by Natasha Tate
His chest tightened to the point of pain. Remaining where he stood while she fought her tears required a strength he hadn’t realized he possessed.
After what felt like an eternity of silence, she finally hauled in a shuddering breath and pressed the back of her wrist to her mouth before straightening with a bright, if strained, smile. “Right.” She smoothed her hair back with her free hand and then reached for the pen on his desk. “I said I wouldn’t ask for anything beyond partnership, and here I’ve already broken my word. My apologies.” She took the pen and bent to lift the stack of papers. “I’ll sign these at home if you don’t mind, because if I stay here, I’m liable to make an even bigger fool of myself and beg you to change your mind.”
Later, after he’d watched her until she disappeared into the night’s cold embrace, he closed his blinds and tried to lose himself in a bottle of Scotch. Halfway through, with his fingers too clumsy to pour another shot and his lips and tongue too numb to taste the burn, Rafael realized no amount of alcohol could blur the clarity of his memories.
He still saw Sophia in every shaft of moonlight and behind his eyes whenever he blinked. He still smelled the faint fragrance of her perfume on his hands, still tasted the heady sweetness of her mouth beneath his. No matter how hard he tried to forget, he couldn’t rid his mind of its memories. Sophia haunted him, just as she always had.
Around 9:00 a.m. the next morning, after he’d packed his office into haphazard stacks of boxes and then slumped into a dreamless, drunken sleep over his empty desk, he awoke with a headache the size of a wine cask. The bright shafts of sunlight Dolores had invited into his office didn’t help, either.
He shot a glare at Dolores and lifted a hand to block the light, trying to minimize the stabbing pain behind his right eye. “Get the hell out of here,” he told the interfering housekeeper.
She ignored him, opening even more blinds with efficient twists of her wrists. “What on Earth did you say to Sophia yesterday? I’ve never seen her so quiet and sad.”
“Let any more light in here, and you’re fired,” he groused.
“You know Sophia will just hire me back,” she said before she cranked the final blinding light into spotlight precision against his face. “You need to apologize to that poor girl, and you need to do it now.”
“Stay out of it,” he groaned.
“Not a chance,” she scolded. “You two are the closest thing I’ve got to a family. And now that you’re home, I refuse to stand by while you make her miserable.”
“She’ll get over it.” Rafael stood and the floor tilted dangerously up to meet him until he steadied himself against the edge of his desk. “For God’s sake, shut the damn blinds.”
“What is wrong with you?” Dolores asked, completely ignoring his edict. “Sophia’s the best thing that ever happened to you. Why would you want to deliberately hurt her?”
“I don’t have to answer to you.”
“Well, you need to answer to someone before you ruin two lives for no good reason,” she huffed.
“I’m not ruining her life.” He glared at her, or at least at the fuzzy outline that had Dolores’s shape. “I’m saving it.”
She moved closer, stabbing a finger into his chest. “I’d never thought it possible, but you are more of a bullheaded fool than Turino ever was.”
Rafael dropped his head, closing his eyes against the lurching sensation in his gut. “I’m only doing what I think is best.”
“How can rejecting the girl you love, the girl you’ve loved for as long as I’ve known you, be what’s best?”
Rafael swallowed. Hard. And then raised his blurry eyes to Dolores’s disappointed brown ones. “Trust me. It is.”
Dolores shook her head, her network of frown lines softening into pity. “She loves you, Raf.”
He hated that his hands shook at that. “She deserves someone better.”
“Oh, Raf.” She lifted one chapped hand and cupped his cheek. “What’s it going to take for you to believe that you deserve better, too?”
He merely stared at her in wretched silence.
She studied his eyes for another long moment before she dropped her hand and sighed. “I hope you realize how wrong you are before it’s too late.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
AFTER Dolores left, Rafael dragged himself up to his bed and slept until nightfall. He awoke disoriented and angry at the world and with his head feeling like it had been stuffed with briars. His brain hurt, his eyes hurt and his body felt as if he’d been run over by a truck. He showered, brushed his teeth and changed into clean clothes, but nothing helped.
He doubted anything ever could.
So he wandered his big empty house until restlessness drove him outside into the soft darkness that cloaked his vineyard and layered his porch in shades of black and plum. The evening breeze cooled his heated skin, bringing with it the scent of soil and grapes and night. Too miserable to appreciate any of it, Rafael stood at the edge of his whitewashed steps and glowered out at the shadowed land he’d sown with his own hands.
He needed to clear his thoughts of Sophia, to remind himself of all the reasons she deserved someone better. He needed to remember all the reasons she could never be happy with him.
She didn’t even know him. She thought she did, but she didn’t. He’d never allowed her to see the Rafael that crouched beneath the thin veneer of civilization he’d donned. He’d never shown her the man capable of hurting those he loved most. The man capable of violence. Of death.
He stepped off the wooden porch and tried to lose himself in the night, walking the darkened rows of vines until his shoulders bowed with fatigue, until the sliver of moon that hung overhead had begun its descent to the horizon.
Hating how he was always, always drawn to the one woman he couldn’t have, he cast an angry glare at the shadowed outbuildings of Sophia’s property. A faint light leaking from one of the Turino Winery’s windows made him go ominously still.
Rafael’s skin prickled. Who could be in the winery at this hour?
It took him two minutes to sprint to the building’s unlocked door, and another minute for his breathing to calm while he eased the door open. His eyes adjusted to the shadowed silhouettes of stainless steel and wood within the main level as he inched his way inside. The large interior was dark, but the pale light that had drawn his attention rimmed the closed door that led to Turino’s cellars.
His crew knew better than to leave the lights on overnight. None of them would have been so careless. Rafael held his breath and crept closer, cocking his head as he listened. A strange sound filtered from below, a jerky, choked snuffling he didn’t recognize.
He tensed, his hands balling into fists while his heart raced beneath his ribs. “Who’s there?” he called.
An abrupt silence met his query.
Jerking the door open, he yelled into the musty space below. “Show yourself,” he demanded, “or I’ll have you arrested for trespassing!”
When no culprit was forthcoming, he thundered down the wooden steps, his boots clanking loudly as he sprang to the floor and landed with his knees cocked and his fists raised.
Only to discover Sophia. Alone. And crying.
Sophia had lurched to her feet, her body silhouetted in the faint light as she flattened herself against a row of oaken barrels. Blotchy-faced and terrified, she didn’t relax her defensive stance until he straightened and lowered his hands.
“What are you doing down here?” he asked, though he needn’t have bothered. It was obvious she was weeping … privately. Her beautiful blue eyes were swollen and her cheeks were damp with tears.
“What are you doing down here?” she shot back, jutting her chin up.
“I saw the light. It’s never on at night and I …” He exhaled and ran a palm over his mouth, disturbed by the evidence of tears on her face and neck. She looked uncharacteristically dismal, his strong Sophia undone by pain. Pain he’d caused. She wore the same white T-shirt and gray shor
ts she’d worn the first night he’d seen her, and the neckline of her shirt was damp and stuck to her skin. Her hair was a mess and he felt so unmanned by her tears, he was momentarily at a loss for words.
“Well, it’s just me, so there’s no need to concern yourself,” she told him tightly.
“You’re crying.”
“So you’ll understand my desire for privacy.” Her nose was stuffed up, making her voice sound plugged and nasally.
The fact that she wept stunned him. In all the years he’d known Sophia, he’d never seen her succumb to tears. Ever. She was not a woman easily dismantled, and he was not a man to be affected by feminine tears. But his pulse was quaking and he couldn’t seem to drawn a decent breath.
“Go away,” she demanded.
“No.”
“I don’t want you here!”
He watched her helplessly, refusing her request. “I know.”
She glared at him mutinously, pressing her mouth into a tight, wounded seam while her eyes filled anew. Soon, her shoulders began to quiver beneath withheld sobs and her desperate attempts to stem the tide of sorrow failed. When it appeared she could contain her tears no longer, she spun to present her back and dropped her face into her hands.
Rafael stared at her T-shirt, stretched across her narrow shoulder blades, at the haphazard ponytail of gold, and the escaped strands that curled at her nape. He fought the urge to haul her into his arms, to turn her against his body while she wept into his chest.
Instead, he said, “I hate seeing you this way.”
“Then leave!”
It felt like his lungs were caught in a vise. “I can’t.”
“Just go already!” she wailed into her hands. “I don’t want you here!”
He remained, disarmed, unable to abandon her while she was so distressed. Especially when he knew her hurt feelings were his fault. After a few moments, she sank to her knees and rocked forward, her silent sobs so wracking, her ribs shook. His own chest tightened and he felt a hard knot thicken his throat. Swallowing against it didn’t seem to help, and when he could bear it no longer, he dropped to a squat and reached for her bowed shoulders. “Soph,” he murmured in a low voice, “come here.”
A fervent shake of her head denied him. “Just l-leave,” she said through her fingers. “G-go away.”
“No.” He couldn’t make his fingers abandon the soft slope of her nape, couldn’t release the tenuous hold on his own remorse. Tugging on her until she rotated toward him, he lifted both palms to the sides of her neck. “I’m not leaving until I know you’re okay.”
“Don’t lie to me!” She lifted devastated eyes to his. “Because you are leaving and I won’t be okay. Ever. Being nice to me now just makes it worse!”
Emotion slammed through him and it took supreme effort to keep from pulling her close. “I’m sorry,” he said quietly. “But it’s for the best. And it’ll get better with time. I promise.”
Tears swelled and spilled again, tracking down her cheeks in wet, miserable streaks. “How?” she insisted in a choked voice. “I d-don’t know h-how to do this by m-myself,” came her choppy explanation, interspersed with sobs. “And I d-don’t even … even—” Sophia clamped her mouth shut as she battled a fresh surge of emotion. “I don’t even want to t-try without you here. I thought I was s-stronger now, that I could b-be your p-partner and not want m-more—” She waged a valiant fight against an onslaught of new tears, lifting brimming eyes to the ceiling and inhaling noisily before she struggled to continue. “But I was w-wrong … I knew it before I even c-came h-here. I should have n-never left L-London.” She blinked furiously, but her efforts to stem the fresh tide of tears did little to contain them.
Kneeling before her, Rafael watched helplessly as she bowed over her hands again, weeping until her entire body shook. He couldn’t breathe while he watched her struggle for control, his heart quaking along with her quivering shoulders. Don’t cry, Soph … I can’t bear it.
But she cried anyway, holding the sobs back with white-tipped fingers until they leaked through in pitiful, choked mewls of grief. Pressure built within his own chest until he could no longer fight the need to hold her.
“Soph … it’s my fault … hush … you’ll be fine … I promise …” Still on his knees before her, he pulled her into his arms and she offered no resistance, sliding limply into him as he tenderly tucked her head against his chest.
“Oh, Raaaf …” she sobbed jerkily as he drew her into his lap and settled to the cool concrete floor with his back against the stacked row of oak barrels. “Why does l-life have to be so h-hard?” She burrowed against him, her hands gripping his shirt as she wept against his chest.
“Shh … it’ll be okay,” he soothed as he cupped the back of her head and pressed her face against his throat. He held her within the circle of his arms while her tears dampened his shirt and skin, wishing he could somehow make up for his callousness. But he couldn’t. He was a brute, incapable of framing suitable words of solace. So he simply held her, in silence, until her sobs faded to soft hiccups, her arm looped weakly about his neck.
Dipping his cheek to the top of her head, he waited until she slowly grew quiet and her breath evened. There were no words he could offer to ease her pain, no combination of syllables that could communicate the consolation he wished to give her.
“I hate that you’re seeing me like this,” she eventually offered in a low, muffled voice.
“Considering the state I was in when your father found me,” he chided, “I’d say we’re even.”
She sighed shakily, and he felt her breasts move against his chest. She scrubbed her face against his chest and mumbled into his skin. “No, we’re not. You were beautiful even then. Bruised, bleeding and angry at the world, you were still the most beautiful thing I’d seen.”
“A monster isn’t beautiful,” he corrected, unwilling to leave her vulnerable without offering some small sliver of his own weakness up for her inspection. “Not when I earned each one of those bruises and deserved every bit of their pain.”
She grew still within his arms, suspended in silence while she absorbed his confession. “How can you say such awful things about yourself?” she finally asked.
He didn’t answer for a moment, steeping himself in the bittersweet pleasure of holding her one final time. Because he knew once he told her, once she knew the truth, she’d turn from him in disgust. How could she not?
So he remained as he was, pressed close to the woman he loved as he weighed the words that would separate them forever. His lips rested against the crooked part of her hair, his hand idly trailing from nape to waist and back again until he finally offered, “My brother died the day your father found me.”
“Your brother?” she repeated, pressing back enough that she could meet his eyes. “I didn’t know you had a brother.”
He pressed his mouth into a tight line, his throat suddenly tight with emotion. “His name was Paolo. And he was nine years old.”
Sympathy softened her expression as she studied his face. “What happened?”
Bleak devastation rose within his chest and he averted his eyes so she couldn’t read the blackness he hid within.
“Tell me,” she urged, her gentle hand rising to cup his jaw and turning him back to her.
Swallowing thickly, he forced himself to continue. “Remember when you asked me about the mark on my hip?”
“Yes,” she whispered as her breath stilled.
“The man who branded me, who branded us … he wasn’t a good man.”
She said nothing, simply waiting for him to continue.
“He branded both Paolo and me—” his fists clenched involuntarily at the memory of his brother’s cries “—so we’d never forget that we belonged to him.”
“Oh, Raf,” she breathed while her face blanched white. “I’m so sorry.”
“It’s not your fault,” he insisted. “It was mine.”
Her eyes, filled with transparent compassion, se
arched his. “How could such a thing possibly have been your fault?”
As difficult as it was, he steeled himself against her sympathy and forced the damning truth past his throat. “If I’d been better … if I’d been good, our mother wouldn’t have sold us to him.”
Horror, tinged with outrage, brought the color back to her cheeks. “Your mother sold you?”
“She had no choice,” he insisted. “I was a violent, rebellious bastard who scared the life out of a woman too frail to defend herself.”
“Against a child?”
“She knew I lived to hate, and that I carried a rage too terrifying to control.”
Her brows knitted in misplaced fury while her hand slid down to the bunched muscles of his shoulder. “With a mother like that, I’d think you had good reason to be angry.”
“No,” he confessed mercilessly, wanting her to understand the truth about him, to stop her blind defense of his character when he possessed none to defend. “She sold me to someone vicious enough to direct my talents while keeping me under a tight rein.”
“I don’t believe it,” she said, gripping his shoulder instead of recoiling as she should. “That woman was selfish and weak and wrong. And if I knew how to find her, I’d wring her neck myself for doing such a beastly, unforgivable thing to her own child.”
“I deserved it.”
Shaking her head while her mouth firmed in rebuttal, she jostled him with her narrow hand. “No, Raf. No child deserves to suffer such atrocities. I don’t care what he does.”
“Even if he kills his brother?”
She stared at him in silence for several seconds before she shook her head again. “I don’t believe it. There’s no way you could have killed your brother.”
“I may as well have,” he choked out. “When I should have protected him, I didn’t. And he died.”
“I’m sure you had no choice in the matter.”
“I did. I did have a choice.” He clenched his jaw against the debilitating flash of pain the memory wrought. “And Paolo died because I made the wrong one.”