by Dani Collins
He cupped her jaw with his damp palm and his wet thumb silenced her lips.
“You don’t care about my past. That’s all that matters to me.”
Her chin crinkled under the line of his thumb while her insides were nothing but trapped birds flittering every which way.
“It can’t be this easy after it was so h-hard.” Her throat was tight, her voice a mere squeak. “For so l-long.”
“It won’t always be easy, mi amor,” he said with tender understanding. “Sometimes I will tell you to come in out of the rain and you’ll make me stand here and count chickens with you. Other times I’ll punish you by making you dress up in designer gowns and talk to strangers.”
“And you’ll still love me despite my petulant sighs?”
“I will love you because of them. Because they will remind me you’re there for my sake, not for designer gowns. It’s inevitable that we argue over the small nonsense of life, but it won’t compare to the harmony I feel waking next to you or holding your hand in mine.”
He took hers now, made a tiny adjustment to her rings. Brought her hand to his lips and kissed her trembling fingers.
“I want to build a life with you, Pia. Not one that seeks vengeance. One that fosters love. I need you in my life, every day, helping me do that.”
“I wanted this so badly and I’ve been trying so hard not to hope for it. It hurt so much when I was convinced it couldn’t come true. Now I’m afraid I’m going to wake up and find out I really am dreaming.”
He bit her knuckle hard enough to threaten pain.
“Ouch! Hey.” She scowled, trying to snatch her hand away in reaction.
He grinned and kept her hand in his as he stood. He gave a gentle tug. “Can we get out of the rain?”
She glanced at her ruined notebook, pages curled and turning to pulp.
“I’ll buy you a bowl of soup,” he coaxed. “We can talk about a foundation to address the effects of climate change on marine mammals or...” He scanned the beach. “What are you doing here?”
“Do you really want to know?” She was embarrassed, but trusted him enough to know that when he laughed at her, it would be in the kindest way possible. “I named them several years ago. I check on them when I’m feeling blue. I like to see who is hooking up with whom and count the new babies.”
His valiant struggle to keep a straight face was love in its purest form.
“I also have a colony of penguins and some polar bears I like to track.” She rubbed her nose where rain was dripping and causing a tickle. “A pod of whales. Way too many dolphins, but they’re so playful and cute.”
“I’m excited to hear all about them,” he assured her with a solemn nod. “Soup?”
She rose, gave a little shrug to knock the worst of the gathered rain off her coat.
“Or we could go to my hotel room,” she suggested. “Warm up in the shower before we dry off and go to bed. Maybe not talk much at all for a while.”
“Then order room service? See, this is why I love being married to a woman who is smarter than me.” He helped her gather her things, then stood with her in the rain a moment longer. Long enough to kiss her senseless.
With his arm firm around her, he drew her from the empty beach into their shared future.
EPILOGUE
Eighteen months later...
“CAN WE HOLD JELLY?” Lily asked, one arm curled trustingly around her Tío Cesar’s neck while he clasped her affectionately against his chest.
Angelo had a very difficult time denying his nieces and nephews anything, particularly sweet Lily with her high voice and innocently batted lashes and her hilarious shortening of Angelica’s name to Jelly.
Tío Cesar was another story. Angelo enjoyed a good-natured trashy relationship with his wife’s brothers, well developed over the year since they’d all had their litter of newborns and he’d partnered with them on an alloy for a gaming console they were jointly developing.
“You’re shameless,” he said to Cesar, nodding at Lily, who coaxed with a wave of her free arm, entreating her younger cousin to join them.
“I like to connect with my nieces. That’s how one keeps the title Favorite Uncle. Pro tip,” Cesar advised in a facetious drawl.
Fighting words. Angelo narrowed his eyes. “Wait until your daughter’s birthday.” He would spoil her enough for a lifetime.
“Please, Jelly?” Lily begged. “Tío Cesar wants to read us a book.”
Angelica peeked from where she had her face buried in Angelo’s neck. She wasn’t particularly shy, but she made strange with her uncles sometimes, mostly because she didn’t see them as often as she saw Poppy and Sorcha and the children.
She had also just woken from her nap to a lot of people and attention, not that they were making a big deal out of her first birthday. Pia had invited her brothers and their families to spend the weekend at their island home because it was the middle of the summer and they all enjoyed an excuse to spend time together. The grandparents had chosen not to make the journey for something so frivolous, which kept it to a laid-back gathering where the children could be as boisterous as they liked.
“Want to cuddle with Lily and Tío?” Angelo asked his daughter.
“Maybe Brenna will join us,” Cesar said of his daughter, noting the little firecracker was working up to fight her brother, Mateo, to the death over a pool noodle.
“You on that, Rico?” Angelo mocked as Angelica went to Cesar and Rico waded into the dispute, his year-old son naked on his hip.
“Tío!” Enrique called from the diving board. “Watch me flip.”
“Where are the women? How did we get outnumbered? Ah, Memo,” Rico muttered as a wet stain appeared on his shirt. “I knew that would happen. Here.” He handed his son to Angelo.
Angelo diapered his nephew while Rico caught Brenna back from chasing her brother down the stairs into deeper water. He plopped Brenna with her father and the girls, then threw off his stained shirt and cannonballed into the pool to soak the boys.
“I told you they’d have everything under control,” Sorcha said as the women appeared with trays of food and drink. Memo went to Poppy, then pointed at his father in the pool so she took him across to hand him in to Rico.
“I’m insulted there was any doubt in us.” Angelo scooped Pia close and stage-whispered, “Thank God you got here when you did.”
She chuckled and looped her arms around his waist, gazing over the convivial chaos of their pool party. “This is nice.”
“It is.”
“Okay,” Poppy said, coming back to uncork a bottle of wine. “I’ve been very excited for this day. Our first vintage and everyone is weaned, right? We girls finally get to split a bottle of wine?”
Pia wrinkled her nose and looked at Angelo. They had suspected they wouldn’t be able to keep it under wraps a full three months.
“Really?” Poppy asked with shock, catching their look while bright tears came into her eyes.
“We didn’t mean to,” Pia admitted sheepishly. “It just happened.”
“Oh, we know how it ‘just happens,’” Sorcha teased.
“Too true,” Poppy said, coming to hug both of them. “That’s wonderful news. Congratulations.”
* * *
Much later, when Angelo was lying replete next to his wife, her damp body relaxed against his, he said, “Do you remember our honeymoon?”
“I think we were just there,” she said on a luxurious sigh and a slither of her naked skin against his own. She settled her head more comfortably on his shoulder.
He smiled into the dark. “That’s what I meant. I remember thinking I had to memorize it because I might never be that happy again, but I am. Often.”
“A wise person once told me that happiness is fleeting, not a state of being.”
“He might not have been as smart as
the woman he was talking to.”
She brought her thigh up to rest across his stomach. Her face turned into his skin as she kissed above his heart. “For the record, after much dedicated research, I have concluded that happiness is a goal worth pursuing.”
“Hypothesis proven?”
“Beyond a shadow of a doubt.”
* * *
If you enjoyed Bound by Their Nine-Month Scandal by Dani Collins you’re sure to enjoy the other Montero siblings’ stories!
Discover the hidden heirs of Cesar in
The Consequence He Must Claim
and Rico in
The Maid’s Spanish Secret.
Available now!
And why not explore these other One Night With Consequences stories?
His Two Royal Secrets
by Caitlin Crews
The Argentinian’s Baby of Scandal
by Sharon Kendrick
His Cinderella’s One-Night Heir
by Lynne Graham
The Sicilian’s Surprise Love-Child
by Carol Marinelli
Available now!
Keep reading for an excerpt from Confessions of a Pregnant Cinderella by Abby Green.
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Confessions of a Pregnant Cinderella
by Abby Green
CHAPTER ONE
LAZARO SANCHEZ SURVEYED the glittering ballroom of one of Madrid’s most exclusive hotels. A hotel that he owned. Satisfaction and anticipation coursed through his veins. This moment...was huge. His whole life had been building to this, to standing here in front of his peers.
But they hadn’t always been his peers. These people wouldn’t have recognised him as the semi-feral teenager who’d roamed and lived on the streets. Hustling to make a few euros by washing car windows at traffic lights; showing tourists how to beat the queues into museums and galleries; eating out of bins when he couldn’t afford to buy food.
The familiar burn of injustice and rage burned low in his gut when he recalled those desperate days. He’d run away from his last foster home when the father had cornered Lazaro in the bedroom and started taking his trousers down.
Lazaro had jumped out of the first-floor window.
From the age of thirteen he’d fended for himself.
The cruel irony of it all was that Lazaro hadn’t been orphaned, or abused by his parents so badly that he’d been removed from their care, like other kids who’d ended up in the foster homes. He’d been abandoned into the system by his parents. And, actually, his father was in this very room right now. Not that he would ever look him in the eye. Or admit he was his father—even under duress.
As for his mother, he’d only ever seen her a handful of times in his life, from a distance.
The reason for that was because Lazaro Sanchez was the illegitimate result of an affair between two members of two of Spain’s oldest and most respected and revered families. The closest you could get to royalty without being royal.
The only way he’d found out about his parentage had been through a mixture of fluke and happenstance. A careless social worker had left his file unattended one day and he’d seen his birth certificate and memorised his parents’ names. When he’d investigated them afterwards nothing had come up. They were fake names.
Then, while changing foster homes at the age of about twelve, he’d been dozing in the back of the car as two social workers had driven him to the new home. He could still remember seeing one of them glance behind, to check if he was sleeping, and then, as if she hadn’t been able to sit on the information any longer, whisper to the other social worker the rumour about who his real parents were.
Lazaro had clamped his eyes shut completely and frozen solid in the back of the car. Even at that age he’d heard of the Torres family and the Salvadors. They were two of Spain’s most important and wealthy dynasties, with lineages stretching back to medieval times.
When he’d had a chance he’d looked them up for more information. And even though it had been just a rumour he’d known as soon as he’d seen a picture of his father when he’d been Lazaro’s age. They were mirror images. And he’d inherited his mother’s unusual green eyes.
He’d taken to stalking the palatial properties belonging to the Torres family and the Salvadors in an exclusive suburb of Madrid. Watching them come and go. Seeing his half-siblings. One in particular was an older boy on his father’s side—Gabriel Torres. For some reason, Lazaro had fixated on him...perhaps because they were relatively close in age.
One day he’d seen them all sitting in a restaurant in the centre of Madrid, celebrating his half-brother Gabriel’s birthday.
Lazaro had waited outside, and when they’d emerged—the women wearing designer dresses and dripping in diamonds, the men in bespoke suits—Lazaro had darted forward and planted himself in front of his father and Gabriel.
‘I’m your son!’ he’d announced, shaking with adrenalin as he’d looked up at the towering man, aware of his half-brother beside him, looking at him as if he was an alien.
It had all happened so fast. Men had appeared from nowhere and Lazaro had found himself face-down in the dirt in an alleyway beside the restaurant. His father had hauled him up by the hair and spat into his face.
‘You are no son of mine—and if you ever come near me or my family again you will pay for it.’
That was when Lazaro’s ambition had been born. The ambition to one day be in a position where he was literally touching shoulders with them. Where they would have to look him in the eye. Where he would taunt them with his presence—with the knowledge that he had thrived and survived in spite of their attempts to excise him from their family histories.
And here he was, in the same room as his father and his half-brother Gabriel—with whom he was embroiled in a bitter and ruthless battle to take over one of Madrid’s oldest indoor market buildings and redevelop it into a new space.
His half-brother Gabriel still refused to acknowledge that Lazaro could be his brother even though—
‘Lazaro?’
He looked to one side to see the reason why both his father, his half-brother and other peripheral members of both his birth families were all in the same room.
Leonora Flores de la Vega.
With her exquisitely beautiful face, long black hair, dark grey eyes and a willowy body that curved in and out in all the right places, she was arguably one of the most beautiful women in Spain.
And one of the most well-connected.
Her family might have no money—in fact that was one of the reasons for the marriage—but their name was as old and venerated as the Torres or Salvador families. And that was priceless.
Hence the reason why Lazaro wanted to marry her. It would bring him another step closer to the inner circle that had always been shut to him, no matter how many millions he’d made. It would bring him another step closer to making his family squirm. Another step closer to ultimate acceptance.
‘Are you all right?’ she asked. ‘You look very fierce.’
He forced a smile and held out a hand to Leonora. She slipped her hand into his and Lazaro closed his fingers around hers. Nothing. Not even a twinge of response. But then he wasn’t marrying her for th
eir chemistry. He was marrying her for something much more enduring. Securing his own legacy. Forcing those who would ignore him to acknowledge him and respect him. Finally.
‘Yes, fine...just a little preoccupied.’
He saw her glance across the room to someone or something, and a faint tinge of colour came into her cheeks. She bit her lip.
‘Are you okay?’ Lazaro asked.
She always seemed so composed, unruffled, it was strange to see her suddenly look a little flustered. Distracted.
She looked back at him and smiled. ‘Yes, I’m fine.’
He tightened his fingers around hers. ‘I’m glad you agreed to marry me, Leonora. I think we can have a good marriage. I think we can be...happy.’
A shadow seemed to cross her face, and her smile faltered for a second, but then she said brightly, ‘Yes. I hope so.’
Lazaro realised at that moment that he hardly knew this woman. He’d sought her out because of who she was, and they’d dated a few times—chaste dates. He liked her. And it was no secret that her family were in dire financial straits. He’d seen an opportunity to silence the critics of his playboy reputation and move that bit closer to where he ultimately wanted to be.
When he’d suggested she marry him, and in so doing pay off her family’s debts, she’d said yes.
He let go of Leonora’s hand and slipped his arm around her back, resting a hand on her hip. An intimate move. A proprietorial move. And still nothing. Not even a trip in his pulse.
He told himself again that attraction wasn’t everything. Lust was a base emotion. No one in this milieu married for lust. He was living proof that they married for other, far more practical reasons and kept their lust hidden. Secret. He wasn’t like them. He had more control.
Suddenly his conscience pricked hard and a picture formed in his mind. A memory, to be precise. A memory that had been haunting him with increasing and irritating frequency. As if the closer he got to making a commitment to Leonora the louder his conscience got.