Page 195 of Keep This Promise
“All kidding aside, I’m here for you too.”
Do men like this really exist? If so, I really did have luck in Vegas.
“Thank you, Holden.”
“Let’s go get dinner and then we can get back to Eden.”
I like that plan, and I am starting to really like him too.
ChapterEighteen
HOLDEN
This isn’t a date. I keep reminding myself of that whenever I want to reach across the table and take her hand. Or when she smiles at me, those blue eyes shining in the candlelight, and it makes my dick hard. I may not remember much about us meeting, but I remember the way she looked at me. It was the same way she’s looking at me now.
“Tell me about you as a little boy,” Sophie says.
That shakes me out of it. “What?”
“What were you like as a child?”
I place my fork down. “I was a normal boy, I guess. I had my fair share of scrapes and bruises. What about you?”
“I was very quiet. I grew up in a home where children weren’t seen or heard,” she replies. “It fostered a very deep love for reading and drawing.”
“Which led to your love of painting,” I finish.
She nods. “I would sit at my window and just draw the outside world how I saw it in my head. Things in my life weren’t always picturesque, but on the canvas, they were. My parents split their time between London and Surrey. We owned a ridiculous home in the countryside and went on holiday there at least once a month.”
“Did you like it?”
“The house? It was stunning. It had an indoor swimming pool and a cinema room, which was unheard of at that time. It was my great grandfather’s mansion and passed down to my father. He loved that house more than I think he loved my mother or me.” She laughs without humor. “Well, I know that’s true. He didn’t care much for either of us. Still, when we went there, I could live in a different world. Where little girls were swung around on the perfect lawn instead of kept off it. Where I could run to my father, and he’d smile with arms open. They weren’t bad parents, just not affectionate. They put on a good show, though. Everyone believed we were a model family that had it all.”
I know that all too well. My parents were absent most of the time and neglectful if they were there. I grew up not knowing much about parental love unless I was with Isaac or Emmett’s family. Most of all, I try very hard not to think about Kira and how they killed her. “My family was that way. The outside didn’t match the life we lived behind the walls. We had a nice house, it wasn’t big, but it was better than most of my friends’ places. They were also the biggest hypocrites I’d ever known. My father was the pastor of a church a few towns over, and my mother was a teacher. Here they were, telling people to care more, to love and respect what we have, but they basically ignored their own children. Mom cared about her appearance in the community, and my father, well, I can’t even get into that. My sister Kira and I basically raised ourselves because our parents were always working with someone who needed them more, not seeing we were falling apart.”
“It seems we had very similar childhoods. Parents who cared more about others than their kids.”
She doesn’t even know the half of it. My parents are why my sister is dead.
“And yet you’re nothing like that with Eden,” I say, not wanting to expose that part of my past yet.
Sophie’s gaze drops as she shakes her head. “I think that’s what I struggle most with. As a mother, how does a parent not love their child? How do they claim they do but then push them away the second their child does something they disagree with?”
“You mean about when you came home pregnant?”
“Yes. But my father was really who would’ve cast me out without a backward glance. He never would’ve entertained his perfect daughter having a child out of wedlock. He was all about appearances, and he and my mother basically arranged my marriage before my father’s death. They wanted me to marry a business adversary, which would have secured the merger of their companies. I was nothing more than a business transaction, and I wanted no part of it.”
“I understand that.”
She nods. “Theo did too. His parents were equally wretched. They resented him for ruining their picture of idyllic life. They wanted a perfect son, and instead, they got a son with a heart defect that would cause them to miss out on life.” She places her napkin down on the table and sighs. “I hated them. They were horrible people, and when he became an adult, they washed their hands of him and his medical care. Too busy trying to catch up on the life they lost having to care for him. Not that they did much of that anyway. Always sticking him with a caretaker or leaving him at the hospital.”
“Sounds like all our parents could’ve lived in a commune together.”
“The land of shit for parents?”
I smile at that. “Mine would be president.”
Sophie leans back, watching me. “Worse than Theo’s parents?”
