Warmth crept into her cheeks. She swallowed as excitement swept through her. “Rafe—”
His fingers slipped from her hair and encircled the back of her neck, stemming the flow of words. The warmth of the contact of skin against skin surged down her torso and settled in her pelvis.
“We’ll move as fast or as slow as you want, Rebekah, but we both know the outcome will be the same.” His hooded gaze lowered to her lips. “It’s inevitable, and there’s nothing wrong with it.”
“It’s still a bad idea to sleep with each other to satisfy a biological need. As if—as if we’re two people in the middle of an affair instead of a divorce.”
“There are people who are divorced who still get together every now and again and have sex. Did you know that?” He said it as if he were educating her about a solution to a science equation.
“Did you know we’re not those people? Those types of situations are usually dysfunctional.” Despite her comments, she’d been seriously considering his suggestion.
His hand fell away and he straightened in the seat. “I don’t think our situation will be dysfunctional,” he said in a firm tone.
* * * *
When they arrived at the restaurant, they entered through a side door, and one of the staff ushered them down a hallway toward the private dining room Rafael had reserved.
After the server took their order, Rebekah took a sip of water, her choice of beverage for the evening.
Her gaze roved around the dimly lit space painted in rich brown and a deep gold color. Their small table sat in the middle of a room large enough to accommodate several tables. One wall made of frosted glass provided privacy while, at the same time, allowing additional light to enter the room.
“Are you enjoying your stay in California so far?” Rafael asked.
Rebekah nodded. “Will your schedule be slowing down this week?”
“Yes. I want to spend more time with Ricardo. Before you know it, the summer will be over.”
“He’ll like that. He adores you.”
He smiled, as if to himself. “I can’t imagine my life without him. What was he like as a baby?”
Rebekah groaned. “Awful. I barely got any sleep the last couple of months before he was born. He moved around so much. It was as if he couldn’t wait to get out!”
Rafael chuckled. “So he’s been a bundle of energy since his time in the womb?”
“Definitely. Once he started walking, that was the end of my peace of mind. And he had an obsession with paper, so I had to keep my textbooks and homework up high so he couldn’t tear them up. I would give him old magazines to tear apart instead.” Rebekah noted the wistful look in Rafael’s eyes. She swallowed. “You know, when he was a toddler, I tried to reach you one more time. But…well, your people wouldn’t let me talk to you directly.”
Rafael frowned. “The only people I had was Marty, and he would’ve told me if you’d called.”
“I didn’t speak to Marty. I spoke to that horrible woman who worked for him. She wouldn’t let me speak to you or Marty, and she more or less told me I could take a number.”
“What?”
“She…” Rebekah stared at him as a disgusting thought entered her mind. “Don’t tell me—you were sleeping with her, weren’t you?”
“I wasn’t sleeping with her,” he bit out.
“But that didn’t stop her from seeing me as a threat.” Rebekah lifted her hand to her mouth. “Oh my God,” she said in a barely audible whisper.
“Don’t, Rebekah.”
“Really?” She shook her head in disgust. It had been so humiliating as she tried to get the woman to allow her to speak to Rafael. “I’m not allowed to get mad because some woman who had the hots for you wouldn’t give you the message that you’re the father of my child? Even if she didn’t believe me, the bi—” Rebekah took a calming breath and fisted her hand on top of the table. “The woman could have at least told you just in case I was telling the truth—which I was.”
“There were other ways to get in touch with me if you really wanted to. You could have hired a lawyer to gain access to me.”
He made it sound so easy. He wasn’t the one who’d had to beg for an audience. “I didn’t want anything from you.”
Rafael sat back. His eyes flashed in anger. “Why would you when you could run home to your daddy? Our life didn’t live up to your standards, so you went back to Atlanta the first chance you got and used my traveling as an excuse.”
Rebekah’s mouth fell open. “How dare you accuse me of something like that? I did not run home. I went to visit my parents. You were gone for weeks at a time.”
“You could have come with me.”
“I didn’t want to.”
“Sí. Comprendo ahora. It’s always whatever Rebekah wants, right? You didn’t want to come, so you didn’t. You didn’t want me to know you were pregnant, so I didn’t. Ricardo is my son, and he and I should’ve known each other right from the beginning. I should have been lying next to you at night when you couldn’t sleep.”
“How exactly would that have worked?” Rebekah asked with saccharine sweetness. “We only had a full-size bed. Where were the other women going to sleep?”
Rafael slammed his large fist onto the table, and Rebekah jumped involuntarily. The sound was so loud she assumed the only reason the table hadn’t broken apart was because he hadn’t intended for it to.
“All right, here we go,” the server said, smiling as she brought in their salads.
Rebekah turned her attention to the young woman, ignoring Rafael’s glare from across the table.
After placing a plate in front of each of them, the server held up a pepper mill and asked, “Pepper?” They waved it away and she left them alone again.
“Look at us,” Rebekah said. “We can’t even have a civil conversation without Ricky as a buffer between us. We keep throwing up the past and we’re hurting each other. He’s the only good thing between us, and we need to focus on working together for his sake.”
Rafael clenched his silverware. “We can’t fix this, can we?”
“No, we can’t.” Rebekah distanced herself from thoughts of reconciliation. That wasn’t what she wanted anyway, was it? “Why even talk about fixing anything? We can’t go back in time and change our behavior. It’s over, Rafe. It’s been over. We were young and impulsive, and we made mistakes.”
“So there’s no point in trying again?” His voice was quiet. He watched her intently.
Rebekah looked down at her plate. “We have too much baggage—from each other. Even if we could try again, I don’t want your life. I don’t want people writing stories about me every time I go to the grocery store. I don’t want my son photographed at school and afraid to play in the yard because paparazzi are hiding nearby trying to get a picture of him. What kind of life is that?” She sighed. “The life you’re living is so different from us. How can you protect him when he’s here with you in California?”
“The same way I’ve been doing since you arrived. There are no guarantees, Rebekah, but you don’t have to live in fear for his safety.” He stabbed the vegetables on his plate with his fork. He stared down at his salad, and the heavy movement of his chest indicated he still struggled to calm down.
Their ruined meal was continued in silence. When the server returned with their dinner, she asked if the salads were okay because they were hardly touched. They assured her everything was fine, and she set the meals on the table and disappeared again after checking to make sure they didn’t need anything else.
“Did you ever do drugs?” Rebekah asked.
“No. Despite what that article said, only a few of the wrestlers I knew did the hard-core stuff, but a lot of them popped painkillers like candy. They needed them to get past the pain of their injuries.”
Rebekah pushed the chicken around on her plate. “Why did you quit?”
When he lifted his eyes, she was shocked by the sadness in their bleak depths. He thought for a
moment before he answered.
“A few years ago, my wrestling contract was getting close to renewal. I was making a lot of money for the WWE. My action figures, T-shirts, pencils, everything sold well. Marty and I discussed a couple of options to get me more money. He planned to negotiate a salary increase for me and a greater percentage of the proceeds from the sales of merchandise with my image and name.
“Around the same time, there was this kid—well, not a kid, really. He was twenty-one or twenty-two, about the same age I was when I started in professional wrestling.” He frowned, and she realized he wasn’t really looking at her. His gaze looked through her. “I have to laugh sometimes when people say wrestling is fake. The blood is real, the punches are real, the body slams are real. It’s choreographed, and we practice our moves to make sure we get them right, but there’s nothing fake about what we do. The problem is, no matter how much you rehearse, mistakes still happen.”
He swallowed, and Rebekah feared his next words. She stared at him, holding her breath, not daring to interrupt because she wanted to hear what he had to say as much as he needed to tell it.
“Poor Little Rich Kid was his stage name. He came from a wealthy family and didn’t want to go into their business, so he went into wrestling instead.” Rafael laughed shortly and shook his head in disbelief. “When he made his entrance, he would hand out one and five dollar bills to the audience. Rich was going to be a star, and we all knew it.
“One night, he and another wrestler were in the ring, giving a great performance. The other wrestler lifted Rich upside down to drop him on his head in a move called the Tombstone piledriver. The key is to keep your opponent’s head above your knees, so when you drop to your knees, his head doesn’t actually hit the mat. It didn’t work that night. His hold on Rich slipped, and instead of his knees hitting the canvas mat first, Rich’s head hit first. He broke his neck. Rich became permanently paralyzed from the neck down.”
Rebekah gasped. She lost what little appetite she had left.
The sound caused Rafael to focus on her again. “Before that, I never seriously considered the danger of what I did. Because of what happened to Rich, I told Marty I wanted out and wouldn’t renew my contract. He tried to convince me to stick it out a few more years, but once my contract ended, I retired.”
* * * *
They struggled through the rest of the evening, talking about mundane topics. They didn’t argue again, but something had changed. Rebekah barely mustered any excitement when the restaurant owner, Wolfgang Puck, came in on one of his surprise visits to the restaurant to greet diners.
Later, she couldn’t recall the taste of a single morsel of what she ate. As Rafael and Wolfgang chatted amicably, she thought about how many times he’d risked getting hurt in cage matches, flying off the top of the ring ropes, taking blows to his body with chairs, and who knew what else he’d done.
Compared to other popular wrestlers, his career had been a short one. Although relieved he was no longer fighting, nausea still settled in her stomach at what he must have gone through over the years. He could have been the victim in a botched maneuver. The thought terrified her so much her heart raced.
Rebekah couldn’t ignore the meaning of the physical reaction she experienced at the thought of Rafael getting hurt. She took off the blinders and admitted the truth.
She was still in love with her husband.
Chapter Thirteen
Back at the house, Rebekah sat with her arms wrapped tightly around her knees in bed, staring at the painting on the opposite wall. She couldn’t get the conversation with Rafe at Spago out of her mind.
Filled with guilt, she wanted to go to him and express her regret for not trying harder to get in touch with him and tell him about Ricardo. She wanted to tell him how sorry she was she hadn’t been more supportive of his career choice.
Tears filled her eyes, and she squeezed them shut, pressing her face to her knees. She fought the urge to feel close to him, to make love to him. Desire flooded her veins, heightened by the thought of him getting hurt or permanently damaged.
In truth, she wanted a little bit of what she’d lost nine years ago. She wanted the pleasure and the passion, even if she didn’t have his undying love. She needed to see him, touch him, hold him, but she was paralyzed by the fear of rejection. Would he forgive her angry words at dinner?
Would he care if she told him she still loved him?
* * * *
Rafael had stripped out of his shirt and jacket as soon as he could. He sat on the sofa in the sitting area of his bedroom, his bare feet crossed at the ankles and resting on top of the coffee table, clothed in only the trousers he’d worn to dinner.
The conversation at Spago made it clear he and Rebekah didn’t have a chance of getting back together. By the end of dinner, she’d become distant, hardly saying a word, and she’d hardly touched her meal. Since the evening had deteriorated into unpleasantness, he’d canceled the other events he had planned for their night out.
Her father had been right to refuse him when he’d asked for her hand in marriage. She’d deserved better—not the pain and public humiliation he’d caused her. Because of him, she’d abandoned the safety and security of her family and had been forced to live in a cheap motel without all the comforts of a clean home and a loving family.
Their day at the pier had given him false hope and made him believe they might have a chance. Now he knew the truth. The thought of being separated from her and Ricardo at the end of the summer was agonizing, but he would have to accept the consequences of his actions.
Rafael ran his hand over his face and dropped it in a heavy thump on the table next to the sofa. With a grunt, he pushed himself up from the chair. He might as well go to bed.
As he moved across the carpet, a knock on the door sounded so lightly he almost didn’t hear it.
“Come in.”
Hesitantly, Rebekah entered the room. She’d let her hair down, and it fell onto her shoulders and down her back in loose curls. He watched as she closed the door by backing into it.
“I know I shouldn’t be here,” she whispered. She pulled her lower lip between her teeth.
He ran his gaze down the front of her thin white nightshirt and wished he hadn’t. She was braless, the protrusion of her nipples prominently displayed. The hem of the shirt stopped several inches above her knees.
Dios! What was she doing in here barely dressed?
His shaft jumped, excited by her presence. Rafael swallowed, his throat as arid as desert sand. “What is it?” he asked harshly.
He clenched one fist, steeling himself against her involuntary flinch at his tone. Uncertainty hovered in her brown eyes, coupled with another emotion he couldn’t read.
“I wanted to tell you I…” She stopped, seemed to think better of what she had been about to say, then continued. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about Ricardo sooner. Because of me, you’ve missed out on so much of his life, and I hope you can forgive me.”
“I’ve already—”
“I’m sorry I wasn’t a better wife to you. When I went back to Atlanta to visit my parents, I didn’t leave you, despite what you thought. I just needed to get away while you were out of town. I didn’t work, and I didn’t have any friends in Las Vegas. I was lonely without you because you were gone all the time. It was hard to attend your matches because I couldn’t stand to see you get hit over and over again, sometimes watching you bleed. Especially in the beginning, when you were involved in underground fighting. Because even though you always won, you would be so badly bruised and swollen, it—” Her voice cracked and she glanced away for a moment to compose herself. “It tore me apart.”
Now he understood what he saw in her eyes. Fear. His recounting of Rich’s story must have made her imagine a similar accident happening to him.
“We both made mistakes. It’s in the past.” She nodded, but she still appeared disturbed by her thoughts. “I was always fine.”
“You we
re, but I wasn’t,” she said softly.
The husky intonation of her voice made the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. She was so close, so tempting, the craving inside him increased at a dramatic clip.
“If that’s all, I think it’s time for you to go back to your room. It’s late,” he said tersely, in a vain attempt to divert his desire for her.
Ever since he’d laid eyes on her back in Atlanta, making love to her had consumed his thoughts and increased after what happened between them in her kitchen. He could still taste her and hear her jagged breaths. The longer she stayed in this room, the harder the battle to repress the bone-deep hunger he held for her. If she didn’t leave soon, he may not let her leave.
Rebekah laughed nervously. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d think you were trying to get rid of me.”
He didn’t see the humor in the situation. “I am.”
Startled, the smile on her face dissolved, only to be replaced by a pained expression. “I don’t understand.”
“¿No entiendes?” he growled in Spanish, because he was at the end of his rope, unable to think and function like normal. His shoulders, rigid with the need to maintain control, ached as if in a vice grip. “Then let me explain.” He strode toward her. In a lowered voice, he spoke slowly so she could understand every word he said. “If you don’t get out of here in the next three seconds, I can’t promise you will ever be able to leave this room tonight. Because all I can think about is bending you over the arm of that sofa, or dragging you down onto the carpet, or laying you across those sheets. The position really doesn’t matter, Rebekah, because they all end the same way—with me deep inside you.”
Her lips parted on a silent gasp. Emotion flared to life in her eyes. “That’s what I want.”
The earth shifted under his feet. His hard flesh strained against the zipper of his trousers. “Rebekah—”
“I mean it.” She stepped closer and ran her soft hands over the contours of his chest. “I want to feel close to you, Rafe. I need to feel close to you.”
Fight for Love Page 9