almost five.” He looked down at her to gauge his tenderhearted lover’s reaction.
She did not disappoint him. Her pretty blue eyes glazed over in shock. “I thought you were a baby, or something.”
“No. My mother was a prostitute.” Again, a sense of utter unreality that he should be telling Piper these things assailed him. “One of her clients fell in love with her and wanted to marry her, but he didn’t want a living reminder of the life she’d led before they met.”
As an adult man, he could almost understand that. Not forgive, but understand. As a child who had adored his mother, the only bright constant in his short life, the one he had relied on entirely for acceptance and love, he hadn’t been so wise. Neither his child’s mind, nor the heart he’d later encased in impenetrable stone, had been able to comprehend his mother’s actions, or even her husband’s attitude.
The man had been kind enough to the small boy the few times they met before he decided to buy Leda’s freedom from her procurer, Zephyr’s father.
“But you were her child!” Piper’s obvious shock nearly ripped her hand from his grasp.
He tightened his grip, unwilling to let her go. “My mother visited. Once a month, but I learned to wish she wouldn’t.”
“Because she never took you with her when she left.”
“No.” No matter how he’d begged at first.
“When was the last time you spoke to her?”
“Last month.” But he hadn’t seen her since he’d run away from the orphanage with Neo, this time by Zephyr’s choice.
Piper stared up at him, her eyes swimming with emotion, her mouth opening and closing, but no sound coming out.
He took pity on her clear inability to fathom this state of affairs. “I contacted her after I made my first million. She was glad to hear from me.”
“You sound like that surprised you.”
“It did. Even though I was now wealthy, there was no guarantee she would want the reminder of her past.”
“You thought money was all you had to give her.”
Naturally. He’d never met a woman who didn’t appreciate financial gifts, his mother setting that precedent early for his young mind. “Why would I believe anything else?”
“She was glad you were safe, though, wasn’t she? I bet she cried that first time you called her.”
That time and almost every one since. “You are right.” Not that he understood why.
If his disappearance was such a hardship on his mother, surely she would not have dumped him at the orphanage in the first place? Nevertheless, she had not abandoned him entirely.
“She paid the orphanage to care for me.” He had discovered that when he made his first donation to the home long before he amassed his first million.
It was the reason he had contacted her later. Without the knowledge she had attempted to provide for him in some way, he did not think he ever would have. But nothing could have altered the path he had taken with his father.
“Are we going to see her while we are here?” Piper’s voice dripped with the emotion clouding her expression.
“No.”
“Of course, I’m sorry.” From looking on the verge of tears, Piper went to embarrassment in a single breath. “There’s no reason to take your friend to visit your mother.”
“It’s not that. She would like you.” How could she not? Piper was a very likable woman. “However, I have no intention of seeing my mother.”
“What? Why not? Surely we have time. Even if she lives on one of the islands. We can skip the sightseeing.”
“She lives in Athens. I bought her a house in Kifissia.” The distance between that district and the one he had been born in was measured in more than kilometers, though.
Piper’s brow furrowed. “According to the guidebook in our suite, that’s the elite part of town.”
“Is that what it said?”
“Well, as good as.”
“The book is right. The wealthy have inhabited Kifissia for generations.”
“And you bought your mother a house there.”
He shrugged. What did Piper want him to say? He had wanted to give his mother a physical break from the past.
“Yet you are not going to visit her.”
“No,” he confirmed.
“But…”
“I have not seen her in more than twenty years, Piper.”
“But you said you spoke last month.” The confusion on Piper’s face was adorable.
He kissed her. Not passionately, but he could not resist the innocent incomprehension covering her features.
“It was her birthday. So, I spoke to her.”
“You call her once a year, on her birthday?” Piper guessed.
“Yes.” The year after he first reconnected with Leda, he had made the mistake of asking what she would like for her birthday.
He’d become too ingrained in American customs. And he’d wanted the excuse to give her something nice, something to show her and the man she had married that Zephyr wasn’t such a dead loss after all. He wasn’t a lame puppy to be abandoned.
But his mother hadn’t asked for a designer handbag, or a new television. She’d only wanted one thing. For Zephyr to call her once a year on her birthday, so she could know he was doing all right. She could follow his success in the papers now, but he still made that call.
Once a year.
“Does she call you?”
“I have asked her not to, unless there is a problem with my brother or sister.” Keeping his mother at a distance was necessary and he could not change that.
“You have a brother and sister?”
He had expected some kind of criticism for his coldness toward his mother, but Piper hadn’t focused on a situation he could not change. She’d zeroed in on the one reality he found truly important. His sister and brother.
“They are half siblings, but I feel a responsibility toward them nonetheless.”
“How old are they?”
“Iola is twenty-nine. She is married to a good man and has three children of her own.”
Six years younger than him, his sister had been born a year and a half after he went into the home.
