One Night In Collection

by Various Authors

‘Sometimes, when the wind whistles through the trees, I swear I can hear the scream my mother gave when she saw Eduardo’s body,’ he said in a low tone. ‘After Eduardo’s funeral I couldn’t bear to be here and I moved away, played polo in just about every corner of the earth. But every night my dreams brought me back to the hacienda and I saw his body, lying grey and lifeless.’

  Diego gave a faint shrug. ‘I had no contact with my mother and grandfather during all that time, but when Alonso died four years ago I discovered that he had made me his heir. Coming back here was … hard.’ Words could not explain how hard it had been to return to his childhood home, he thought grimly. ‘At first I resolved to sell the estancia—but I couldn’t. Eduardo loved this place, it was his birthright, and to sell it would have felt like the ultimate betrayal.’

  He glanced down at Rachel’s upturned face and thought how beautiful she was. Tears shimmered in her eyes, and he realised with a jolt that her tears were for him.

  ‘Do you understand now why I can’t live here?’ he asked jerkily. ‘This should have been Eduardo’s home.’ And Eduardo should have had a beautiful wife and a child. His eyes were drawn to Rachel’s swollen stomach. He knew she was finding these last few weeks of her pregnancy tiring, but she never complained, in the same way that she had not complained about moving to a new country and starting a new life. He had never told her how much he admired her for the way she had coped, he brooded. He had simply shut her out, as he shut everyone out. She deserved more than that, but he could not give her more. He was empty inside.

  ‘Rachel …’ While he had been wrapped up in his own thoughts she had turned very pale, and he saw a spasm of pain cross her face. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said gruffly. ‘I know you hoped to stay here.’

  She shook her head. ‘It’s all right. I think you are wrong to blame yourself for Eduardo’s death, and I also think he would have wanted you to be here,’ she said gently. ‘But I understand why you would prefer to go back to the city, and I’m sorry I sent Arturo away.’

  Rachel managed a faint smile, wanting to reassure Diego, but she felt another curious sensation in her lower stomach like the one she had felt a few moments ago, and she caught her breath as a sudden searing pain tore through her, so intense that she doubled over.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Diego demanded urgently. ‘Are you in pain?’

  ‘It’s nothing,’ she muttered, standing upright as the spasm passed. ‘I think it must have been one of those practice contractions, in preparation for the real thing. The lady at the birthing class said you can have them for weeks before the birth. They’re called Braxton Hicks contractions.’

  ‘Santa madre! I don’t give a damn what they’re called,’ Diego said explosively. ‘I just don’t want you having them here, miles from anywhere.’ He dragged his hand through his hair. ‘Wait here while I go and call Arturo. I’ve left my mobile at the stables and the only phone in the house is downstairs.’ He strode across the room but paused in the doorway and turned back to her. ‘Rachel … thank you.’

  She understood immediately that he was thanking her for not denouncing him as a murderer as his mother and grandfather had done. Tears pricked her eyes but she gave him a wobbly smile. ‘Go and make that call.’

  She heard him thunder down the stairs and wanted to call out that there was no need to panic, but just then another spasm ripped across her abdomen and she stifled a cry. She hadn’t expected the practice contractions to be so strong and did not relish having them for the next few weeks. Her backache was agony and another spasm, worse than the two previous ones, almost made her legs buckle. She bit down on her lip so hard that she tasted blood, and tried to breathe calmly. But as the contraction finally passed she became aware of wetness between her legs and a bolt of fear shot through her as she realised with a sense of numb disbelief that her waters had broken.

  Diego slammed down the phone and swore savagely before he ran back upstairs. ‘Arturo will be a while. There’s been a serious accident on the freeway and he says the traffic is … hell,’ he finished slowly, his brain struggling to comprehend the sight of Rachel sitting on the bed, her head thrown back on the pillows and her legs drawn up.

  ‘Dios! What are you doing?’

  Sweat was pouring down her cheeks and her face was screwed up in an expression of agony, but it was the note of fear in her voice that made his gut clench as she gasped, ‘Diego … I think I’m in labour.’

  The paralysis that had temporarily gripped Diego’s muscles eased. ‘No, querida, it’s just the practice contractions,’ he reassured her. ‘The baby’s not due for another four weeks.’

  ‘But it’s coming now.’ Pain ripped through Rachel’s body and she could not hold back her cry. ‘My waters have broken. The baby’s coming, I know it is.’ She stared up at him desperately, tears pouring down her face. ‘I’m scared. It’s too soon. And we can’t get to the hospital.’

  Diego quelled the fear coursing through him and knelt beside the bed, taking one of her hands in his. ‘Querida, even if you are in labour, first babies don’t arrive that quickly. All the books say so. Arturo will come soon and we’ll get you to the hospital, I promise.’

  In reply Rachel let out a scream that tore at Diego’s insides, and he watched in helpless disbelief as she tensed, her fingers clutching spasmodically around his hand. ‘Our baby hasn’t read the book,’ she sobbed when she was able to speak. ‘Diego, please … please, you’ve got to take my knickers off.’

  The note of terror in her voice forced Diego to control his own fear. Rachel was in pain and he had to help her. Without another word, he jumped up, pushed her dress up to her waist and removed her underwear.

  ‘Santa madre, I can see the head,’ he said harshly. ‘Rachel, I must get you to the hospital. The helicopter …’

  ‘I’m not giving birth in a helicopter,’ she gasped, her face screwing up once more as another contraction built to a crescendo of unbelievable pain. ‘Oh, Diego, this is all my fault. I shouldn’t have come, and I’ve put the baby in danger. There’s no one here to help, but I can’t give birth on my own,’ she wept.

  ‘You’re not going to give birth on your own, querida.’ Diego’s voice was strong and calm, soothing Rachel’s terror. ‘I’m going to call the emergency services, but if they don’t arrive in time I will deliver the baby.’

  ‘Can you?’ she asked waveringly, staring up at him with tear-drenched blue eyes.

  There was no room for doubt, no time to remember that he had failed Eduardo. ‘I can do anything,’ he said steadily. ‘Trust me, mi corazon.’

  From then on Rachel lost all sense of time and the world became a blur of pain that sucked her under and threatened to overwhelm her. Her only anchor to reality was the sound of Diego’s deep voice encouraging her and telling her that she was doing brilliantly, that she was the most amazing woman in the world.

  ‘I want to push,’ she groaned as the pain became deeper. ‘Diego … I can’t bear it …’

  ‘Easy now, querida, easy now.’ He spoke to her gently, as he would a frightened colt, trying to control the wild excitement flooding through him as he realised his child was about to be born. But something wasn’t right. ‘Rachel …’ his voice was suddenly urgent ‘… the cord is around the baby’s neck. You mustn’t push yet. Do you understand me? You must wait.’

  Racked with pain, Rachel put her arms above her head and gripped the rungs of the wrought iron headboard as she tried to recall the advice from her birthing class to pretend she was blowing out a candle. Short little breaths, short little breaths … ‘I can’t hold back,’ she cried, panting as she desperately fought the primal urge to push.

  ‘It’s all right.’ Diego snatched air into his lungs. ‘Push now, Rachel.’

  And, with a guttural scream, she did. Diego stared in utter wonder as the baby’s head and shoulders emerged, followed by a tiny slippery body, and as he held his son in his hands his throat burned with the tears that slid unchecked down his face.

 
; ‘We have a son,’ he said in an awestruck voice. ‘Rachel, we have a son.’

  He looked up and saw the tears running down her cheeks. Wordlessly she held out her arms and, as he placed their child in her hands, their eyes met and held and he could not hide the emotions that were storming through him.

  A thin cry broke the intense silence and as Rachel looked down at her tiny son she felt a tidal wave of love for him that swept away the doubts and fears she had harboured during her pregnancy. Nothing was more important than her baby, she thought mistily as she instinctively held him to her breast and felt a piercing joy when he suckled. He was worth every second of pain, and although he had been conceived by accident he was the most wanted, most adored baby in the world.

  She looked up at Diego and her heart contracted when she saw that his face was wet. He was not emotionless, she thought sadly, but he had been so terribly hurt, and she did not know how to heal him. Her mind reran the birth, the frightening power of the contractions that she had felt were tearing her in two, and Diego’s calmness and strength as he had held her. It could have gone terribly wrong, she thought shakily, remembering his sharp command not to push because the cord was round the baby’s neck. Instinctively she hugged her newborn son to her and swallowed the lump in her throat.

  ‘Our son owes you his life,’ she said softly.

  Pain flared in Diego’s eyes. He could not tear his gaze from Rachel. Her hair was lank with sweat and she looked utterly exhausted, but her smile as she looked down at her son was the most beautiful thing he had ever witnessed. She was incredible, he thought deeply. And it had taken him far too long to appreciate how lucky he was to have her in his life—but he did not deserve her when Eduardo had nothing.

  Rachel could sense Diego drawing away from her, retreating behind the barricades he had built around his heart, and she wanted to reach out to him and assure him that she would never hurt him as his mother and grandfather had done. But there was no time—and too much to say—and the sound of footsteps running up the stairs heralded the arrival of the paramedics.

  ‘You had an amazingly quick labour for a first baby,’ the paramedic commented when she had cut the cord and cleaned the baby, before wrapping him in a blanket. ‘What are you going to call him?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ Rachel murmured, stroking her finger over her son’s petal soft cheek and his mass of downy black hair. ‘I want him to have an Argentinian name.’ Because Argentina would always be her child’s home, she acknowledged. She had glimpsed the look of possessive pride on Diego’s face as he had handed the baby to her, and she had known then that whatever happened between them, Diego would never part with his child. ‘You choose,’ she said shyly, giving Diego a tremulous smile. She wondered if he would want to name their son after his twin, but she did not like to suggest it.

  After a second he said, ‘Alejo is a good strong name—which complements his good strong lungs,’ he added wryly, recalling his surprise that such a tiny baby had made such a loud protest when the nurse had washed him.

  ‘Alejo Ortega,’ Rachel tried it out and smiled down at the infant now sleeping in her arms. ‘It’s perfect.’ He was perfect, and she would never ever leave him—which meant that she and Diego were stuck with each other, she thought sleepily, unable to fight the wave of exhaustion that swept over her.

  ‘Are you happy?’ she asked suddenly, staring at Diego and searching for some sign that would give her hope. But the wealth of emotion that had blazed in his eyes at the moment of Alejo’s birth had disappeared, and the smile he gave her was cool and impersonal as he leaned over her and brushed his lips lightly over her cheek.

  ‘Of course I am happy,’ he murmured. ‘You have given me a son. What more could I want?’

  Me, Rachel wanted to cry. You could want me. But she said nothing and prayed he would think her tears were of happiness for her baby.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  ALTHOUGH Alejo appeared in perfect health, despite his abrupt entry into the world, he was four weeks’ premature and the paramedic was anxious to get him to the hospital in Buenos Aires as quickly as possible. Rachel did not argue. Her baby’s well-being was paramount, but once she was in the ambulance she smiled down at her tiny son and whispered, ‘You knew where you wanted to be born, didn’t you, my angel. Now we just have to persuade your daddy that you should grow up on the Estancia Elvira.’

  She spent a week in the exclusive private hospital Diego had booked, but felt a fraud when the nurses fussed around her because, apart from being a bit tired, she felt absolutely fine. Alejo had a mild case of jaundice—not unusual in premature babies, the doctor assured Rachel—but after phototherapy treatment, where he lay beneath an ultraviolet lamp, the baby quickly recovered and demanded feeding every two hours with a shrill cry that could not be ignored.

  Back home, Rachel did her best, and Diego assisted in every way he could and frequently paced the nursery floor at two in the morning with his tiny son nestled into his shoulder. But, after a month of virtually no sleep, Rachel was hollow-eyed and painfully thin, and was inconsolable when the midwife suggested that she should supplement Alejo’s feeds with baby formula.

  ‘He was a low birth weight because he was early, but this baby is going to take after his father,’ the midwife told her, glancing at Diego’s six feet four frame. ‘Alejo will do just fine on bottled milk; it’s you I’m worried about,’ she said, her beady eyes skimming over Rachel. ‘You’ve lost too much weight.’

  ‘I’m naturally thin,’ Rachel defended herself. Privately she was amazed that her once huge stomach was now as flat as it had been before she’d fallen pregnant, and that she was already able to wear her jeans again. But she was exhausted and permanently anxious about Alejo, and her disappointment that she could not breastfeed him properly was made worse when Diego announced that he had hired a nanny.

  ‘I don’t need a nanny. I want to care for my baby myself,’ she snapped, before bursting into tears.

  ‘Post-baby blues are very common for new mothers in the first weeks after the birth,’ the midwife had explained to Diego when he had managed to snatch a word with her out of Rachel’s earshot. But he could not allow the situation to continue. Rachel was wasting away before his eyes and something had to be done.

  ‘Ines will give Alejo his evening feed and be responsible for him during the nights,’ he told Rachel implacably.

  ‘Why can’t I give his evening feed?’ Rachel demanded sulkily, hating the idea of someone else looking after her baby, but at the same time acknowledging that most days she couldn’t think straight because she was so tired.

  ‘Because in the evenings you will do your hair and makeup and change into one of the new dresses I ordered for you, and we will go out for dinner.’ Diego’s eyes gleamed with determination at Rachel’s mutinous expression. ‘You’re not just a mother, querida. You are also a wife, and you have a husband who wants to spend some time with you.’

  Rachel was so stunned by this statement that, once she had met Ines, and discovered her to be both friendly and highly experienced in child care, she stopped fretting about leaving Alejo for a few hours. It was good to wear normal clothes again, instead of maternity dresses. Diego had taken her for fittings at several of the top design houses and now her wardrobes were full of smart day-wear and exquisite evening gowns that showed off her slender figure.

  The first evening they went out she was armed with a mobile phone and a spare in case Ines needed to contact her, but when she sat opposite Diego in one of the city’s most exclusive restaurants it struck her that this was the first proper date they had ever been on. They had eaten out regularly when she had first arrived in Argentina, but then she had been preoccupied with her pregnancy. Now she no longer felt fat and ungainly, and in her sexy new clothes she felt like an attractive woman for the first time in months.

  Had Diego even noticed? she wondered, peeping at him over the top of her menu. He glanced up from the wine list and she smiled at him and shook back h
er hair, excitement shooting through her when she saw his eyes linger on the low-cut neckline of her dress. Her breasts were a lot smaller than during her pregnancy, she thought ruefully. But the flare of heat in his eyes was unmistakable, and heat pooled between her thighs as she wondered if tonight he would ask her to share his bed for the first time since Alejo’s birth.

  They enjoyed a leisurely meal and, although their conversation revolved around their new son, Rachel felt closer to Diego than she had done for weeks. He seemed more relaxed tonight. Earlier in the day, when he had helped her bath Alejo, he had told her how he and Eduardo had delighted in flooding the bathroom at the hacienda when they had been young boys. Seizing the moment, she had encouraged him to recount more tales from his childhood and he had done so, laughing at the memories of the escapades he and Eduardo had got up to. Afterwards, when they had tucked their son into his crib, Diego had looked at her intently.

  ‘I had forgotten all the good times I shared with my brother,’ he admitted. ‘Or maybe I deliberately pushed them away because they were too painful to recall.’

  ‘Are they painful now?’ she’d asked softly.

  He had sounded faintly surprised as he replied slowly, ‘No—they’re good memories, and I don’t want to lose them.’

  They lingered over coffee and in the soft glow of the candle flickering on their table Diego’s eyes gleamed like polished gold. ‘You look stunning tonight,’ he murmured. ‘You have regained your figure, and that dress shows off your tiny waist perfectly.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Rachel’s heart was beating so hard she was sure it must be visible beneath her blue silk dress. She held her breath when he reached across the table and took her hand in his, idly rubbing his thumb over the pulse jerking in her wrist.

  ‘I have a present for you—a little token of thanks for giving me my adorable son.’

  At the sight of the small velvet box Rachel quickly schooled her features into one of appreciation, but when Diego opened the lid to reveal a band of diamonds and brilliant blue gems she gave a gasp of genuine delight. ‘Oh, Diego, it’s lovely.’