his hand against Molly’s spine. “Turned out she’d never told her Ivy League husband about me, and the prick refused to bring up ‘some piece of trash’ she’d had off a stranger in a club.”
“Prick is too nice a word.” Molly pulled back to look him in the eye, her expression livid in a way he’d never seen, not even when they’d fought. “Who says that in front of a grieving child? He deserves to be horsewhipped, the useless waste of space.”
Fox found himself grinning, the last thing he’d ever have expected. “Trust me, I’ve had a few fantasies along those lines—before I realized the limp-dicked f**ker wasn’t worth it.”
Kissing him in that way she had of doing, one that always made his grin deepen, Molly said, “I’m sorry you had to live with such ugliness,” and brushed her fingers through his hair.
Fox’s smile faded. “I didn’t—to cut a long story short, the prick told my mother it was either him or me, and she chose him. I was placed in a boarding school in another state and left there to rot.” No way to dress it up and he’d stopped trying to convince himself otherwise a hell of a long time ago. “It was an expensive place, a sop to her conscience I guess. As she led me inside, she said, ‘I love you, Zachary,’ and it was the first time in my life anyone had ever spoken those words to me.”
Hearing the way he bit off the declaration, Molly knew the damage done that day had been brutal. Fox likely never again wanted to hear those words, wouldn’t trust them if he did.
“I was never invited back to their house,” he continued in the same harsh tone, “spent my vacations at the school and, later, at Noah’s house. My mother visited about twice a year, when I suppose she could sneak around the prick—or when she could be bothered.” He leaned back against the sofa, his fingers digging into her h*ps as his grip tightened. “When I was ten, I told her I didn’t want to see her again.”
Molly’s chest throbbed with an ache that made her eyes hot, but she didn’t allow her sadness for the boy he’d been to show. Fox, she knew instinctively, was too proud to accept that. Instead, she ran her hand down to tug at one of his, twining their fingers together when he allowed her to take it. Neither did she ask him if his mother had listened to what had been a desperate cry for love disguised as anger—his face told her the truth.
“Thank you for trusting me.” Grazing the rigid line of his jaw with her fingertips, she rubbed her nose gently against his. “I know that can’t have been easy.”
“It’s not exactly a secret.” He thrust his free hand through his hair. “The tabloids and gossip sites dug up every dirty detail of my life as soon as Schoolboy Choir hit the big time.”
“Mine wasn’t secret either,” she pointed out. “It still hurts to talk about it.”
His brow darkened. “I’m a man. I don’t have feelings.”
“Ha-ha.” A deep tenderness in her veins that she knew was going to get her into bad, bad trouble, the kind of trouble that could permanently scar, she kissed him on a wave of heartbreaking emotion. The contact helped heal the torn-up places inside her, at least a little.
She hoped it did the same for him.