by Emma Darcy
Shock completely paralysed any movement forward. She couldn’t believe he would bring a third party into a night of personal and private revelations. Or weren’t the photos of Zoe’s life important to him—just a curiosity which could be satisfied any time at all?
Her mouth finally returned to working order. Enough to say, “I don’t think so, Quin.” Glaring steely determination, she added, “Our deal doesn’t involve anyone else.”
He sucked in a deep breath. The bullet-grey eyes seared hers with their own determination and the welcoming air changed to ruthless purpose. “It’s my mother, Nicole. Come all the way from Argentina to meet you and her grand-daughter.”
His mother!
Whom she had never been invited to meet in the past!
Nicole’s mind reeled over this totally unexpected move from Quin. What did he mean to gain by it? How was she supposed to respond?
“Argentina?” she repeated dazedly.
“That’s where her family lives. My mother returned there three years ago to be with them. It’s her home country.”
“Yours, too?” Nicole croaked, desperately trying to slot this new information into her very limited knowledge of Quin’s background.
A careless shrug accompanied his reply. “Not anymore. I’ve made my home here. Please…my mother is tired from the fourteen-hour flight from Buenos Aires, but she wants so much to meet you…”
He stepped back, beckoning Nicole into his penthouse. Her feet moved, pulled by a curiosity that demanded satisfaction. As Quin ushered her past the open kitchen area, she saw a woman rising to her feet from one of the leather sofas near the view of the harbour—a tall, handsome woman, whose strong-boned face was etched with fatigue, her heavy-lidded, dark eyes looking almost bruised by the shadows around them.
Her only make-up appeared to be a plum-red lipstick, and her iron-grey hair was pulled back into a neat bun. Despite this austerity, or because of it, she exuded a rather intimidating dignity, probably enhanced by the stylish black suit she wore and the jet earrings and necklace, all of which made Nicole feel overwhelmingly underdressed for this meeting in her jeans and peasant blouse.
Her feet faltered, coming to a halt as the thought struck that she was probably viewed as a loose woman by Quin’s mother—living with her son, having his child out of wedlock, not even telling him about the pregnancy so they couldn’t be properly married as good girls undoubtedly would in Argentina. A tide of hot embarrassment raced up her neck and burnt her cheeks even as she feverishly reasoned this was all Quin’s fault, not hers. She’d done what he’d wanted until it had become too…too wrong!
Quin pried the carry-bag from her grip, passing it to his other hand as he took hold of her elbow to draw her forward. “Nicole, this is my mother, Evita Gallardo.”
“Not…not Sola?” Nicole babbled in bewilderment.
“When I returned home, I resumed my maiden name,” Quin’s mother explained, wincing apologetically at her son as she added, “There was too much shame attached to the name of Sola.”
“Shame?” Nicole repeated, feeling utterly confused.
Quin’s mother had moved to meet her and was now holding out both hands in what seemed like appeal…or was it in greeting? Nicole quickly offered her own and they were taken and pressed, the dark eyes of Evita Gallardo suddenly transmitting an anxious concern.
“It is a long story,” she said. “And I have come because I owe it to you. I hope you will understand.”
Understand what? Nicole almost blurted out, but conscious of already sounding like a parrot, she constrained herself to nodding. Then realising she hadn’t even greeted the woman, she hastily said, “I’m very pleased to meet you, Mrs…um…Miss…? Gallardo.”
“Please…call me Evita. We are already family. You have borne me a grand-daughter,” came the soft reasoning.
“Right,” Nicole agreed, relieved to see no hint of criticism in the dark eyes. There seemed to be more a wish—a need?—for acceptance.
Because of Zoe!
The answer was so obvious, Nicole berated herself for getting uptight about her own impact on Quin’s mother. Regardless of how she was viewed, Evita Gallardo would undoubtedly be very guarded against offending the legal custodian of her grand-child. This meeting had to be about establishing amenable contact, opening a gateway into Zoe’s life. Which meant Quin had to be very seriously intent on being a constant part of their daughter’s future.
“I brought some albums with photos of Zoe,” she said, impulsively offering to Evita Gallardo what she had begrudged giving to Quin. Somehow it was different—woman to woman with the shared knowledge of how it was to have a child. “Perhaps you would like to look through them.”
“I would like it very much.” She squeezed Nicole’s hands in fervent gratitude, then released one to wave her own towards the sofa she’d left. “Please come and sit with me.”
“Coffee, Nicole?” Quin asked, distracting her momentarily from his mother.
His eyes glimmered with satisfaction, giving Nicole the instant impression this scenario was going exactly as he had planned. Ruthless in going after what he wanted, she thought, but what end did he have in mind? He’d caught her by surprise with this introduction to his mother, and Nicole could feel any control over what would happen next slipping right out of her hands. She saw no alternative but to ride this evening through as best she could. “Yes, please,” she answered.
At least having coffee when she first arrived was normal routine. After their first night together she had declined any further dinner invitations, preferring to eat the evening meal with her mother and Zoe before she left home. Besides which, dining out with Quin had seemed too much like dating and she’d wanted to keep the deal a deal with a finish line, not slide back into a relationship with him.
As she accompanied his mother to the sofa, Nicole reflected that it was now impossible to avoid an ongoing relationship, given Quin’s stated commitment to being far more than a nominal father to Zoe. Involving his mother was definite proof of how serious he was about it.
Though his mother would undoubtedly return to her home in Argentina and visits from her would probably be few and far between, so her presence here tonight didn’t really prove anything.
Nicole sternly cautioned herself against taking mental leaps into a future that might not materialise. She sat down with Evita Gallardo, very conscious that she should take only one step at a time in this murky situation. Assume nothing. Trust nothing. Just go with the flow tonight.
Quin placed her carry-bag on the coffee table in front of them. “Wait for me before you start with the albums,” he said. “I don’t want to miss anything.”
His eyes seared hers with the message he’d missed far too much already and Nicole inwardly bridled at the implied accusation of having shut him out from where he should have been. If he’d given her any sense of commitment during their two-year relationship, she wouldn’t have chosen to be a single parent.
“Of course, we will wait,” his mother answered a touch anxiously, as though pleasing her son was of paramount importance.
Quin headed off to the kitchen to make coffee and Nicole turned to Evita Gallardo, wanting the background information that Quin had always denied her. “You said the name of Sola carried too much shame. Would you explain that to me, Evita?”
She sighed heavily, giving Nicole the distinct impression that it took a huge effort to reveal a history, which was obviously a source of personal pain and embarrassment. The dark eyes held sadness and deep regrets as she began to speak.
“My husband, Luis Sola, was a very handsome, very charming, very clever man. I was…under his spell…for many years, believing he was everything he portrayed himself to be. But he used our marriage to gain access to people of wealth he would not have met otherwise, and he defrauded them, as well as members of my family, of a great deal of money. One day, everything seemed normal, and the next he was gone, leaving me and our son to face the scandal of his treachery.”
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Evita shook her head and heaved another sigh. “I could not bear it. And it was particularly bad for Joaquin, who had to carry the stigma of his father’s crimes at school. He was only thirteen and suddenly he was ostracised from everything. Even my family shunned him. Because he looked so very much like Luis, he was most unfairly cast as a bad seed who would also bring shame upon us all.”
“But you didn’t believe that,” Nicole said encouragingly, caught up in the story and wanting to hear more.
“I know my son. He is a Gallardo through and through.” There was a flash of pride in the pained eyes. “It was better for him that we accept exile in Australia than to stay in Buenos Aires where he would never be trusted. So we came here and Joaquin vowed he would prove them all wrong.”
“How?”
“By making restitution, returning all the stolen money.”
This was the driving force behind his single-minded ambition to make as much money as he could, Nicole realised, stunned by how little she had known about the man she had loved.
“Once we were settled here, he worked very hard. Studied hard,” his mother went on. “He won a special scholarship to a university and got a business degree, then moved straight into a bank to learn how to make money from money.”
“Which he proceeded to do with extraordinary success. The star player,” Nicole commented wryly.
Evita nodded, then eyed her ruefully. “When he met you and left the house my father had provided for us to be with you, it meant his feeling for you was very strong. It worried me that it would pull him away from fulfilling what I had dreamt about—returning to Buenos Aires with great pride in my son and what he had achieved.”
She lifted her hands in an appeal for forgiveness as she added, “I would not meet you. I would not give you any status in Joaquin’s life. I would not let him even speak of you to me. So it is because of my selfishness…”
“You don’t have to go that far, Madre,” Quin interrupted as he carried the cappuccino over to where they sat. “I wasn’t about to let anything prevent me from achieving what I’d resolved to do.” He set the coffee cup down on the table and looked straight at Nicole. “I thought I could have my cake and eat it, too, but in doing so, I lost far more than I’d bargained for.”
Zoe, he meant.
The restitution mission had won out over any commitment to the relationship they’d shared, no matter how strongly he had felt about her. Though she guessed the deep-seated trauma of what had happened when he was thirteen was not something that could be easily set aside, especially when he had the end-goal in his sights.
“I presume you did win respectability back in Buenos Aires since your mother now lives there,” she remarked.
“Yes. All the debts were paid with interest three years ago,” he answered almost cynically, no pride at all in his achievement.
His mother promptly supplied the pride. “It was such an honourable deed, my family finally embraced him as one of their own.”
“Why didn’t you stay?” Nicole asked, curious to know why he’d turned his back on the status of hero.
His eyes flashed mockingly. “My name is Joaquin Luis Sola. I am still my father’s son, and that means nothing in Australia.”
“A clean slate,” Nicole interpreted.
“Not so clean.” His gaze dropped to the carry-bag. “Could we look at the photo albums now?”
His mother’s words—an honourable deed—kept playing through Nicole’s mind as she removed the albums from the bag and stacked them on the table in the right order. Was his not so clean slate centred on Zoe now? Was it a matter of honour for him to be a good father to his daughter?
Honour wasn’t love.
And neither was lust.
She would have to be very, very careful not to colour Quin’s current moves with feelings he didn’t have. That could lead to big mistakes, and it wasn’t just herself who would end up paying for them. She didn’t want Zoe’s innocent acceptance of Quin as her father to result in a long string of hurtful disappointments. Though how she could prevent that now, she didn’t know.
He sat down beside her as she rested the oldest album on her lap, ready to turn to the first baby photograph of Zoe. It meant she was sandwiched between her daughter’s father and grandmother on the long leather sofa, and the sense of inevitable involvement with both of them weighed heavily on her mind and heart, making her feel tremulous inside.
She couldn’t stop her hand from shaking a little as she opened the album and her voice turned husky from a sudden welling of emotion. “This is Zoe on the day she was born.”
She looked so tiny in the hospital baby trolley, all bundled up with only her face showing—a rather red face framed by a surprisingly thick mass of spiky black hair. Her eyes were shut and the crescents of long thick eyelashes were also stunningly black.
“Oh! She looks just like Joaquin when he was born!” Evita marvelled, clasping her hands over her heart as though all her prayers had been answered.
“No, Madre.” Quin’s arm reached out, a finger gently touching the baby’s full lower lip in the photograph. “This perfectly shaped mouth comes directly from Nicole. And Zoe is very much a little girl, not a boy.”
A mouth he knew all too intimately, Nicole thought, feeling his strongly muscled thigh pressing against hers and cravenly wishing there was more than hot sex driving the desire that constantly simmered between them. It hurt that there wasn’t, even more now than it had in the past as she continued to show the baby photographs of their daughter whom she now had to share with him.
After that first correction to his mother, he sat in silence, intently viewing the progression of Zoe’s infancy to the toddler stage. It was Evita who peppered Nicole with questions and made increasingly infatuated comments about her beautiful grand-daughter. Quin just looked, and Nicole grew more and more conscious of tension emanating him, a turbulent tension that swirled with all he restrained himself from saying. She could feel him thinking, I missed out on this, and this, and this…and the bitter vengefulness that had driven many of her thoughts and actions started sliding into guilt.
Had she been terribly wrong to keep Zoe from him?
His silence continued through the second album and almost to end of the third. It wasn’t until Nicole turned a page to reveal a much thinner Zoe standing beside the newly constructed butterfly tree, that he made a sound—a low gravelly rumble in his throat. Then…
“This must be after she was struck down with meningitis.”
“Meningitis!” Evita cried in horror.
Shock rolled through Nicole. She had not told Quin of Zoe’s illness so how did he know? Her head jerked around to look at him and she caught a poignant look of pain and anger in his eyes before he bent forward to answer his mother.
“Fortunately Zoe recovered with no long-term ill effects from it, Madre. And Nicole came up with the brilliant idea of creating a butterfly tree to help her look forward to being completely well again. Which she is. Delightfully so,” he added gruffly.
Zoe must have told him when he gave her the Ulysses butterfly. He was glossing over the terrible worry of that time to soothe his mother’s concerns, but Nicole was deeply disturbed by the reaction he was now covering up. Did he really care so much? Had she been selfishly unfair in depriving him of his child?
As she proceeded to leaf through the fourth and last album where the photographs demonstrated beyond doubt that their daughter was, indeed, a normal healthy little girl, her mind kept zipping to the fact that Quin would have been free of the long hangover from his father’s crimes when Zoe contracted meningitis. But even after he’d returned from Argentina, he had obviously continued to pursue the accumulation of wealth, so he wouldn’t have had much time to give to a sick child, anyway.
It was all very well for him to think he might have acted differently. Nicole told herself he had a lot to prove before she’d be convinced his priorities had been reshuffled. Though he had walked away from a business client so as not to lose his time with her. Then visiting Zoe on Tuesday morning…
“Oh! She’s learning ballet!” Evita exclaimed in delight.
It was the last photograph in the album—Zoe in her pink dancing costume with a many layered tulle tutu, striking a typical pose with arms arched above her head, one foot planted firmly on the floor and the other pointed.
“She’s into all forms of dance,” Nicole answered. “My mother has a dance school and I teach there. Zoe has been attending children’s classes most of her life. Not because I put her into them. She just loves dancing.”
“Do you think she would dance for me while I’m here?” Evita asked hopefully.
“Let’s not leap too far ahead, Madre,” Quin swiftly interposed as Nicole closed the album, her mind whirling around his mother’s request and not finding a ready reply.
It seemed stupid to feel fearful, yet she had only met Evita Gallardo tonight and she’d had no time to think about introducing another grandmother to Zoe. The sense of being trapped into acknowledging a relationship instead of having a choice about it raised a wave of panic. First, Quin. Now his mother in quick succession. It seemed as though the special bond she had with her daughter was being threatened.
“I did not mean to presume,” Evita said, anxiety in her voice and in the hand that reached out and pressed Nicole’s. “I am very tired, and seeing the photographs…” She sighed, patting Nicole’s hand reassuringly. “I will retire to my room now and leave you with Joaquin to decide on what is appropriate.”
Quin stood as his mother rose from the sofa and quickly moved to take her arm. “Is there anything you need, Madre?” he asked caringly.
“No.” She leaned against him for a moment, then squared her shoulders and nodded to Nicole. “Good night, my dear. I am sorry our meeting was so long delayed.”
Nicole returned the nod, unable to bring herself to say anything beyond a courteous, “Good night.”
“Stay, Joaquin,” his mother commanded. “I can make my own way to my room.”
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