by Diana Palmer
“You are quiet this morning, Señora Laremos,” Diego said gently, his black eyes slow and steady on her pale face as she toyed with her toast. “Did you not sleep well?”
He was taunting her, but she was too weary to play the game. “No,” she confessed, meeting his searching gaze squarely. “In fact, I hardly slept at all, if you want the truth.”
He traced the rim of his coffee cup with a finger, and his gaze held hers. “Nor did I, to be equally frank,” he said quietly. “I have been alone for many years, Melissa, despite the opinion you seem to have of me as a philandering playboy.”
She lifted her coffee cup to her lips for something to do. “You were never lacking in companionship in the old days.”
“Before I married you, surely,” he agreed. “But marriage is a sacred vow, niña.”
“I’m not a girl,” she retorted.
His chiseled lips tugged into a reluctant smile. “Ah, but you were, that long-ago summer,” he recalled, his eyes softening with the memory. “Girlish and sweet and bright with the joy of life. And then, so soon, you became a sad, worn ghost who haunted my house even when you were not in it.”
“I should have gone to college in America,” she replied, glancing at a quiet but curious Matthew. “There was never any hope for me where you were concerned. But I was too young and foolish to realize that a sophisticated man could never care for an inexperienced, backward child.”
“It was the circumstance of our marriage which turned me against you, Melissa,” he said tersely. “And but for that circumstance, we might have come together naturally, with a foundation of affection and comradeship to base our marriage on.”
“I would never have been able to settle for crumbs, Diego,” she said simply. “Affection wouldn’t have been enough.”
“You seemed to feel that desire was enough, at the time,” he reminded her.
Wary of Matt’s sudden interest, she smiled at the child and sent him off to watch his cartoons with his breakfast only half eaten.
“He’s little, but he hears very well,” she told Diego curtly, her gray eyes accusing. “Arguments upset him.”
“Was I arguing?” he asked with lifted eyebrows.
She finished her coffee and put the cup down. “Won’t you be late for work?”
“By all means let me relieve you of my company, since you seem to find it so disturbing,” he said softly. He removed a drop of coffee from his mustache with his napkin and got to his feet. “Adiós.”
She looked up as he started to the front door, mingled emotions tearing at her.
Diego paused at the door, glaring toward Matthew, who’d just turned the television up very loud. He said something to the boy, who cut down the volume and glared accusingly at the tall man.
“If you disturb the other tenants, little one, we will all be evicted,” Diego told him. “And forced to live on the street.”
“Then Matt can go home with Mama,” the child said stubbornly, “and go away from you.”
Diego smiled faintly at that show of belligerence. Even at such a young age, the boy had spirit. It wouldn’t do to break it, despite the fact that he was another man’s child. Matt had promise. He was intelligent and he didn’t back down. Despite himself, Diego was warming to the little boy.
Impulsively he went to the television and went down on one knee in front of the dark-eyed child. Melissa, surprised, watched from the doorway.
“On the weekend, we might go to the zoo,” Diego told the boy with pursed lips and a calculating look in his black eyes. “Of course, if you really would rather leave me, little one, I can go to see the lions and tigers alone—”
Matt blinked, his eyes widening. “Lions and tigers?”
Diego nodded. “And elephants and giraffes and bears.”
Matt moved a little closer to Diego. “And could I have cotton candy? Billy’s dad took him to the zoo and he got cotton candy and ice cream.”
Diego smiled gently. “We might manage that, as well.”
“Tomorrow?”
“A few days past that,” Diego told him. “I have a great deal to do during the week, and you have to take care of your Mama until she gets well.”
Matt nodded. “I can read her a story.”
Melissa almost giggled, because Matt’s stories were like no one else’s, a tangle of fairy-tale characters and cartoon characters from television in unlikely situations.
“Then if you will be good, niño, on Saturday you and I will go see the animals.”
Matt looked at Melissa and then at Diego again, frowning. “Can’t Mama come?”
“Mama cannot walk so much,” Diego explained patiently. “But you and I can, sí?”
Matt shifted. He was still nervous with the man, but he wanted very much to go to the zoo. “Sí,” he echoed.
Diego smiled. “It is a deal, then.” He got to his feet. “No more loud cartoons,” he cautioned, shaking his finger at the boy.
Matt smiled back hesitantly. “All right.”
Diego glanced at Melissa, who was standing in the doorway in her pink silk gown and her long white chenille housecoat, with no makeup and her soft blond hair curling around her pale face. Even like that, she was lovely. He noticed the faint surprise in her gray eyes, mingled with something like…hope.
His black eyes held hers until she flushed, and her gaze dropped. He laughed softly. “Do I make you shy, querida?” he asked under his breath. “A mature woman like you?”
She shifted. “Of course not.” She flushed even more, looking anywhere but at him.
He opened the front door, his glance going from the child back to her. “Stay in bed,” he said. “The sooner the leg is better, the sooner we can begin to do things as a family.”
“It’s too soon,” she began.
“No. It is five years too late.” His eyes flashed at her. “But you are my responsibility, and so is Matt. We have to come to terms.”
“I’ve told you I can get a job—”
“No!”
She started to say something, but he held up a hand and his eyes cut her off.
“¡Cuidado!” he said softly. “You said yourself that arguing is not healthy for the child. ¡Hasta luego!”
He was gone before she could say another word.
It was a hectic morning. Diego had hardly gotten to the office before he and Dutch had to go out to give a demonstration to some new clients. When they got back, voices were raised behind the closed office door. Diego hesitated, listening to Joyce and Apollo in the middle of a fiery argument over some filing.
Dutch came down the hall behind him, a lighted cigarette in his hand, looking as suave as ever. He glanced at Diego with a rueful smile.
“Somehow combat was a little easier to adjust to than that,” he said, indicating the clamor behind the closed office door. “I think I’ll smoke my cigarette out here until they get it settled or kill each other.”
Diego lit a cheroot and puffed away. “Perhaps someday they will marry and settle their differences.”
“They’d better settle them first,” Dutch remarked. “I’ve found that marriage doesn’t resolve conflicts. In fact, it intensifies them.”
Diego sighed. “Yes, I suppose it does.” His dark eyes narrowed thoughtfully. Last night seemed more and more like a dream as the din grew. Would he and Melissa become like that arguing couple in the office? Matthew was their unresolved conflict, and despite his growing interest in the child, he still couldn’t bear the thought of the man who’d fathered him.
“Deep thoughts?” Dutch asked quietly.
The other man nodded. “Marriage is not something I ever coveted. Melissa and I were caught in a—how do you say?—compromising situation. Our marriage was a matter of honor, not choice.”
“She seems to care about you,” the other man ventured. “And the boy—”
“The boy is not mine,” Diego said harshly, his black eyes meeting the equally dark ones of the other man.
“My God.” Dutc
h stared at him.
“She left me after I cost her our child,” Diego said, his eyes dark and bitter with the memories. “Perhaps she sought consolation, or perhaps she did it for revenge. Whatever the reason, the child is an obstacle I cannot overcome.” His eyes fell to the cheroot in his hand. “It has made things difficult.”
Dutch was silent for a long moment. “You’re very sure that she lost your child?”
That was when Diego first began to doubt what he’d been told five years ago. When Dutch put it into words, he planted a seed. Diego stared back at him with knitted brows.
“There was a doctor at the hospital,” he told Dutch. “I tried later to find him, but he had gone to South America to practice. The nurse said Melissa was badly hurt in the fall, and Melissa herself told me the child was dead.”
“You got drunk at our last reunion,” Dutch recalled. “And I put you to bed. You talked a lot. I know all about Melissa.”
Diego averted his eyes. “Do you?” he asked stiffly.
“And you can take the poker out of your back,” Dutch said. “You and I go back a long way. We don’t have many secrets from each other. Things were strained between you and her. Isn’t it possible that she might have hidden her pregnancy from you for fear that you’d try to take the boy from her?”
Diego stared at him, half-blind with shock. “Melissa would not do such a thing,” he said shortly. “It is not her nature to lie. Even now, she has no heart for subterfuge.”
Dutch shrugged. “You could be wrong.”
“Not in this. Besides, the years are wrong,” he said heavily. “Matthew is not yet four.”
“I see.”
Diego took another draw on his cheroot. Inside the office, the voices got louder, then stopped when the telephone rang. “I had my own suspicions at first, you know,” he confessed. “But I soon forgot them.”
“You might take a look at his birth certificate, all the same,” Dutch suggested. “Just to be sure.”
Diego smiled and said something polite. In the back of his mind there were new doubts. He wasn’t certain about anything anymore, least of all his feelings for Melissa and his stubborn certainty that he knew her. He was beginning to think that he’d never known her at all. He’d wanted her, but he’d never made any effort to get to know her as a person.
When Diego came home, Matthew was sprawled on the bed and Melissa was reading to him. He paused in the doorway to watch them for a few seconds, his eyes growing tender as they traced the graceful lines of Melissa’s body and then went to Matt, becoming puzzled and disturbed as he really looked at the child for the first time.
Yes, it could be so. Matthew could be his child. He had to admit it now. The boy had his coloring, his eyes. Matt had his nose and chin, but he had the shape of his mother’s eyes, and his hair was only a little darker than hers. Except that the years were wrong—Matt would have to be over four years old if he was truly Diego’s son. Melissa had said that he was just past three. But Diego knew so little about children of any age, and there was always the possibility that she hadn’t told the exact truth. Little things she’d said, slips she’d made, could reveal a monumental deception.
She didn’t lie as a rule, but this was an extraordinary situation. After all, she’d had more than enough reason to want to pay him back for his cruelty. And was she the kind of woman who could go from him to another man so easily? Had she? Or had she only been afraid, as Dutch had hinted—afraid of losing her son to his real father? She might think Diego capable of taking Matt away from her and turning her out of their lives. His jaw tautened as he remembered his treatment of her and exactly why she had good reason to see him that way. If he didn’t know Melissa, then she certainly didn’t know him. He’d never let her close enough to know him. What if he did let her come close? He turned away from the door, tempted for the first time to think of pulling down the barriers he’d built between them. He was alone, and so was she. Was there any hope for them now?
Melissa hobbled to the supper table with Matt’s help. She looked worried, and Diego wondered what had upset her.
He didn’t have to wait long. Halfway through the first course, she got up enough nerve to ask him a question that had plagued her all day.
“Do you think I might get a job when the doctor gives me the all-clear?” Melissa asked cautiously.
He put down his coffee cup and stared at her. “You have a job already, do you not?” he asked, nodding toward a contented Matthew, who was obviously enjoying his chicken dish.
“Of course, and I love looking after him and having time to spend with him for a change,” she confessed. “But…” She sighed heavily. “I feel as if I’m not pulling my weight,” she said finally. “It doesn’t seem fair to make you support us.”
He looked, and was, surprised at the remark. He leaned back in his chair, looking very Latin and faintly arrogant. “Melissa, you surely remember that I was a wealthy man in Guatemala. I work because I enjoy it, not because I need to. I have more than enough in Swiss banks to support all of us into old age and beyond.”
“I didn’t realize that.” She toyed with her fork. “Still, I don’t like feeling obligated to you.”
His eyes flashed. “I am your husband. It is my duty, my obligation, my responsibility, to take care of you.”
“And that’s an archaic attitude,” Melissa muttered, her own temper roused. “In the modern world, married people are partners.”
“José’s mama and papa used to fight all the time,” Matthew observed with a wary glance at his mother. “And José’s papa went away.”
Diego drew in a sharp breath. “Niñito,” he said gently, “your mama and I will inevitably disagree from time to time. Married people do, comprende?”
Matthew moved a dumpling around on his plate with his fork. “Yo no sé,” he murmured miserably, but in perfect Spanish.
Diego frowned. He got up gracefully to kneel beside Matthew’s chair. “¿Hablas español?” he asked gently, using the familiar tense.
“Sí,” Matthew said, and burst into half a dozen incomplete fears and worries in that language before Diego interrupted him by placing a long finger over his small mouth. His voice, when he spoke, was more tender than Melissa had ever heard it.
“Niño,” he said, his deep voice soothing, “we are a family. It will not be easy for any of us, but if we try, we can learn to get along with each other. Would it not please you, little one, to have time to spend with Mama, and a nice place to live, and toys to play with?”
Matt looked worried. “You don’t like Matt,” he mumbled.
Diego took a slow breath and ran his hand gently over the small head. “I have been alone for a long time,” he said hesitantly. “I have had no one to show me how to be a father. It must be taught, you see, and only a small boy can teach it.”
“Oh,” Matt said, nodding his head. He shifted restlessly, and his dark eyes met Diego’s. “Well…I guess I could.” His brows knitted. “And we can go to the zoo and to the park and see baseball games and things?”
Diego nodded. “That, too.”
“You don’t have a little boy?”
Diego hated the lump in his throat. It was as if the years of feeling nothing at all had caught up with him at last. He felt as if a butterfly’s wings had touched his heart and brought it to life for the first time. He looked at the small face, so much like his own, and was surprised at the hunger he felt to be this child’s father, his real father. The loneliness was suddenly unbearable. “No,” he said huskily. “I have…no little boy.”
Melissa felt tears running hot down her shocked face. It was more than she’d dared hope for that Diego might be able to accept Matt, to want him, even though he believed he was another man’s child. It was the first step in a new direction for all of them.
“I guess so,” Matthew said with the simple acceptance of childhood. “And Mama and I would live with you?”
“Sí.”
“I always wanted a papa of my ow
n,” Matthew confessed. “Mama said my own papa was a very brave man. He went away, but Mama used to say he might come back.”
That broke the spell. Diego’s face tautened as it turned to Melissa, his black eyes accusing, all the tenderness gone out of him at once as he considered that his whole line of thought might have been a fabrication, created out of his own loneliness and need and guilt.
“Did she?” he asked tersely.
Melissa fought for control, dabbing at the tears. “Matt, wouldn’t you like to go and play with your bear?”
“Okay.” He jumped down from his chair with a shy grin at Diego and ran off to his room. Except for the first night, he’d given them no trouble about sleeping alone. He seemed to enjoy having a room of his very own.
Diego’s face was without a trace of emotion when he turned to her. “His father is still alive?” he said tersely.
She dropped her eyes to the table while her heartbeat shook her. “Yes.”
“Where is he?”
She shook her head, unable to speak, to tell any more lies.
He took an angry breath. “Until you can trust me, how can we have a marriage?”
She looked up. “And that works both ways. You never trusted me. How can you expect me to trust you, Diego?”
“I was not aware that he spoke such excellent Spanish,” he remarked after a minute, lessening the tension.
“It seemed to come naturally to him,” she said. “It isn’t bad for a child to be bilingual, especially in Tucson, where so many people speak Spanish anyway. Most of his friends did.”
He leaned back in his chair, his dark eyes sliding carelessly over Melissa’s body. “You grow more lovely with each passing day,” he said unexpectedly.
She flushed. “I didn’t think you ever looked at me long enough to form an opinion.”
He lit a cheroot, puffing on it quietly. “Things are not so simple anymore, are they? The boy is insecure.”
“I’m sorry I argued with you,” she said sadly. “I made everything worse.”
“No. You and I are both responsible for that.” He shrugged. “It is not easy, is it, pequeña, to forget the past we share?”