Читать книгу One Night Of Consequences Collection - Ким Лоренс, Annie West - Страница 63
ОглавлениеTHE FIRST TIME I saw London, I was a grief-stricken fourteen-year-old, newly orphaned, just arrived from New York. My grandmother, whom I’d never met, sent her driver to collect me from Heathrow. The sky was weeping and gray. I remembered trembling as I walked up the steps of the tall white mansion in Kensington, a house roughly the same size as my entire apartment building in Brooklyn.
Brought in by the butler, I’d found my grandmother sitting at her antique desk in the morning room. I stood in front of the fireplace for some moments, my eyes stinging and my heart aching, before she finally looked up.
“So you’re Lena,” she’d said, looking me up and down, from the lumpy coat my mother had made before her hands grew frail in illness, wasting away like her heart since my father’s death six months previously, down to my feet crammed into cheap, too-small shoes that had been all my loving but sadly unskilled father had been able to afford. “Not much of a beauty,” she’d said crisply, with some regret.
It was raining in London today, too.
As Alejandro’s driver waited, holding open my door, I shivered, looking up at the white mansion. I felt suddenly fourteen again. Except now I was going to face my cousin.
Claudie and I were the same age, but she was so different in looks and manner that we could have been born on opposite sides of not just the Atlantic, but the universe.
When I’d first come to the house—devastated by the loss of both my mother and my father within six short months—I’d tried so hard to make my beautiful, spoiled cousin like me, but she’d scorned me on sight. She’d been determined to drive me from the house. Especially once grandmother died and she saw the terms of the will. And she’d finally gotten her wish. She’d won....
“What are you waiting for?” Alejandro said impatiently. “Get out of the car.”
“I changed my mind. I don’t need to go in.”
“Too bad. You’re going.”
He looked far too handsome and rested. He’d slept and showered on his private jet. He was in a fresh suit. I, on the other hand, hadn’t slept at all since yesterday. After an interminable visit to a private hospital in San Miguel de Allende, where he’d paid a small fortune for the DNA test, we’d gotten on his private 747 and I’d spent the long flight walking back and forth in the cabin, trying to calm Miguel enough to sleep. But the cabin pressure hurt his ears, and only my continual walking soothed him. So I’d gotten exercise, at least, using the aisle of Alejandro’s jet as my own private treadmill.
But there’d been no shower for me. I felt groggy, sweaty and dirty, and I was still wearing the same white cotton sundress I’d worn in Mexico. There was no way I was going to face my cousin like this.
It was bad enough letting Alejandro see me.
He’d barely said ten words to me on the plane; in fact, he’d said just five: “Want me to hold him?” Of course, I refused. I hadn’t wanted to give up possession of my baby, even for a moment. Even thirty thousand feet in the air, when there was no way for him to run off. The DNA test had proved the obvious—that Alejandro was Miguel’s father—but I was fighting his emotional and legal claim with every cell and pore.
Now, as Alejandro looked at me in the backseat, the difference between his sleek gorgeousness and my chubby unattractiveness was so extreme I imagined he must be asking himself what he could ever have seen in me. Which begged the question: If he hadn’t deliberately seduced me last summer to create an heir, then why on earth had he?
I licked my lips. “Alejandro,” I said hesitantly. “I...”
“Enough delay,” he growled. “We’re going in.”
I looked at my baby, tucked into a baby seat beside me in the back of the limo, now sleeping in blessed silence. “You go. I’ll stay here with Miguel.” Which would also be the perfect way for me to sneak to Edward’s house, at the end of the street.
“Dowell can watch him.”
I glanced at the driver doubtfully. “No.”
“Then bring Miguel with us.”
“Wake him up?” I whispered, scandalized. I narrowed my eyes. “Of course you wouldn’t worry about that. You’re not the one who spent the whole flight walking in circles trying to make him sleep.”
Alejandro set his jaw. “I offered to take him....”
“You could have offered again.” I was dimly aware that I sounded irrational. There was no way he could have taken Miguel from me on the jet except by force, which wouldn’t exactly have gone over well, either. My cheeks got hot. “It doesn’t matter.”
He lifted a dark eyebrow. “You do know how to take care of Miguel better than I do.”
His tone told me whom he blamed for that. “I had no choice. I thought you were going to steal him from me.”
“So you stole him first?”
I blinked. I hadn’t thought of it that way before.
“You could at least have called me directly,” he ground out.
Now, that was unfair! “I tried! You wouldn’t take my phone calls!”
“If I’d known you were pregnant, I would have.” His jaw tightened. “You could have left a message with Mrs. Allen....”
“Leave a message with some faceless secretary at your London office to let you know, oh, hey, I’m pregnant with your baby? Seriously?” I lifted my chin. “You should have just taken my damn call!”
Alejandro stared at me, his lips pressed in a thin line. “This argument is over.” He turned away. “Unlatch the baby carrier and lift it out of the seat. That won’t wake him up, as you know perfectly well.”
My cheeks burned slightly. Yes, I’d known that. I’d just been hoping he wouldn’t.
When I didn’t move, Alejandro started to reach around me. With a huff I turned and unlatched the seat. Miguel continued softly snoring in sweet baby dreams, tucked snugly in the carrier with a soft blanket against his cheek.
As the driver closed the door behind us with a snap, I stood on the sidewalk, staring up at the cold white mansion.
I’d never wanted to return to this house. But there was one silver lining. I hadn’t been lying when I’d told Alejandro I wanted to come back for Miguel’s legacy. Something I’d been forced to leave behind that had nothing to do with the inheritance I’d lost.
As I looked up, the soft drizzle felt like cobwebs against my skin. Like memories. Like ghosts.
“What now?” Alejandro was glaring at me as if I wasn’t his favorite person. I couldn’t blame him. He wasn’t my favorite person right now, either.
Although at this moment there was one person I liked even less. I swallowed.
“I’m scared,” I whispered.
He stared at me. “Of Claudie?”
I nodded, not trusting my voice.
“You don’t need to be scared,” he said gruffly. “I’m here with you now.” Reaching out, he took the baby carrier from my trembling hands. “Come on.”
Alejandro carried our sleeping baby up the stone steps and knocked on the imposing front door.
Mr. Corgan, the longtime butler, opened the door. His jowly face was dignified as he greeted Alejandro.
“Good morning, Your Excellency.” Then he glanced at me and his eyes went wide. “Miss Lena!” He saw the sleeping baby in the carrier, and the usually unflappable Mr. Corgan’s jaw fell open. “It’s true?” He breathed, then glanced at Alejandro, and the mask slipped back into place. Holding open the door, he said sonorously, “Won’t you both please come in?”
He led us into the elegant front salon, with high ceilings and gilded furniture. Everything looked just as I remembered—vintage, French and expensive. I’d been allowed in this room only a handful of times, the last being when I’d begged Claudie for money to fly to Spain. The day my life had fallen apart.
Mr. Corgan said, “I regret that Miss Carlisle is...out...at the moment, but she has a standing order to welcome you at any time, Your Excellency, if you care to wait.”
“Sí,” Alejandro said coldly. “We will wait.”
“Of course. She will be so pleased to see you when she returns. May I offer refreshments? Tea?”
Alejandro shook his head. He sat down on the pink striped couch near the window. He seemed incongruous there, this dark, masculine Spaniard with severely tailored black clothes, in a salon that looked like a giant powder puff, with the powder made of diamond dust.
He set down the baby carrier on the white polished marble floor beside the sofa. I swiftly scooped it up, and exhaled in relief now that my sleeping baby was safely back in my possession. I followed Mr. Corgan out of the salon and into the hallway.
Once we were alone, the butler’s mask dropped and he turned to face me with a happy exclamation.
“We missed you, girl.” He hugged me warmly. I closed my eyes, smelling pipe smoke and brass polish. Then I heard a crash and pulled back to see Mrs. Morris, the housekeeper, had just broken a china plate in the hallway. But she left it there, coming forward with a cry.
A minute later, both of them, along with Hildy, the maid, were hugging me and crying and exclaiming over Miguel’s beauty, his dark hair, his fat cheeks.
“And such a good sleeper, too,” Mrs. Morris said approvingly. Then they all looked at each other. I saw the delicate pause.
Then Hildy blurted out, “Who’s his father, then?”
I glanced back at the salon, biting my lip. “Um...”
Hildy’s eyes got huge when she saw who was in the salon. Then she turned to Mr. Corgan. “You were right. I owe you a fiver.”
His cheeks went faintly pink as he cleared his throat with a harrumph. “I might have heard some of your conversation with Miss Carlisle the day you left, Miss Lena.” He shook his jowly head with a glare. “It wasn’t right what she did. Driving you from the house a year before you would have got your grandmother’s inheritance.”
I was surprised for only a second. Then I gave a wry smile. Of course they knew. Household staff knew everything, sometimes even before their employers did. “It doesn’t matter.”
“But it does,” Mrs. Morris said indignantly. “Miss Carlisle wanted your inheritance and the moment she convinced you to move out of the house, she got it by default. Just a year before it would have finally been yours!”
I pressed my hand against my temple as emotions I had spent the past year trying to forget churned up in me.
When I turned eighteen, I could have left for college, or gotten a real job. Instead, I’d remained living in this house, working as a sort of house manager/personal assistant for my cousin beneath her unrelenting criticism as she tried her best to drive me away. I’d had a small salary at first, but even that had disappeared when she’d lazily announced one day that she was cutting the salaries of the staff by twenty percent. “They don’t need it,” she sniffed. “They are lucky, working all day in my beautiful house. They should be paying me!”
Mr. Corgan and Mrs. Morris and the rest had become my friends, and I knew they had families to support. So I’d given up my salary rather than see them suffer. Leaving me virtually destitute for years, in spite of working eighteen-hour days.
But I hadn’t minded, not really, because I’d known all I had to do was remain in this house until I was twenty-five, just a few months from now, and I would have gotten the huge inheritance once destined for my father, before he’d been cut out of the will for the crime of marrying my mother.
Eight years ago, when my grandmother lay dying, she’d clutched his old teddy bear and dissolved in tears I’d never seen before as she remembered the youngest son she’d once loved best. She’d called for her lawyer.
If Robert’s child proves herself worthy of the Carlisle name, my grandmother’s will had read, and she still lives in the house at the age of twenty-five, she may claim the bequest that would have been his.
But now it had all reverted to Claudie. I hadn’t cared a whit about the money last year, when I’d feared my baby would be stolen from me. But now...
“The house hasn’t been the same without you, Miss Lena,” Mr. Corgan said.
“Half the staff resigned after you left,” Mrs. Morris said.
“She’s been intolerable without you to run interference.” Mr. Corgan shook his head grimly. “I’ve worked for this family for forty years, Miss Lena, but even I fear my time here is nearing an end.” Leaning closer, he confided, “Miss Carlisle still insists she’ll marry your duke.”
“He’s not my duke....”
“Well. He’s the only man rich and handsome enough for her, though she says she’d marry any rich idiot who’d make her a duchess....” Glancing back over his shoulder, he coughed, turning red.
Turning, I saw Alejandro standing in the doorway of the salon. I wondered how much he’d heard. His face was half hidden in shadow, his expression inscrutable.
“Did you change your mind about the tea, Your Excellency?” Mr. Corgan gasped, his face beet red.
Alejandro shook his head. His eyes were dark, but his lips quirked at the edges. “We rich idiots prefer coffee.”
The butler looked as if he wished the earth would swallow him up whole. “I’ll get it right away, sir....”
“Don’t bother.” He looked at me. “Did you get what you came for?”
He’d heard everything, I realized. He thought I’d come for my inheritance. He thought that was the precious thing that had brought me here. It wasn’t.
I turned to Mrs. Morris urgently. “Did she throw out my things?”
“She wanted to,” she said darkly. “She told me to burn it all. But I boxed it all up and left it in your attic room. I knew she’d never bother to go all the way up there to check.”
“Bless you,” I whispered, and hugged her. “Stay and have coffee,” I called to Alejandro. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.” I started up the stairs, carrying my sleeping baby with me.
Climbing three floors, I reached the attic. It looked even more desolate than I remembered, with only one grimy window, an ancient metal bed frame and stacks of boxes. Setting down the baby, I went straight for the boxes.
“What are you looking for?”
Hearing Alejandro’s husky voice behind me, I turned. “These boxes hold everything from my childhood.”
He stepped inside the attic room, knocking his head against the slanted roof. He rubbed it ruefully. “I can see why Claudie wouldn’t come up here. This place is like a prison cell.”
“This was my home for over ten years.”
His dark eyes widened. “This room?” He slowly looked around the attic, at the rough wood floors, at the naked lightbulb hanging from the ceiling. “You lived here?”
I gave a wistful laugh. “From the time my parents died when I was fourteen, until I left last year when...well. It looked nicer then, though. I made decorations, paper flowers.” A lump rose in my throat as I looked around the bare room where I’d spent so many years. The bare mattress on the metal bed frame where I’d slept so many nights. I gently touched the bare lightbulb and swung it on the cord. “I had a bright red lampshade I bought from the charity shop on Church Street.”
“A charity shop?” he said sharply. “But you’re Claudie’s cousin. A poor relation, I know, but I’d assumed you were well paid for all your work....”
This time my laugh was not so wistful. “I was paid a salary after I turned eighteen, but that money had to go to—other things. So I started earning a little money doing portraits at street fairs. But Claudie allowed me so little time away from the house...”
“Allowed you?” he said incredulously.
I looked at him. “You heard about my inheritance.”
“How much would it have been?”
“If I was still living in this house on my twenty-fifth birthday, a few months from now, I would have inherited thirty million pounds.”
His jaw dropped.
“Thirty...”
“Yes.”
“And you left it all?”
“To protect my baby. Yes.”
“To protect our baby, you sacrificed more money than most people see in a lifetime.”
He sounded so amazed. I shook my head. “Any mother would have done the same. Money is just money.” I glanced down at Miguel, and a smile lifted my cheeks as I said softly, “He is my life.”
When I finally looked up, his dark, soulful eyes were looking at me as if he’d never seen me before. My cheeks went hot. “I expect you think I’m an idiot.”
“Far from it,” he said in a low voice.
He was looking at me with such intensity. Awkwardly, I turned away and started digging through the top box. Pushing it aside, I opened the one beneath it.
“What are you looking for?” he said curiously.
Not answering, I pulled out old sweaters, old ragtag copies of books I’d read and reread as a teenager, Rebecca, A Little Princess, Jane Eyre. Finally, at the bottom of the box, I found the three oversize, flat photo albums. “Thank you,” I whispered aloud when I saw they hadn’t been burned, or warped from being left to rot in the rain or scribbled on with a venomous black marker, or any of the other images I’d tormented myself with. Pressing the albums against my chest, I closed my eyes in pure gratitude.
“Photo albums?” Alejandro said in disbelief. “You begged me to come to London for photo albums?”
“I told you,” I said sharply. “I came for my baby’s legacy.”
“But I never thought...” Frowning, Alejandro held out his hand. “Let me see.”
Reluctantly, I handed them over, then watched as he turned through the pages of the top album, at old photographs pressed against yellowing adhesive pages beneath the clear plastic cover.
“It nearly killed me to leave them behind,” I said. “It’s all I have left of my parents. My home.” I pointed to a picture of a tenement building where the ground floor was a butcher’s shop. “That was our apartment in Brooklyn.”
He turned the page. “And this?”
My heart twisted when I saw my mother, young and laughing, holding a ragtag bouquet of flowers, sitting in my father’s lap. “My parents’ wedding day. My dad was a student in London. He fell in love with a waitress, an immigrant newly arrived from Puerto Rico. He married her against his family’s wishes, when she was pregnant with me....”
Alejandro looked at me for a long moment, then silently turned more pages. My babyhood flashed before my eyes, pictures of me as a tiny baby, getting bathed in the sink, sitting on a towel on the kitchen floor, banging wooden spoons against a pot and beaming with the same chubby cheeks that Miguel had now.
Finishing the first album, Alejandro handed it to me without a word, and thumbed through the second book, then the third. My childhood passed swiftly—learning to ride a bike...my first day at school...
“Why are you interested?” I said haltingly. “Is it—to make fun of me?”
“To make fun?” He looked at me with a scowl. “You think I would taunt you about having a happy childhood?” He shook his head. “If anything, I envy you,” he said softly, looking back at the pages that my tenderhearted mother had made for me when I was a child. Right up to the very last photo, of my father at Christmas, sitting beneath the tree wearing a Santa hat, smiling lovingly at the camera as he held my mother’s homemade gift of a sweater. Two months later, he was dead. There were no more photos. The last few pages of the album were blank. Alejandro said softly, “I have no pictures of myself with my mother. None.”
I blinked. “How is that possible? I mean, I’d think you’d have a million pictures taken....”
He abruptly looked at me. Without answering, he closed the photo album and handed it to me.
“Perhaps you’re not who I thought you were.”
“Who did you think I was?”
“Exactly like all the other women I’ve ever dated. In love with the idea of being a rich duchess.” He looked down at me, his dark eyes infinite and deep as the night sky. “But I’m starting to think you’re different. A woman who would willingly leave thirty million pounds... You were actually in love with me, weren’t you?”
My breath got knocked out of me.
“That was a long time ago.”
Our eyes met, and I suddenly had to get out of the attic. I picked up Miguel’s baby carrier with one arm and carried the albums with the other. “I’ll be downstairs.”
Without looking back, I fled, rushing down the flights of stairs. My teeth were chattering, and I was shaking with strange emotion. Edward, I reminded myself. The other reason I’d come to London. I had to get his help before Alejandro could bully me into going to Spain. Although it actually wasn’t going to Spain that frightened me. It was never being able to leave again. It was being separated from my baby. It was being completely under the control of a man who’d almost destroyed me once, just by making me love him.
As I reached the bottom of the staircase, I heard a car door slam outside. Through the windows, I saw a flash of purple.
Claudie had come home.
I turned to where Hildy was loitering at the bottom of the stairs. “Hildy!”
“Oh, hello,” she said, blushing when she saw me. “I was just dusting the banister, Miss—”
“My cousin is here. Please.” Grabbing Hildy’s arm, I whispered, “I need you to take a message to Edward St. Cyr.”
“Edward St. Cyr?” Hildy’s eyes nearly popped out of her head. “Mr. St. Cyr himself? Are you serious?”
“Tell him I need to see him,” I said with more assurance than I felt.
“Here, miss? You know he and Miss Carlisle hate each other....”
Hearing my cousin fumbling at the door, I shook my head. “Tell him...the Princess Diana Playground in thirty minutes.”
With a quick, troubled nod, Hildy hurried toward the back door. Just in time, too. The front door slammed.
“Well. Look who’s back.”
My cousin’s voice was a sneer. Warily, I turned to face her for the first time in a year.
“Hello, Claudie.” She was wearing a tight, extremely short bandage dress, the kind you might wear to a club if you wanted a lot of attention, in a vivid shade of purple that almost matched the hollows beneath her eyes. “Late night?” I said mildly.
She glared at me.
“If you came to beg for your inheritance, forget it. My solicitors went through the will with a fine-tooth comb,” she ground out. “You’ll never...” Then she saw the baby and gasped in triumph. “You brought the brat here? I knew you’d see reason.” She rubbed her hands together in glee. “Now I’ll either make him marry me, or else I’ll—”
“You’ll what, Claudie?” Alejandro said coolly from the top of the stairs.
My cousin looked up, speechless for the first time in her life. But she recovered almost instantly. Smiling up at him, she put her hand on her hip, setting a pose that showed her figure to advantage, wearing her six-inch heels and skintight purple dress, trailing a cloud of expensive perfume. Her gorgeous, long blond hair tumbled over her shoulders, emphasizing the bone structure of her sharp cheekbones.
But as she licked her big lips, beneath her smile, her eyes were afraid. “Alejandro. I didn’t know you were here.”
He came down the stairs, looking down at her. He stopped in front of her. Even though she wore such high heels, he was still taller.
“You lied to me, Claudie,” he said pleasantly. “Lena wasn’t holding my baby hostage. You were.”
She visibly trembled, then tried to laugh. Reaching into her crystal-encrusted bag, she got out a pack of cigarettes. “Darling, I don’t know what kind of lies my precious cousin might have told you, but...”
He grabbed her wrist almost violently.
“Do not,” he said coldly, “smoke near my son.”
“Your son,” she breathed, searching his gaze, then ripped her arm away. “Are you so sure of that?” Her beautiful blue eyes hardened. “How do you know he’s yours? You should have seen all the men who used to come through here, Alejandro—trooping up to Lena’s bedroom every single night—”
A little gasp escaped me, like an enraged squeak.
Alejandro lifted an eyebrow. “Then they must have been lost, on their way to your room, Claudie.”
Her eyes narrowed. “I don’t like what you’re implying—”
“We did a DNA test,” he said, cutting her off. “The baby is mine.”
For a moment, she stared at him. But you could almost see her gather her forces. “He doesn’t have to be.” She looked from him to me. “If you don’t treat him like your son, no one else will.”
“You think I would abandon my own child?”
“Fine,” she said impatiently. She flung a skeletal finger toward my sweetly sleeping son. “We can take her baby. She’s nobody, Alejandro. She won’t be able to stop us....”
With a gasp, I protected the baby carrier with my body.
“Just think.” Claudie swayed her hips as she walked toward Alejandro with her hypnotic red smile. “Just think how perfect our future could be.” She started to wrap her arms around him. “With your money and title, and my money and connections...the two of us could rule the world.”
He looked down at her coldly. “Do you really think I’d want to rule the world, if the price would be marriage to you?”
Shocked, she let her arms fall to her sides.
“You used Lena for years as an unpaid slave,” he said, “then threatened to take her baby, for the sake of stealing what you wanted—her inheritance. And then you tried to blackmail me into marrying you!”
She licked her lips. “I...”
He held up his hand sharply, cutting her off. His voice was deep and harsh. “For the past year, you’ve lied to me, saying if I ever wanted to see my child, I had to marry you. Blaming Lena, making me think she was the one to blame. For that, you deserve to go to hell. Which I hope you will find—” he gave her a sudden, pleasant smile “—very soon. Adios, Claudie.” Scooping up the baby carrier, he turned to me gravely. “Shall we go?” Without another word, he walked out the front door.
“Alejandro, wait,” Claudie gasped, but I was the only one left to hear. “You.” Her face as she turned to look at me really did look like a snake’s. Or maybe a dragon’s—I could almost see the smoke coming out of her nostrils as her blue, reptilian eyes hardened. “You did this!”
For the past decade, I’d dreamed of what I would say to her if given the chance, after all my lonely years, crying alone in my attic. All the subtle and not so subtle ways she’d insulted me, used me, made me feel worthless and invisible for the past ten years. But in this moment, all those things fled from my mind. Instead, the real question came from my heart.
“Why did you hate me, Claudie?” I whispered, lifting my tearful gaze to hers. “I loved you. You were my only family. Why couldn’t you love me? Why wouldn’t you let me love you?”
My cousin drew herself up, all thin gorgeousness.
“Why?” She lit her cigarette with shaking hands. “Because you’re not my real family.” Taking a long draw on her cigarette, she said in a low, venomous hiss, “And you’re not good enough for Alejandro. Blood always tells. Sooner or later, he will be embarrassed by you, just as I was. He’ll take your child and toss you in the gutter, like you deserve.”
My mouth fell open as her poisoned dart hit me, square in the heart.
“It didn’t have to be this way,” I choked out, and I turned and fled, still holding my photo albums against my chest, like a shield.
Outside, a sliver of sun had split through the dark clouds, through the rain. Stopping on the sidewalk, I turned back and looked up at the Carlisle mansion for one last time.
“Goodbye,” I whispered.
Then I climbed into the limo, where the driver waited with my door open, and he closed it behind me.
“Enjoy a tender farewell?” Alejandro was already in the backseat, on the other side of Miguel, who had woken and was starting to whimper.
“Something like that,” I muttered, trying to surreptitiously wipe my tears.
“I was surprised. It’s not like you to let me walk off with—” His voice cut off as he saw my face. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” I said. Turning to my baby, I pressed his favorite blanket against his cheek and tried to comfort him. Tried to comfort myself. My baby’s tears quieted and so did his quivering little body, as he felt the hum and vibration of the car’s engine beneath him. His eyelids started to grow heavy again.
“What did she say?” Alejandro said. Frowning, he looked closer at my face. “Did she...”
There was a sudden hard knock on his window. Miguel’s little body jerked back awake, and his whimpers turned to full-on crying. Alejandro turned with a growl.
Claudie stood by the limo, her eyes like fire. “Open this window!” she yelled through the glass.
Alejandro’s expression was like ice as he rolled it down a grudging two inches. She leaned forward, her face raw with emotion.
“We could have ruled the world together, Alejandro, and you’re throwing it all away—for that little whore and her brat!”
Alejandro said softly, his face dangerous, “If you ever insult either my son or his mother again, you will regret it.”
Claudie looked bewildered. To be fair, she’d insulted me for so long she’d probably forgotten it wasn’t nice.
“But Alejandro...” Her voice had a strange begging sound I’d never heard from her. “You’ll never find someone with my breeding, my beauty, my billions. I love you....”
“You love my title.”
Her cheeks flushed red. “All right. But you can’t choose her over me. She’s...nothing. No one.”
I swallowed, blinking fast.
“Blood always tells,” she said. “She’s not good enough for you.”
Alejandro looked quickly at my miserable face. Then he turned back to Claudie with a deliberate smile.
“Thank you for your fascinating opinion. Now move, won’t you? I need to take Lena shopping for an engagement ring.”
“You’re—what?” Claudie staggered back. I gasped. Miguel was crying.
The only one who looked absolutely calm was Alejandro. Turning away from her, he sat back in the plush leather seat, and said to Dowell, “Drive on.”
Claudie stared after us, looking stupefied on the sidewalk, and almost forlorn in her tight club dress and bedraggled mascara. Looking back at her through the car window, I felt a strange wave of sympathy.
Because I, too, knew what it felt like to be left by Alejandro Navaro y Albra.
“You didn’t have to be so cruel,” I whispered.
“Cruel?” he said incredulously. “You defend her, after the way she treated you?”
“She’s still my cousin. I feel sorry for her....”
“Then you’re a fool,” he said harshly.
I stroked my crying baby’s cheek. My lips creased sadly. “Love makes us all fools.”
“She doesn’t love me. She doesn’t even know me.”
“That’s what you said to me, too,” I said softly. I met his gaze. “I wonder if any woman will ever truly know you.”
For an instant, I thought I saw hunger, even yearning in his dark eyes as he stared down at me. Then the expression shuttered, leaving me to decide I’d imagined it. But even then, he continued to look at me, as if he couldn’t look away.
“What are you staring at?” I put my hand to my messy ponytail, feeling suddenly self-conscious. “I must look a mess.”
“You look...” His eyes slowly traced over my hand, up my arm, to my neck, to my lips. “You look like a woman who cares more about her baby than a fortune. Like a woman who works so hard and so well—for free—that she’s beloved by the entire household staff. You look,” he said softly, “like a woman who feels sympathy, even for the coldhearted creature who tried to destroy her.”
“Are you—complimenting me?”
He gave a low laugh. “If you’re not sure, I must be losing my touch.”
I flushed. Turning away, I took a deep breath. And changed the subject. “Thank you for bringing me back to London. For these.” I motioned toward the photo albums. “And for giving me the chance to finally ask Claudie something I’ve wanted to know all my life. I always wondered why nothing I did was good enough to make her love me.” I looked out the window at the passing shops of Kensington High Street. “Now I know.”
Silence fell.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
I nodded over the lump in my throat.
“I know how it feels,” he said in a low voice, “to be alone.”
“You?” I looked at him sharply, then gave a disbelieving snort. “No, you don’t.”
His dark eyes were veiled. “When I was young, I was good friends with...our housekeeper’s son. We were only six months apart in age, and we studied under the same governess. Friend? He was more like a brother to me,” he said softly. “People said we looked so much alike, acted so much alike, we could have been twins.”
“Are you still friends?”
He blinked, focusing on me, and his jaw tightened. “He died in the same crash that took the duke, the duchess. The housekeeper. Twenty-three years ago.”
“They all died in the same crash?” I said, horrified.
He looked down. “I was the only one to survive.”
I thought of a young boy being the only survivor of a car accident that took his parents, his best friend. That made him a duke at the tender age of twelve. I couldn’t even imagine the loneliness. The pain. Reaching out, I took his hand and whispered, “I’m sorry.”
Alejandro drew away. “It was a long time ago.” I saw tension in his jaw, heard it in his voice. “But I do know how it feels.”
I swallowed, feeling guilty, and embarrassed, too, for all my complaining when he’d suffered worse, and in silence. “What was his name? Your friend?”
He stared at me, then his lips lifted slightly. “Miguel.”
“Oh.” I gave a shy smile. “So that’s why you don’t mind that I named our baby Miguel—”
“No.” He seemed to hide his own private smile. “I don’t mind at all.”
I frowned, looking at him more closely.
His expression shuttered, and his dark eyebrows came down into a scowl. “His surname, however...”
I sighed. “I thought you might want to change that. But don’t worry.” I gave an awkward smile. “I won’t hold you to your marriage proposal.”
His eyes were dark and intense. “What if I want you to hold me to it?”
My lips parted in shock.
“What?” I said faintly.
His dark eyes challenged mine. “What if I want you to marry me?”
“You don’t want to get married. You went on and on about all the women who tried to drag you to the altar. I’m not one of them!”
“I know that now.” Leaning his arm across the baby seat, he cupped my cheek. “But for our son’s sake, I’m starting to think you and I should be...together.”
“Why?”
“Why not?” He gave a sensual smile. “As you said, I already broke one rule. Why not break the other?”
“But what has changed?”
“I’m starting to think...perhaps I can trust you.” His eyes met mine. “And I can’t forget how it felt to have you in my bed.”
Something changed in the air between us. Something primal, dangerous. I felt the warmth of his palm against my skin and held my breath. As the limo drove through the streets of London, memories crackled through me like fire.
I remembered the night we’d conceived Miguel, and all the other hot days of summer, when I’d surrendered to him, body and soul. I trembled, feeling him so close in the backseat of the limo, on the other side of our baby. Every inch of my skin suddenly remembered the hot stroke of Alejandro’s fingertips. My mouth was tingling, aching....
“That’s not a good reason to marry someone. Especially for you. If I said yes, you’d regret it. You’d blame me. Claim that I’d only done it to be a rich duchess.”
He slowly shook his head. “I think,” he said quietly, “you might be the one woman who truly doesn’t care about that. And it would be best for our son. So what is your answer?”
My answer?
I remembered the darkness I’d fallen into the last time Alejandro wanted me—then stopped wanting me. I’d never let myself be vulnerable to him ever again. I couldn’t. He’d almost destroyed me once. I could never live through that again.
Sooner or later...he’ll take your child and toss you in the gutter, like you deserve.
I couldn’t give him control over me, ever again. I couldn’t be tempted. My only hope was to get away. My only hope was...
Oh, heaven...what time was it?
“I need to...” As I saw the time on the dashboard of the limo, my heart nearly burst in panic. “Stop the car!” I leaned forward desperately toward the driver. “Let me out!”
Looking confused, Dowell pulled over on the side of the busy road.
“What are you doing?” Alejandro demanded, looking at me as if I was crazy. I felt crazy.
I unbuckled our baby, who’d just stopped crying and was looking drowsy. “Miguel needs a walk to help him sleep....”
“Is that a joke?”
I didn’t answer. Cradling our baby, I stepped out on the sidewalk in front of Kensington Palace, and started running into the park, toward the playground. Toward Edward.
