“I know and I was not intending to try and tell you what to do.” He abruptly grinned. “I will leave that to Uncle Argus. No, I just wanted to say that the earl is a man who needs to know that people are being completely honest with him. Right now he believes you are. So, I just thought that you might wish to tell him about Ilar.”
She cursed as he walked out, shutting the door quietly behind him. Argus could prove to be a problem but she easily shrugged aside that part of what Artemis had said. He was right about Brant and she had seen that truth about Brant almost from the beginning. Brant had good reason to mistrust anyone who kept secrets. He even had good reason to be wary about trusting women since the most important woman in his life had betrayed his trust time and time again. That mistrust had grown in him with every new half-sibling he met. Now he had to think that most of his life had been filled with lies. She was giving him the truth but was doing so in small doses and that was wrong.
Olympia moved to pour herself some wine. She then stood before her window and stared out at the small moonlit garden below. Her secrets had been her own, shared only with her family, for so long it was almost painful to reveal them to anyone else. The things she had told him already had been hard enough. To try and tell him her greatest secret of all could easily choke her.
Ilar, she thought and her heart hurt. She missed him. He was her greatest treasure and her biggest secret. Even her family never mentioned Ilar, just as they rarely spoke of her marriage. Yet Ilar was listed as the Baron of Myrtledowns if anyone cared to look and they would only need a tiny more research to know that the baron listed in the records could not be her husband. In thirteen years no one had bothered to sort out the truth and she had decided to just leave the subject alone, to remain silent and even secretive by keeping Ilar in the country.
“Where he must stay until he is older,” she said aloud as if hearing the words would help remind her of the need for that secrecy, that isolation of her own son.
Thinking of Ilar took her mind back to that horrible night thirteen years ago, the night Ilar had been conceived, and she shuddered, quickly drinking deep of her wine to still a rising fear. Her cousin Maynard had always come round the house, been their playmate for years. Yet that night he had looked at her in a way that had chilled her to the bone. Before she could escape him, however, he had used his gift on her, a gift very similar to Argus’s. Too young to protect herself from his skill, Maynard had bent her to his will. Olympia could recall very little of what had happened next. She had woken up with her skirts around her waist and a pain between her legs. While staggering to her feet, she had placed her hands on the ground and read in the remaining emotions staining the grass just what her cousin had done to her.
Cousin Maynard had paid dearly for his brutal act. Still in shock she had found herself married and, within a very short time, a widow. She knew her brothers had killed her cousin, had perhaps been aided by others in her far too large family, but she had never asked them for the details of it all. When she had found herself with child, she had been stunned, for she was little more than a child herself. Once or twice she had wondered if she could rid herself of the permanent memory of Maynard’s abuse, but each time her child had moved in her womb and she had been unable to even try to be rid of the baby. And thus was Ilar born, the occasional source of memories she would much prefer to forget, yet her joy as well.
Artemis was right. Brant needed to know before he discovered it for himself. And he would. She knew she would not be able to resist the need to become his lover for much longer. The marks left from Ilar’s birth were faint and small but they were there and there was a very good chance Brant would see them. Her reticence about becoming Brant’s lover was almost gone and with it would go her ability to tell him to stop.
Just a little longer, she thought, as she shed her robe and crawled into bed. It was nice to be desired by a man like Brant and she wished to revel in the simple joy of that for a while longer. Men did not often react well to discovering the woman they desired had a child. She wanted nothing to disturb the rapidly growing passion she and Brant shared so effortlessly. It was selfish and she knew it, just as she knew she could be risking his trust, but for a while she wanted what was happening between her and Brant to be hers and hers alone.
Chapter 8