The Royal Collection. Rebecca WintersЧитать онлайн книгу.

      Ronan slid a glance at Shoshauna. She had changed into a striped shirt and some crazy pair of canvas slacks she had found in the cottage, lace-up front with frayed bottoms that made her look like an adorable stowaway on a pirate’s ship.

      Despite the outfit, she was changed since the surfing episode, carrying herself differently. A new confidence, a new certainty in herself. He was glad he’d let down his guard enough to be part of giving her that gift, the gift of realizing who she would be once she went back to her old world.

      Surely, he thought looking at her, at the tilt of her chin, the strength in her eyes, the fluid way she moved, a woman certain of herself, she would carry that within her, she would never marry a man for convenience, or because it would please others. He remembered her hand resting on his back. Surely, in that small gesture, he had felt who she was, and who she would be.

      Tonight, their last night together, he would keep his guard down, just a bit, just enough.

      Enough to what? he asked himself.

      To have parts of her to hold on to when he let her go, when he did not have her anymore, when he faced the fact he would probably never look at her face again.

      Then he would have this night: the two of them, a bonfire, her laughter, the light flickering on her skin, the sparkle in her eyes putting the stars to shame.

      In the gathering darkness they hauled firewood to the beach. As the stars came out, they roasted fish on sticks, remembered her antics in the water, laughed.

      Tomorrow it would be over. For tonight he was not going to be a soldier. He was going to be a man.

      And so they talked deep into the night. When it got colder, he went and got a blanket and wrapped it around her shoulders, and then when it got colder still and she held up a corner, he went and sat beneath the blanket with her, shoulder to shoulder, watching the stars, listening to the waves and her voice, stealing glimpses of her face, made even more gorgeous by the reflection of the flame that flickered across it.

      At first the talk was light. He modified a few jokes and made her laugh. She told him about tormenting her nannies and schoolteachers.

      But somehow as the night deepened, so did the talk. And he was hearing abut a childhood that had been privileged and pampered, but also very lonely.

      She told him about the kitten she had found on a rare trip to the public market, and how she had stuck it under her dress and taken it home. She smiled as she told the story about a little kitten taking away the loneliness, how she had talked to it, slept with it, made it her best friend.

      The cat had died.

      “Silly, maybe to be so devastated over a cat,” she said sadly, “but I can’t tell you how I missed him, and how the rooms of my apartment seemed so empty once he was gone. I missed all his adorable poses, and his incredible self-centeredness.”

      “What was his name?”

      “Don’t laugh.”

      “Okay.”

      “It was Retnuh. In our language it means Beloved.”

      He didn’t laugh. In fact, he didn’t find it funny at all. He found it sad and lonely and it confirmed things about her life that she had wanted to tell him all along but that he had already guessed anyway.

      “Prince Mahail’s proposal came very shortly after my Beloved died. Ronan, it felt so much easier to get swept along in all the excitement than to feel what I was feeling. Bereft. Lonely. Pathetic. A woman whose deepest love had been for a cat.”

      But he didn’t see it as pathetic. He saw it as something else: a woman with a fierce capacity to love, giving her whole heart when she decided to love, giving it her everything. Would the man who finally received that understand what a gift it was, what a treasure?

      “Will you tell me something about you now?”

      It was one of those trick questions women were so good at. She had shared something deep, meaningful. She wasn’t going to be satisfied if he talked about his favorite soccer team.

      “I wouldn’t know where to begin,” he said, hedging.

      “What kind of little boy were you?” she asked him.

      Ah, a logical place to begin. “A very bad one,” he said.

      “Bad or mischievous?”

      “Bad. I was the kid putting the potatoes in the tailpipes of cars, breaking the neighbors’ windows, getting expelled from school for fighting.”

      “But why?”

      But why? The question no one had asked. “My Dad died when I was six. Not using that as an excuse, just some boys need a father’s hand in their lives. My mother seemed to know she was in way over her head with me. I think wanting to get me under control was probably motivation for most of her marriages.”

      “Marriages? How many?” Shoshauna whispered, wide-eyed. This would be scandalous in her country where divorce was nearly unheard of. It had been scandalous enough in his own.

      “Counting the one coming up? Seven?”

      “You can’t be responsible for that one!”

      Still, he always felt vaguely responsible, a futile sense of not being able to protect his mother. When he was younger it was a sense of not being enough.

      “What was that like for you growing up? Were any of her husbands like a father to you?” Shoshauna asked.

      And for some reason he told her what he had never told anyone. About the misery and the feelings of rejection and the rebellion against each new man. He told her about how that little tiny secret spark of hope that someday he would have a father again had been steadily eroded into cynicism.

      He didn’t know why he told her, only that when he did, he didn’t feel weaker. He felt lighter.

      And more content than he had felt in many years.

      “What was your mother’s marriage to your father like?” she asked softly.

      He was silent, remembering. Finally he sighed, and he could hear something that was wistful in him in that sigh. He had thought it was long dead, but now he found it was just sleeping.

      “Like I said, I was only six when he died, so I don’t know if these memories are true, or if they are as I wish it had been.”

      “Tell me what you think you remember.”

      “Happiness.” He was surprised by how choked he sounded. “Laughter. I remember, one memory more vivid than any other, of my dad chasing my mom around the house, her running from him shrieking with laughter, her face alight with life and joy. And when he caught her, I remember him holding her, covering her with kisses, me trying to squeeze in between them, to be a part of it. And then he lifted me up, and they squeezed me between them so hard I almost couldn’t breathe for the joy of it.”

      For a long time she was silent, and when she looked at him, he saw what the day had given her in her face: a new maturity, a new ability to be herself in the world.

      And he heard it in her voice, in the wisdom of what she said.

      She said, “Once your mother had that, what she had with your father, I would think she could not even imagine trying to live without it. By marrying all those men, she was only trying to be alive again. Probably for you, as much as for herself. It wasn’t that she wanted those men to give you something you didn’t have, it was that she wanted to give you what she had been before, she saw you grieving for her as much as for him.”

      It was strange, but when he heard those words, he felt as if he had searched for them, been on a quest that led him exactly to this place.

      A place where, finally, he could forgive his mother.