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“That’s why your developments are so special, isn’t it?”
“Because I recognize history when I see it?” he asked with underlying amusement.
She reached out and took his hand. She could not help herself. She needed to touch this incredible man. “Because you recognize the unique flavor of wherever you are and rather than try to change it, you seek to enhance it.”
Very few developers could make that claim, and none as successful as Stamos & Nikos Enterprises.
“Neo and I learned early to see the good in wherever we were.” He laced their fingers together, giving her a look that implied he wasn’t just talking about property development.
“Even the orphanage?” she asked softly.
“I admit I saw more good there than Neo did.”
“I’m not surprised.”
He shrugged.
“That’s a pretty nice talent to have. I wish I’d had it as a child like you did.” She might have found moving around as much as her family had done easier than she had. “Heck, I wouldn’t mind having it now.”
“Don’t play down your strengths. That was one of the first characteristics I admired in you.”
“Seriously?”
“Definitely. When you look at a property, you do not see what is, but what could be.”
“That’s not the same thing.”
“No, but it comes from the same attitude.”
“Then why was I such a miserable kid?” She felt like an idiot asking that. She’d been a grown-up for a long time. The little girl that found changing homes and schools every couple of years so traumatizing was long gone.
“It wasn’t an inability to find the good in each new situation that your father’s military career led you to that made you so unhappy. It was the fact you found so much to love and enjoy in each new place and that got ripped from you with every new reassignment.”
Feeling light-headed, and not from the panoramic view of Athens, she swallowed after developeing a suddenly dry throat. Because Zephyr was exactly right. Every time she had found the place she wanted to occupy in her new world, she had been ripped away from it.
But still. “Lots of kids grow up the way I did.”
“That doesn’t make it any easier on each one that does it. There were more than two dozen other children in the orphanage my mother abandoned me to. That reality did not make my own situation any easier to accept when she left me behind.”
“Your mother abandoned you to the orphanage?”
Zephyr walked to a viewpoint that overlooked Hadrian’s Arch. He still had hold of Piper’s hand, so she came with him. Feeling like the only connection he had with the present was their entwined fingers, he could not believe he had shared that information with Piper. He’d never even talked about it to Neo. Yet, he knew he was going to tell Piper the truth now.
Maybe not all, but at least some. He just didn’t understand why.
“How old were you?” she asked, after several moments of somber quiet between them.
“Four, 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.
His mother had missed her visit with him that month and the one after. He’d thought she’d finally grown tired of coming to see him and wasn’t coming back. But she’d returned and she’d had a beautiful baby with her when she did.
“Have you met the children?”
“Yes, Iola insisted.”
“You sound like you don’t understand why.”
“I’m the bastard child her mother gave birth to when living a life they would all rather forget happened. My sister doesn’t even remember meeting me. She was too young the last time I saw her.”
“Your mother brought her to visit?”
“Yes.”
“That was cruel.”
He shrugged. To his way of thinking, it had been much more cruel when his mother stopped bringing Iola. Some might have thought he would be jealous of the baby, but Zephyr had adored Iola from the very beginning. He had been heartbroken when his mother’s husband had insisted Leda stop bringing his sister to visit when she was two.
But just like when he had begged to be taken with her, his mother turned deaf ears to his pleas to see the little girl he had allowed himself to love.
“I thought she was the most amazing being ever. I was in awe of her.”
“What did she think of you?”
“I don’t know. Her father did not want her to wonder about me, so my mother stopped bringing her on the visits when she was old enough to begin remembering them. My mother only brought my brother a handful of times as an infant for the same reason.”
“Clearly, they don’t want to forget you. Not if your sister insisted you meet her children.”
“I take care of them.” And even his stony heart could be moved by the little ones who called him Uncle Zee.
“You think that’s the only reason they want you in their lives?”
“Why else?”
“Maybe for the same reason I’d want you in my life even if I didn’t work with you.” How could he be so unaware of his own true worth? she wondered.
“Would you?”
“Yes.”
He didn’t believe her, but he appreciated the sentiment.
“Does your brother-in-law work for you?” Piper asked.
