Читать книгу The Best Of February 2016 - Catherine Mann - Страница 16

CHAPTER SIX

BUOYED BY HER dalliance with Cesar, Sorcha felt radiant. And optimistic.

He made her feel magnetic, looking at her constantly, hand not just resting on her back, but thumb caressing the edge of her gown where her skin was exposed.

Even the thought of having to face down Diega didn’t dent her confidence. She felt rather protected, flanked by Cesar on one side and Rico on the other. Like one of the fold. Rico was cast from the same mold as his older brother and father, dark and handsome, tall and well built, capable of flirting and flattering, but with the same distance from emotional attachments as the rest of them.

“Did Cesar tell you I offered to marry you?” Rico had asked while bringing her a cocktail earlier.

“No,” she had said, stunned. “Why on earth would you do that?” She’d met him several times while working for Cesar, but had rarely exchanged more than appointment details or an offer to fetch him coffee. With Cesar firmly holding her interest from the first, she’d never seen Rico as anything but one of her boss’s high-level associates, never a romantic prospect.

“You’re smart, pleasant and attractive. It was a practical solution. Enrique would have had our name and a proper share in the family fortunes. Diega would have had the title she wanted,” Rico said with a diffident shrug. “You could have relayed the offer,” he added, speaking to Cesar now. “She might have preferred a lower profile. Did you think of that?”

He wasn’t joking.

Neither was Cesar when he said a clear and flinty “No.”

“It’s moot now,” their father said, and the men began discussing the technical properties of new alloy.

“Tell me about the house,” La Reina prompted Sorcha.

She gave a short rundown, carefully filtering everything she said, determined to leave the right impression. “Cesar said I should hire an assistant, but I’ve been interviewing staff for the house and the idea of going through the process for yet one more position right now... I can’t face it. What are your thoughts? Do I need one?”

She mentally laughed at how pretentious she sounded.

“I’ll have mine do the preliminary screening. You’re right, it’s too much when you’ve just had a baby. You have just the one nanny?”

Their nanny was the most underworked caregiver in continental Europe, considering how enamored Sorcha and Cesar were of their son, but Sorcha only said, “For now.”

The small talk wrapped up and they now stood in the foyer of the family mansion, greeting all of Spain as far as Sorcha could estimate.

She might not have been raised in high society, but her father had been titled, educated at Cambridge and a member of the House of Lords. She knew what good manners looked like and had learned early to adopt his posh accent for job interviews, especially in London. Cesar had been taken aback the first time he’d overheard her talking to her mother, falling into their broad Irish accent as she did. Already firmly entrenched as his PA, she had had a moment of insecurity as she danced around explaining that she was actually peasant stock, not the snobby aristocrat she mimicked.

Tonight she was pretending to be exactly that, determined to make Cesar and his family proud to call her a member of their family. At least not ashamed.

It was all going well until, quite suddenly, the Marques de los Jardines de Las Salinas was in front of her, congratulating her on her marriage. He was Diega’s father. Then her mother was in front of her, also offering a distant smile.

“Querido,” Diega said to Cesar, her smile wide and avaricious as she arrived with her parents. She paused to kiss both his cheeks. “I brought an old friend of yours. I hope you don’t mind. As I said to your mother when I called, perhaps we can make a match for Pia.” She sent a moue down the line, winking at Cesar’s sister before bringing her gaze back to catch at Sorcha’s. Her smile hardened. “Cesar was at school with him,” Diega explained. “Thomas Shelby. The Duke of Tenderhurst. Do you know him?”

Sorcha’s heart stopped. The Duke of— Her half brother?

“Tom,” Cesar was saying. “Nice to see you.”

Sorcha couldn’t bring herself to look. Her gaze locked to Diega’s triumphant one as Diega moved along to Rico.

Sorcha told herself to breathe, but she was turning to stone, like a spell had been cast, filling her insides with gravel and earth and hardening agents. Clay. Gummy, suffocating sludge.

“Meet my wife, Sorcha,” Cesar said, oblivious.

Her half brother showed not a hint of recognition as he took her limp hand and claimed it was nice to meet her.

His smile faltered until she found a stiff one, then he shook her hand and said something about how happy he was for her and Cesar. He wished them a long life and moved along the line.

Get through this, Sorcha told herself, grappling for composure.

The worst part was, he looked just like her da.

* * *

Cesar wouldn’t call himself intuitive, but spending time with a baby developed a few skills for reading a mood. He knew what the dismayed precursor to an emotional meltdown looked like and Sorcha teetered for a millisecond on that bubble, obviously knocked off-kilter by Diega’s arrival.

After their stolen moment of passion earlier, he was in a state of sustained tension not unlike the final moments before climax, when his control wanted to unravel. He’d been thinking they were both standing in the fire of sexual awareness, burning with anticipation, but she was no longer with him.

What could he say about Diega being here? He’d forewarned her. He’d chosen Sorcha and his son over her. That ought to count for something.

Sorcha recovered quickly, making him almost doubt he’d seen anything. She now held a smile on her face, greeting people and exchanging pleasantries, but he could tell she wasn’t herself. And her behavior was odd because she had disguised her falter well. He was surprised with himself for noticing the change in her. He hadn’t realized how attuned he’d become to her.

What she looked like, he realized with a hard shock, was like one of them. The natural warmth he took for granted, in the same way he expected her blond hair or blue eyes, was extinguished. It had been replaced by a facade of forced good manners.

They were finally able to leave the door and move into the crowd that had spilled out to the lawn and open-sided tents. The orchestra paused so his father could make a toast, welcoming Sorcha into the family.

She smiled, looked as radiant as Cesar had called her earlier, but ethereal. Insubstantial. Her eyes were shiny and the strain behind her expression suggested she was quietly miserable.

And that misery felt like a knee to the groin. He was pleased to introduce her as his wife. Proud. Despite the costs to his family and the impact on their relationship with Diega’s, he had concluded his son was worth it. Once they lived properly as husband and wife, he would no doubt be more than satisfied.

Was she not pleased to call him her husband?

They started the dancing and she was a mannequin in his arms, not the receptive woman from earlier, but a stick figure that held him off.

He reflexively turned himself inward. Aloofness was his comfort zone, but it was difficult to maintain when the promise of physical intimacy had been bending the barbed wire he kept in a perimeter around his inner self.

“I should check on Enrique,” she said as the song finished.

He realized she was trembling and tightened his hands on her, trying to still the odd vibrations rolling off her.

“What’s wrong?” he asked, surprised to sense he was being rejected—which was an extraordinary enough circumstance without the heavy dose of reacting to it with a feeling of injury that weighted his insides.

“Nothing.” Her smile was such a blatant lie, it was a slap across the face. “Excuse me.”

He did not follow anyone and beg for affection. He let her go.

* * *

The nanny looked up from where she was reading a book in the sitting room. Enrique was sleeping in the cot next to her.

“I have a headache,” Sorcha choked with a weak smile and pointed to the bedroom, then closed the door behind her.

Sinking onto the foot of the bed, she wrapped her arms across her middle and told herself not to cry.

“Oh, God,” she whispered, more racked with fear and pain than she had been while in labor. Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God. She rocked, trying to ease the agony ripping upward like a tear from the very center of her being into her heart, rending and leaving jagged edges as it climbed to score her throat.

She was going to lose him. This time, when she told him about her father, there would be no sidestepping for a prettier angle. They might have grown closer than they’d ever been over their few weeks of marriage, but she hadn’t found the right way to explain what a pariah she really was.

Was Diega enjoying telling him? Sorcha hadn’t been able to wait and watch him realize what he’d married. Had she honestly imagined it would never come out?

She would have to face his disdain now.

Cesar had gone to school with him. Tom. Her husband’s friend was part of the evil, awful— He didn’t even know who she was! He had never even cared enough to look up a photo or find out his half sisters’ names.

Why would he? They were trash.

Don’t cry, she begged herself, pushing her bent knuckles against her trembling lips.

The door clicked and her husband stood in the opening for a long moment, observing her. His scowl might have edged toward concern, but her eyes blurred and she couldn’t tell.

She rose, wobbling in her shoes as she moved to the box of tissues. Plucking several from the holder, she dabbed her face, trying to stem the pressure beneath her eyes, but tears leaked onto the crumpled tissues, staining them with mascara and eye shadow.

“I did tell you,” she said, like it counted for anything that she’d confessed to being illegitimate. That was a far cry from whatever was being whispered about her downstairs. Tom was one of them and she already knew how quickly she would be exiled as not.

She was right back to that moment of walking across the schoolyard, when everyone had stared. The headmistress at the door had given her a cold look and someone had whispered, “Bastard.”

Her sister had held her hand in a sweaty grip while Sorcha had sought out her best friend, Molly. She’d seen Molly every single day since they’d both been in nappies, but Molly had only mumbled, “Mum says I shouldn’t be friends with you anymore.”

Sorcha had survived it and had stopped caring that people had refused to serve them, but the fact Cesar was going to react the same way had her stomach churning.

“Maybe I should have foreseen this could happen,” she said, voice traveling through razor blades all the way up from her lungs. “You’re both titled. I don’t know why I’m shocked you’re acquainted, but I honestly didn’t mean to—” She sniffed.

She hadn’t meant to bring her shame into his mother’s house and attach it to their son. How had she thought this wouldn’t happen?

“I told you she would be here. Resign yourself to seeing her, Sorcha. She and Rico—”

“It’s not her,” she choked, shaking her head. Diega was a catalyst. She was the spark, Tom was the fuse, but Sorcha’s mum taking up with a married man was the keg of dynamite that was causing her life to explode.

Gripping her own elbows, Sorcha looked to the ceiling, trying to stem the tears.

At what point would they be finished paying for her mother’s mistake in loving the wrong man?

“Sorcha, I haven’t seen you like this except for that time with your niece. Has something happened with your family?”

She choked again, this time on hysterical laughter. “Yes. Ha.”

Her voice started to waver and she dug her fingernails into her skin, using the physical pain to overcome the crevasse widening down the middle of her heart.

“I told you my father married for money? To save his estate? He didn’t love his wife. Couldn’t stand her. Once his children went to boarding school, he spent all his time in Ireland, only going back to England when his son and daughter were home. You must have noticed the house on the hill in my village? That’s where we lived with him.”

“You lived there?” He sounded surprised.

Of course he was. It was a showpiece. A far cry from the tiny row house where her mother took in travelers to help pay the mortgage.

“Da spent a lot of money fixing it up. It made him popular in the village, hiring local builders and such. Mum was his maid. He fell in love, no surprise. She was twenty to his thirty-eight. When she became pregnant with me, she moved into the house proper. We lived like a real family, if you overlooked the fact he had another family in England. Most people pretended to, since their livelihoods depended on his keeping the house open.”

She risked a glance at him, dabbing under her nose as she did.

He was listening, probably wondering where she was going.

“He promised Mum the house, but that didn’t happen. It belonged to his ‘real’ family. When he died, they sent a lawyer, told us the property was part of the titled holdings and evicted us.”

“How old were you?” He narrowed his eyes, as if trying to recall if she’d told him this before. “There were four of you, by then? And your mother?”

She shrugged and nodded. “I was almost twelve.”

“That’s a long time to be a man’s pretend wife. Your mother didn’t contest it?”

“How? She sold her jewelry to buy groceries. She wasn’t even allowed to keep the car he’d given her. The whole village turned their backs on us because she’d been living in sin. The only people who were kind to us were the staff we’d lived with at the house. They helped her find a room over a carriage house. We shared it for two years until I was able to start working and help with rent.”

She blew her nose.

He was completely unreadable, arms folded, only the penetrating glacier-blue of his eyes moving as he searched her expression, filing this new information into his mental database.

“All five of us in one room with a single hot plate and no refrigerator or even a proper bath, just a toilet and a sink with a curtain. No one at school would talk to us. Mum had to ride the bus into the next village to work and even then it was only washing dishes and doing laundry for a hospital. Even waiting tables was impossible. People were horrid to the bunch of us for years.”

“Like that woman at the hotel,” he ventured. “Why didn’t you move?”

“To where? With what money?” She came to the heart of her story. “I tried to tell you in the hospital that I wasn’t in your class. I should have tried harder, obviously, but I really hate talking about it.” She pinched the bridge of her nose, stemming the pressure underscoring her eyes. “It’s so humiliating. But I should have been honest. Pretending I’ve risen above it makes me the trash they called me. Now it’s all going to come out downstairs, when Diega tells everyone Thomas Shelby is my half brother.”