by Dani Collins
* * *
Sorcha was glad she was sitting because her heart stopped then kicked with a hard beat of shock, making her woozy. As husband and wife?
No. She wasn’t so silly as to hear a proposal in that statement. He might have called off his wedding, but that was just a postponement. Wasn’t it?
“You, um, want to move to Ireland with me?” she asked.
“It’s good you’re keeping your sense of humor,” he said with a faint, patronizing smile. “No. We’ll marry and live in Spain.”
Another breathtaking spasm squeezed and released her heart. She tried to swallow and couldn’t.
“You want to marry me,” she managed to say. “What about—” She waved at the check. “I thought this meant you’re marrying Diega after all. Was it this romantic when you proposed to her, by the way? I’m sorry, that’s cruel. You probably don’t remember because you were in a coma. At least I’m awake. Count your blessings, Sorcha!” she babbled, hysterical laughter rising in her throat.
Cesar didn’t move, his face stony. “There are times, Sorcha, when that runaway tongue of yours really ought to be held firmly between those pretty white teeth.”
“What do you want me to say?” she cried. “Thank you? Apparently your brides are interchangeable. I’ve never felt that way when contemplating my eventual husband.”
“My children are not,” he stated, tone as hard as his expression. “Interchangeable. And he had better be my son, Sorcha. If those tests come back telling me I’ve been had, I won’t be happy.”
“As opposed to now, when you’re ecstatic?”
“Less sarcasm once we’re married, hmm? More sweetness.”
She snorted. “We’re not getting married, Cesar.”
“Sorcha,” he said in that terrible voice he used when he was about to annihilate someone. She had always excused herself from the room so the poor sod wouldn’t have a witness to his or her dressing-down.
Her stomach curdled, but she tightened militant fingers into the blanket across her waist and said, “No.”
He came over to clench his hands around the rail of her bed.
“You know how I feel about thieves,” he said in that deadly tone. “You were going to keep my son from me. You were going to do that to me. I may never forgive you for that.”
I trusted you. That’s what he was saying and now that trust had been impacted.
A sob formed in her diaphragm and sat there as an aching lump. She’d been self-protecting.
How could she explain that she’d grown up tarred by what had been seen as her mother’s failed attempt to better herself in the dirtiest, craftiest way? Sorcha could not bear to be viewed in the same light. Her pride had demanded she take all the responsibility for her actions.
“How could I tell you? You were engaged to the woman you had always planned to marry. This is what I expected.” She flicked the check with her finger, sending it helicoptering off the bed onto the floor. “That’s not who I am. I don’t get pregnant to make money. Or to force men to marry me.”
“Nevertheless, we will marry.” He folded his arms.
“You don’t want to marry me! You don’t love me. You don’t even see me as a friend! You didn’t call after I left Spain. You didn’t care that I was out of your life.”
If she had hoped he would protest that she was wrong and he did care, she was sorely disappointed.
“I don’t love Diega, either,” he asserted. “Love isn’t a requirement for my marriage.”
“It is for mine!”
They battled it out with a silent glare for a few seconds before she tore away her gaze, flinching at what he was offering: a knockoff of the designer marriage she had fantasized. Yes, she had imagined marrying him, but in her vision, love was the stitching that held it together.
“You’re telling me you’re not too proud to accept a onetime slice of my fortune, for the sake of our son, but you’re too proud to marry so Enrique can inherit all of it. Do you really want to raise him in Ireland, away from his birthright? To have him one day discover I have children with another woman and those children are living the life he should have had?”
Sorcha sucked in a breath as though he’d stabbed her. “You do remember,” she said through numb lips, swinging her gaze back to him.
“Remember what?” His face blanked.
“What I told you about my father that day. That I have half siblings who inherited his wealth and we were left with nothing.”
He shook his head, irritation flashing as he said through his teeth, “No. I remember nothing of that day. I never will.” His face spasmed into tortured lines before he shrugged off the dark emotion. “But I’m capable of extrapolating the outcome if I marry another woman. She will expect her children to inherit. That’s all you would ever see.” He pointed to the far side of the bed, where the slip of paper had fallen to the floor.
All those ugly zeroes felt like bullet holes through her heart every time she looked at them.
“You just said you don’t want him thinking his father didn’t care enough to provide for him. I care enough to give him everything that should be his! Try telling me that you, a woman who feels as strongly about her family as you do, will do anything less than the same. How could you justify raising him alone, on a shoestring, when he could have two parents with every advantage provided for him? He deserves to inherit his title, Sorcha.”
Okay, she hadn’t mentioned that part to him, that her father’s title had gone to his legitimate English son while his illegitimate Irish daughters had been turned out like squatters. It was horrible to think of Enrique one day feeling as she had—not only dismissed and overlooked, but also treated like trash consigned to the curb.
He doesn’t love me, her heart cried. But her own upbringing had taught her that as wonderful as love was, you couldn’t eat it. Should she really dismiss his attempt to offer the support she’d always wished her father had provided?
Thinking about her father and that awful realization that he’d ultimately abandoned them to their own resources brought back all her old feelings of inadequacy, the ones she couldn’t put voice to because they were so lowering. Cesar really would think she was trying to trap him into marriage.
Lifting a cautioning hand, she said, “Think about that title of yours. I’m not like you. I’m working class.” Gutter class, more like.
“As the mother of the heir to my title, your stock improves. Certainly with my mother.” The look on his face told her he wasn’t saying that to be insulting. It was a fact. Status mattered to his mother.
And that was what she was afraid of. What would happen if her background came out? It had been humiliating enough to live through it once.
“I...okay I lied,” she belatedly conceded. “I only put your name on the paperwork because—”
The look on his face stopped her. The air electrified around them and she thought lightning was actually going to shoot out his eyes and incinerate her.
He gave the side of her bed a rattle of disgust, pushing away.
“Dios, Sorcha! You almost had me. Why would you say that?” His hand swept through the air to erase her claim.
“Because I don’t want to marry you!” Another lie. She covered her face, hiding from the truth. What if she married him? Hadn’t she dreamed of the chance to drill past all those tempered metals he’d hammered into a shell around his heart and find the man beneath? This was her chance.
And if she failed, he could turn out like her father, falling in love elsewhere.
“What are you really afraid of?” he asked in stern challenge. “Because I’ve never known you to be a coward. In fact, if anyone else was in this situation—if I was in this situation with another woman,” he said, coming across to her again, words coming out faster and hotter, “you would tell me to marry
the mother of my child.”
She scowled. “And you would tell me there were more factors to consider and I should mind my own business.”
“In this case I’m telling you you’re right. Enjoy it,” he snapped back.
“Look, my father didn’t love his wife—”
He cut her off impatiently. “Loveless marriages can work. My parents are an excellent example.”
“Ha!” It escaped her before she could hold it back.
His brows shot up.
“Do you honestly think they’re happy?” she asked.
“I don’t think they’re unhappy. They each receive what they want from the union. In our case, you’ll have a father for your child. Tell me that’s not important to you. Tell me you don’t wish your father had lived and stayed with your family.”
That was hitting below the belt! Of course she did. She’d loved her father the way any daughter did. Losing him had been devastating. She’d been eleven, that painful age of beginning to develop and already not feeling like herself in her own body, moody and overwhelmed.
She’d also been old enough to understand what it meant that her father had two families and intelligent enough to grasp the full scope of disgrace as they were given a multitude of looks from former friends and neighbors, looks that varied from pitying to smug.
With her father in residence, he’d offered them protection from judgment. They’d lived their life as if they were his legitimate family. Without him, they were pretenders. Her mother’s family, already having disowned her over the scandal of her living with a man out of wedlock, had refused to help. The entire village had distanced themselves.
Sorcha had gone as hungry as her sisters that first year, while her mother sold her jewelry and begged for any job she could get. Sorcha hadn’t questioned or complained about any of it. She had comprehended all too clearly why they were living in one room and her mother was working in a hospital laundry and cried all the time.
She didn’t plan to ever wind up in circumstances that dire, but that’s where “love” could land you, she reminded herself. Her father’s other children hadn’t suffered like that. They were probably quite content, no matter how their parents had felt about each other, so why was she hesitating to give Enrique that same material security just because Cesar didn’t love her?
“What would you get from the union?” she asked warily.
“Besides my son?” he asked facetiously. “A wife who excites me sexually.” His brows went up when she gasped. “Why does that surprise you? I slept with you that day because I’d been attracted to you from the first time we met. That much I know without question. You know what else I know?”
She caught her breath, shaking her head, scenting danger as he came around to the open side of her bed.
“You wouldn’t have let anything happen between us if you hadn’t been suppressing the same attraction. You know what I keep thinking? You were quitting because you were jealous of Diega. Sexually. You knew that once I married, you and I would never sleep together. I knew that. It was bothering me. I wasn’t ready to get engaged because I had promised you to myself before I went off the market.”
“Do you hear how arrogant you are?” she managed to reply, heart stumbling. “You were planning to make me your last hurrah? That’s incredibly insulting.”
He ran his gaze over her in a way that drew the blanket down, exposing her to his roving eye. “I’ve always expected we’d be very compatible. How was it?”
“Are you serious?” She burned alive as he shoved her back into that sensual fire with a look. “Ask Diega. She seems to have all the details on what we did that day.”
“The things I let you say to me,” he muttered, touching her chin to force her to look up into his eyes.
All the emotions she used to be able to disguise in a blink flooded behind her eyes with hard pressure. She couldn’t breathe.
“Of all the memories I’ve lost, the most maddening is not remembering what it’s like to make love to you. I cannot wait for our do-over.” He bent and covered her lips with his own, hard, but not hurtfully. He seemed to catch himself at the last second and decide whether he wanted to plunder or merely sample.
Maybe he was waiting for a rush of memory, trying to remember how their first kisses had tasted. She remembered. She wanted to protest and turn away from his kiss, but her body knew him in a primal way that made her soften in welcome. Her hand lifted to caress the stubble on his cheek, urging him to linger, playing her mouth against his in invitation.
With a gruff sound deep in his throat, he took control of the kiss and ravaged, but gently, his stubbled beard lightly abrading her skin. He claimed in a way that felt familiar, yet new. He stole, but gave back at the same time, started to pull away, then returned as if he couldn’t help himself. The teasing sent flutters of arousal through her, burning her blood to the ends of her limbs, making her fingers and toes tingle. It was disconcerting to become so aroused when she was hardly in a state to make love.
It was so amazing, though. She never wanted him to stop, but he finally did with a few soft, wet bites of his teeth catching at her lips.
He drew back enough to see into her eyes. His gaze was disturbed, frustrated yet excited. Hot with desire. They were both breathing heavily.
“Seriously,” he said in a quiet rasp. “How was it?”
The question felt incredibly intimate, like he was asking her to describe an experience with a stranger, yet she could see he was deeply invested in her response. He wanted details. She wanted to be flippant, self-protect and be cool and pretend he hadn’t set the bar so high she had despaired before it was even over. She had known she’d never find another man to give her the same level of pleasure.
Memories flooded in, the way he’d kissed the skin he’d revealed, made her climax with barely a flexing touch between her thighs, had her wrapping her legs around his waist, then had taken his time, making love to her gently and slowly, savoring each thrust until she’d been pleading for him to drive harder and faster and deeper—
He stroked his thumb against her stinging cheek. Satisfaction relaxed his expression as he read everything he needed to know in her blush of fresh response.
“I wish I remembered that.” He sounded so wistfully sincere she blushed harder and flinched in torment at the same time, raw. Feeling like the most important experience of her life was forgotten by the man who’d provided it.
And it was.
She swallowed and dropped her hand, ducking her head.
Then there was that agonizing reason why it had been so good. He was an aficionado of women, having dedicated himself to learning how to pleasure multitudes before her. So many.
She’d been dying on a distant level that day, wondering how she stacked up. It hadn’t helped that he’d disappeared before she’d woken. She’d needed the reassurance of his approval and satisfaction. His absence had been so demoralizing she still didn’t know how to deal with it. Things had worsened from there until they were here.
Frowning at the flowers Octavia had given her, Sorcha tried to imagine how she could balance the heaven and hell of being married to him. There was no question he expected her to sleep with him. What if she wasn’t up to his standards? Sometimes she let herself believe that Diega had been lying when she’d said he had begged for forgiveness. She didn’t want to believe she had been merely a conquest, but what else would she have been?
What if the only reason he wanted her today was because he couldn’t remember that he hadn’t enjoyed himself the first time?
“I’ll take this back to my father and tell him you’ve had a better offer.” He retrieved the check from the floor and folded it to tuck it in his pocket.
“Cesar—” He was such a pushy, dogged, overwhelming man.
But there was no way she could look into her son
’s eyes and admit that she’d had the chance to give him everything he was entitled to and turned it down. Not when she knew how it felt to receive nothing from her own father.
As for love, well, she’d long ago resigned herself to this infatuation of hers with Cesar not being returned. At least she’d be with him, not pining from afar.
“My mother is anxious to see Enrique,” she said as she realized he was waiting for her to speak. “I want to go to her as soon as I’m released.” Way to be a tough negotiator, Sorcha.
“Of course. We can marry in Ireland. One of us ought to have family present.”
CHAPTER FIVE
SHE SHOULDN’T HAVE been surprised that Cesar would be so single-minded. Or so possessive. His protocols with intellectual property told their own story about the lengths he would go to ensure he would never be stolen from again.
But could he not see that if she wanted her son to have a father, that meant she expected him to be a father? He disappeared to Spain until she was released, asking her to text a few photos of Enrique, but showing little interest in his son or the final DNA report that proved it.
“Go ahead and forward it. My parents will want that reassurance,” he said like it was a bureaucratic hoop he couldn’t avoid.
“Don’t you want to see it?” she challenged.
“If I thought you were lying, I wouldn’t have upended my life to marry you. Are they releasing the two of you now?”
“Tomorrow,” she replied.
He chivalrously turned up with an infant carrier, carting it out himself after interrogating the nurse about Enrique’s health and schedule for immunizations, but he had yet to properly hold his son.
They went to her modest flat, where she had already been packing to give it up, planning to live with her mother through the birth and her maternity leave.
When he saw the boxes, Cesar gave her a sharp look. “Small wonder you went into labor early.”
She shrugged off that comment and called her landlord to explain the situation. Cesar took over, informing the man that his assistant would have everything shipped to Spain before the lease was up and that they were leaving today.