by Olivia Gates
She came to, to Rodrigo kissing her, worry roughening his voice. “Cybele, mi alma, por favor, open your eyes.”
Her lids weighed tons, but she opened them to allay his anxiety. “I thought you knocked me senseless the first time because it was the first time. Seems it’s going to be the norm. Not that you’ll hear anything but cries for an encore from this end.”
She felt the tension drain from his body, pour into the erection still buried inside her. His gaze probed her tear-drenched face, proprietary satisfaction replacing the agitation in eyes that gleamed with that Catalan imperiousness. “In that case, prepare to spend half of our married life knocked senseless.”
She giggled as he wrapped her nerveless body around him and prowled to the bathroom. He took her into the tub, already filled, laid her between his thighs, her back to his front, supporting her as she half floated. He moved water over her satiated body, massaging her with it as he did with his legs and lips. She hummed with the bliss reverberating in her bones.
She would have taken once with him, would have lived on the memory forever. But this was forever. It was so unbelievable that sometimes she woke up feeling as if she were suffocating, believing that it had all been a delusion.
She had serious security issues. This perfection was making her more scared something would happen to shatter it all.
He sighed in contentment. “Mi amor milagrosa.”
She turned her face into his chest, was about to whisper back that it was he who was the miracle lover when a ring sounded from the bedroom. The center calling.
He exhaled a rough breath. “They’ve got to be kidding.”
She turned in his arms. “It has to be something major, if they’re calling you on your wedding night. You have to answer.”
He harrumphed as he rose, dried himself haphazardly and went to answer. He came back frowning. “Pile up, serious injuries. Son and wife of an old friend among them.” He drove his fingers in his hair. “¡Maldita sea! I only started making love to you.”
“Hey. Surgeon here, too, remember? Nature of the beast.” She left the tub, dried quickly, hugged him with both arms-an incredible sensation. “And you don’t have to leave me behind. Let me come. I hear from my previous employers that I was a damn good surgeon. I can be of use to you and the casualties.”
His frown dissolved, until his smile blinded her with his delight. “This isn’t how I visualized spending our wedding night, mi corazon. But having you across a table in my OR is second on my list only to having you wrapped all around me in my bed.”
After the emergency, during which their intervention was thankfully lifesaving, they had two weeks of total seclusion on his estate.
The three weeks after that, Cybele ticked off the two top items on Rodrigo’s list, over and over. Daily, in fact.
They worked together during the days, discovering yet another area in which they were attuned. It became a constant joy and stimulation, to keep realizing how fully they could share their lives and careers.
Then came the nights. And if their first time and their semi-aborted wedding night had been world-shaking, she’d had no idea how true intimacy would escalate the pleasure and creativity of their encounters. Even those momentous occasions paled by comparison.
It was their five-week anniversary today.
She was in her twenty-second week of pregnancy and she’d never felt healthier or happier. Not that that convinced Rodrigo to change her prenatal checkups from weekly to biweekly. “Ready, mi amor?”
She sprang to her feet, dissolved into his embrace. He kissed her until she was wrapped around him, begging him to postpone her checkup. She had an emergency only he could handle.
He bit her lip gently, put her away. “It’ll take all of fifteen minutes. Then I’m all yours. As always.”
She hooked her arm through his, inhaled his hormone-stimulating scent. “Do you want to find out the gender of the baby?”
He looked at her intently, as if wanting to make sure of her wish before he voiced his opinion. Seemed he didn’t want to risk volunteering one that opposed hers. “Do you?”
She decided to let the delicious man off the hook. “I do.”
His smile dawned. He did want to know, but considered it up to her to decide. Surely she couldn’t love him more, could she?
“Then we find out.”
“So what do you hope it is?”
He didn’t hesitate, nuzzled her neck, whispered, “A girl. A tiny replica of her unique mother.”
She surrendered to his cosseting, delight swirling inside her. “Would you be disappointed if it’s a boy?”
His smile answered unequivocally. “I’m just being greedy. And then, you know how seriously cool it is to be female around here.”
She made the goofy gesture and expression that had become their catchphrase. “Women rule.”
Four hours later, they were back in their bedroom.
They’d made love for two of those, only stopped because they had a dinner date with Ramón and other colleagues in Barcelona.
She was leaning into him, gazing in wonder at his reflection in the mirror as he towered behind her, kissing her neck, caressing her zipper up her humming body, taking extra care of her rounding belly. She sighed her bliss. “Think Steven and Agnes will be happy it’s a boy?”
His indulgent smile didn’t waver. But she was so attuned to his every nuance of expression now, she could tell the question disturbed him. Since it indirectly brought up Mel.
And the mention of Mel had been the only thing to make him tense since they’d gotten married, to make him even testy and irritated. He’d once even snapped at her. She’d been shocked that day. And for a moment, black thoughts had swamped her.
She’d wondered if this fierceness was different from his early moroseness concerning Mel, if now that he was her husband, Mel was no longer simply his dead foster brother, but her dead first husband and he hated her mentioning Mel, out of jealousy.
The implications of that were so insupportable, she’d nearly choked on them. But only for a moment. Then he’d apologized so incredibly and she’d remembered what he was, what Mel had been to him.
She’d come to the conclusion that the memory of Mel was still a gaping wound inside him. One that hurt more as time passed, as the loss solidified. With him busy being the tower of strength everyone clung to, he hadn’t dealt with his own grief. He hadn’t attained the closure he’d made possible for everyone else to have. She hoped their baby would heal the wound, provide that closure.
His hands resumed caressing her belly. “I think they’ll be happy as long as the baby is healthy.”
And she had to get something else out of the way. “I called Agnes this morning and she sounded happier than I’ve ever heard her. She said those who filed the lawsuits weren’t creditors but investors who gave Mel money to invest in the hospital, and that the money was found in an account they didn’t know about.”
His hands stopped their caresses. “That’s right.”
“But why didn’t they ask for their money instead of resorting to legal action, adding insult to injury to bereaved parents? A simple request would have sent Agnes and Steven looking through Mel’s documents and talking to his lawyer and accountant.”
“Maybe they feared Agnes and Steven wouldn’t give back the money without a strong incentive.”
“Apart from finding this an incredibly irrational fear since Mel and his parents are upstanding people, there must have been legal provisos in place to assure everyone’s rights.”
“I don’t know why they acted as they did. What’s important is that the situation’s over, and no harm’s done to anyone.”
And she saw it in his eyes. The lie.
She grabbed his hands. “You’re not telling me the truth.” He tried to pull his hand away. She clung. “Please, tell me.”
That bleak look, which she’d almost forgotten had ever marred his beauty, was back like a swirl of ink muddying clear water.
> But it was worse. He pushed away from her, glared at her in the mirror like a tiger enraged at someone pulling on a half ripped-out claw.
“You want the truth? Or do you just want me to confirm that those people acted irrationally, that Mel was an upstanding man? If so, you should do like Agnes and Steven, grab at my explanation for this mess, turn a blind eye and cling to your illusions.”
She swung around to face him. “You made up this story to comfort them. The debts were real. And you must have done more than settle them to make Mel’s creditors change their story.”
“What do you care about the sordid details?”
Sordid? Oh, God. “Did…did I have something to do with this? Are you still protecting me, too?”
“No. You had nothing to do with any of it. It was just more lies Mel fed me, poisoned me with. I lived my life cleaning up after him, covering up for him. And now he’s reaching back from the grave and forcing me to keep on doing it. And you know what? I’m sick of it. I’ve been getting sicker by the day, of embellishing his image and memory to you, to Agnes and Steven, of gritting my teeth on the need to tell you what I figured out he’d done to me. To us.”
She staggered backward under the impact of his exasperated aggression. “What did he do? And what do you mean, to ‘us’?”
“How can I tell you? It would be my word against a man who can’t defend himself. It would make me a monster in your eyes.”
“No.” She threw herself in his path. “Nothing would make you anything but the man I love with every fiber of my being.”
He held her at arm’s length. “Just forget it, Cybele. I shouldn’t have said anything…Dios, I wish I could take it back.”
But the damage had been done. Rodrigo’s feelings about Mel seemed to be worse than she’d ever feared. And she had to know. The rest. Everything. Now. “Please, Rodrigo, I have to know.”
“How can I begin to explain, when you don’t even remember how we first met?”
She stared at him, the ferocity of his frustration pummeling her, bloodying her. She gasped, the wish to remember so violent, it smashed at the insides of her skull like giant hammers.
Suddenly, the last barricade shattered. Memories burst out of the last dark chasm in her mind, snowballing into an avalanche. She remembered.
Thirteen
She swung away, a frantic beast needing a way out.
The world tilted, the ground rushed at her at a crazy angle.
“Cybele.”
Her name thundered over her, then lightning hit her, intercepted her fall, live wires snaring her in cabled strength before she reinjured her arm beneath her plummeting weight.
Memories flooded through her like water through a drowning woman’s lungs. In brutal sequence.
She’d first seen Rodrigo at a fundraiser for her hospital. Across the ballroom, towering above everyone, canceling out their existence. She’d felt hit by lightning then, too.
She’d stood there, unable to tear her eyes off him as people kept swamping him in relentless waves, moths to his irresistible fire. All through, he’d somehow never taken his eyes off her. She’d been sure she’d seen the same response in his eyes, the same inability to believe its power, to resist it.
Then Ramón had joined him, turned to look at her, too, and she knew Rodrigo was telling him about her. He left Ramón’s side, charted a course for her. She stood there, shaking, knowing her life would change the moment he reached her.
Then a man next to her had collapsed. Even disoriented by Rodrigo’s hypnotic effect, her doctor auto-function took over, and she’d rushed to the man’s rescue.
She’d kept up her resuscitation efforts until paramedics came, and then she’d swayed up to look frantically for Rodrigo. But he’d vanished.
Disappointment crushed her even when she kept telling herself she’d imagined it all, her own response, too, that if she’d talked to him she would have found out he was nothing like the man she’d created in her mind.
Within days, she’d met Mel. He came with a huge donation to her hospital and became the head of the new surgery department. He offered her a position and started pursuing her almost at once. Flattered by his attention, she’d accepted a couple of dates. Then he proposed. By then, she had suspected he was a risk-taking jerk, and turned him down. But he’d said he used that persona at work to keep everyone on their toes, and showed himself to be diametrically different, everything she’d hoped for in a man, until she accepted.
Then Mel had introduced Rodrigo as his best friend.
She was shocked-and distraught that she hadn’t imagined his effect on her. But she’d certainly imagined her effect on him. He seemed to find her abhorrent. Mel, unaware of the tension between the two people he said meant the most to him, insisted on having Rodrigo with them all the time. And though Mel’s bragging accounts of his friend’s mile-high bedpost notches had her despising Rodrigo right back, she’d realized she couldn’t marry Mel while she felt that unstoppable attraction to his best friend. So she broke off the engagement. And it was then that Mel drove off in a violent huff and had the accident that had crippled him.
Feeling devastated by guilt when Mel accused her of being the reason he’d been crippled, Cybele took back her ring. They got married in a ceremony attended by only his parents a month after he was discharged from hospital. Rodrigo had left for Spain after he’d made sure there was nothing more he could do for his friend at that time, and to Cybele’s relief, he didn’t attend.
But the best of intentions didn’t help her cope with the reality of living with a bitter, volatile man. They’d discussed with a specialist the ways to have a sex life, but his difficulties had agonized him even though Cybele assured him it didn’t matter. She didn’t feel the loss of what she’d never had, was relieved when Mel gave up trying, and poured her energy into helping him return to the OR while struggling to catch up with her job.
Then Rodrigo came back, and Mel’s erratic behavior spiked. She’d confronted him, and he said he felt insecure around any able-bodied man, especially Rodrigo, but needed him more than ever. He was the world’s leading miracle worker in spinal injuries, and he was working on putting Mel back on his feet.
But there was one thing Mel needed even more now. He was making progress with the sex therapy specialists, but until he could be a full husband to her, he wanted something to bind them, beyond her sense of duty and honor and a shared house. A baby.
Cybele had known he was testing her commitment. But was feeling guiltier now that she’d lived with his affliction reason enough to take such a major step at such an inappropriate time? Would a baby make him feel more of a man? Was it wise to introduce a baby into the instability of their relationship?
Guilt won, and with her mother promising she’d help out with the baby, she had the artificial insemination.
Within a week, her conception was confirmed. The news only made Mel unbearably volatile, until she’d said she was done tiptoeing around him since it only made him worse. He apologized, said he couldn’t take the pressure, needed time off. And again Cybele succumbed, suspended her residency even knowing she’d lose her position, to help him and to work out their problems. Then he dropped another bombshell on her. He wanted them to spend that time off on Rodrigo’s estate.
When she’d resisted, he said it would be a double benefit, as Rodrigo wanted Mel there for tests for the surgeries that would give Mel back the use of his legs. And she’d had to agree.
When they’d arrived in Barcelona, Rodrigo had sent them a limo. Mel had it drive them to the airfield where his plane was kept. When she objected, he said he didn’t need legs to fly, that flying would make him feel like he was whole again.
But during the flight, in answer to some innocuous comments, he got nasty then abusive. She held her tongue and temper, knowing it wasn’t the place to escalate their arguments, but she decided that once they landed, she’d face him, as she’d faced herself, and say that their relationship wasn’t working, and it
wasn’t because of his turmoil, but because of who he was. A man of a dual nature, one side she’d loved but could no longer find, and the other she couldn’t bear and seemed was all that remained.
But they hadn’t landed.
Now she heaved as the collage of the crash detonated in image after shearing image, accompanied by a hurricane of deafening cacophony and suffocating terror.
Then the maelstrom exchanged its churning motion for a linear trajectory as all trivial memories of every day of the year before the accident burst like flashes of sickening light, obliterating the blessed darkness of the past months.
Everything decelerated, came to a lurching stop.
Her face was being wiped in coolness, her whole self bathed in Rodrigo’s concern. She raised sore eyes to his reddened ones.
His lips feathered over them with trembling kisses. “You remember.”
“My end of things,” she rasped. “Tell me yours.”
The heart beneath her ear felt as if it would ram out of his chest.
Then he spoke. “When I saw you at that fundraiser, it was like seeing my destiny. I told Ramón that, and he said that if anyone else had said that, he would have laughed. But coming from me, I, who always know what’s right for me, he believed it, and to go get you. But as I moved to do that, all hell broke loose. You rushed to that man’s aid and I was called to deal with multiple neuro-trauma cases back here. I asked Ramón to find out all he could about you, so I could seek you out the moment I came back.
“I tried for the last almost eighteen months not to reconstruct what I instinctively knew and didn’t want to-couldn’t face. But the more I knew you, the more inconsistencies I discovered since the accident, the more I couldn’t pretend not to know how it all happened anymore. Mel was there, too, that initial day. He was right behind me as I turned away from Ramón. He must have overheard my intentions. And he decided to beat me to you.”
