by Tara Pammi
And that wasn’t all.
A small table was set up in front of the cabana, with candles and dinner for two. A pink cardboard box with a small bow also sat on it. The curly “A” on top of it looked very familiar...
His hard body shifting behind her, Diego wrapped his arms around her, his strong legs supporting her own.
“That’s a box from Angelina’s in Paris.” It was her favorite patisserie on the Champs d’Elysées.
Suddenly she knew what was in it. She turned to him, laughter bubbling out of her.
“Anna told me you’ve mentioned their pastries once or twice.”
She met his laughing gaze. “How about a million times?”
“Happy Anniversary, minha esposinha.”
Her breath hitched in her throat. It was the first thing that had hit her when she’d woken up this morning—the reason why she had wandered away so far from the villa. It was the one date she had always taken off and spent at her apartment, reliving that day.
She nodded, struggling to speak past the lump cutting off her breath. Stretching on her toes, she pressed into him until his erection rubbed against her bottom.
He groaned and hugged her tighter.
“I don’t want the pastry.”
He licked the seam of her ear. Her skin was too fraught with need to contain her.
“What do you want, querida? Whatever it is, I will bring it to you.”
“You,” she said clearly, loud enough for anyone in the vicinity to hear. It wasn’t all she actually wanted to say, though. “I want you, Diego.”
Without waiting for his answer she dragged him toward the cabana, intent on showing him with her actions everything she still wasn’t brave enough to put into words.
They tore off each other’s clothes with frenzied movements, as though they were both aware of how fragile, how precious this moment of perfection was.
Pushing her back into the soft mattress, Diego stretched out on top of her, his taut muscles a heavenly weight over her. His mouth, his tongue, his caresses, he was everywhere— kissing her, licking her, tasting her, generally reducing her body to a writhing mass of sensations and needs. He didn’t give her a minute to breathe.
She cried out loud, the raw sound clawing its way out of her throat, when he pulled her nipple deep into his mouth and suckled at it. His rough fingers tweaked its twin, and twangs of hot pleasure shot down between her legs.
He smelled of the ocean, his muscles taut and shifting under her touch. She sobbed incoherently when he rubbed her aching core with the heel of his palm while his mouth trailed wet kisses around her navel. Pleasure coiled low in her belly, tugging every nerve-ending inside her along for the ride. Her whole body was unfolding mindlessly in tune with his erotic strokes.
His hair-roughened legs rubbing against hers, he reversed their positions with one smooth movement until she was straddling him.
Her sex quivered with need as his erection rubbed against her folds, and a shiver inched its way all over her skin.
Putting her weight on her thighs, she resisted.
His face was all severe planes and rough angles in the fading light. His choppy breath bounced off of her skin, giving her goosebumps.
His mouth was tight, his gaze drugged with desire. “This is not the time for one of your arguments, gatinha.”
She smiled at the way his words rolled over each other, his accent creeping into his words. She placed her palms on his thighs and the rock-hard muscles clenched under her touch.
He groaned—a guttural, painful sound—as she drew her palms upward a little, until the pads of her fingers were idly tracing the length of his erection.
Her mouth dry, she forced herself to put her thoughts into words. “I want you on top of me.” Pushing her hands into her hair, she stretched innocently.
His gaze moved to her breasts. Naked hunger was etched into his face. “Why?”
She slid off him and stretched alongside him. He immediately turned toward her. “I’m going to start showing in a little while.” He moved his palm to her stomach. “And I...we...in the coming months it’s going to be awkward.”
He frowned. “So you won’t want to have sex anymore? Because being near you and not having it will kill me.”
She laughed. God, she would never have enough of his piercing honesty. “I will. But today I want your weight over me as you enter me. I want to feel every inch of you plastered to me.”
He didn’t say anything. He just pulled her wrists up with one hand and kissed her mouth, plundering her. Kneeled between her legs. Pulled one leg over his shoulder. Covered every inch of her with him as he thrust into her.
She was already wet and ready for him. But something more than pure lust sang in her veins. Her breasts shifted against his chest as he moved inside her. Her stomach groaned under the weight of his muscles. Sweat beaded over his forehead and she licked his shoulder when he thrust again.
It was hard and crushing. Her breathing was ragged, her skin ablaze with need. The delicious friction of his thrusts awakened a billion nerve-endings in her groin muscles.
Sharp bursts of pleasure crested over her. Desire pooled low and intense in her pelvis. She sensed his control slipping, his desire taking over, just as hers did, and each thrust was more desperate and less measured. Each sound he made was rougher and filled with a delicious lack of control.
When they hit their climaxes and pleasure broke out all over her she knew nothing was going to protect her heart now. How stupid she had been to think she still had control over this—that she could withstand it without losing herself.
Her heart was Diego’s now—whatever he wanted to do with it. And she couldn’t help but hope, after everything they had been through together, that he wouldn’t trample it.
CHAPTER TWELVE
IT HAPPENED WHEN they had almost reached the villa. The fact that it had been near midnight by the time they had finished with each other, and with dinner at the secluded spot, meant that the loud, strident peal from his cell phone shattered the peace, the moment of perfection.
Diego froze next to her, bringing them both to a grinding halt even before he picked it up. He literally froze—his body next to her and his hand around hers going from delicious warmth to dreadful cold in a second. The jarring tune blared again, and Kim realized why she had felt a shiver go down her spine that first time.
That ringtone was different from his usual one. Which meant he had set it up for a particular call. And he seemed to expect the worst.
He shifted to the side, almost as though hiding himself from her, and picked up his phone.
The conversation lasted two minutes—tops.
A curse flew from his mouth and Kim flinched. With a growl that had the little hairs on her neck standing, he hurled his cell phone. It fell into the ocean and sank in seconds with a little gurgle.
Leaving the most deafening silence around them.
His emotions floated over him like a dark cloud that cut off the intense physical connection she had felt with him only a few minutes ago. Like a signal of extreme danger to anyone who dared approach him.
Foreboding inched over her, her skin chilly in the balmy night air.
He stared into the ocean, his shoulders rattling.
She reached him quietly where he stood, with tension and aggression pouring out of every sinew of him. “Diego, what’s going on?”
“He’s dead.”
The words landed around them with the intensity of an earthquake that shook everything. She swayed for a second, her gut trembling. She dug her toes into the sand, blindly seeking to root herself. “Who?” she asked, wishing her instincts could be wrong.
“Eduardo.”
The anguish in him wound itself around her. “I’m so sorry, Diego.”
“Multiple organ failure killed him.”
“I—”
“But they are wrong.”
Her tongue wouldn’t move to form the words she wanted to ask. She was so terrified
of everything crumbling. “What do you mean?”
“I’m the one who killed him. As surely as if I put my hands on his throat and choked the life out of him.”
Kim gasped. The self-loathing in his words was unbearable to hear. The need to comfort him pounded in her blood. “What are you talking about? Eduardo loved you.”
“And I used his love, his trust in me, to my advantage. He was already crumbling under the weight of my father’s expectations. And you know what I did? I befriended him under false pretenses, gained access to the company’s information and pulled it out from under him. My father had no choice but to hand it over to me. I told myself Eduardo was barely keeping it together anyway. And then, when you left, I wanted blood. I went from driven to obsessed. Instead of helping him, I pushed him into his own destruction. I should have known Eduardo was already using—should have known how close he was to breaking. By the time I did it was already too late. Are you still glad that it’s my children you’re carrying, gatinha?”
The words dug their claws into her.
“I am. Because you’re not that man anymore, Diego. You never were. I see how you are with Miguel, what you’ve gone through to pull him from that life. Whatever culpability you have in Eduardo’s death—if you have any—you have paid for it a million times over.”
She moved toward him and folded her arms around his middle from behind. A tremor shook him and it crashed into her, his raw anguish churning her stomach.
Innocence. They had both never had it. And even without realizing it they had been drawn to each other. For the first time she felt the loss of it as keenly as he did.
She pressed her mouth to his shoulders, felt him shudder under her touch, felt his rock-hard muscles relax against her. Felt him pull in a breath with the utmost effort.
She wanted to do everything she could to ease his pain. The intensity of how much she wanted to rocked through her. For a second she thought he might let her share his pain—for once let her support him.
“You have to forgive yourself. If you don’t you’ll—”
He walked away from her without a word.
His silence whipped at her hope. The weight of his guilt was a crushing weight on her own shoulders, even if he said it wasn’t her fault.
Kim stood there watching him go, her hold on him just as slippery as the sandbanks holding the ocean at bay.
* * *
Kim didn’t see Diego over the next couple of days. It was Miguel who informed her that he had gone to Sao Paulo to bury Eduardo, and that Marissa was by his side. It was Miguel who didn’t leave her side for a minute, as though he could understand her mounting confusion.
Marissa was the one person Diego hadn’t shut out of his grief. His friend had stayed by his side while Kim had watched from afar.
It hurt like nothing else in her life had—like a nail stuck under her skin, gouging into her flesh. And there was nothing she could do to change it
Would it be like this forever? She hated that feeling from the depths of her soul—hated that her happiness, her very state of mind, was dependent on whether Diego would ever smile at her again.
It was the same vicious circle of hell she had gone through when she had found her mother’s note. What could she have done differently? What could she change within herself? It was a powerless, clawing feeling she couldn’t shed.
She blinked back tears, disgusted by the feeble feelings. She missed him every minute of every day with an intensity that stole the breath from her lungs.
How could she live like this forever? Wanting to be more, needing to be more to him, but knowing that she could never change it?
She knew they had formed a bond in the past days. She knew, for all that her life had been an emotional desert, that what they shared had been special. But he would never love her. She would never amount to anything other than the mother of his children.
It was a truth she had already known, except now it felt excruciatingly unbearable.
Pain constricted her chest. Her lungs were collapsing under its crushing weight. She sank to her knees on the hardwood floor in her bedroom and hugged herself.
She couldn’t live with him like this—forever wondering, waiting for the moment he decided she wasn’t worth it, the moment he decided he was done with her.
Because he would. Sooner or later he would decide he only wanted his children. She would go mad waiting for that moment.
She had wanted this chance with him, but she didn’t want it at the cost of losing her sanity, her will.
* * *
Diego couldn’t believe the evidence of his own eyes. His gut kept falling lower and lower as he methodically checked each room through the villa. He left her room for last—like a coward postponing the moment of truth.
She has gone.
Miguel had texted him almost two hours ago. Because Miguel, unlike his pilot and the rest of the staff, had known something was wrong, had known her swift departure was something Diego wouldn’t have agreed to if his life had depended on it.
Lost in his own world on the other side of the island, pushing himself through another rigorous workout, Diego had seen it too late.
His heart, if it was possible, felt as if it had come to a screeching halt. Because he had instantly known it wasn’t a work emergency, as she had claimed to everyone else, or a tantrum because he had been avoiding her since he had heard Eduardo’s news.
Kim didn’t throw tantrums. She didn’t argue, and she didn’t fight back—she left quietly, as though he wasn’t even worth a goodbye.
His helicopter was gone, his pilot was gone and Kim was gone. And yet he couldn’t crush the fleck of hope holding him together.
It was the most pathetic feeling that had ever run through him. Right up there with the hope that had fluttered every time his mother had trotted him down to his father’s house to beg for his help.
He arrived at the suite she had been using. The sheer curtains at the French windows flew in the silence. Crickets chirped outside on the veranda.
She hadn’t left the room as spotless as she usually did. A couple of paperbacks were still on the bed.
The scent she used, lily of the valley, fluttered over the breeze toward him. Knocked him in the gut like a kick to his insides. He breathed deeply, trying to get the knot in his belly to relent.
A strange sense of déjà-vu descended on him. He looked at the bathroom, his heart in his throat, waiting for her to emerge from it as she had in the hotel suite that day. She would come out and turn her nose up at him. Challenge him. Rile him. And kiss him.
Breathing through the pain, he reminded himself that it would crest soon. It had to.
It didn’t.
He rammed his fist into the nearby wall and roared a pithy curse.
Despite his best efforts, he was right where she had left him six years ago—he still wasn’t enough for her. Why else would she leave without a word?
In the wake of that crushing realization came waves of roaring fury and unrelenting pain. He was damned if he’d let her go.
He would move heaven and earth to drag her back into his life. He would spend every last dollar he had and more on suing her for custody, using any legal means he had to tie her to him. He would destroy everything he had built—destroy himself if that was the price to make her his again.
He wanted her back in his life. And he would fall as low as needed.
* * *
He had just hung up with his lawyer when Miguel entered his office. He cast a long look at Diego, threw a file on his table, switched on the flatscreen TV and left.
Diego was about to turn off the TV when a familiar sight stopped him in his tracks. The pristine white beaches, the turquoise waters as a background, with Miguel in the forefront, were here—on the island.
Stunned, he settled into the couch.
The documentary started with Miguel being asked questions about his past life. Diego could see the resentment in his face, past hurt playing shadows in his d
ark gaze, the effort it cost him to answer those questions.
He shivered as he realized it was Kim answering the questions. She walked Miguel through every tough question, her tone gentle as he revealed his horrible past
The questions then focused on his current life. His chest tightened and a warm energy flew in Diego’s veins as she probed Miguel on how Diego had taken Miguel out of the street gang in Rio di Janeiro, how Diego had worked long days to get through to Miguel that violence wasn’t the answer, how Diego had brought him to this island...
Tears burned in Diego’s eyes as the short feature went on. As Kim interviewed the other two kids who had joined them last week.
And then it was her smiling face that filled his huge screen.
“The world should know of Diego Pereira’s efforts to get these kids out of violent street gangs and toward a better life.”
Her statement reverberated within him, shaking the rigid fear at the core of him loose.
He switched the television off, his heart pounding. She thought the world should know what he was doing. But he had never wanted the world’s applause, the world’s validation.
He had wanted it from her, had craved it. He had wanted to be worthy of the strong, brilliant, beautiful woman she was.
Feeling as though he was coming apart, he opened the file that Miguel had tossed at him.
The contents of the file blew him away. There were detailed plans for the infrastructure required to run a shelter for kids recovering from drug problems. There was a list of healthcare workers who had expertise in working with kids like Eduardo. A list of legalities and forms that needed to be fulfilled in order to begin such a program right there on the island.
It was detailed, precise and exactly what he had had in mind when he had bought the island. He had never revealed his plans to her. She couldn’t have created a file that made her loss more apparent.
Every inch of him ached at the emptiness he felt. Had she been horrified by what he had driven Eduardo to?
Seeing Eduardo’s body, seeing his own father, whom he had hated for so many years, his hatred blazing just as ever, had broken the hold he had kept on himself—had shown him what he couldn’t achieve through wealth or power, however hard he fought.
