Portrait in Death (In Death #16)(67)

Surprise flashed in Roarke's eyes before he narrowed them. "Eve discussed... she spoke to you about what I've learned?"

"However we disagree, whatever our difficulties with each other, we have one thing in common. That's you. You worried us both, needlessly."

"I did." He rose, walked a few paces down the path. Back again. "I can't get a grip on it. Any sort of a grip. It makes me sick inside in a way I haven't felt... in a very long time. And I wondered, I let myself wonder, if you knew."

"If I knew... ah." As another piece fell into place, Summerset let out a long breath. "I didn't. I had no knowledge of this girl. As far as I knew, Meg Roarke was your mother."

Roarke sat again. "I never questioned it."

"Why should you have?"

"I've spent more time, taken more care turning over the background on a low-level employee than I have on my own beginnings. I blocked them out from my mind and from data banks. Wiped most of it clean."

"You protected yourself."

"Fuck that." It was temper as much as guilt that radiated from him. "Who protected her?"

"It could hardly have been you, a babe in arms."

"And no justice for her, not by my hand. Not by her son's hand, for the bastard's been dead for years now. At least with Marlena-"

He cut himself off, drew himself in. "Marlena died to teach me a lesson. You never blamed me for it, not once have you said you blamed me."

For a long beat, Summerset looked over the garden. Those violently blue hydrangeas, the bloodred of roses, the hot pink of snapdragons. His daughter, his precious child, had been like a flower.

Beautiful, brilliant, and short-lived.

"Because you weren't to blame. Not for what happened to my girl, not for what happened to your mother." Summerset's gaze tracked back to him, held. "Boy," he said quietly, "you were never to blame."

"Neither was I ever innocent, not in my own memory anyway." With a little sigh, Roarke snapped off one of the blossoms, studied it. It occurred to him he hadn't given Eve flowers in some time. A man shouldn't forget to do such things, especially when the woman never expected them.

"You could have blamed me." He set the flower in Summerset's lap because that, too, was unexpected. A small gesture, a small symbol. "You took me in, when he'd damn near beaten me to death, and I had no one and nowhere to go. You didn't have to; I was nothing to you then."

"You were a child, and that was enough. You were a child half-beaten to death, and that was too much."

"For you." Emotion all but strangled him. "You took care of me, and you taught me. You gave me something I'd never had, never expected to. You gave me a home, and a family. And when they took part of that family away, when they took Marlena, the best of us, you could have blamed me. Cast me out. But you never did."

"You were mine by then, weren't you?"

"God." He had to take a breath, a careful one. "I suppose I was."

Needing to move, Roarke got to his feet. With his hands in his pockets he watched a small fountain gurgle to life above a riot of lilies. He watched the cool water until he was calm again.

"When I decided to come here, wanted to make my home here and asked you to come, you did. You left the home you'd made for the one I wanted to make. I don't think I've ever told you that I'm grateful."

"You have told me. Many times and in many ways." Summerset laid his hands over the strong blue flower, looked out over the garden. The peace of it, and the beauty of it.

The world within a world the boy he'd watched become a man had created. Now that world had been shaken, and needed to be put steady again.

"You'll go back to Ireland. You'll have to go back."

"I will." Roarke nodded, unspeakably grateful to be understood without having said the words. "I will, yes."

"When?"

"Right away. I think it's best to go straight away."

"Have you told the lieutenant?"

"I haven't." Unsettled again, Roarke looked down at his own hands, ran the gold band of his marriage around his finger. "She's in the middle of a difficult investigation. This will distract her from it. I'd considered telling her I had business out of town, but I can't lie to her. It'll be simpler, I think, to make the arrangements, then tell her I'm going."

"She should go with you."

"She's not only my wife. Not even always my wife first." He angled his head, smiled a little. "That's something you and I might never see quite the same way."

Summerset opened his mouth, then shut it again. Deliberately.

"People's lives depend on her," Roarke said with some exasperation. "It's something she never forgets, and something I'd never ask her to put second. I can handle this on my own, and in fact, I think it's best I do."

"You were always one for believing you had to handle everything yourself. In that area, you and she are peas in a pod."

"Maybe." Because he wanted their faces on the same level, Roarke crouched. "Once, if you remember, when I was young and things were a bit tight for me, and the hate I felt for him still hot-running like some black river inside me-I told you I was going to take another name. That I wouldn't keep his. Wanted nothing of his."