by Lucy Monroe
The only thing that remained was her career and it was not the comfort it had always been. She wished she could be the mannequin she’d often compared herself to…no emotions, no pain lacerating her insides.
The phone chirped again a few minutes later, but she ignored it. When it rang a third time, she turned it off and threw it against the wall. It thumped and fell with an empty thud, nothing to satisfy the feelings raging through her.
A knock sounded on the door. “Amber, sweetheart, you need to be at your shoot in thirty minutes and I haven’t heard the shower go.”
Her mom’s voice sounded hoarse, like she’d been crying. Amber could not afford to rage…to give into the pain…not right now. Her mom needed her to be strong. She needed to be strong for herself. Using the techniques she’d taught herself to get centered for a shoot, she pulled the emotions in until they were contained deep inside.
Another knock sounded. “Amber…are you all right?”
“Fine.” Her own lie added to all those her mom had told her…for the same good cause, though. Right? “I’ll be out in a little bit.”
“Okay, honey.”
“Thanks, Mom.” Was that normal voice hers?
How could it be? But she had to keep it together. There was too much emotional turmoil surrounding them already at the moment. She’d tell her mom about Miguel. Later. After her dad and sister had gone home to Boston. After she was sure her mom was going to be okay emotionally as well as legally.
Amber would be strong for her mom. Strong for herself, she couldn’t rely on anyone else.
CHAPTER TEN
ONLYAmber didn’t tell her. She didn’t see the need. Her mom asked about Miguel once and Amber told her about his trip to Prague. Thingsdid heat up with her career and she was so busy working, she saw her mom rarely.
When Helen told her that she was going to work for George Wentworth and moving to Boston so Amber could spend her off time getting to know her family there, she was relieved her mom would not be alone. She kept the house in California as a home base, though. She knew they all expected her to go to Boston, that her mom had moved to make it easier for her, but she couldn’t do it. She needed time to come to terms with where her life had gone.
Her sister got married and Amber flew to Boston to be maid of honor. She spent the two days she had with her family wearing the smile that had launched her career. The nausea had started a couple of weeks after she and Miguel broke up, but she didn’t worry about it. Stress could do that to a person.
She didn’t feel much like eating anyway, so when she was nauseous, she didn’t. She got a commercial spot and found it easy to lose the five pounds her agent wanted her to. She started wearing more makeup to hide the circles under her eyes from lack of sleep.
When she slept, she dreamed. About Miguel. They weren’t nightmares, far from it…she relived every moment in his arms, but waking up hurt like someone was pounding her chest with an anvil. Easier not to sleep at all than to deal with the pain on waking.
She was driving to a shoot two hours from her home when the lack of sleep caught up with her. She woke in an area hospital. Her body ached, but not like anything was broken. Like she was having a really bad period.
She moaned and forced her eyes to open.
No one else was in the emergency cubicle.
“Miss Taylor?”
She looked up as the doctor came in. At least she assumed it was the doctor. “Yes?”
“How do you feel?”
“Not so good.”
“It could be a lot worse.”
“Yes.”
“When you fell asleep, your foot relaxed on the accelerator and impact happened at less than thirty miles per hour we figure.”
“Was anyone else hurt?” She couldn’t stand the thought of being responsible for someone else’s pain.
“No other cars were involved.”
“I didn’t break anything?”
“How do you feel?” he asked, instead of answering.
“Achy. Like I’m having a bad monthly.”
“I’m sorry, Miss Taylor.”
Something in his eyes said he meant more than commiseration for cramps. “What’s wrong with me?”
“You lost the baby.”
“Baby?” She’d been pregnant? But she and Miguel had been so careful.
“You didn’t know you were pregnant?”
“No.”
“That explains you not taking care of yourself.”
She stared at him, the silent criticism screaming through her brain. She hadn’t known she was carrying a baby. She hadn’t taken care of the baby. Her baby was dead because she’d fallen asleep at the wheel.
When she lurched up in bed, the doctor seemed to know exactly what she needed and had the small elliptically shaped dish near her mouth before she was sick on the sheets of the pristine hospital bed. Pristine and white. No blood anywhere. Her baby was already gone.
She checked herself out of the hospital a few hours later after calling her agent and telling him a portion of the truth. She’d been in an accident. She didn’t tell her mom anything, just went home and prepared for the next day’s shoot.
The nausea did not leave with the end of her pregnancy. The thought of food sickened her. She had not eaten enough to keep her pregnancy viable, she could not force herself to imbibe fuel for her own sake now. She didn’t deserve it. She forced herself to sleep, though, no matter how much waking might hurt.
She couldn’t risk falling asleep at the wheel again and hurting someone else.
She answered her cell phone five days after losing the baby and heard Miguel’s voice on the other end of the line. “Don’t ever call me again,” she said in a voice that sounded dead even to her own ears and then hung up.
Three weeks later, her agent called her into his office. He was practically vibrating with anger as he tossed a set of photos onto the desk in front of her.
“What the bloody hell is this, Amber?”
She looked down at the pictures and tried to understand what had him so angry. Her smile was there. She’d posed exactly as the photographer had asked her to. She looked back at her agent with a question in her eyes.
“You look like a flippin’ skeleton.”
“You told me to lose weight for the commercial.”
“That was ten, maybe fifteen pounds…hell, honey, I can’t tell how much weight you’ve lost, ago. You want to tell me why you’re trying to kill yourself slowly?”
“I’m not.”
“Then, explain this.” He waved with anger at the pictures.
She shrugged. “Is the client mad?”
“Mad? I don’t know. They refused to use the pictures and got another model for the gig. You tell me.”
“Oh. Maybe we should concentrate on commercials then.”
“You aren’t a flippin’ actress, Amber Taylor. You’re a model and you’re going to be a dead model if you don’t start eating.”
She didn’t know what to say. She wasn’t going to die. That was silly. So, she’d lost some weight. “I’ll try to gain a few pounds back.”
“Good.”
But she couldn’t make herself eat. She couldn’t make herself feel. She understood how her father could have turned off all emotion. It was the only way to control the pain. She hoped that if she had a child, she would not abandon it, but she didn’t. Her baby was dead and she could not stand to feel anymore.
She thought of her sister and how the other woman had kept loving in spite of a lifetime of rejection. How odd that Amber would turn out more like their father despite being raised by a loving mom than Ellie who had been raised in a dearth of emotion.
A week later, she walked into the house to find her sister, her mom, her dad and Sandor Christofides ensconced in the living room waiting for her.
Her sister gasped when she saw Amber. Her dad said a truly ugly word and Amber’s mom started to cry. “Baby, I don’t know what’s happening, but you’ve got to let us help.”<
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“Is this about Miguel?” Ellie asked, proving that the instincts of a twin went beyond being raised in the same home or even aware of one another’s existence.
Suddenly it all hit her…the loss of love before it had been fully realized, the loss of her baby, so precious and unknown to her, the loss of trust in life as she knew it. Everything inside Amber coalesced into a kind of hurt that sent her crumpling to the floor, a keening wail filling the air around her. Some distant part of her mind said she should go to whoever was hurting so much they were making that noise, but she was too wounded to move.
The next two months weren’t easy. She had to force herself to eat with the same regimented dedication she had once forced herself not to eat for the sake of her career. The days were difficult to get through, the nights longer so much so.
She had stopped dreaming.
Miguel called again. She didn’t bother to say anything this time. She simply hung up.
She still didn’t feel, but her skeletal thinness was slowly going away and she did her level best to project a smiling countenance when she was with her family. It was on the day that her agent called her with the first job in weeks that she realized she didn’t want to be a model any longer.
She finally understood that it had always been more than her body when she had nothing more to give to the camera. She went to work for her father and moved into his mansion, which seemed to make those around her happier. And that was all that mattered anymore.
Miguel felt like hell.
He’d spent twenty hours of the last forty-eight traveling and hadn’t slept in longer than that. The last six months had been the most dismal of his life. The project was going fine, but he missed Amber like an amputated limb. And she wanted nothing to do with him.
He’d made a monumental mistake breaking up with her over the phone…or rather breaking up with her at all. He’d been worried about being fair to her, about his own ability to remain faithful when they saw each other rarely. Well, the last concern had been put to rest with no further doubts.
For the first time in his adult life, he’d been completely celibate for six months. And not because of lack of opportunity. There were many beautiful, sophisticated, sexually available women in Prague. However, none of them had sea-blue eyes he could drown in, or the endearing habit of biting a perfectly formed lower lip, or the fascination with history that his preciousquerida had exhibited.
None of them touched his heart or sent his libido into orbit with a simple look.
He’d realized his mistake early, but fought his feelings, sure they were temporary. While he’d never missed a woman before, he was confident that what he’d been feeling was not love. So damn sure of himself that he’d ignored his own heart because his mind said that love and marriage would come later in life, and not to a career minded woman he would have to share with the rest of the world.
For a man who was so rarely caught wrong, he’d done a spectacular job of messing up.
He’d finally given into his urges to call her and she’d told him she never wanted to hear from him again and hung up on him. He’d tried to call back, but she hadn’t answered. He’d been furious, or so he’d told himself for his pride’s sake. It had taken another two months for him to acknowledge that what he felt was hurt and he’d tried calling again.
This time she had not even done him the courtesy of speaking. She’d simply hung up and it was then that he realized he was not dealing with an angry woman, but one who was in pain. And he felt like hell, knowing it was his fault. Maybe she was better off without a selfish bastard like himself in her life.
He’d convinced himself of that for another two months. Until the weekly report came in from his investigator. Okay, he was obsessed, but he needed her. She refused to have anything to do with him, so he kept track of her, got copies of all her work, watched the commercial she’d made over and over again until he felt like some kind of seedy stalker.
He thought she looked like something was missing…her spark of animation. Then he would tell himself he was being self-serving believing that. But when the report came back that she was no longer modeling and had canceled her contract with her agent, he knew something was very wrong and he was determined to find out what and fix it.
If he could.
He tormented himself with the thought that she might have found someone else, but the investigator had no evidence of her dating. Not that he was watching her that closely. Miguel wasn’t really a stalker. Nor was he willing to invade her privacy completely. But there was no public evidence that Amber had gotten involved with another man.
Grateful for that small favor, Miguel stumbled into the hotel room in California. He would sleep and then go to see Amber tomorrow.
His cell rang and he thought about letting it go, but saw the caller was his investigator.
He flipped the phone open. “Menendez here.”
The investigator spoke in rapid Catalan, but Miguel had no trouble understanding.
“Amber is living with her mother in George Wentworth’s home? And she’s working for him? In what capacity?”
He didn’t know what shocked him the most, that Amber had moved away from her beloved warm beach, that she was living with a man old enough to be her father or that she was working for him. But the investigators next revelation, sent Miguel’s mind reeling in a free fall.
George Wentworth’s daughter was almost a mirror image of Amber Taylor. The investigator had done some further checking and discovered that Wentworth had twin daughters, but one of them had disappeared from the hospital less than a week after birth. There was only one conclusion to draw from this, considering how alike Amber and Eleanor Christofides were in looks. Amber was George Wentworth’s daughter.
Miguel didn’t know how her mom fit into this strange turn of events, but the fact that she was living in Wentworth’s house right now, too, said something.
He was tempted to order an immediate flight to the East Coast, but common sense prevailed. If he was exhausted, his pilot would be, too. He needed sleep before seeing Amber and time to digest this new information.
He called and ordered an early morning takeoff instead, then despite all the stuff crowding his brain, he slept.
Amber schooled her features into a pleasant expression and then went downstairs to meet her family for dinner. Ellie and Sandor were here, too, and she knew that she had to be careful to project positive emotion or her sister was going to start asking questions again.
In some dim part of her brain, it surprised her that her mom was easier to fool than her sister. But maybe that was because Helen Taylor seemed as intrigued by George Wentworth as Amber was. Though for obviously different reasons.
At first, Amber had thought the interestwas because he was her father, but after moving to Boston, she’d come to see that her mom’s fascination with her father was much more personal. She was glad for her mom even if the joy didn’t reach all the way inside. Her brain told her this was a good thing and that if her heart could feel anything, it would be happy.
Ellie was smiling and chatting with their father when Amber walked into the living room, but her sister jumped up and rushed over for a hug when she saw her.
Amber returned the embrace, careful not to pull away too quickly.
Ellie kept hold of her arms as she stepped back a little and looked to Amber closely. “You look great.”
“Thank you. You, too.” Ellie didn’t dress as trendily as Amber, but she always looked nice and this evening was no exception.
“How are you liking your new job?”
“I like it, more than I expected even, but Mom’s fascination with financial details rubbed off somewhere along the way.”
“And she’s wonderful at it, too,” her mom chimed in, her voice warm.
“So her supervisor tells me,” her dad said with a smile and a small one-armed hug for her mom.
Weird. This thing between them was strange. Good, but definitely strange. She now re
alized that her mom’s inability to fall for another guy had as much to do with her fear of what would happen when Amber was discovered for who she really was as her great love for Len Taylor.
“It is all good,” Sandor added, completing the round of approval for her new job.
She’d been a little stunned at first that no one had demurred when she’d said she didn’t want to be a model anymore. Then she’d latched onto the fact from a couple of things her mom and sister had said that they blamed her career in part for her near death experience from self-enforced starvation.
They blamed Miguel, too, and the stress of learning she’d been kidnapped as a baby. Her mom still felt guilty, no matter what Amber said. She hated that, but she couldn’t admit the truth. That her inability to eat was her own fault…she was the one who had killed her baby.
She couldn’t admit that to them, though.
If she allowed herself to feel, the grief and guilt would overwhelm her.
Ellie was looking at her worriedly again and she realized she’d let her façade of contentment slip. She was pulling it back into place, trying to project warm friendliness in her eyes when the doorbell rang. Seconds later her dad’s housekeeper led Miguel Menendez into the room.
He looked haggard. Dark circles under his eyes, thinner than she’d last seen him and his complexion was almost sallow with stress and fatigue. Even so, he was the most gorgeous thing her eyes had ever set on.
Shouldn’t she hate the sight of him? But she didn’t…only the feelings trying to break through her self-imposed barrier.
He ignored everyone else in the room and focused entirely on her. “Querida,we need to talk.”
The world went dark around the edges. She swayed.
He lurched toward her, his arms stretched out and he swore. In Chinese. Like the first time he cursed around her.
For some reason that was more than she could take and the blackness descended like a welcome blanket.
When she opened her eyes, he was there.
“Go away.”
“No.”
She glared, a surge of anger going through her. “I don’t want to see you.”
“Yes, you do. I screwed up. I need to fix it. We need each other.”
