‘But I don’t need Egyptian cotton sheets with a thousand threads,’ she’d protested.
‘You might not, but I do.’ He’d then put his mouth to her ear and added, ‘Believe me, bomboncita, I will be sharing the sheets with you whenever I can.’
She’d had to press her thighs together to counteract the throbbing warmth his seductive words had roused and hoped no one could see the flush of colour staining her cheeks. The plan for him to take her shopping had been delayed by two days as, other than taking the dogs for long walks together, they’d found it impossible to drag themselves out of bed.
They had been the most heavenly days of her life.
They moved on from the slow cooker—Emiliano patted it to let the poor sales assistant tasked with helping them know they wanted it—and, after selecting a coffee machine, Becky found the utensils. She laughed to find a fish slice here cost as much as a slow cooker would have done in a reasonably priced store.
‘Why don’t you already have these things?’ Emiliano asked while Becky dithered over which knife set she wanted.
‘I lived in student digs when I was doing my degree but the university I did my doctorate at was close enough to my mum’s for me to commute, so I moved into her annexe. My parents built and furnished it for my grandmother. She lived in it until she became too fragile and had to move into a care home.’
‘You can show me it when you introduce me to your parents.’
She grimaced. ‘We’ll see. Anyway, that’s me done here. I’ve enough to get started in the flat. Can we get something to eat now?’
But a kernel of distrust had unfurled in Emiliano at the expression on Becky’s face. ‘You don’t want me to meet them?’
He had yet to spend more than a night with a woman without her hinting about meeting the parents, despite him making it very clear that what they were sharing was sex and only sex. Adriana was the only woman whose parents he’d wanted to meet. Only when they were over had he discovered why she’d resisted this—to stop him learning the truth about her. By then it was too late. The titanic damage had been done.
‘My dad’s in Europe somewhere having a midlife crisis,’ she said, her tone shorter than he was used to.
‘And your mother?’
She shrugged. ‘We don’t speak any more.’
‘Why not?’
‘For reasons I’m not discussing in the middle of a department store. Can we get some lunch?’
‘Only if you let me buy you an outfit for the party.’
‘I don’t like wearing dresses.’
‘It doesn’t have to be a dress,’ he stressed. Again. She’d been happy enough about going to the celebration party he was throwing until he’d mentioned the dress code and she’d become mutinous. He would never understand her. ‘Just something that isn’t jeans.’
‘I feel comfortable in jeans.’
‘Yes, but you won’t feel comfortable if you’re the only one wearing them. Everyone’s dressing up.’
Her eyes narrowed and her lips pursed. ‘Just don’t expect me to wear heels. Not going to happen.’
‘Fine.’
‘Good. Can we get food now?’
Lacing his fingers through hers, Emiliano led her out of the store. The sun had risen, spring warmth filling the busy Buenos Aires streets. A short walk later and they were shown to an outside table at a chic restaurant that sold a mean submarino, a milk drink served with a chunk of chocolate he just knew Becky would love, especially as she’d vowed to only have one coffee a day for the duration of the pregnancy. His instinct on this was correct and he watched her stir the chocolate into the hot milk with an enchanted smile at this small pleasure.
While they waited for their food to be brought to them, he set about quizzing her.
‘What happened with your mother?’
The enchanted smile fell. ‘Can’t we just relax for half an hour?’
‘It is not relaxing to talk about your mother?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
She scowled. ‘Honestly, you really are a bulldozer when you want something.’
‘I don’t like evasion.’
Her eyes flashed. ‘That had better not be a dig.’
‘I just find it curious that you’ve never mentioned you’re not on speaking terms with your mother.’
‘Seriously?’ She leaned forward. ‘You know what I find curious? That this is a repeat of a conversation we’ve had before. I work for you for months and you never ask me any personal questions whatsoever, then when you discover new things about me you act all surprised and immediately assume I’ve been hiding things. You are so cynical!’
‘And you’re still hiding.’
‘I am not. I don’t like to talk about it because it still hurts.’
‘Your mother?’
She nodded and had a sip of her submarino. The chocolate must have soothed her for she closed her eyes to savour it and her shoulders loosened. ‘We fell out at Christmas.’
‘What happened?’
‘We had an argument about her new husband and she kicked me out.’
As Emiliano took a moment to digest this, their food was brought to them. He hadn’t known her mother had remarried.
He took a bite of his steak baguette before saying, ‘What was the argument about?’
She looked away from him with a shrug.
‘You remember that night when we spoke about my mother on the porch?’
Her eyes flickered.
‘I didn’t hold anything back.’
‘Yes, you did.’
‘I did not.’
‘Did too. You wouldn’t tell me why you were sacked from the family business.’
‘It wasn’t relevant to the conversation.’
Her narrowing eyes told him she saw straight through this evasion.
He sighed. ‘Look, it’s a time in my life that still makes me angry to think of. I never speak about it.’
‘Did it involve a woman?’
Now his eyes narrowed.
Shaking her head, she dug her spoon into the provoleta still bubbling in the skillet it had been served to her in, and blew on the gooey cheese she lifted out. He’d learned these past few days that Becky’s savoury tooth was as big as her sweet tooth.
‘You have big trust issues when it comes to women,’ she observed, before popping the spoon into her mouth.
‘So would you if you had a mother like mine.’
‘Nice evasion.’
‘I must have learned it from you.’
Their eyes clashed and then, in an instant, her taut features loosened at the same moment he felt the tightness in his chest loosen and they both started laughing.
Emiliano caught hold of her hand and brought it to his lips. ‘Just wait until I get you home.’
‘Ooh, what are you going to do to me?’
‘I’m going to make love to you for so long you won’t be able to walk for a week.’
‘Promises, promises,’ she teased with a gleam in her eyes. Her foot found his calf and gently rubbed against it.
Still smiling, she dipped her rustic bread into her provoleta and had a bite that was pure provocation.
‘You, bomboncita, could drive a saint to madness.’
‘Just as well you’re not a saint then.’
CHAPTER TEN
EMILIANO WAS AS good as his word. Within minutes of them returning to the ranch he’d locked his bedroom door, stripped her naked and made love to her for so long she doubted she’d be able to walk for a month. It was glorious.
Utterly sated, she dozed while he went off to exercise the dogs, only stirring when he returned to the room and slipped back into bed to make love to her all over again.
When she finally left the bed to shower, she couldn’t help but g
iggle to feel the delicious lethargy in her limbs.
Back in the bedroom, wrapped in Emiliano’s way too big robe, which she’d claimed for her own, she was thrilled to see he’d had dinner brought to them.
He grinned. ‘I thought it saved us having to get dressed.’
‘I like your thinking.’
After they’d eaten a great dish of carbonada each, an Argentinian beef stew that had a wonderful sweetness to it, Emiliano put the television on and stretched out on the sofa. Becky lay beside him, her back against his torso, bottom resting against his groin, and he wrapped his arms tightly around her.
Although a tactile person, he’d never been a man for cuddling. It was one of the many intimacies he’d chosen to avoid and he found it a little alarming how good it felt to lie like this, not speaking, not making love, simply holding each other. He decided it was best not to ponder on this.
When the documentary ended he kissed the top of her head. She sighed and stretched her back.
‘I thought you’d fallen asleep,’ he murmured.
‘Just thinking.’
‘About?’
‘Us. The baby. My parents. How we can avoid the mistakes they made.’
‘Ready to tell me about it?’
She sighed again and wriggled onto her back. ‘It wasn’t that I didn’t want to tell you, just that I didn’t want to do it in public. It’s still pretty raw for me.’
He adjusted himself so he could look at her face more clearly while still keeping his body pressed against hers. ‘Was their divorce recent?’
‘The divorce itself was finalised a year ago but the separation happened when I left for university. Literally, I left on the Saturday and Mum kicked Dad out on the Sunday. She’d been waiting for me to “flee the nest,” as she put it.’
‘Did you say they married because she got pregnant with you?’
She nodded. ‘They were very young. Mum was nineteen; Dad was twenty.’
‘My mum was only twenty when she had me. But they were already married.’
She smiled and brushed a thumb against his mouth. ‘Mine should have stayed single. They spent my entire childhood arguing. Not passionate arguments or anything like that, but constant cold sniping at each other.’
‘How were they with you?’
‘Great. Very loving and supportive in everything I did. They just hated each other. They were like children taking constant pot-shots at each other. Mum told me after that she’d known since I was a toddler that the minute I was old enough to cope and understand, she would end the marriage.’
‘Was it a relief for you when it ended?’
‘It would have been if they’d stayed the same people, but they both changed. The only thing that didn’t change was the bickering—if anything, the separation made them worse. They fought about everything, right down to the koi carp in the garden pond. That’s why the divorce took so long to go through. In the end, the courts decided how the marital assets were split and neither of them was happy about it so it must have been the right judgement. Mum got the house, half their savings and half Dad’s pension. Dad got the business.’
‘Catering, wasn’t it?’
‘Event catering. He built it from nothing and it became very successful, which was just as well as the pair of them spent a fortune on lawyers’ fees. The divorce was rubber-stamped a year ago and Mum remarried pretty much immediately. Dad sold the business and bought himself a motorbike to travel around Europe. He says he’s recapturing his lost youth. He video calls every month or so. You should see him; he’s grown his hair and a beard and has loads of young women falling over him. Amazing what a powerful bike and a wallet stuffed with cash does to a man’s sex appeal. He’s now planning to travel America so I’ve no idea when I’ll see him again.’
‘That must be rough.’
‘It is.’ A flash of real pain rang from her eyes. ‘I miss him.’
‘What happened with your stepfather?’
Her features visibly tightened at the mention of him. ‘Ruddy gold-digging con-artist.’
Emiliano propped himself on an elbow to study her face even more closely. His nightmare with Adriana had made gold-digging con-artists a specialist subject for him. ‘Really?’
‘He’s a slimy twenty-seven-year-old personal trainer who usually dates hot young women. Mum hired him a couple of years ago. He moved in within weeks of them getting together and they married a month after the divorce was finalised.’
‘Why do you think he’s a gold-digger?’ he asked carefully, thinking that until he’d met Becky his own type had been blonde, stick-thin models and socialites with bust sizes higher than their IQs. ‘I understand why her marrying someone your age would make you feel uncomfortable but the age gap between them is less than the one between Celeste and my father—my adoptive father, I mean—and tastes change. Is it because your mother is the older party?’
‘I’d already got used to her having lovers my age. She put me in the annexe rather than let me move back into the main house as she said I needed privacy, but really it was to keep me out of sight and stop me cramping her style when her current lover was around. Anthony was the first one she really fell for. If I thought he was genuine I wouldn’t care, but I’ve seen first-hand what a sly, spoilt, manipulative narcissist he is. He’s got her wrapped around his finger. He hasn’t worked a day since they married, but she’s bought him a sports car, a wardrobe of designer clothes and had a gym installed for him. All he has to do is look at something and he gets it, and then the bastard thought he could have me too.’
A trickle of ice ran down his spine. ‘What happened?’
Her chin jutted and her lips tightened before she answered. ‘I’d run out of coffee so popped into the house to borrow some. I didn’t know Mum had gone food shopping for the Christmas party they were hosting. The creep pinned me to the kitchen wall and said he’d seen me looking at him...’ her face contorted with distaste ‘...and knew that I wanted him. Then he stuck his tongue down my throat and groped me.’
The trickle of ice turned into a sea that spread through his veins. ‘Did he hurt you?’
Green eyes flashed with rage. ‘My reflexes worked too well for that. I kneed him right where it hurts the most.’
‘Good,’ he said grimly although he was already thinking ahead to ways he could exact proper retribution. ‘And then what happened?’
‘I locked myself in the annexe until Mum got back but I was so upset and angry that I could hardly speak to tell her. Anthony was as cool as a cucumber and denied everything. He said I was jealous and trying to split them up because I wanted him for myself. She believed him and kicked me out right there and then.’
For a moment Emiliano couldn’t speak. It was as if a hand had plunged through his ribcage, grabbed hold of his heart and twisted it.
‘I haven’t spoken to her since. She won’t answer my calls or messages. I’m dead to her.’
To his horror, two fat tears spilled from her eyes.
‘Have you told her about the baby?’ he asked gently. ‘That might be the bridge you two need to rebuild things.’
‘I’ve been too scared.’ She squeezed her eyes shut and pinched her nose. ‘What if she ignores it like she’s ignored all the other messages? I’ve begged her over and over to talk and I get nothing back. I don’t know how I’d cope if she were to reject our baby too.’
Not saying a word, Emiliano lay back down and pulled her to him, wrapping his arms tightly around her and stroking her hair as she cried into his chest.
For Becky, his silent comfort spoke more than any meaningless words could say. All this time, she’d believed she was coping but she saw now that she’d only buried the pain out of reach.
Within weeks of kicking Becky’s father out her mum had hooked up with her first young lover. Becky remembered being homesick and deciding to visit, o
nly to have her mum send her back as she had a weekend of partying planned. Hurt—devastated—and at a loss at how to handle it, Becky had thrown herself into her studies. She’d tried to understand her mum’s newfound enthusiasm for younger men, tried to pretend the maternal love she’d always taken for granted wasn’t being tainted by suspicion from a mother who’d stopped looking at her as a daughter and begun seeing her as a rival. And then that horrendous day had come; her mum shrieking at her like a harpy, accusing Becky of jealousy and spite while her new husband watched with that hateful smirk...
Estranged from her mother, her father thousands of miles away, she’d thrown herself into her studies with a vengeance, completing her doctorate in record time, working her brain harder than she’d ever done until she burnt herself out. But even then she hadn’t paused long enough to think and certainly not long enough to feel. She’d thrown herself into the hospitality work and then the work for Emiliano, filling the months before starting her new job. Anything rather than face up to the reality that she was truly alone.
Who would have believed, she thought in wonder as the tears dried up, that selfish, arrogant Emiliano Delgado would be the one she would finally open up to and confide in? And who would have believed him capable of listening so well and giving such tender comfort?
There were a lot of things she would never have believed about him. The spoilt playboy was only one facet of the man and, she was coming to believe, only the shiny surface of him. Beneath it, he was a man capable of great kindness and empathy.
‘Where did you go after you left?’ he asked quietly once all the tears had been purged.
‘I moved into Dad’s mobile home. He bought it when Mum kicked him out. He’d already gone off on his bike trip by then.’
‘Why didn’t you go to another family member or a friend?’
‘The rest of my family live by the coast a hundred miles away—my parents moved to the Midlands when they married. As for friends...’ She shrugged and tried to sound nonchalant. ‘I didn’t really have anyone I was close enough with to ask.’
The Cost of Claiming His Heir Page 10
