Blood Will Tell by Christine Pope

Author:Christine Pope [Pope, Christine]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2012-05-30T11:46:49+00:00

XVII

Miala’s hands found the back of her office chair. Somehow the feel of the expensive leather under her fingers was oddly reassuring. Or perhaps she felt a little safer because both the chair and the bulk of her desk provided some sort of barrier between her and Eryk Thorn.

He waited, watching her carefully. As always, she could not tell what he might be thinking.

How often had she gone over this scene in her mind? How many times had she tried to decide what would be the best way of telling him about Jerem? She’d always thought she would have more time to prepare, more time to soften the news. There was no way to deny the boy’s parentage—Thorn’s legacy revealed itself in every line and curve of Jerem’s face.

“He’s yours,” she said simply, forcing herself to keep her gaze level and steady, fixed on the mercenary.

The dark eyes seemed to bore back into hers. “Were you ever going to tell me?”

At that remark she gave a small, bitter laugh. “And how was I supposed to do that? You didn’t exactly make yourself available.”

One eyebrow lifted slightly. “I can be found—if you know where to look.”

“Well, you knew exactly where I was, and you never came calling,” Miala snapped. Then she looked down at her hands, white-knuckled as they clenched the soft leather of the seat back. Damn it—she had sworn that she wouldn’t take him to task for his absence. She’d known she had no hold on a man such as Eryk Thorn. Taking a breath, she replied, in as reasonable a tone as she could manage, “I made the decision to have him. So it was my responsibility to raise him.”

Finally Thorn looked away from her and glanced around the room, at every detail, from the softly pulsing light sculpture on her desk to the expensive antique lithographs on the textured walls.

Perhaps he thought she had raised the boy in too soft an environment. Miala had always tried to make sure that Jerem never lacked for anything—not in his home, not in his school—not even in the friends she’d made sure he cultivated. Outsiders they were and always would be, but Miala’s continuing successes and the unremarkable life she and her son led had eventually won over most of their acquaintances in the upscale neighborhood. Not for Jerem a life on the margins, where he never fit in or felt comfortable in his surroundings. Too often in her own childhood she’d considered herself ignored, superfluous—she was the reason her father got stuck on Iradia in the first place, after all, and between her half off-worlder status and their continuing poverty, Miala had always felt on the outside, even in as marginal a place as Aldis Nova.

But in making sure everything was safe for Jerem, perhaps she had denied his heritage. Maybe the continuing scrapes he got into at school were simply the expression of a restlessness he had inherited from his father. Miala knew nothing about Thorn’s background, except

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