by Kim Lawrence
She swallowed, noticing again the signs of stress and tension in his face. Always lean, he appeared to have dropped several pounds that added a few more hollows and planes to his chiselled features.
He dug into his pocket and produced a small velvet box. Nell knew what was in it before he opened it.
Luiz watched, the strength of his frowning displeasure cranked up several notches as she tucked her hands behind her back. Did she think he was going to force it back onto her finger?
Actually, now that he thought about it, the idea had merit!
‘So you got it, then,’ she said brightly as the multi-faceted stone caught the light.
‘I got it,’ he confirmed grimly.
Nell glanced up, registered the barely suppressed anger in his face and looked away. ‘Is there a problem?’
The ring had seemed fine when she had finally managed to get it off, it was her finger that had been bruised and swollen. She absently rubbed the bare finger; it had healed, the bruises were barely noticeable but the bruises inside would, she feared, never go away.
Well, they won’t while you’ve got an attitude like that, girl. Stop whining; stop mooning around after him. He doesn’t love you and he never will so suck it up and get on with it. This baby doesn’t need a tragic loser as a mum. She took a deep breath and lifted her chin, but couldn’t help flinching as he yelled.
‘Yes, there’s a problem!’ he gritted through clenched teeth, his fury fuelled by the fact she had actually recoiled from him. Did she think he would hurt her? Madre de Dios, he would have walked across hot coals to protect her from pain.
‘I thought you might just have been passing and thought, Gosh, yes, why don’t I drop in on Nell, embarrass her in front of her colleagues and abuse her a bit? Well, if that was your intention, Luiz—full marks!’
‘I am not trying to hurt you, Nell! Why do you think I’m here?’ he added, struggling to shed some of his anger. Not terribly rational anger when you recognized, as he reluctantly did, that, rather than walking across hot coals—noble but not overly practical—it might have been better if he hadn’t hurt her in the first place.
‘Think?’ Thinking required a brain that functioned and could say something other than, Love me—love me!
Conscious her laugh was making him look at her strangely, she gave her head a little shake. Focus, focus…what was the question? Why? Clearly not to ask her to rethink the marriage proposal—which was good, she told herself, because nothing had changed.
‘I don’t have the faintest!’ she admitted after a silence. ‘But while you’re here do you mind lowering your voice? This is a library, not a football stadium!’
‘Why did you send the ring back?’ he said, totally ignoring her request.
She shook her head. For a man with a mind like a steel trap the question did not strike her as taxing. ‘You came all this way to ask me that? What was wrong with a phone?’
He arched a sardonic brow. ‘You would not have answered it.’
Nell’s eyes slid self-consciously from his. ‘Well under the circumstances I could hardly keep it.’
‘You can keep my child.’ His eyes slid to her still-flat stomach as he spoke.
Nell’s eyes flew to his face.
‘But you cannot keep my ring?’
‘Will you lower your voice?’ she hissed, glancing over her shoulder at people who were pretending they weren’t listening to every word he was saying. ‘I like this job and I don’t want to lose it!’ Taking a step closer and lowering her voice, Nell added, ‘And it isn’t just your child.’
Luiz, who made no attempt to lower his voice, accused loudly, ‘It is not me who has forgotten this child has two parents.’
‘I haven’t forgotten anything, Luiz.’ Her chin sank to her chest as she admitted in a broken whisper, ‘I wish I could.’
How was she meant to live a normal life when her every waking moment was haunted by memories of the short time they had spent together?
Luiz hooked a finger under her chin and forced her face up to his. ‘You’re crying?’ His immunity to female tears was totally lacking as she shook her head in denial.
Luiz looked around, frustration stamped on his dark features. ‘Is there somewhere private we can be?’ He turned his autocratic glare on the efficient-looking woman who was approaching them with purpose. She withstood the contact for a few seconds before she suddenly discovered she was needed elsewhere.
Nell, watching the ‘cross to the other side of the road’ moment, thought, So this is what it feels like to be on a sinking ship. Though she couldn’t really blame Lydia; it would take a very brave person or, in her case, a total fool to take on Luiz Santoro.
‘Thanks, Luiz,’ she said thickly. ‘That was my boss. I’ve probably lost my job.’
‘Do not be foolish.’
Good advice, Nell admitted, her eyes drifting with helpless longing over his lean face, but way too late.
‘Well?’
She looked at him blankly and shook her head.
‘Somewhere private?’ he reminded her.
Nell struggling for control, nodded mutely and pointed in the direction of a door to their left.
Luiz followed the direction of her shaking finger and nodded and, sliding a hand along her shoulders, said, ‘Come.’
It was not a suggestion and Nell, for once not disputing his autocratic decree and overpoweringly conscious of the eyes that followed their progress, allowed herself to be directed towards the staff room.
To Nell’s relief it was empty. She reached out and grabbed the shelf above the radiator to steady herself. ‘Do you ever make a request or do you always issue orders?’
Luiz, who was looking around the small room with an expression of distaste, looked genuinely bewildered by the husky accusation, which he chose not to respond to. Instead he gave his damning verdict on their private place. ‘This is a cupboard.’
‘A cupboard in your world is a staff room in mine. But what has happened to my manners? Have a seat.’ She made a grand sweeping gesture towards one of the two chairs in the room. ‘Or a cup of tea?’ She gestured towards the kettle and two mugs that stood beside a small sink. The room boasted a small coffee table too.
Luiz ignored the frivolous invitations and carried on standing there, his eyes trained with unnerving intensity on her face, looking big, outrageously sexy and totally out of place in the basic room.
It might not be the cupboard he claimed, but it felt like it with him in it. Her hand went to her throat. She knew the walls of the room were not closing in on her but the illusion was very real.
At his sides Luiz’s hands clenched into white-knuckled fists; he could not bear being responsible for her misery. ‘You are still crying,’ he accused, a nerve clenching in his lean cheek as he watched a tear silently slide down her cheek.
‘What if I am?’ Nell sniffed with husky belligerence. ‘Why wouldn’t I be crying? I can’t forget a single second we had together, not one second—you’re stuck in my head for ever.’ She lifted a shaking hand and struck her forehead a glancing blow with the heel of her hand before pressing it palm flat to her chest. ‘You’re stuck in my—’ She stopped abruptly and groaned, ‘Oh, God!’
Tears pouring in earnest down her cheeks, she tried to turn away, but was prevented by the big hands that fell heavily to her shoulders. ‘Let me go, Luiz!’ she begged, aiming a feeble blow at his iron-hard chest, but somehow she ended up laying her head there and sighing as his long fingers moved gently over her hair. ‘I can’t do…’
‘Never!’
Nell’s face slowly turned up to his. Caution and hope competed in her eyes as she looked up at him. ‘N-never?’ she repeated slowly.
‘I cannot let you go, mi querida.’
‘Because of the baby?’
‘Leave the baby out of this.’
Nell gave a bitter laugh. Her feelings were ambiguous when he didn’t prevent her pulling away from him. ‘Easy for you to say—you’re not throw
ing up every morning.’
‘Has it been very bad for you?’
When she read the concern and self-reproach in his face Nell felt instantly remorseful. ‘I’m fine, I’m not trying to make you feel guilty… It’s just not something I can forget about, and how can it not be part of this conversation when if it wasn’t for the baby you wouldn’t even be here?’ she observed sadly.
‘You never asked me.’
It was his odd strained manner as much as the abrupt change of subject that made her blink at him in confusion. ‘Never asked you what?’
‘What track my single-track mind runs along.’
‘One track,’ she corrected absently. The flammable quality in his unblinking stare was making it hard for her to cling to the shreds of her composure—breathing she had given up on entirely. She wasn’t sure if it was lack of oxygen or the mixture of anticipation and apprehension tying her stomach in knots that was responsible for the buzzing in her ears.
‘I have a one-track mind.’ His sensual lips twitched at the correction, but his manner remained just as intense as he continued to speak, ‘One-track when it comes to one beautiful witch with eyes that see into my soul.’
‘Me?’ she said in a small voice.
‘You, querida.’
He smiled and the rush of emotion that surged through Nell made her knees sag in ecstatic relief. ‘You think about me?’
Luiz bent his head and brushed her delicate eyelids with his lips before framing her face in his hands and declaring in a voice that shook with emotion, ‘I go to sleep thinking about you, I wake up thinking about you and in between I think about you, Nell…’ He dragged a not quite steady hand through his dark hair and admitted, ‘This situation needs to be dealt with—I am not functioning well.’ As understatements went this was massive.
Despite the incredible nature of his confession and the way her optimistic romantic heart had gone into happy-ending mode, Nell regarded him with wary caution.
‘How do you propose dealing with it?’
‘Marry me.’
She turned her head away to hide the tears that sprang to her eyes. ‘We have been here before, Luiz.’
‘I know, and I know why you said no. It was not because you don’t love me, because I think…no, I know you do, Nell. You don’t have to say anything…’
Nell looked him and thought, Good, because at that moment she couldn’t have spoken if her life depended on it.
‘Marry me, Nell, because I love you. Is that not what you wanted me to say, mi querida?’
Nell shook her head, unable to allow herself to believe the message that shone in his incredible eyes. ‘You’re saying this now because you know that’s what you think I want to hear…?’ She couldn’t bear for him to say the things she longed to hear if he didn’t mean them—it would be too painful. ‘I can’t bear it!’
Luiz felt the broken whisper like a knife to his heart. He stepped into her, his hands closing over the feminine curve of her hips, moulding her soft body into his hard angularity as he drew her towards him until they stood thigh to thigh. He breathed in her scent… Madre de Dios, he had missed her.
‘No, I’m saying it now because I can’t keep it in any longer.’
Nell heard with wonder the total sincerity in his voice and saw infinite tenderness in his face as he looked at her. She felt her doubts and uncertainties vaporize; she felt lighter than she had done in weeks.
‘No, I’m saying it now,’ he continued in the same driven voice, ‘because I want the world to hear.’
Nell loosed one hand and, with a strangled sob that caused his brow to crease in anxiety, she dashed it across her tear-filled eyes.
He cupped the side of her face with one big hand and rubbed his thumb across the gentle curve of her cheek.
‘Don’t cry,’ he begged. ‘I cannot bear it. I have missed you so much, mi querida. I have been a fool, a coward.’ The self-disgust in his face spoke volumes. ‘I told myself that a man only loves once in his life, because it seemed to me that a man could only survive losing the sort of love I had with Rosa once. After she died I retreated into myself and constructed walls.
‘But I realise now that I didn’t really survive. Part of me has been dead, Nell.’ He looked at her with glowing, loving eyes and clasped her hand to his chest, pressing it against his heart. ‘Until you, mi querida, woke it up.’
A little cry was wrenched from Nell’s aching throat. The tears that clung to her eyelashes were cleansing.
There was wonder in his eyes as his glance drifted across her face. ‘You are incredible, so beautiful—no wonder I fell in love with you at first sight.’
Nell’s throat ached with emotion as she lifted her hand to his lips and said, ‘Hush, you don’t have to say that—’
She cut him off with a shake of her head as she struggled to be grown up and mature about this. He had baggage—it was not rational to expect him to come to her as a blank slate.
Rosa had been his first love. She could ask him to choose between them and he might even feel he should, but Nell knew that in the long run he would resent her for it.
‘I believe you love me, but I know that you’ll never love me the way you loved Rosa.’ She didn’t want him to feel he had to compensate by pretending he felt things he didn’t.
‘I loved Rosa not as I love you?’ He tilted his head to one side as if considering her words. Then nodded and said, ‘This is true.’
Nell smiled in the face of her misery and told herself she could settle for being his last love and not his first.
‘That has been my problem. What I felt for Rosa was slow, deep and gentle. What I felt for you, on the other hand…’ He sucked in a deep shuddering breath that lifted his chest as, with an expression of wonder, he trailed his fingers over the curve of her cheek. ‘What I felt for you was passionate, extreme and intense. It was drawn,’ he said, pressing a clenched fist to his chest, ‘from somewhere deep inside me. I told myself it was lust, a violent chemical reaction that had no staying power, because I felt guilty.’
‘Guilty?’ she echoed, startled. The possibility had never crossed her mind.
He inclined his dark head. ‘Yes, guilty. Rosa had known me inside out and I her, yet you, a stranger, you challenged me on every level, and at the same time made me feel things I had never felt before…and your face…your lovely face, without trying, you, your face…’ Abstracted, wondering warmth entered his eyes as he stared down at her and then, as if unable to resist the temptation, pressed a hard, hungry kiss to her soft lips.
Nell melted, then as he lifted his head, her glowing eyes focused on his beloved face, she no longer tried to repress the words she had ached to give voice to. ‘I love you, Luiz.’
The breath left Luiz’s lungs on one deep relieved gasp. A slow smile spread across his face, wiping away the lines of strain around his mouth and removing the last shadows from his eyes. ‘You have no idea how much I needed to hear you say that.’
The husky confession moved Nell profoundly. It had not occurred to her until that moment that Luiz, with his supremely confident manner, might nurture any doubts. ‘I thought you knew I loved you,’ she teased with husky warmth.
His shoulders lifted in a shrug. ‘I couldn’t let myself think anything else or I would have gone mad. You see how much power you have over me.’
Nell, her eyes shining like stars, laid her hand lightly against the side of his face. He turned his head and pressed an open-mouthed kiss to her palm.
‘I promise I won’t misuse it.’
‘If you do I will probably deserve it. When I think of all the pain that could have been avoided if I hadn’t been such a blind, stubborn fool!’ With a self-contemptuous grimace he shook his head in disbelief. ‘I love you, but I fought it with every cell of my body. I wouldn’t allow myself…can you forgive me? Can you understand it felt like the ultimate betrayal to her memory?’
Nell, who knew she could forgive him anything except not loving her, did not r
espond to his anguished question. She fully appreciated how difficult this was for Luiz, a man who kept his own counsel, who did not share his feelings easily, to reveal so much of himself this way and she did not want to interrupt the flow of startling confidences that fell from his lips.
‘Since Rosa died I had never invested emotionally in a relationship. I never wanted to, then you came, and if I had admitted even to myself that I loved you…?’ He shook his head. ‘I was in denial, and then you called me on it—you accused me of romanticising my marriage. I was so angry that I—’
Nell’s eyes shone with regret as she caught his hand. ‘I’m sorry, Luiz. I shouldn’t have said what I did. It was—’
‘It was the truth, querida,’ he cut in.
Shock washed across Nell’s face. ‘But you loved Rosa—you had a perfect marriage…?’
He released a sardonic crack of laughter. ‘Perfect as in paradise?’
The reminder of her harsh words brought a regretful flush to Nell’s cheeks.
‘The fact is we had problems.’
Nell’s eyes widened. ‘You did…?’
He nodded and looked amused by her amazement. ‘My memory has been very selective. I chose not to remember them. Who knows—if she had not died our marriage might have been good, it might indeed have been perfect, we might have grown together, but it is equally possible that we might have grown apart. The signs were there.’
The forthright admission shocked and, if she was honest, reassured Nell, who felt relieved to have the pressure to conform to some saintly standard of perfect wife removed.
‘Rosa was a free spirit and my success financially was something she thought staid and boringly conventional. And in my turn I was not overly enamoured by her crystals, alternative therapies and arty friends in kaftans. We were both very young and not very tolerant. She was ready for a family and I was not.
‘I think,’ he admitted, ‘I was doing Rosa a disservice by remembering her as some insipid saint. She was more than that. But Rosa is the past, a memory.’ His voice thickened as his finger straightened over hers. ‘You, mi querida, are the future. My future.’