Emilio said quietly, ‘I could see them, those old roses. There were no roses where we lived. No trees. Your life could not have been more different from mine. And yet—it was extraordinary. Like finding the other half of myself. The person who had done the things I hadn’t. And could somehow share them with me.’
Abby’s heart beat hard. She turned to him in the gathering dusk.
‘It was important to you,’ she said on a note of wonder.
‘You have no idea how important.’
‘Tell me.’
He struggled to put it into words.
‘You have to understand that I was not in a good mood. I was burning up with resentment. My family was falling apart and I had to do something about it. But—that meant giving up everything I had worked for. And I had worked, by God.’
‘I know,’ Abby said quietly. ‘Federico said.’
He sent her a quick unsmiling look.
‘Then maybe you can imagine how vicious I was feeling. I had to let people like the Montijos patronise me because I wanted to do business with them. From their point of view I was just one up from a performing monkey. They would ask me to dinner and then expect me to put on an exhibition match to pay for my supper.’
Abby stepped closer. ‘Horrible,’ she said vehemently.
Emilio laughed. ‘Actually, it wasn’t as bad as I’d started to think. Felipe was fine. We’re still friends. Some of the younger women were a bit—predatory.’
Abby remembered the knowing conversation in Rosanna’s bedroom. ‘I remember.’
‘I didn’t like women of that class very much. And I’d got used to protecting myself from teenage groupies. And then I walked out into the garden that night and there you were.’
‘I’m beginning to see,’ she said slowly.
‘You were everything I’d learned to mistrust,’ Emilio said very seriously. ‘And then, suddenly, everything I wanted.’
‘Oh!’ said Abby again, on a long note of wonder.
He took her hands.
‘You were too young and I was too mixed up and it could never have worked. But I never forgot, my heart, my life. All the time I’ve played the field, just like that damned newspaper said, it was because I knew that second-best was never going to do and I didn’t want any woman to break her heart over me. So I kept it strictly for fun.’
The Callies, the Floritas, even the Rosannas slid over the horizon. Abby felt as if a great weight had lifted from her heart.
At last she dared to say it. ‘Do you love me?’
Emilio did not hesitate so much as a heartbeat. ‘Forever.’
Abby trembled. But she believed him. She found she was trembling because she believed him. It seemed the most important thing that she had ever done.
‘It seems so—unlikely.’
He misunderstood.
‘I’ll prove it to you,’ he said urgently.
‘What?’
‘Come with me.’
He seized her hand and ran her back to the house. Once there, he took her through the shadowed rooms into the cool tiled sitting room. At one end there was a glass cabinet. He switched on a table lamp to show it to her.
Abby shook her head bewildered.
‘Your tennis medals?’
‘Only the first one. This is the important stuff.’
She bent forward.
There was a gold medallion on a stiff blue ribbon. The other medal seemed to be for life saving. On the next shelf there was a tennis racquet, its strings grey with use. A certificate which said Emilio Arturo Diz was a licensed pilot. A parchment deed of some sort, sealed with a huge red wax blob and silk strings. And a shoe.
A shoe?
Abby leaned forward, staring.
It was very high-heeled, cracked with nine years incarceration, strappy and delicate. She had hated those shoes so much. And he had found the one she kicked off and kept it all these years.
Abby found herself forgiving Rosanna Montijo, all seventeen-year-old girls and even ankle-breaking stiletto heels. She turned and found herself in his arms.
‘Emilio Diz, you’re a romantic,’ she said, her voice full of tender laughter.
He was surprised. ‘Of course.’
‘And you love me.’
The arms round her waist tightened until she winced. But she did not complain. She leaned into him, breathing in his scent of him, knowing her power. And his.
She said quickly, bravely, ‘Ask me to marry you again.’
‘I am going to. I always wanted to do it here, among my trees.’
She moved in his arms. ‘Then take me outside. Now. Quickly.’
Emilio caught her urgency. He almost ran her through the silent house.
The sky was purple-black. A soft wind curled off the neighbouring peaks and stirred her hair. The stars glittered. In the shadows, his body was just as she had remembered all these years, strong and fiercely controlled.
‘Marry me,’ he said in a shaken undervoice.
Abby put her arms round him. She did exactly what she had done all those years ago. Kissed him, without reserve. With total passion. With her whole heart.
And he did what he had done in her dreams ever since. He kissed her back.
Fierce, yes. Controlled, no.
Abby drew a long, long breath of completion.
‘Yes,’ she said.
ISBN: 978-1-4603-6547-2
MORE THAN A MILLIONAIRE
First North American Publication 2001.
Copyright © 2001 by Sophie Weston.
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More Than A Millionaire (Contemporary Romance) Page 18
