by Dani Collins
Ramon clicked off his phone and tucked it in the pocket over the ache of regret that hung in his chest.
Definitely better to end things before she began to wonder about wedding dates herself, he thought bleakly.
Since it was office hours when he arrived in Paris, he went to work, but only found Etienne at Isidora’s desk.
“Where is she?” he asked, scanning the empty room, accosted by a weird premonition that grew worse as Etienne blinked in bewilderment.
“She didn’t call you? Bernardo had a heart attack. She’s gone to Madrid. I’ve been waiting to hear if he’ll pull through—”
Ramon walked out, already speed-dialing his pilot.
* * *
“Why didn’t you call me?” Ramon’s voice came in with his footsteps, behind her, dragging her from a sea of worry to a boatload of pain. When his hand settled on her shoulder, she stiffened in defense, not able to cope with both sources of anguish at once.
His hand left her and in her periphery she saw it curl into a loose fist. He moved to stand closer to the bed, his expression tightening as he took in how her vibrant father was gray and still beneath his light sheet. His face was obscured by breathing equipment, his arm tied to an IV bag. The room was eerily quiet. Just that low sough of manufactured breath, the muted blip of equipment a lonely signal, proclaiming his heart still functioned. Barely.
“Was your mother with him? Where is she?” He glanced around.
She gave her father’s limp fingers a reassuring squeeze, only able to reply with a faint shake of her head, not willing to go there. According to her father’s housekeeper, who had been the one to call Isidora, Francisca had packed a few days ago. She wasn’t at her own home. Isidora had tried to reach her without success, which suggested she was away. Far away. With someone else. On a yacht, beyond coverage, perhaps.
So much for this latest reconciliation.
Isidora wasn’t ready to face any of it. She would have to wonder if her mother’s fickle soul had caused her father’s cardiac arrest and that created such a division of loyalty in her, she thought it might break her clean in half.
Focus on the positive.
“He made it through the surgery. They say that’s a good sign.” Her voice was desert-dry, thin and arid.
He transferred his attention to her, frown deepening as he studied her. “You look exhausted. Have you slept? Eaten? How long have you been here?”
She vaguely recalled a nurse giving her a canned protein drink while she waited for her father to come out of surgery. She had meant to finish it, but couldn’t remember if she had taken more than a few sips.
“Can you please stop asking me questions? I was talking to Papa in my head. I want him to know that I love him. You can go, if you want. I’m just going to sit here.”
* * *
Ouch.
He wasn’t going anywhere, not that he wanted to be in a hospital again. It hadn’t been very long since he’d sat vigil with his brother, waiting for news on Cinnia. It was the most helpless feeling in the world.
But he couldn’t let her face it alone.
He did what little he could, checking with a nurse for a prognosis, which was at the grim wait-and-see stage. He shared the update with his siblings, who were all troubled by the news, then found a coffee station. He made a cup for Isidora, heavily sweetened and creamed.
“Gracias.” She sipped and set it aside, all her focus on her father.
Time crawled for several hours, then suddenly her mother fluttered in.
“Ah, mi ángel! Lo siento mucho. I should have been here sooner. I didn’t have my phone. How is he?” Her tearstained face contorted with fresh anguish as she looked at Bernardo. She burst into fresh tears, one hand on the bed rail, the other going around Isidora’s waist as her daughter rose to stand beside her. She turned her face into Isidora’s shoulder and cried without reserve for several minutes.
Silent tears slid out of Isidora’s closed eyes, but even he could sense her mixed feelings, her distancing as her mother came up for air.
Francisca’s expression grew even more stricken. “You’re upset with me. Why?” Her gaze swung to Ramon with alarm. “Did you—?”
He jerked his head in swift denial. Now was not the time to reveal Isidora’s parentage.
He braced himself for Isidora to catch on and demand to know what they were hiding, but she didn’t even look at him.
“I’m upset that you left him, Mama.” Isidora’s voice was that heavy, anguished thing that wrung out his heart.
“No para un hombre. To a spa. I swear.” She grasped at Isidora’s arms. “We argued and I needed time—”
“No, Mama.” Isidora tried to shrug off her mother’s touch. “I don’t want to be in the middle of it.”
“There’s nothing to be in the middle of! You have to believe me, querida.” Her mother gave her a little shake as she searched her daughter’s expression, her own growing frantic. Fearful. “He asked me to marry him again. I said I would move in, but he insisted on marriage. Now he may die—”
“He won’t,” Isidora quickly said, shoulders caving as she reached for her mother. “He’ll pull through. He has to.”
Francisca looked like a lost child as Isidora comforted her, completely the wrong way around.
Ramon looked away, dismayed by all of it. Suspicious that Francisca had been with a man, but he wasn’t about to throw accusations around a room like this.
Not long after, the doctor told them Bernardo’s vitals had improved.
Ramon convinced Isidora to let him take her home to rest. She was so exhausted, she didn’t have any fight left in her and fell asleep in the car. She woke when they arrived and said plaintively, “I thought we were going to my home.”
“Your mother’s?”
“My apartment. The one I bought when I requested a transfer. I sent all the things you removed from my place in Paris. I was going to start unpacking.”
“That will have to wait.” She was a wreck. “We’re here now.” In Salamanca, at the villa built by his mother’s ancestors in the nineteenth century, not that that made an impression on her.
She moved like a zombie as she accompanied him up the front steps of the family mansion, barely looking around.
This home was one of the places few people except immediate family ever entered. He had lived here as a child, until Trella’s kidnapping had prompted their father to create the heavily guarded compound, Sus Brazos, in southern Spain. Like all their homes, this one had been retrofitted and secured to the nth degree, but retained its exemplary architecture and original grandeur. Their father used to say it was more stairs than house, but it had tremendous charm, with its stained glass windows, ornate scrollwork and marble columns. The staff took care of him very well and seemed genuinely pleased to see him. He felt good to be home.
“I know you’re tired,” he said to Isidora. “But I called ahead. The soup is ready. You need to eat.”
She sighed with resignation and let him guide her into the stately dining room, where she lowered onto the velvet-covered chair he held for her. She smiled weakly as their cocido madrileño arrived, fragrant enough to make his own stomach pang.
As they were left alone, and the only sound was the quiet clink of spoons against bowls, she said softly, “It’s okay. I already know.”
“Perdóname?” He paused with his spoon in midair.
“Mama told you when you were sharing secrets that night, I suppose?” The low light cast shadows over her hollow cheeks, making her look that much more haunted with her bruised eyes and cloak of anguish.
His mind went first to how blindly he had walked into Trella’s trap. He liked to think he learned from his mistakes.
“You’ll have to be more specific. I’m not sure what you’re talking about.”
The corners of her mouth trembled as though she tried for a cynical smile, but didn’t have the strength. He suspected there was disappointment there, too. In him, for making her spe
ll it out.
“My mother has never had it in her to be exclusive to anyone. She cheated on my father a lot, right from the beginning. He married her because she was pregnant. He thought it would get better, but it didn’t. He blamed himself. He traveled so much, working for your father.” She waved her spoon toward him. “I don’t say that to imply your father is responsible for her infidelity. Papa has no regrets about working so closely with him. When Trella was taken... He had a daughter. He wanted desperately to help, not be one of the vipers who tried to capitalize.”
“We know.” The words seemed to vibrate in the still, empty cavern that his chest became. “Bernardo was one of the few to take our side after our father passed, supporting us against the board. He has always been highly valued by our family. We’re all upset he’s in hospital.”
“I know.” She dropped her gaze to her bowl as she stirred her soup. “And he was an ambitious man when he was younger. He wanted to work that hard. When he did come home, he wanted that home to include his daughter, so he didn’t confront Mama about her infidelity. He didn’t want to divorce her. He knew she had been molded into what she was by her childhood. He didn’t want a replay of custody battles and risk turning me into the same thing. But by the time I was starting school, he couldn’t ignore any longer that I looked nothing like him.”
Ramon set down his spoon and sat back.
“He knew she must at least suspect I wasn’t his. He had a DNA test done and knew for sure.”
“But he didn’t confront her.”
She shook her head. “He was angry enough to divorce her outright, but...he loved me.” She smiled through a sheen of tears. “He knew he would lose me in a custody battle. I wasn’t his. He didn’t know what to do. He asked your father for advice and your father asked him, ‘Who will be her father if not you?’ So he stayed a little longer.”
Her smile wobbled and turned down.
“I owe your father for that,” she said huskily. “It wasn’t easy for Papa.”
He watched her swirl her soup, eating nothing, thinking of Trella saying “For some crazy reason she has decided she would die for us.”
“This is why you agreed to our engagement.” He wanted to be alone then, to deal with the roaring, howling shame in him. Somewhere, in his past, his father had done something so noble and kind for this girl, it filled him with a swell of pride. His father had ensured Isidora had something she desperately needed, that she deserved, and he, Ramon, had come along years later, grabbed it roughly and used it without remorse.
“I love him so much.” Her voice cracked. “I knew Mama was...not like other mothers. I used to lie to him about the men in the house, about where she had been. I lied to people all over the city, trying to cover up for her. I was so afraid he would find out and leave us. Leave me.” She bit her lips together to still their tremble.
He drew a measured breath into lungs that burned.
“When your father died...” Her lashes came up and sent empathy to him that compressed his chest even further. “It hit Papa hard. He reassessed his own life, the sacrifices he was making in staying married. I think he thought if he divorced my mother, he would stop loving her, but that never happened. He told me everything once they started their proceedings, in case it came up. He didn’t want me to be blindsided by it.”
“But if you all knew at that point, why didn’t you take it up with Francisca?”
She shook her head in a hopeless little gesture.
“Mama doesn’t process relationships the way other people do. She didn’t have parents who loved her so she doesn’t know how to be a parent, doesn’t understand how love works. That’s why I needed Papa so badly. If I could have, I would have gone to live with him after they divorced. It was so disruptive to live with her. But if she had known that I knew he wasn’t my father yet preferred him over her...? It would have killed her. I mean that almost literally. She’s a broken person. She’s desperate to feel loved and counts on me to love her no matter what. It’s something that keeps her from completely self-destructing. To take that away from her, and reveal that I know she did this awful thing to my father... And what is the next step? Ask her about my biological father? Make her admit she doesn’t know? She would expect that I would never forgive her. Maybe I wouldn’t. I would lose her, that’s for sure. One way or another she would disappear from my life. I can’t risk that.”
The slant of her shoulders, so heavily weighted, made his own ache. He carried a lot of pain himself, but in that moment, he took in the scope of hers and he was humbled.
“I’m really tired. Can I go to bed now?” She set aside her spoon.
He gave her barely dented soup a dismayed glance. “I’ll take you up.”
He put her in his own bed, watching her move like a robot on autopilot as she stripped her pants, then pulled her bra straps down her arms before digging under her shirt and throwing her bra to the floor. She was asleep before her head hit the pillow.
He watched her for a long time, wondering what would happen to her if she lost the one person she counted on to love her.
* * *
It had all been a bad dream. They were still in Rio and she had dreamed that he had ended things so ruthlessly. He hadn’t dumped her in Paris like soiled laundry. She hadn’t received a call that had shaken her to her very foundation.
Part of her knew that she was kidding herself, that she was in his bed in Madrid, but as her hands skimmed over the warm satin that was Ramon’s hard body next to hers, she let herself travel back in time a mere few days, to when she had believed their future was bright and endless.
He responded by gathering her into his heat, murmuring something about her needing sleep.
“I am sleeping,” she whispered against his neck, nuzzling the stubble under his chin with her nose. Her hand found his length, slowly worked up and down as he grew under her touch. “I’m dreaming. Don’t wake me.”
He said something she didn’t catch, an imprecation, and dug his hand into her hair, pulling her closer as he searched for her mouth with his own. His heavy body rolled, tucking her beneath him.
Time slowed. He drew out each kiss, each caress, peeling open one button at a time down her shirt, then parting it to spread kisses across her chest. When he finally found her nipple, she was practically weeping, all of her skin sensitized, all of her being expanding with love for him.
“Touch me,” she begged, pushing his hand between her thighs, where she was wet and aching.
He growled with appreciation, then stroked his hand on her inner thigh, spreading her legs wider to accommodate him as he settled between them. When he climbed his fingertips back to where she yearned, she gasped into his mouth.
He slid away, down and down, mouth following a leisurely path through the valley of her breasts while his hands cruised in tender caresses across her skin. His lips grazed the ridges of her ribs, played into the trembling plane of her belly, and finally his hot breath fogged the humid grove between her thighs.
He pleasured her, driving her up and up the rise of tension.
She stroked her fingers through his hair, blatant in how she offered herself to him, joyous in her abandonment. No man would ever give her this again. She had to take it now. Now.
She cried out as a climax rocked through her, anguished that it was over so quickly, but he rose over her, moving away briefly for a condom, then settled on her again. As he slid into her, she sighed with repletion. All of her folded around him, drawing him in deeper.
He made love to her like that for a long time, slow and easy, as if he, too, wanted to prolong this connection. As if he knew, as she did, that this was their last time.
But it couldn’t last forever and their bodies were too responsive to each other’s. The friction of his movement was building to a screaming pitch inside her. She was so mindless in her arousal, her hands moved in uneven patterns across his shoulders and back. They slid of their own accord to his flexing buttocks and urged him to thrust
harder. Deeper.
He pushed his hands beneath her buttocks and took her with him, driving ruthlessly. She closed her legs across his back and lifted herself into him, glorying in the animalistic act, thrilling to the roughness of it. The implacable imprinting of his body into hers.
On and on she clung to him, everything obliterated from her mind except him. This. Them. Timeless. Forever.
Then, suddenly, the world exploded. They both released jagged noises as a powerful climax overcame them both in a rush of culmination and abject loss.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
ISIDORA FELT LIKE an exposed nerve as they arrived at the hospital. She and Ramon hadn’t spoken much, just exchanged the mundane things. Breakfast was ready. What time should he order the car, that kind of thing. She had showered alone, which had made her feel bereft.
Neither acknowledged their lovemaking, which had made her feel like it was something shameful that needed to be hidden, at least from herself.
She felt like her father, going back to her mother again and again, hoping for a better result. She had judged Bernardo at times, thinking him foolishly optimistic and a glutton for punishment. Now she judged herself the same way.
At least they would have a clean break.
Her father was awake when they arrived, still very weak, but the doctor was there and pleased with how things were progressing. He was recommending a move out of intensive care and discussed the plan for his recovery at home when he was discharged in a week or two.
“I’ll stay with him,” Isidora said, smiling through her relieved tears at her father, not looking at Ramon as she said it. He couldn’t argue. It was a perfectly legitimate reason to end their pretend engagement.
“Oh, no, querida,” her mother protested. “You have a wedding to plan. So do I.” She smiled, glowing as she gazed at Bernardo. “Of course I’ll be your father’s nurse. In sickness and health, correcto, mi amor?”
“But you said—?” From the way her mother had spoken yesterday, she had thought Francisca didn’t want to marry again.