by Lucy Monroe
She sat up and realized she was on her bed. On top of the covers, not beneath them. “I don’t need you. Go away!”
A gasp from beside her had her head swerving. Her sister was next to her on the bed; Sandor stood beside her, his hand on her shoulder. Her mom stood just behind Miguel, looking as shocked as Amber felt. Like the first time she’d seen him, her dad was comforting her mom. It was sweet, but she wished they’d all go away. Not just Miguel.
All of them.
She didn’t need Miguel. She didn’t. She didn’t want to need anyone. She didn’t deserve to. She hadn’t been there for the tiny being who had needed her and no one else. She’d let that newly formed person down.
Pain clogged her throat and she realized she was swallowing back tears. This wasn’t right. She couldn’t feel. She didn’t want to.
“Go away, Miguel, please—” Her voice broke and she had to breathe deeply to keep the tears at bay.
“I am not going anywhere.”
“That is not for you to say. This is my home and I’ll be damned if I’ll let you stay here and upset my daughter.”
Miguel didn’t look shocked at that revealing speech. He didn’t look impacted by it at all. His eyes never left her face. “You are mine, Amber, and I am yours.”
“No.” She shook her head, frantic for him to leave. “I can’t be yours. Not anymore.”
“That’s it.” Her dad’s hand landed on Miguel’s shoulder and her Catalan ex-lover tensed as if ready for battle.
“Stop it.” That was Ellie’s voice, as sharp as a drill sergeant’s and shocking everyone in the room. “Knock it off, Dad.”
Amber wanted to look at her sister, ask her what she thought she was doing, but she couldn’t drag her gaze away from Miguel.
“Don’t tell me you’ve decided to champion this man’s case, Ellie. You know how much he hurt your sister.”
“I know he looks as bad as she does when she thinks no one is watching. I know I saw the same grief and wild despair in his eyes when she fainted I saw in hers that day we went to get her in California. I know that for the first time in months my sister’s voice is ringing with real emotion, even if it’s anger. It’s real.”
“She was getting better…” That was her mom, but Amber couldn’t make herself look at her, either.
Miguel’s gray eyes were eating her alive and she felt them on her skin, like she’d felt nothing else since she woke up in the hospital and learned she’d lost the baby she hadn’t even known about.
“No, she wasn’t getting better, she was getting more proficient at hiding her lack of feeling. She loves us all enough to pretend, but it has been just that…a pretense. I tried to convince myself it wasn’t, but seeing her when Miguel came into the living room, I know it was. You all know it was.”
The sound of fabric sliding against fabric and her mom’s voice came as if muffled by a large male chest. “She’s right. God in Heaven help us…but she’s right.”
There were tears in her mom’s voice and Amber wanted to comfort her, but she couldn’t move.
“I don’t know what happened between you and my sister, Mr. Menendez, but I think you might be the only person who can bring her back from the place she’s been living for months.”
“No.” The word whispered out of Amber’s mouth before she knew it was there.
Ellie’s hand grasped hers. “Yes, baby. I know he hurt you, but he’s hurting, too. There has to be a way back for both of you.”
Finally…finally…Amber looked away from Miguel to her sister. “There isn’t. It’s gone.”
“Your heart isn’t gone anymore than Dad’s was after Mom died, but I’ll be darned if I’m going to spend the next two decades waiting for you to come back to us like I waited on him. Near death woke him up, but you would have died from not eating, too. The doctors said your organs were dangerously close to shutting down, but it didn’t matter. You still didn’t come back.”
“I started eating again.”
“But you still don’t want to feel. You aren’t living. You’re just existing.”
“I am living. For all of you.”
Tears spilled over Ellie’s eyes. “Amber, baby, we need you to live for you. We all love you so much.”
“I can’t stand to be around Miguel.”
“Please, Amber…just talk to him. If you want Dad and Sandor to throw him out afterward, then they will…but please, do this…for me.”
“But why?”
“Because I think he can help you heal.”
“He can’t give me back what I lost.”
“No, but maybe he can give you something else instead. Maybe not. Maybe you really do hate him, but, honey, you are real for the first time in weeks…months even. I need you to talk to him, to keep the realness going. If only to tell him he’s a selfish bastard who doesn’t deserve you.”
“I already know that.” Miguel’s voice was rocky and the words were too much for Amber’s fragile hold on her emotions.
She turned wild eyes to him. “It’s not like that. Please, I…” Her throat closed and she had to concentrate to get more words out. “Privacy…” She gulped in air, wondering why it was so hard to breathe. “If we’re going to talk…we need privacy.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
ELLIEsqueezed her hand and then stood. “Come on, everyone.”
“Amber,” her mom said in a pleading voice and she forced herself to look at her. “Sweetheart, I can’t lose you…not like this. You’ve got to be okay.”
Amber nodded. “I know.”
“Will you eat before you talk?”
Her roiling stomach made her want to refuse, but she knew how important this was to her mom, how important it was toher if she wanted to stay healthy.
“Maybe a tray?”
“I’ll bring one up.”
“Bring food for Miguel, too.”
“I am not hungry.”
She turned fierce eyes on him. “If I have to eat, so do you. You look like you’ve lost a stone and you didn’t have a stone to lose.”
There was satisfaction in being the one doing the haranguing in this area.
Her dad actually laughed. It was such a nice sound and Amber realized one that had been all too infrequent over the past months. “Listen to her, son.”
“Anything.”Miguel’s face twisted with emotion. “If it will make you happy.”
Amber stared. Would it make her happy if he ate? She didn’t think so, but…but…“I would be satisfied.”
“Then I will eat.”
They waited in silence, neither making the slightest effort to break it or move from their positions on her bed, until her mom returned with a tray laden with two dinner plates and juice to drink. “Eat first, talk after,” she admonished and then left.
And that is what Miguel and Amber did. They ate.
When they were finished, Miguel took the tray and put it on the floor. Then he turned back to face her, his expression as ravaged as her sister had alluded to. “Your sister said you almost died…from not eating?”
She nodded.
He swallowed, his eyes glistening in a way she couldn’t accept as real. “Why?” he asked in a whisper.
Terror coursed through her. No one else had asked that. They’d all assumed they knew the answer and she’d let them go on believing it. So, she hadn’t had to lie. Could she lie to him? Could she pretend that it was what everyone else believed it had been?
But he was the baby’s father. He deserved to know. Didn’t he? He’d rejected her, but that didn’t mean he didn’t have the right to know. But she hadn’t admitted her culpability to anyone. Not even the E.R. doctor, though she was sure he suspected.
Miguel waited without speaking, apparently willing to sit like that all night while she worked through the thoughts swirling in her head. Oh, but his eyes spoke and the message in them was so filled with emotion she wanted to hide.
He was feeling enough for both of them and she didn’t understand how that co
uld be. He was the one who had not wanted to try to have a long distance relationship, but he looked like a man who had been abandoned by love. Not vice versa.
She licked her lips. “A couple of weeks after I got back from Spain, I got nauseous. It was an all day thing and my agent wanted me to lose a few pounds for a commercial.”
“You did not have a few pounds to lose.”
She shrugged. “It was easy to stop eating at all when food made me feel sick. I wasn’t sleeping, either. The dreams…they got to me and I hated waking up to loneliness.”
“I am sorry.” He made a pained sound, his hands fisting against his thighs with white knuckle intensity.
“Miguel?”
He shook his head, like he was trying to pull himself together. “You almost died. I could not have stood that and I know it is my fault.”
He sounded like that knowledge was killing him. And it wasn’t true. “No. I worked out that you’d never once lied to me or led me on. I just assumed that if it was so special for me, it must be for you, too.”
“It was special.”
She could have argued, but it didn’t matter anymore. That part of her life was gone. She didn’t know if he wanted to sleep with her again, or to be her friend, or what, but she didn’t want any of it. She’d talk to him because Ellie was right…she needed to, but then he was leaving and she didn’t want to see him again.
“Anyway, I didn’t take care of myself. Not your fault. Mine. I should have, but I didn’t. I fell asleep at the wheel while driving to a shoot. I woke up in Emergency and my baby was gone.”
“Your baby?” he asked in a faint voice, surging up from the bed and falling almost immediately back to sit on it—as if his legs would not hold him. “You were pregnant?” he croaked.
Should she have softened the blow some way? Probably, only she didn’t know how. What else could she say? “Yes. And we were so careful, I don’t know how it happened, but it did and I didn’t protect my baby and I’ll never forgive myself,” she admitted the deepest pain of her heart.
“The first time…we were not so careful.” He was gray beneath the dusky tone of his skin. “Our baby…is dead.” This time, the shimmer in his eyes was obvious moisture and a tear slid down that he seemed totally unaware of. “You almost died. I did not protect either of you,” he grated in a voice like sandpaper.
“It wasn’t your job.” It had been hers and she had messed up. Horribly.
“So…after the…” He paused, swallowed and made a visible effort to pull himself together. “After the baby, you stopped eating altogether?”
“I starved our baby…I deserved to starve myself.”
“No!” He grabbed her shoulders, his expression like the damned. “No, Amber. Do not say this…do not think this…not ever again!”
“I can’t help thinking it.” Truth was like that. It wouldn’t leave you alone.
“You must. It is wrong. So very wrong. You lost the baby after the accident, no?”
“Yes.”
“If you had starved the baby, you would have lost it before that…the baby depleted your strength when you had none to give. You gave the last of yourself to the baby and nearly killed yourself in the process.” Another tear slid down his cheek and he swiped at with impatience this time, as if annoyed with his own weakness.
“I killed our baby.”
Miguel thought he might be sick. He had thought he had hurt before, but the pain of missing her was nothing like this. To know that she had almost died…that their baby was dead. It was worse than anything he could imagine…except maybe if she had died. And for her to believe it was her fault when he had been the one to let her down.
Every word was a slashing knife wound in his heart. He did not know the words to convince her otherwise, but he had to try. “You might as well say I killed her, because you would not have been so distraught if I had not rejected our love.”
He wished he could believe she thought that, even a little. She should, but it was so clear she was taking all the blame on herself and he could not stand it.
“We never said we loved each other.”
“But it was there all the same, was it not?”
She shook her head.
But he knew she lied. She had loved and so had he even if he had been too stupid to see it until too late. However, he was not going to push that particular issue right now.
This was more important. “You are not responsible for the death of our baby.”
“Yes, I am. If I had been taking proper care of myself—”
“Which you would have been if I had not hurt you, if you had realized you were pregnant, but you did not.”
“I should have.”
“No, why would you? You had never even had sex before me…you had no experience with these things. You had every reason to believe the nausea was a result of stress. You’d learned your father was not who you believed him to be, your life was changed irrevocably…I had let you down when you needed me most.” Would he ever forgive himself for that? He did not know, but he would do his best to spend a lifetime not repeating that mistake. “Your stress level was phenomenal. I should have recognized love when it smacked me in the face, but I did not and you and our baby paid the price.”
He shuddered inside with the knowledge of how close he’d come to losing them both.
“No…I…You don’t love me, Miguel.”
“I do.”
She shook her head and he almost smiled. But he was hurting too much for even dark humor to get through. Only if he had ever considered a woman’s reaction to him saying he loved her, it would not have been denial. But maybe with this woman and the way he’d treated her, it was the only reaction that made sense.
He could not change the past, only work on their future. And they did have a future. Together. Because apart, they were both only partial people.
“I don’t want to talk anymore.”
“You need to rest, but I do not want to leave you.”
“You have to leave.”
He was not so sure about that, but he said nothing. He would talk to her father after he left her to rest.
He leaned down and pressed a chaste kiss to her soft lips. “We will talk more tomorrow.”
“No.”
“Sleep,” he said instead of answering.
There was no point in arguing something he was determined to win.
When he went downstairs, they were all waiting for him in the living room.
Ellie, the sister, was looking expectant. Her husband faintly menacing and her father much the same. Helen Taylor looked like she was terrified to hear what he had to say and just as frightened of leaving it unsaid.
“I would like to stay here, if I may,” he said, coming straight to the point. It felt like begging, but he had to stay near her. He and Amber had too much to work through. And after learning he had almost lost her to starvation, he could not make himself leave her…even to find a hotel.
“Did she talk to you?” Ellie asked when her father didn’t answer Miguel’s request right away.
“Yes, her guilt over the baby is immense, but I’m determined to help her work through it and come to see that she is not at fault.”
“Baby?” her mother asked in a voice similar to the one he’d used upon hearing.
And it was only then that he realized none of these people had known. Damn it, if he’d been thinking straight, he would have wondered…been circumspect until he could ask her. However, even knowing how devastated she had been, he was stunned to realize she hadn’t shared something so shattering with her beloved mother.
The words could not be unsaid however. The only choice was to move forward. “I think perhaps there is a great deal we need to tell each other.”
Amber woke to her alarm the next morning having slept fourteen hours straight. She had forced herself to sleep since the accident, but had not rested so well since returning from Spain.
She showered in her en suite and dressed in a f
aux suede pantsuit in alligator print by Tesori. It was only a little loose, which filled her with satisfaction. She was getting better physically. That was good for her family.
Maybe even for her.
She wasn’t completely shocked to see Miguel at the breakfast table, though the way he and her father were chatting like old friends took her aback.That she had not expected.
Both men looked up on her entrance and smiled.
Her dad’s expression mirrored a lack of tension she only now realized had been there because it was gone. “Good morning, Amber. You look like you slept well.”
“I did.” She returned his smile.
“That is good to hear,” Miguel said, his expression a little more difficult to read than her father’s.
“Where’s Mom?” she asked as she sat down and waited for the housekeeper to bring her breakfast.
“Right here,” said a feminine voice from the doorway.
She came over and hugged Amber before kissing George’s cheek and then sitting down. She nodded at Miguel. “Good morning, Miguel. I trust you slept well.”
He gave a noncommittal shrug. “I hope to spend the morning with Amber. Will that be a problem?”
“Why are you asking her?” Amber inquired, feeling genuinely confused. Miguel might be arrogant, but he wasn’t the type to treat her like her opinion didn’t matter.
“I learned last night that she was your direct supervisor. I do not want to interrupt your work schedule, but I do want to talk.”
“Oh.” Brilliant. As conversational gambits went, that was stellar.Not . But she wasn’t sure whatto say.
She’d been adamant the night before that she didn’t want to see him anymore, but in the light of morning, she realized he was giving her an opportunity to have closure on a painful part of her life and she should take it.
“There’s no problem on my end with Amber taking the morning off,” her mom said, a quaver in her voice Amber didn’t understand.
She turned to look her mom full in the face and saw grief in the blue eyes that she did not understand. “What’s the matter?”
“I don’t understand why you didn’t tell me. Or maybe I do. I suppose you decided you couldn’t trust me after finding out what I did. I…” Tears filled her eyes and she shook her head. “I’m sorry, I promised myself I wouldn’t do this.”