The Santiago Sisters

by Victoria Fox

  She wasn’t an animal. Not like that man …

  Scarlet shivered. It was finished now. She and Henry had their family to look forward to, and she didn’t intend to waste another second.

  Vittorio Da Strovisi drove into the woman like it was the last fuck of his life. He gripped her ass, slapping it so hard that she cried out in surprised pain. He fucked like there was no tomorrow. Some days, some fucks, he wished there weren’t.

  In Florence, he had attended a seasonal concert—candlelit and tasteful as the carols were sung in an outdoor star-strewn amphitheatre. Afterwards he was screwing in a dark alley, while the rest of his crowd mingled, the wife of one of his cronies, stripped bare of her glimmering emerald gown, her knickers caught round her ankles.

  It was a bad habit he had got into, imagining any woman he nailed was Calida Santiago. He had to let go. Calida wasn’t around any more. She had been beaten and starved by a suicidal maniac and the outcome had been inescapable.

  Vittorio kept remembering her; he couldn’t help it. The feeling he had whenever he thought of her was one of pulsing life and radiating heat. Calida had been vibrant, her anger hot and her passion sure, as if she had swallowed the sun. He had never met a woman like her—strong, independent, combative; giving him the impression that should he walk out of her life one day she wouldn’t grant him a second thought. It was desperately attractive, and desperately rare.

  He worried that he had been in love with her. He must have been, if he’d asked her to marry him. If he’d wanted to be with her—and still did—every second of the day. Love was a weakness, an admission of frailty; love was danger.

  Vittorio wasn’t in the business of being in love.

  The music continued. So did Vittorio, because when he stopped it all came tumbling down: the summary of his years, empty and cold.

  Tess opened her eyes and felt sunlight warm her aching bones.

  Where was she? Somewhere familiar. Somewhere she had lost long ago, and recently found again. Somewhere old and somewhere new: a place of belonging.

  The room took her back twenty years. It wasn’t the room she used to sleep in. She remembered knocking softly on its door, for fear of disturbing her mama. It had wallpaper now and proper floorboards, the holes in the roof long gone and the whistling wind sealed off from outside. Her belongings filled the closet and the drawers. The window was open a fraction, letting in the scent of lavender.

  She could detect it now without feeling guilt. Without thinking of her father. Its scent reminded her that while so much changed, so much else stayed the same.

  Tess rolled over. The space next to her was empty. Someone had been in bed with her last night; she could feel his warmth still on the sheets, and she smiled when she recalled whom it was. His touch had put her broken body back together.

  ‘Hello, Pirate.’

  Alex Dalton was at the door. ‘I didn’t want to wake you,’ he said.

  She held her arms out. Alex, her Alex … always and forever him.

  ‘You’re beautiful when you’re sleeping,’ he told her, touching his lips to hers.

  ‘And when I’m awake?’ she teased.

  ‘Not so much.’

  She thumped him. Alex kissed her properly then, firmly, in the same way he’d kissed her that crazy night in England, in the same way he’d kissed her when she’d arrived back in America and visited Calida in hospital and fallen helpless into his arms. His kiss was one of absolute intent. It said everything the past fifteen years had longed to say; it was a true, eternal declaration of the love he had always kept hidden from her, and, when Tess kissed him back, she matched it word for word. It was Alex who had adored her from afar; he who had bought the farm and land from Daniel but never told her, Alex who had worked to restore it to a place where she could find home again. She could barely take in that he would do such a thing.

  ‘I did it for you,’ he said. ‘I would do anything for you.’

  Mia had known. She told Tess she had always known.

  ‘I want you to be happy,’ her best friend said. ‘All that time with Alex, I knew it was you he was thinking of. You’re meant to be, Tess. So be. Please, just be.’

  For the first time in a long time, she was.

  ‘Where’s Calida?’ she asked.

  Alex looked at her, solemn devotion in his eyes.

  She climbed out of bed and made her way through the hall, past the kitchen with its cast-iron stove, past the table they had sat at with Diego, past the pictures Alex had salvaged of their family: of Mama, Papa, Calida, and her.

  Tess opened the door on to the veranda. It was hot and hazy, the peaks and dips of her heritage soaring like ice caps in the distance. The horizon melted in the blazing sun. Alex stepped up behind her and put his hands on her shoulders.

  ‘There,’ he said. ‘Look.’

  Two figures shimmered in the heat and Tess squinted to catch them.

  ‘She told me you were dead …’

  But Calida had always been living. She had been waiting, following, believing in their reunion all this time, and against all odds she had never given up.

  Against the poison words she’d believed Tess had said.

  At the hospital, not once had Tess let go of her sister’s hand. Not once had she stopped talking, reassuring Calida that she was here and here to stay, that she loved her and wasn’t letting go. Please wake up. Don’t die. Not now. You can’t.

  They had so much to make up for. So much life left to live.

  I love you. I’m not going anywhere without you again.

  She could not fathom that Simone had told such lies.

  How could you?

  Nothing Simone could say would justify it. It had been a terrible crime. No matter how Tess tried to see it from her adoptive mother’s point of view, she couldn’t.

  But Simone wouldn’t give up. She called Tess every day, and when that failed she sent missives through her people, gifts, begging letters and emails, pleading answerphone messages. ‘I’m not stopping,’ Simone told her. ‘You can bet the rest of your life I’ll be waiting. Come back to me, Tess. Let me explain. Let me say sorry.’

  Maybe, some day, she would … but not yet.

  Simone had lost two children that night. Her son, whom no one had known about and who explained so much, slumped dead in her apartment, his blood all down his mother’s dress. And me. But Tess felt, hour by hour, a creeping sadness for Simone that, if allowed to grow, could flower into something like sympathy.

  It was too soon to know how she felt. For now, Simone wasn’t getting her back—and neither was Hollywood. First, she had to return to the start.

  She had to realise, as she did now, watching the figures advance towards them and with the reassuring heat of Alex at her back, that without foundations no tower could ever soar. Those dreams little Teresa had nurtured with Julia, having her hair brushed, listening at her mother’s knee, were castles in the sky. Floating, rudderless, inconstant as the wind. Without a counterpoint on the ground, there was nothing to catch her. Wrongly, she had thought she could cut loose her beginnings and start afresh. She had welcomed that; wished for it. Never stopping to ask what would happen if she fell from her castle: what or who would be there to save her?

  Her twin. Always her twin, without whom the world, castles, skies, riches, fame, ambition, laughter, sadness, happiness, truth … none of it meant anything.

  Money didn’t matter. Fame didn’t matter. There was nothing left to prove.

  The figures were coming closer now. Alex planted a kiss on the back of her neck. ‘There she is,’ he said.

  ‘There she is,’ repeated Tess, each word a miracle.

  She slipped from his grasp and ran to meet them.

  The horses’ hooves kicked up swirls of gold dust. Calida loosened the reins and rushed like fire over the earth, Daniel alongside her, their animals dashing for victory before they pulled the reins and slowed, the estancia finally coming into sight.

  Daniel caught her. She e
vaded his touch and circled on her horse but then he took her and held her, their horses side by side, panting in the heat.

  He kissed her. A kiss she longed for now just as much as she had when she was thirteen. A smile she loved as ardently this day as she had then.

  Older now, wiser, in some ways changed—but in the vital ways the same.

  Some days, she thought of all the time they had lost, on mistakes, on mix-ups, on not saying what they felt or meant. Others, Calida knew she had needed that to grow. Now, they were allies. Equals. In leaving the farm, she had learned about the world, about herself, about the great tapestry of people who kept the earth turning, but most of all she had learned that she would always hunger for home. This was where she belonged, with the horses and the land and with Daniel. With him, she had only ever had to be herself. Not her twin, nothing pretend; just her. It was enough.

  ‘I can feel your heart,’ Daniel said. It seemed to spill into his, thumping lifeblood, each recognising its counterpoint in the other.

  ‘What does it feel like?’ she asked, kissing him again, unable to stop kissing him. They had so many kisses to make up for. She could kiss him to the end of time.

  ‘Strong.’

  Calida knew that was true. Strong enough to do what she had done, to survive where others might not. But, then, she’d had something to survive for.

  Calida dismounted and led her horse the rest of the way.

  Through the farm gate, in the distance, she saw her twin sister.

  You’re there. You’re real. It’s you.

  The words she had held tight to all the time she was sick; Teresita reaching from afar, singing to her, talking to her, wishing her back from the brink. Calida was alone on the vast savannah; and beyond the mountains, a plea had blown on the wind.

  Come back … Come back … I’m here, come back …

  She had known she had to live. Or she would die trying.

  Even now, their phone call seemed impossible. So much of it did, from breaking into her sister’s building, to the van, to her attacker, to her semi-conscious ride in the ambulance—but somehow, most of all, that phone call. She had been ready to drown when a lifeline hit the waves and she had groped for it, pressing it to her ear, and before any words were uttered she had felt it. She had known.

  At the last moment, Teresita saved her. Calida would never forget hearing her twin’s voice, and, more, the answer buried deep within it. An answer to the question she had carried since she had first wished Teresita away. Did you leave me behind? No. Never. The years had misunderstood them; they had misunderstood the years. In Tess Geddes’ tears, Calida had heard Teresita Santiago: the girl who had never left.

  One memory held sharp where others faded to shadow. Long ago, that morning they had ridden with their father, and Calida had protected her sister from the guanaco’s death. She had sat and held her hand, held her safe, but hadn’t realised then that Teresita had been holding her safe, too. They were each other’s home.

  ‘Go to her,’ said Daniel.

  Calida didn’t need to be told twice. She started walking but her walk broke into a run, and the sun was on her face and the dust was in her hair and the sky and earth cradled them and bathed them in the promise of the future, knowing that whatever it brought, here or afar, now or then, they would never be separated again.

  She fell into her sister’s arms, one heart strong against the other.

  We’ll always be together. Promise?

  Promise.

  And this time they were.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Thank you to Madeleine Milburn, Cara Lee Simpson and Anna Hogarty, the best and most brilliant team I could wish for. To Sally Williamson and everyone at Harlequin UK for bringing my books to life, and for the gorgeous covers.

  To Carol Jones Cabalgatas and her gaucho Marc for an unforgettable Patagonian adventure. And to Mark Oakley for sharing it, and so much else, with me.

  ISBN: 978-1-474-03086-1

  THE SANTIAGO SISTERS

  © 2016 Victoria Fox

  Published in Great Britain 2016

  by Harlequin MIRA, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London

  Bridge Street, London, SE1 9GF

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