He stared down at the inky brew in his cup and put it down untasted, before lifting his gaze to hers.
‘I took your advice,’ he said simply. ‘And went to Argentina.’
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
‘YOU WENT TO ARGENTINA,’ Tara repeated slowly.
He nodded. ‘I did.’
There was a momentary pause. ‘And what did you find there, Lucas?’
She was staring deep into his eyes, her expression as distant as ever he’d seen it, and Lucas wondered if coming here unannounced had been a crazy idea. But he owed her this. He owed her the knowledge which had first shocked and then saddened him. And he owed it to himself to discover whether he had messed everything up.
‘I found my brother there,’ he said simply.
‘You have a brother?’
‘I do. His name is Alej—Alejandro Sabato—and he has a family of his own. His wife is English and she’s called Emily and they have a young baby, Luis.’
‘That’s nice,’ she said stiffly.
He wanted to tell her about the terrible pain in his heart because he’d missed her so much, but old habits died hard and for the time being he sought refuge in facts. ‘He’d actually been trying to find me, but because I’d changed my name his investigators kept coming up with blanks. Anyway, he was able to fill me in on everything I needed to know.’
Her gaze was still steady. ‘Which is?’
He shrugged his shoulders, for there was no easy way to say this, no acceptable way of defining the harsh facts surrounding his conception. ‘My mother was a prostitute and my father was one of her clients,’ he bit out. ‘A drunken thief who used to spend long periods in prison, and when he was released he would come out, beat her up and make her pregnant.’
She licked her lips and he could see a swallowing movement in her throat. ‘So how did you come—?’
‘To be brought up in one of the most expensive parts of one of the most expensive cities in the world?’ he supplied, and she nodded. ‘My mother had given birth to Alej just a year earlier and she was having enough trouble feeding one child, let alone another. So she decided to sell me. I suppose it made perfect economic sense. She went to see someone in Buenos Aires—someone who put her in touch with a rich American heiress—’
‘Your mother?’ she interrupted breathlessly.
‘No!’ he negated viciously. ‘Wanda Gonzalez never earned the right to call herself that during her lifetime, so I’m damned sure I’m not going to honour her with that title now she’s dead.’ He gave a bitter laugh. ‘She had specified that she wanted a birth mother from Argentina, so that I would resemble my “father” as much as possible.’
‘And did you?’ she questioned curiously. ‘Resemble him, I mean?’
He shook his head. ‘Not really. We had the same hair colour, but that was about it—I was bigger, stronger, more powerful.’ He gave a short laugh. ‘And that’s how I came to be brought up amid such great wealth in Manhattan, while Alejandro lived a very different life in Argentina—that is, until he escaped from abject poverty to become one of the world’s greatest polo players.’
‘Alejandro Sabato,’ she ventured slowly, with a nod of her flame-bright hair. ‘Yes, I’ve heard of him.’
‘I’m sure you have. He was a bit of a poster-boy for the sport in his time. But I haven’t come here to talk about my brother, Tara.’
She became instantly alert. ‘No?’ she challenged.
He wanted her to make this easy for him. To soften her lips into a smile. To send him a soft, unspoken message with her eyes so he could get up and walk right over there. Pull her hungrily into his arms and kiss her as he’d dreamt of doing ever since she’d walked out of his New York apartment. Because if he started kissing her and they began to make love, surely it would blot away some of the pain.
But something stopped him and it was the sense that this was the biggest deal he’d ever tried to pull off and he couldn’t afford to get it wrong. Yet getting it wrong was a distinct possibility, even though he knew how to wheel and deal in a boardroom. When to talk and when to let silence work for you. He knew about joint venture capital, about leasing out cars or lorries which people couldn’t afford to buy themselves, but he knew nothing about telling a woman that he loved her. And wasn’t that the crux of what he really wanted to say to her? The most important thing.
No. First up he needed to acknowledge what she had done for him. To tell her some of the things he had felt. Still felt. ‘I wanted to be angry with my mother and to blame her for the life into which I was born,’ he whispered. ‘And for a while I was. But then I realised that she’d taken a bad situation and tried to make it better. It can’t have been easy to give me away, but she did. And she did it for me, so I wouldn’t starve—and so that Alej wouldn’t starve either. She probably thought she was giving me the best chance she could—she wasn’t to know that Wanda was weak and Diego was cruel.’
‘Lucas,’ she said, and for the first time he could hear a softening of her voice and saw concern pleating her brow, as if she had detected his pain and wanted to soothe it away.
But he shook his head to silence her because he needed to say it, to let it all out so it could no longer gnaw away at him.
‘I would never have found this out if you hadn’t encouraged me to find my brother,’ he said. ‘You are responsible for that, Tara. For the bond I now have with my brother. For the discovery that I have a nephew and a sister-in-law. But when I saw that family of theirs it was like a dagger to my heart.’
‘Lucas!’ she said, as if she could hardly believe he was saying stuff like this, and wasn’t there a part of him who could hardly believe it himself?
‘I realised then that I had been given the opportunity to have a loving family—with you,’ he said huskily. ‘And because of my pride and arrogance and my cold and unfeeling heart, I had probably blown it. But I’m hoping against hope that I haven’t blown it and I’m asking you to give me another chance because... I love you, Tara.’
She was shaking her head as if she didn’t believe it, but the brief clouding of her eyes told him she didn’t dare believe it and he knew he wasn’t in the clear yet.
‘I love your spirit and the way you answer me back,’ he continued softly, and his eyes crinkled. ‘Even although sometimes that trait makes me as mad as hell. I like the way you’re loyal and true and that beneath your often prickly exterior there beats a heart of pure gold.’ He swallowed. ‘The first time I made love to you, it was like nothing I’d ever experienced. The way you made me feel was completely alien to me—’
She pursed her lips together. ‘That’s why you couldn’t wait to dash away the next morning and fly to New York early?’
‘Because it scared the hell out of me,’ he admitted. ‘It made me feel vulnerable, in a way I hadn’t allowed myself to feel for years. And then, when I told you stuff I’d kept bottled up for so long and you comforted me with your arms and with your body...’ He swallowed. ‘You just rocked my world. You’re still rocking it. Even now when I told you about my real mother and father, you just accepted it calmly. I was watching your face and you didn’t seem appalled, or shocked. You didn’t start expressing fears about what bad blood I may have being passed onto our baby.’ He saw her flinch. ‘Listen to me, Tara, I know I handled it badly but I didn’t know at the time how to handle it. But now I do. I’m asking you to forgive me and telling you that since you’ve been gone my life seems empty. To tell you that I want to marry you and spend the rest of my life with you. To give our child love and security, as well as to each other. To create a family. A real family. The kind of family which neither of us has ever had before. That is...that is if you feel you could ever love me too. So what do you say, Tara Fitzpatrick?’
Right then Tara was finding it impossible to say anything, she was feeling so choked up. Because Lucas might not be carrying a big bunch of flowers and
a diamond ring, but he was telling her he loved her and he was asking her to marry him.
But he still didn’t know, did he?
He didn’t know everything about her because she’d kept her own guilty little secrets. And although she’d tried several times to tell him about her past—hadn’t she been quietly glad when he’d cut her short? Hadn’t that given her the justification she’d needed to bury it even deeper—to act as if she were Tara Goody-Two-Shoes—in which case, perhaps she was the coward, after all.
‘I’m not the woman you think I am,’ she said slowly.
‘You’re everything—’
‘No. I’m not. Hear me out, Lucas. Please. Because this is important.’ She stood up, because it was difficult sitting there in the piercing green spotlight of his gaze. So she walked around the Doyles’ lovely old sitting room, with its faded furniture and leaf-framed view over the silvery lake, and gave a small sigh as she began her story. ‘My mother was a nurse in England when she got pregnant by someone whose name I was never told.’ Her voice grew reflective. ‘She never saw him again, so she came back to Ireland with me and I was brought up by my grandmother, while Mammy went out to work. We lived pretty much hand to mouth, in a little cottage on the outskirts of Ballykenna, and when I was two, my mother got breast cancer—’
‘Tara.’
‘No, Lucas,’ she said fiercely. ‘Let me finish. She got breast cancer and it was very aggressive. It was obviously very sad but I can’t remember much about it, or maybe I just blocked it out. She died very quickly and I was left in the sole care of my grandmother.’ She swallowed as she made an admission she’d never dared make before, even to herself. To realise that just because someone went through the mechanics of caring for you, didn’t mean that they liked you or loved you. Especially if you reminded them of their own failings.
‘She was a cold and bitter woman,’ she continued, with a wince. ‘Though it took me a long time to find out why. To discover why she hated men so much and why she used to dress me like a frump.’ She swallowed. ‘And why the other children used to laugh at me behind my back.’
‘Why?’
She drew in a deep breath. Here it was. The truth—in all its unvarnished clarity. ‘My grandmother had been a nun and my grandfather a priest and their liaison was a huge scandal at the time, because my mother was the result of that liaison. Oh, they tried to hush it up but everyone knew. And I think that some of the burden of the guilt my grandmother carried around with her must have transferred itself onto me. It’s why I was terrified of men and of intimacy until I met you, Lucas.’
She didn’t know what she expected him to do, but she’d imagined some moment of reflection while he processed what she’d just told him. As if he’d need time to come to terms with her revelation and maybe to get his head around what a massive scandal it had been at the time. But instead he was getting up out of the faded velvet chair and crossing the room with a purposefulness which was achingly familiar to her. And when he put his arms around her and pulled her close, she started to cry and once she had started she couldn’t seem to stop. The tears came hard and fast and Tara realised she was crying for all kinds of reasons. She was crying for the women of earlier generations who’d had to deal with judgement and being shunned. And she was crying for her poor dead mother who would never know her grandchild. Those tears were of sorrow, but hot on their heels came tears of gratitude, and joy—for being fit and healthy and carrying a child beneath her fast-beating heart. A child who...
She turned her wet face up to Lucas and saw compassion and love blazing from his green eyes and that gave her the courage to tell him. ‘I love you, Lucas,’ she whispered. ‘So much. And yes, I want to spend the rest of my life with you.’
He nodded, but didn’t speak, just drew his arms around her even tighter and for now that was enough.
It was more than enough.
EPILOGUE
‘LUCAS...’ TARA GAVE a luxurious stretch as she felt the warm lips of her husband tracking over her bare stomach, making her flesh shiver into little goosebumps. Again.
She swallowed down her growing desire, because they’d only just made love, hadn’t they? Was it always going to be this good? she wondered dreamily.
‘We’ll...we’ll be late for dinner.’
‘Dinner isn’t until nine-thirty,’ he whispered. ‘You know they eat late in Argentina.’
‘Yes, but even so.’ She fluttered her fingertips to his bare shoulders. ‘We really ought to be getting dressed.’
‘Say that with meaning, Tara.’ There was a note of laughter in his voice as he moved to lie on top of her. ‘And perhaps we will.’
Within minutes she was gasping out his name as he drove into her and he was kissing away the sounds of her helpless little cries as she came. But even though a deep lethargy crept over her afterwards, Tara forced herself to wriggle out from beneath Lucas’s hard, honed flesh and head for the en-suite bathroom, because they had a whole delicious evening ahead of them. Quickly, she showered and, when Lucas took her place to stand beneath the powering jets, she returned to the bedroom to slither into a silky black jersey dress and matching pumps, before creeping along the corridor to where Declan was fast asleep, in a cot beside his bigger cousin, Luis.
For a moment she just stood there, gazing down at the dark heads of the two sleeping babes, and a great wave of love and contentment swelled up inside her. They were so lucky, she thought, with a sudden twist of her heart. So very lucky. All of them.
She and Lucas had been married in Dublin just before the birth of their beloved son, Declan. Her friend Stella had been bridesmaid and the celebrations had been memorable for many reasons, not least because Stella had rebuffed the advances of the Italian billionaire Salvatore di Luca, which was pretty much unheard of. And the guest of honour had been Brett Henderson—the actor who had caused Lucas to be so jealous in New York—who had offered to sing a song at their wedding, about love changing everything.
‘He’s clearly still smitten,’ Lucas had grumbled, when she’d excitedly shown him the email.
‘Rubbish,’ Tara had disagreed. ‘I think he just likes a woman with an Irish accent—in which case he’ll have plenty to choose from at the reception! Our friends will never forgive us if we say no, Lucas. And besides, nobody could disagree with the sentiments of the song he’s planning to sing, could they?’
And Lucas had no answer to that.
Their honeymoon had been postponed until Declan was six months old, when they went on an extended stay with Alej, Emily and Luis at their beautiful Argentinian estancia. The two women had hit it off immediately and it had warmed Tara’s heart to see Lucas bonding with the brother he was quickly getting to know. Her husband was learning about the land of his birth, too, and had changed his name back to his birth name—not the one he’d seen written above a pub on the very first night he’d arrived in Dublin, completely alone. As Lucas Sabato he was building a mother-and-baby unit outside Buenos Aires, to support women and children who had fallen on hard times. Tara swallowed. To help prevent another helpless baby being given up because his mother couldn’t afford to feed him...
And tonight they would eat outside beneath the stars with Emily and Alej and count every single one of their blessings.
She heard soft footsteps behind her and felt the whisper of Lucas’s lips against her neck. His arm snaked around her waist and for a moment the two of them were silent as they stood looking down at their son.
‘It’s crazy,’ said Lucas softly.
‘What is?’
He shrugged. ‘How I’ve gone from being a man with nothing to a man who has everything.’
She turned to look at him, an expression of bemusement on her face. ‘Some people wouldn’t describe a relatively young billionaire as a man with nothing.’
He shook his head. ‘All the money in the world doesn’t come close to the way I feel
when I look at you, and Declan. Because you have given me all that is properly precious. You gave me courage to seek out my family and doing that has enriched my life. You have given me a beautiful son. But most of all, you’ve given me your love and that is priceless.’ He tilted her chin, his voice a little unsteady. ‘You are my everything, Tara Sabato, do you realise that?’
He had taken her breath away with his soft words and Tara had to dab furiously at her eyes to stop her mascara running. ‘And you are my everything,’ she answered fiercely. ‘For the first time in my life I feel as if I have a real home and that you and Declan are the beating heart of that home. And I love you. I love you so much. You do know that, don’t you, Lucas?’
Tenderly, Lucas stared down into the amber gleam of her eyes. The woman he admired more than any other. Who was strong and smart and brave and beautiful. His equal. His wife. His love. ‘Do I know that?’ He smiled as he wiped a mascara-coloured teardrop away from her freckled cheek. ‘You betcha.’
* * *
If you enjoyed The Argentinian’s Baby of Scandal by Sharon Kendrick, look out for the first instalment in The Legendary Argentinian Billionaires duet, Bought Bride for the Argentinian, available now!
And why not explore these other One Night With Consequences stories?
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Keep reading for an excerpt from The Maid’s Spanish Secret by Dani Collins.
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The Argentinian's Baby 0f Scandall (One Night With Consequences) Page 15