Loving The Temperamental Adonis
Chapter 133: Reflecting on life

Chapter 133: Reflecting on life

"Your wrist, did he do that_" he began to explain but she interrupted him with a small laugh.

"I don’t know what you’re talking about but I got injured a week ago in a ceremony at the orphanage."

"What?"

Noticing his surprise and seeing how obviously he seemed to crave conversation with her, she smiled and began to explain to him while she ate. "Owen and I were invited to a charity event at an orphanage in Zen weeks ago but when we got there, Owen had to leave for some important meeting while Rayne and her boyfriend, Max, stayed back with me. Actually, before I was invited, I have been feeling quite down, then when I saw the children at the orphanage, I couldn’t help myself anymore and got too excited with them. At first I felt so bad for visiting the orphanage without buying enough gifts for the children, then I decided to rent a big bus and took the children out to the amusement park in the city, we went to the haunted house and one of the children got so scared he jumped on me all of a sudden and I lost my balance and ended up cutting my wrist on some sharp object. It was my own fault, the little boy was so terrified,"

She finished, smiling at the memory. "I love all the children and wish I could take them back home with me, and at that moment the thought of adopting one of them seemed so right, but then I changed my mind."

"Why did you change your mind?"

She waved her fork dismissively. "I changed my mind because the children look so happy together, if I adopt one of them, when I know I won’t have time for the child because of my work, I’ll feel terrible. Besides, Owen won’t approve of adoption when he looks eager to have his own children. But I do plan on taking full responsibility for some of the kids at the orphanage by giving them the education they deserve, even though I didn’t end up adopting any of them, I still consider them as a part of me somehow."

Neil noted the softness that crept into her voice and the glow that lit her brown eyes as she spoke of the children, and he continued to smile at her, marveling at her capacity for compassion and her sheer sweetness. She liked children, he noted, a surge of bitterness crept into his heart with the realization that she would be married to a man who was as eager as she was to have children. Unwilling to let her stop talking, he cast around for another subject and asked,

"What were you doing in Novaria the day we met?"

"Oh that, I actually travelled to Novaria because I was so eager to interview Aurora Quinn, the most talked about celebrity in the country."

"Did you interview her?" He asked.

"Yes. I did, it was a fun interview."

"Do you like you job?" he asked, strangely unwilling to let her stop talking. He’d chosen the right topic, Neil realized when she gave him a heart-stopping smile and warmed to the subject immediately.

"Of course, I do..." And so she continued to tell him everything she liked about her job and how much it meant to her. She told him how people had disliked her at first because of the scandal five years ago about her being the reason Neil Wayner had killed those students. Noticing that their current conversation was destroying the lively atmosphere, Neil asked her another question to divert the conversation.

"Do you still play the guitar?"

"I stopped playing the guitar the day I left Zen, but I was forced to play it again months ago." She said, using her fork to poke her food.

"I see," he said, but he didn’t completely see at all; he knew, without a doubt that she must have stopped playing guitar because of him. "Who forced you to play it again?" He asked, curious.

"Alvin, he made me play again."

Her face glowed at the mere mention of the name Alvin, and Neil was instantly curious about the male who seemed to mean more to her than her fiance. "Who is Alvin?"

"He’s one of the children at the orphanage—one of my favorites of them all, actually. He’s blind, but he has the most beautiful silver eyes in the world, he plays the guitar despite his disability to see. When I first saw him sitting alone in a corner playing the saddest song in the world, i couldn’t resist playing for him when he asked if I could play him a song. He reminds me of someone, someone who’s lost in the dark void of my memories... sometimes, I feel like, I had a different life before I knew who I was, it’s like whenever I try to remember that life, something stops it from resurfacing in my head..."

Neil’s expression blanked upon hearing that. He stared at her lost expression as if to search for the depth of them. Five years ago, he’d known that something was wrong with her memories, and five years later he realized that that ’something’ wasn’t cured yet.

"I was supposed to see Emma yesterday in Mirage Mesa, but now..."she muttered softly as if she were talking to herself.

"Who is Emma?"

She jerked her head away from her plate and glanced at him as if just realizing he was seating in front of her. She wrinkled her small nose innocently that it made Neil feel the urge to kiss her plump mouth.

"Emma is my therapist." She said, "She has been helping me with the weird feeling I’ve been having. And she has also been helping Alvin to cope with his disability to see..." She began to tell him about the boy while keeping anything about her own condition away from it. Few minutes later, she felt a little embarrassed by her emotional enthusiasm, and lapsed into silence again, and concentrated on her meal.

When he was finished eating, Neil settled back against the sofa and propped his ankle on the opposite knee, watching the flames leaping and dancing in the fireplace, as he gave his dinner companion a chance to finish her meal without further interruptions from him. Perhaps it was the fact that he’d been locked in prison where there was no one to entertain him, or perhaps it was the fact that being with Mia Harrison again made him feel like he’d missed a lot of a great deal from life experience, thus he’d wanted to hear her keep talking about her experiences.

He tried to concentrate on the next stage of his journey and his plan to go after the Mastermind behind Da Kroll, but in his state of sated relaxation in his mountain house, he was more inclined to dwell on the amazing, quirk of fate that had caused Mia Harrison to be sitting across from him. Throughout all the long weeks of working out every detail of his escape—throughout the endless nights he’d lain in his cell, dreaming of his first night in this house—not once had he ever imagined that he’d be here with Mia.

For a thousand reasons, it would have been far better if he were alone, but now that she was here, he couldn’t just lock her up in a room, bring her food, and pretend she wasn’t. After the last hour in her company, however, he was sorely tempted to do exactly that, because she was forcing him to recognize and reflect on all the things he had missed in his life and the things that were going to be lacking in it for all time.

At the end of the week, he would be on the run again, and where he was going, there’d be no luxurious mountain cabins with cozy fires; there would be no more pleasant conversations about children in the orphanage with a lovely journalist who happened to have eyes like an angel and a smile that could melt stone. He couldn’t remember ever seeing a woman’s entire face light up the way hers had when she talked about those children!

He’d seen rich heiresses, who would throw themselves at him light up at the possibility of getting a set of jewelry from him; he’d seen the world’s finest heiresses beg for his attention and his touch, which would annoy him to no end and make him view all women as clingy bitches, but until tonight, he had never, ever witnessed nor felt the real pleasure of wanting a woman to keep talking and smiling at him.

When he was eighteen years old, being beaten in the camp by his own uncle for the slightest mistake, and almost strangling on tears he refused to shed, he’d vowed never, ever to look back, to wonder how his life might have been if he hadn’t agreed to join the military at the age of twelve, if he had just taken his late father’s legacy and continued to run the Galverra Enterprises.

Yet, now, at the age of thirty-two_almost thirty three, when he was hardened beyond repair by the things he’d done and been and seen, he looked at Mia Harrison and succumbed to the temptation to wonder what his life would have been like if he wasn’t blinded with his revenge against his parents killer.

As he lifted the wine glass to his lips, he watched the fireplace and watched a log crack in a shower of sparks and wondered what would have happened if his twelve year old self had seen the little Mia when he went to search for her after his parents death. Would she have been able to save him from himself then, to teach him to forgive, to soften his heart, to fill up the empty spaces in his life?

Would she have been able to give him goals greater and more rewarding than his taste for cold revenge, would she had been able to stop him when he was losing his mind as a teenager and killing without awareness when angered?

With someone like Mia in his bed, would he have experienced something better, deeper, more profound, more lasting, than the mindless pleasure of an orgasm?

Lastly, the clear unlikelihood of his thoughts hit him, and he marveled at his own foolishness. Where in the hell would he have ever thought of settling down? Until he was sentence to prison, he’d taken his life like nothing. He’d wasted money on buying new, unnecessary things because he was too spoiled to wash anything, as a boy, he had been surrounded by servants and people, whose very presence were daily reminders of his social superiority.

Though he had grown in camp, he still held on to the thought that he was more superior than anyone, he still believed he had control over anyone and could destroy anybody, his pride and ego were always hanging on his sleeves. He’d tossed his past away until he met Mia Harrison in Ivy Grove, and then, he had only taken her as a fleeting amusement, but now he was starting to wonder what it would be like if she had been in his life right from their childhood until now.

If she were there, would he have had memorable moments in life, where he would have fun and enjoy the fun in life without having to connect everything to his mission?

No, he wouldn’t have changed his ways even though she had stayed with him, and he was damned sure he would have ruined her life and even killed her from one of his temper outbursts or destroy that beautiful smile of hers. He was a monster, a devil someone as angelic as Mia Harrison should stay clear of. But here he was, sitting in the same room with her.

Neil rolled his glass between his hands as he contemplated all of his shattered thoughts, trying to be brutally honest with himself. After several moments, he decided that if Mia had been with him through out all those years, he wouldn’t have done anything to hurt her, he would have cherished her and done his damned best to keep her beautiful smile.

However, now that he had come to this point where he was slowly losing his sanity, he would never, ever try to think of what a life would be with her. If she wouldn’t be interfering with any of his plans, he would have ushered her straight out of his life and told her to go home and marry her fiance, have his children, and live a life with meaning. Because, even at his most calloused, most jaded moments of his life, Neil would never have wanted to see anything that was as fine and unspoiled as Mia Harrison become handled and used and corrupted, by him or his enemies who would gladly use her to get to him.

But what if she had insisted on staying with him anyway, despite his advice, would he have then taken her as his wife and take her to his bed and have children with her, if and when she seemed to be willing?

No.

Would he have wanted to have children with her?

No!

Would he have even wanted to keep her around and allow himself to love and cherish her?

Damn! No!

Why not?

Neil already knew exactly why not, but he glanced over at her anyway as if to confirm what he felt: She was sitting with her feet curled beneath her on the sofa, the firelight gleaming on her shiny hair as she looked up at a beautiful landscape portrait hanging above the fireplace, her entire profile was as serene and as innocent as a little girl. And that was why he wanted to avoid her before he went to prison and why he didn’t really want to be around her now.

She deserves better than him. He was a man who’d sworn to never give his heart to any woman, to never have children. But she seemed to be a complete opposite of him.

Although he was only six years older than she in actual years, he was centuries older than she in experience, and most of that experience had not been the sort she would admire or even approve of—and that was true even before he went to prison. Besides her youthful idealism, Neil felt terribly old and jaded.

The fact that he found her incredibly sexy and desirable right now, even engulfed in that shapeless, bulky sweater of his, and the fact that he had an erection at this very moment only made him feel like a dirty, old, disgusting letch.

On the other hand, she’d also made him smile tonight, and he appreciated that, he decided as he gulped down a swallow of wine.