Enamored

by Diana Palmer

“We can drink another cup together,” he said, “while Mrs. Albright clears away the dishes.”

  She poured and watched him add cream to his coffee, her eyes soft and loving. “It went well, don’t you think?”

  He lifted an eyebrow and smiled. “Apollo and Joyce, you mean? I expect he has met his match there. Properly attired, she has excellent carriage and a unique kind of beauty.”

  “I thought so, too.” She laughed. “I think she hit him. Did you notice his cheek?”

  “I was also noticing the very vivid lipstick on his mouth,” he mused with a soft chuckle. He leaned back in his chair with a sigh. “Poor man. He’ll be married before he knows it.”

  She balanced her cup and saucer on her lap. “Is that how you think of marriage? As something to cause a man to be pitied?”

  “Oh, yes, at one time I felt exactly that way,” he admitted. He lit a cheroot and blew out a cloud of smoke. “I even told you so.”

  “I remember.” She smiled into her coffee as she sipped it. “I was young enough and naive enough to think I could make you like it.”

  “Had I given you the chance, perhaps you might have,” he said. His dark eyes narrowed. “I cannot remember even once in my life thinking of children and a home when I was escorting a woman, do you know? Even with you, it was your delectable body I wanted the most, not any idea of permanence. And then I lost my head and found myself bound to you in the most permanent way of all. I hated you and your father for that.”

  “As I found out,” she said miserably.

  “It was only when you lost the baby that I came to my senses, as odd as that may sound,” he continued, watching her face. “It was then that I realized how much I had thrown away. I had some idea of my grandmother’s resentment of you when I left you at the casa and took myself away from your influence. Perhaps I even hoped that my family’s coldness would make you leave me.” He dropped his dark eyes to his shoes. “I had lived alone so long, free to do as I wanted, to travel as I pleased. But the weeks grew endless without you, and always there was the memory of that afternoon in the rain on our bed of leaves.” He sighed heavily. “I came home hoping to drive you away before I capitulated. And then you came to me, and because I was so hungry for you, I told you that you repulsed me. And I pushed you away.” His eyes closed briefly.

  She felt a stirring of compassion for what he’d gone through, even though her own path hadn’t been an easy one.

  “When you left, how did you manage?” he asked.

  “By sheer force of will, at first.” She sighed. “I had to go through a lot of red tape to get to stay in the United States, and when Matthew came along, it got rough. I made a good salary, but it took a lot of money to keep him in clothes and to provide for a babysitter. Without Mrs. Grady, I really don’t know what I’d have done.”

  His chin lifted, and he studied her through narrow dark eyes. “Did you never wonder about me?”

  “At first I wondered. I was afraid that you’d try to find me.” She twisted her wedding band on her finger. “Then, after I got over that, I wondered if you were with some other woman, having a good time without me.”

  He scowled. “You thought me a shallow man, niña.”

  Her thin shoulders lifted, then fell. “You said yourself that you didn’t love me or need me, that I was a nuisance you’d been saddled with. What else was I to think, Diego? That you were pining away for love of me?”

  He took a draw from his cheroot and quietly put it out with slow, deliberate movements of his hand. “When I began selling my services abroad for a living, it was to help my family out of a financial bind,” he began. “Because your mother had run away with your father, taking her dowry from us, the family fortunes suffered and we were in desperate need. After a while I began to enjoy the excitement of what I did, and the risk. Eventually the reason I began was lost in the need for adventure and the love of freedom and danger. I suppose I fed on adrenaline.”

  “There’s something your family never knew about my mother’s dowry, Diego,” Melissa said. “She didn’t have one.”

  He scowled. “What is this? My father said—”

  “Your father didn’t know. My grandfather was in financial straits himself. He was hoping for a merger between his fruit company and your family’s banana plantations to help him get his head above water.” She smiled ironically. “There was never any dowry. That was one reason she ran away with my father, because she felt guilty that her father was trying to use her in a dishonest way to make money. My father’s father died soon afterward, and my father inherited his fortune. That’s where our money came from, not from my mother’s dowry.”

  “Dios mío,” he breathed, putting his face in his hands. “Dios, and my family blamed your father all those years for our financial problems.”

  “He thought it best not to tell you,” she said. “The wounds were deep enough, and your father said some harsh things to him after he and my mother were married. I suppose he rubbed salt in the wounds, because my father never forgave him.”

  “You make me ashamed, Melissa,” he said finally, lifting his dark head. “I seem to have given you nothing but heartache.”

  “I wasn’t blameless,” she said. “The poems and the note I wrote so impulsively were genuine, you know. All I lacked was the courage to send them to you. I knew even then that a sophisticated man would never want an unworldly girl like me. I wasn’t even pretty,” she said wistfully.

  “But you were exquisite,” he said. He looked and sounded astonished at her denial of her own beauty. “A tea rose in bud, untouched by sophistication and cynicism. I adored you. And once I tasted your sweetness, amada, I was intoxicated.”

  “Yes, I noticed that.” She sighed bitterly.

  “I fought against marriage, that is true,” he admitted. “I fought against your influence, and to some extent I won. But even as you ran from my bedroom that last night at the casa, I knew that I had lost. I was going after you, to tell you that I had meant none of what I said. I was going to ask you to try to make our marriage work, Melissa. And I would have tried. At least I was fond of you, and I wanted you. There was more than enough to build a marriage on.” He didn’t add how that feeling had grown over the years until now the very force of it almost winded him when he looked at her. He couldn’t tell her everything just yet.

  She searched his dark, unblinking eyes. “I was too young, though,” she said. “I would have wanted things you couldn’t have given me. You were my idol, not a flesh-and-blood man. You were larger than life, and how can a mere mortal woman live up to such a paragon? Oh, no, señor. I prefer you as you are now. Flesh and blood and sometimes a little flawed. I can deal with a man who is as human as I am.”

  He began to smile, and the warmth of his lips was echoed in his quiet, possessive gaze. “Can you, enamorada?” he asked. “Then come here and show me.”

  Her heart skipped with pure delight. “On the couch?” she asked, her eyebrows raised. “With the door wide open and Mrs. Albright in the kitchen?”

  He chuckled softly. “You see the way you affect my brain, Melissa. It seems to stop working when I am in the same room with you.”

  “All finished, except for the coffee things,” Mrs. Albright said cheerfully as she came into the room.

  “Leave the coffee things until tomorrow,” Diego said, smiling at her. “You have done quite enough, and your check this week will reflect our appreciation. Now go home and enjoy your own family. ¡Buenas noches!”

  “Thank you, señor, and buenas noches to you, too. Ma’am.” She nodded to Melissa, got her coat from the closet and let herself out of the apartment.

  Diego’s eyes darkened as they slid over Melissa with an expression in them that could have melted ice. “Now,” he said softly. “Come here to me, little one.”

  She got up, her heartbeat shaking her, and moved toward him. Diego caught her around the waist and pulled her down into his lap with her blond head in the crook of his arm and his black eyes searin
g down into hers.

  “No more barriers,” he breathed as he lowered his head, drowning her in his expensive cologne and the faint tobacco scent of his mouth. “No more subterfuge, no more games. We are husband and wife, and now we become one mind, one heart, one body…amada!”

  His mouth moved hungrily on hers and she clung to him warmly, delighting in his possessive hold, in the need she could sense as well as feel. He was going to possess her, but she was no longer a twenty-year-old girl with stars in her eyes. She was a woman, and fully awakened to her own wants and needs.

  She bit his lower lip, watching to see his expression. He chuckled softly, arrogance in every line of his dark face.

  “So,” he breathed. “You are old enough now for passion, is that what you are telling me with this provocative caress? Then beware, querida, because in this way my knowledge is far superior to yours.”

  Her breath quickened. “Show me,” she whispered, curling her fingers into the thick hair at the nape of his neck. “Teach me.”

  “It will not be as tender as it was the first time, amada,” he said roughly, and something dark kindled in his eyes. “It will be a savage loving.”

  “Savage is how I feel about you, señor,” she whispered, lifting her mouth to tease his. “Savage and sweet and oh, so hungry!”

  He allowed the caress and repeated it against her starving mouth. “Then taste me, querida,” he whispered as he opened her lips with his and his arms contracted. “And let us feast on passion.”

  She moaned, because the pleasure was feverish. He bruised her against him, and she felt his hand low on her hips, gathering them against the fierce tautness of his body. She began to tremble. She’d lived on dreams of him for years, but now there was the remembered delight of his mouth, of his body. He wanted her, and she wanted him so much it was agonizing. She clung, a tiny cry whispering into his mouth as she gave in completely, loving him beyond bearing.

  He rose gracefully, lifting her easily as he got up. He lifted his head only a breath away, holding her eyes as he walked down the hall with her, his gaze possessive, explosively sweet.

  “No quarter, enamorada,” he whispered huskily. “This night, I will show no mercy. I will fulfil you and you will complete me. I will love you as I never dreamed of loving a woman in the darkness.”

  She trembled at the emotion in his deep, softly accented voice. “You don’t believe in love,” she whispered shakily.

  His dark eyes held her wide gray ones. “Do I not, Melissa? Wait and see what I feel. By morning you may have learned a great deal more about me than you think you know.”

  She buried her face in his throat and pressed closer, shuddering with the need to give him her heart along with her body.

  “Querida…” he breathed. His arms tightened bruisingly.

  At the same time, a childish voice cried out in the darkness, and that sound was followed by the unmistakable sound of someone’s dinner making a return appearance.

  Chapter Ten

  Matthew was sick twice. Melissa mopped up after him with the ease of long practice and changed his clothes and his sheets after bathing him gently with soap and warm water.

  He cried, his young pride shattered by his loss of control. “I’m sorry,” he wailed.

  “For what, baby?” she said gently, kissing his forehead. “Darling, we all get sick from time to time. Mrs. Albright’s grandson had this virus, and I’m sure that’s where you caught it, but you’ll be much better in the morning. I’m going to get you some cracked ice so that you don’t get dehydrated, and perhaps Papa will sit with you until I get back.”

  “Of course,” Diego said, catching Melissa’s hand to kiss it gently as she went past him. “Make a pot of coffee for us, amada.”

  “You don’t need to sit up, too,” she said. “I can do it.”

  His dark eyes searched hers. “This is what being a father is all about, is it not? Sharing the bad times as well as the good? What kind of man would I be to go merrily to my bed and leave you to care for a sick little boy?”

  She could barely breathe. He was incredible. She touched his mouth with her forefinger. “I adore you,” she breathed, and left before she gave way to tears.

  When she came back, with the coffee dripping and its delicious aroma filling the kitchen, she was armed with a cup of cracked ice and a spoon. Diego was talking to Matthew in a low voice. It was only when Melissa was in the room that she recognized the story he was telling the boy. It was Beauty and the Beast, one of her own favorites.

  “And they lived happily ever after?” Matthew asked, looking pale but temporarily keeping everything down.

  “Happiness is not an automatic thing in the real world, mi hijo,” Diego said as Melissa perched on the side of the bed and spooned a tiny bit of cracked ice into Matthew’s mouth. “It is rather a matter of compromise, communication and tolerance. Is this not so, Señora Laremos?”

  She smiled at him. He was lounging in the chair beside the bed with his shirt unbuttoned and his sleeves rolled up, looking very Latin and deliciously masculine with the shirt and slacks outlining every powerful muscle in his body.

  “Yes. It is so,” she agreed absently, but her eyes were saying other things.

  He chuckled deeply, and the message in his own eyes was more than physical.

  She gave Matthew the ice and took heart when it stayed in his stomach. In a little while he dozed off, and Melissa pushed the disheveled dark hair away from his forehead and adored him with her eyes.

  “A fine young man,” Diego said softly. “He has character, even at so early an age. You have done well.”

  She glanced at him with a smile. “He was all I had of—” She bit her tongue, because she had almost said “of you.”

  But he knew. He smiled, his eyes lazily caressing her. “I have waited a long time for you to tell me. Do you not think that this is the proper time, querida? On a night when we meant to love each other in the privacy of my bedroom and remove all the barriers that separate us? Here, where the fruit of our need for each other sleeps so peacefully in the security of our love for him?”

  She drew in a steadying breath. “Did you know all the time?” she asked.

  “No,” he said honestly, and smiled. “I was insanely jealous of Matt’s mythical father. It made me unkind to him at first, and to you. But as I grew to know him, and you, I began to have my suspicions. That was why I sent for his birth certificate.”

  “Yes, I saw it accidentally in your desk,” she confessed, and noted the surprise in his face.

  “But before I saw it,” he continued softly, “Matthew described to me a photograph of his father that you had shown him.” He smiled at her flush. “Yes, niña. The same photograph I had seen in your drawer under your gowns, and never told you. So many keepsakes. They gave me the only hope I had that you still had a little affection for me.”

  She laughed. “I was afraid you’d seen them.” She shook her head. “I cared so much. And I was afraid, I’ve always been afraid, that you might want Matt more than you wanted me.” She lowered her eyes. “You said that love wasn’t a word you knew. But Matt was your son,” she whispered, admitting it at last, “and you’d have wanted him.”

  “Him, and not you?” he asked softly. He leaned forward, watching her. “Melissa, I have not been kind to you. We married for the worst of reasons, and even when I found you again I was still fighting for my freedom. But now…” He smiled tenderly. “Amada, I awaken each morning with the thought that I will see you over the breakfast table. At night I sleep soundly, knowing that you are only a few yards away from me. My day begins and ends with you. And in these past weeks, you have come to mean a great deal to me. I care very much for my son. But, Melissa, you mean more to me than anything on earth. Even more than Matthew.”

  She gnawed her lower lip while tears threatened. She took a slow, shuddering breath. “I wanted to tell you before I left Guatemala that I hadn’t lost the baby. But I couldn’t let him be born and raised in
such an atmosphere of hatred.” She looked down at the carpet. “He was all I had left of you, and I wanted him desperately. So I came to America, gave birth to him and raised him.” Her eyes found his. “But there was never a day, or a night, or one single second, when you weren’t in my thoughts and in my heart. I never stopped loving you. I never will.”

  “Amada,” he breathed.

  “Matthew is your son,” she said simply, smiling through tears. “I’m sorry I didn’t trust you enough to tell you.”

  “I’m sorry I made it so difficult.” He leaned forward and took her hand in his, kissing the palm softly, hungrily. “We made a beautiful child together,” he said, lifting his dark eyes to hers. “He combines the best of both of us.”

  “And we can look into his face and see generations of Sterlings and Laremoses staring back at us,” she agreed. Her soft eyes held his. “Oh, Diego, what a waste the past years have been!”

  He stood up, drawing her into his arms. He held her and rocked her, his voice soft at her ear, whispering endearments in Spanish while she cried away the bitterness and the loneliness and the pain.

  “Now, at last, we can begin again,” he said. “We can have a life together, a future together.”

  “I never dreamed it would happen.” She wiped at her eyes. “I almost ran away again. But then Joyce reminded me that I’d done that before and solved nothing. So I stayed to fight for you.”

  He laughed delightedly. “So you did, in ways I never expected. I had married a child in Guatemala. I hardly expected the woman I found in Tucson.”

  “I couldn’t believe it when I saw you there,” she said. “I’d dreamed of you so much, wanted you so badly, and then there you were. But I thought you hated me, so I didn’t dare let you see how I felt. And there was Matt.”

  “Why did you not tell me the truth at the beginning?” he asked quietly.

  “Because I couldn’t be sure that you wouldn’t take him away from me.” She sighed. “And because I wanted you to trust me, to realize all by yourself that I’d loved you far too much to betray you with another man.”