‘Daniele wasn’t going to inherit but he was expected to build a great life for himself—why should it be different for me because I was girl? Why should my future depend on what would, essentially, be the goodwill of a man I hadn’t even met? Why should I be forced to beg for money to buy the clothes I need when I can earn it myself and control my own life? I think that was the moment I decided I would take my own path and prove that anything my brothers could do, I could do too, and do it better. I’ve spent my whole life working towards that. But I didn’t live like a recluse. I partied and had fun but relationships... I saw how my friends were with their boyfriends and how their relationships consumed their lives and knew I couldn’t afford that distraction.’
While she spoke, Felipe didn’t say anything, listening with narrowed eyes without comment.
She met his gaze and tried to smile but instead found herself wiping away another tear. ‘Until eleven days ago I never had the sense that it could all end at any moment. My father’s death was awful but he’d been in his seventies and had been ill for years. In many ways the end was a relief for him. Pieta was only thirty-five, young, fit, recently married, a whole future to look forward to and it was all taken away in a moment by something as innocuous as fog. Fog!’ She could laugh at the madness and cruelty of it.
To watch her father slowly disintegrate had been heart-breaking but his faculties, his sense of humour...they had all survived in him to the very end. They’d had time to prepare. Nothing could have prepared her or any of them for Pieta’s death.
‘All those people who died in the hurricane in Caballeros, they’d had futures and family too, people who loved them. If it could happen to Pieta and to them, then why not me?’
Felipe made to speak but she raised a hand to stop him.
‘Whether I have days left to live or years or decades, I want to live it to be the best I can but I want to feel it too. You make me feel things I’ve never felt before. Good feelings. Scary feelings. But real feelings.’ Feelings she’d ached to explore to see where they would take her because what if she never felt them again? ‘Do you understand that?’
His dark eyes held hers as he gave a sharp inclination of his head.
‘I don’t know if it was this new awareness of life and its fragility that woke these feelings up or if it was just the catalyst...’ She attempted a smile. ‘No, I do know. If I’d met you under different circumstances I still would have wanted you. What I don’t know is if I would have had acted on it. I don’t expect anything from you or want anything more than this. Don’t think you took advantage of me. I gave my body to you freely as a consenting woman, just as you gave yours freely to me as a consenting man.’
She tried to smile again but her chin wobbled too much for it to form. ‘And that’s it.’
As Felipe listened, his fury with both Francesca and himself slowly seeped from him.
Curled on the huge bed, she looked so intensely vulnerable that his heart ached.
His pulses hammering, he shifted closer to her and took her cold hands, which just a short time ago had been warm, and rubbed them gently between his own then pressed a kiss to them.
She attempted another shaky smile that made the ache in his heart expand.
‘I hurt you, didn’t I?’ he said quietly.
She drew her lips in and nodded. ‘That was my own fault. If you’d known...’
‘If I’d known it was your first time I would have taken it slowly, not taken you like a rutting bull.’
She pulled a face. ‘If you’d known it was my first time you wouldn’t have taken me at all. That’s why I didn’t tell you.’
He laughed, his chest lightening at her wry quip.
‘You’re right, I have made many assumptions about you, querida,’ he said, reaching out to stroke her pale cheek. ‘It’s the nature of my life. I work with men, the people I protect are normally men too.’
Women had always been on the periphery of his life, even his own mother, too busy working to feed him for him to learn any feminine secrets. Women were a mystery. He’d shared his bed with many of them through the years but had no clue as to how their minds worked. Francesca was the closest he’d come to understanding.
‘Women have always seemed like a different species to me,’ he admitted ruefully. ‘I accepted your family’s description of you being a danger to yourself at face value, which I wouldn’t have done if you’d been a man.’
‘Maybe they were right,’ she whispered.
He shook his head, knowing she was thinking back to her gung-ho response to the Governor’s demand for a cash bribe. ‘To begin with you were on the edge but you soon found the strength you needed. What I am trying to say in my clumsy way is that I’ve not been able to look past my initial assumptions and too busy fighting my attraction to you to see you as you really are.’
‘How do you see me now?’
‘As strong.’ And beautiful. ‘You’re a fighter, querida.’
Another tear rolled down her cheek. She screwed her face up as he wiped it away with his thumb.
‘Not very strong now,’ she mumbled.
He leaned forward and cupped her face in his hands. ‘I’ve seen men bigger than me cry. It’s nothing to do with strength and nothing to be ashamed of.’
She sighed and nodded then seemed to gather herself together, her back straightening. ‘I should put my nightshirt on.’
Her legs made a slight wobble as she padded to the dressing room and closed the door behind her, re-emerging moments later with her nightshirt on.
She stood in the doorway and tucked a stray lock of hair behind her ear. ‘What happens now?’
His heart hurt to see her vulnerability. He couldn’t turn his back on it, not yet.
‘Now, querida, we get some sleep.’ Sliding under the bedsheets, he opened his arms to her.
Tentatively she walked to him. When she climbed onto the bed he switched the bedside light off then gently laid her down so she was nestled against him.
Holding her tightly, he lay with her in silence, his mind still reeling from everything that had just happened, his loins still aching from unfulfilled desire.
Instead of acting on it, he did nothing more than stroke her hair and trace his fingers gently over the top of her back.
He’d never held a woman like this before. It was an intimacy he’d always steered away from.
He couldn’t stay here holding her like this. Equally, he couldn’t leave her. Not yet.
Only when Francesca’s breathing had become deep and regular, her limbs weighty on him, did he extricate himself and settle in his makeshift bed on the floor, attempting to calm his racing head and thrumming heart enough to find some sleep of his own.
* * *
Felipe opened his eyes, instantly alert to any sound.
The suite was in darkness. All was quiet. But something had woken him.
Then he heard it again, the sound that had roused him from his sleep. A whimper.
He threw his covers off and climbed onto the bed where he found Francesca curled in a ball, crying into her pillow.
‘Querida?’ Tentatively, he put a hand on her head.
She stilled at his touch. After a moment she turned her face and opened her eyes. ‘Felipe?’
He smoothed damp hair from her wet face. ‘What’s the matter?’
Her face crumpled and tears fell down her cheeks, silvery in the shadowed darkness.
‘A bad dream?’
She gave a jerky nod.
He scooped her up to pull her to him and wrapped his arms tightly around her.
‘Hush,’ he whispered, kissing the top of her head. ‘It’s over now.’
Clinging to him as if he were a life raft, she sobbed into his chest.
‘It’s over now,’ he repeat
ed, feeling as ineffectual as it was possible to feel.
He’d held fellow soldiers in his arms when they’d sobbed over a fallen comrade, but never had he held them and heard the cracks of his own heart.
If he had the power, he would snatch out the terror that had taken her into its hold and bury it for ever.
‘It’s over.’
Her hair brushed against his chin as she shook her head. ‘It will never be over.’
He held her until the shudders ceased and the tears dried up, then got under the covers and lay beside her, still holding her to him.
‘It will get better,’ he whispered, stroking her hair. ‘Not yet, not for a long time, but one day.’
‘How?’ she asked dully into his chest.
‘I know loss. Grief has to come out. You’ve been keeping yourself so busy during the day it’s coming out at night.’
She was silent for a long moment before saying in a small voice, ‘It’s not grief. It’s guilt.’
‘Guilt over Pieta?’
She nodded.
‘How can you feel guilt, querida? You weren’t in the helicopter with him.’
There was another lengthy silence. When she eventually replied her voice was so low and muffled it was a struggle to hear clearly.
‘When Mamma called me to tell me my brother had died, I thought she was talking about Daniele. He’s always travelling by helicopter. I didn’t realise it was Pieta until she asked me to go with her to tell Natasha.’
‘Why would you feel guilty about that?’
‘Because my first emotion when I realised it was Pieta was relief that it wasn’t Daniele.’
Francesca waited for a reaction from him, a condemnation, however subtle.
His only response was to tighten his hold and rub his mouth into her hair.
‘I haven’t told anyone that,’ she whispered. ‘I tried to deny it to myself but he won’t let me forget.’
‘Who won’t?’
‘Pieta. He’s haunting my dreams. He knows how I felt. He knows the truth and he won’t let me forget it.’
‘That’s not possible,’ he said gently, his breath warm against her skull. ‘They say dreams are our subconscious talking to us and I know it to be true from my own experience. That’s all it is.’
‘My guilty conscience talking to me?’ She swallowed back more tears.
‘Yes. But you have nothing to feel guilty about.’
‘I have everything to feel guilty about.’
‘Did you wish Pieta dead?’
‘No!’ The idea was so horrific that she disentangled herself from his hold and sat up. ‘No. Of course I didn’t. He was my brother and I loved him.’
‘And he knew that.’ He took her hand and laced his fingers through hers. ‘He was your hero.’
She smiled wistfully and squeezed his interlinked fingers. ‘I did love him. I really did. But I was never close to him as I am to Daniele. He left home to go to university when I was six so I only have faint memories of living with him. He was this mythological being who would sweep into the family home at various times bearing thoughtful gifts. He would sit down with me and ask me questions and listen closely to all my answers. He encouraged me in everything I did. Truly, he was a brilliant big brother but...’
‘But?’ Felipe asked into the silence.
‘He was detached. I never connected emotionally to him. Daniele’s a lot older than me too but he was a proper brother. He teased me and tormented me, and I teased and tormented him back. When I went to university, he was always dropping in on a whim if he was in Pisa, taking me out in his newest car or jet or whatever expensive toy he’d recently brought. He took me shopping, brought me my first legal drink...’
‘He was the fun one?’ Felipe suggested.
‘Yes. That. The fun one. That wasn’t Pieta’s fault. He was raised the eldest son, knowing the family’s estate would pass to him, that keeping it intact for the next generation would be his responsibility. He was very serious. When I started working for him at his law firm I hoped we would get closer and I would see another side to him. I thought we would go out for lunch together and have after work drinks.’
‘It didn’t happen?’
‘We never had the time. I only started my traineeship a few months ago and Pieta was rarely there as he was always travelling. I was put under the charge of one of his senior lawyers.’
She sighed and lay back down, resting her head next to his. All that time she’d thought she would have to finally get to know her oldest brother, all gone in an instant.
‘Pieta was a hard man to get to know,’ Felipe said quietly. ‘I worked with him many times on his philanthropic missions. He was a good man and I enjoyed his company.’
‘But?’ she prompted, certain he wanted to say more.
He rolled onto his side to look at her, so close his nose brushed hers. ‘He kept people at arm’s length. I don’t think there were many people he allowed to see his real self.’
‘I wish things could have been different between us and that we’d been closer.’
‘I know you do. Pieta was just a man doing the best he could with the hand he’d been dealt. I’m sure he didn’t mean to shut you out.’
Francesca gazed at him, her chest feeling so much lighter yet, conversely, unbelievably full.
‘Thank you,’ she whispered.
‘For what?’
‘For listening and not judging.’
He kissed the tip of her nose.
She thought back to his earlier comment about the subconscious. ‘What was it that gave you bad dreams?’
She caught the flash of pain in his eyes.
Palming his cheek, she stroked the soft beard. Tentatively, she probed, ‘Is it from when you were shot?’
He covered her hand with his own. ‘I lost my closest friend that day. I watched him die.’
‘Oh, Felipe,’ she breathed with a sympathy she felt right in the centre of her being.
‘The Special Forces do many classified covert missions. This was one of them. The most I can tell you about it is that a group of Spanish executives were taken hostage in a North African country by a guerrilla group. My unit was flown in to rescue them. Our intelligence was faulty. We were told there were three hostage takers but there were eight of them. It was a bloodbath. We lost ten of the hostages and I lost three of my men. Good men. Sergio was shot first. He’d been by my side since our basic training days when we were green eighteen-year-olds. We took selection for the Special Forces together...we were as close as brothers. I was best man at his wedding. I was to be godfather to his child. I lost everything that day—my brother, my army family and the career I loved.’
Francesca, her heart in her mouth, stared into the dark eyes and wished with all her heart that she could find the words to take his pain away.
No wonder he understood her pain so much. He must have been battling his own nightmares for the past decade.
His overprotectiveness and desire to plan for each and every eventuality suddenly made perfect sense. Even the business he’d formed, protecting civilians, ensuring they were as safe as they could be, never leaving anything to chance. She would bet her career none of his clients had ever been taken hostage while under his protection.
It also made sense of his solitude. Here was a man who’d spent his childhood alone but in the army had found a place where he belonged, only to have it all ripped away from him in one disastrous mission.
This time she was the one to wrap her arms around him and hold him close so his head was nestled in the crook of her neck, his beard scratching her collarbone.
She swallowed a lump away and closed her eyes, trying to process how everything had turned on its head.
This closeness she felt with Felipe right now..
.
Did sex always lead to such emotional intimacy?
How did men find it so easy to conduct meaningless affairs? How could Daniele and Matteo hop from one bed to another without a second thought?
She’d assumed it would be the same for her but what had happened between her and Felipe that night transcended way beyond sex.
Her head was so full that it took a long time to fall back to sleep. When she finally did, there were no dreams.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
IN THE MORNING, Francesca awoke to find the bed empty and the sound of the shower running.
She looked at her watch. Seven o’clock.
The longest night of her life had passed very quickly.
When Felipe emerged from the bathroom, fully dressed in a navy suit and tie—she had no idea how he kept his suits so pristine—the strangest shyness passed over her.
‘How are you feeling?’ he asked, casting her that piercing, scrutinising gaze that made her belly flip.
‘Like I could sleep the whole day.’
He smiled wryly. ‘You can sleep on the plane. We’re running late so you’ll have to eat breakfast on the plane too. I don’t want to rush you but we need to be at the airport within the hour.’
‘I’ll get a move on then.’ Scooting out of bed, she brushed past him and locked herself in the bathroom.
She looked in the mirror, expecting to see a different face reflecting back.
She felt different. She felt as if her world had changed.
Everything that had passed in the night felt like a dream, her nightmare a dream within it.
Felipe had caught her at her lowest moment and carried her through it.
Protecting His Defiant Innocent Page 12