have overlooked all that, and her revulsion toward promiscuous men, under the spell of his charisma? Or could that have been his attraction? The challenge of his unavailability? The ambition of being the one to tame the big bad wolf? Could she have been that perverse and stupid….?
“Are you ready, Agnes?”
Cybele lurched at the sound of Rodrigo’s fathomless baritone.
Stomach churning with the sickening conjectures, she dazedly watched him hand Agnes out of the car. Then he bent to her.
“Stay here.” She opened her mouth. A gentle hand beneath her jaw closed it for her. “No arguments, remember?”
“I want to do what you’re all going to do,” she mumbled.
“You’ve had enough. I shouldn’t have let you come at all.”
“I’m fine. Please.”
That fierceness welled in his eyes again. Then he gave a curt nod, helped her out of the car.
She didn’t only want to be there for these people to whom she felt such a powerful connection. She also hoped she’d get more answers from Agnes before she and Steven flew back home.
Cybele watched Rodrigo stride with Steven to the hearse, where another four men waited. One was Ramón Velázquez, her orthopedic surgeon and Rodrigo’s best friend—for real—and partner.
Rodrigo and Ramón shared a solemn nod then opened the hearse’s back door and slid the coffin out. Steven and the three other men joined in carrying it to the cargo bay of the Boeing.
Cybele stood transfixed beside Agnes, watching the grim procession, her eyes flitting between Rodrigo’s face and Steven’s. The same expression gripped both. It was the same one on Agnes’s face. Something seemed…off about that expression.
Conjectures ping-ponged inside her head as everything seemed to fast-forward until the ritual was over, and Steven walked back with Rodrigo to join Agnes in hugging Cybele farewell. Then the Braddocks boarded the Boeing and Rodrigo led Cybele back to the Mercedes.
The car had just swung out of the airfield when she heard the roar of the jet’s takeoff. She twisted around to watch it sail overhead before it hurtled away, its noise receding, its size diminishing.
And it came to her, why she knew that off expression. It was the exhausted resignation exhibited by families of patients who died after long, agonizing terminal illnesses. It didn’t add up when Mel’s death had been swift and shocking.
Something else became glaringly obvious. She turned to Rodrigo. He was looking outside his window.
She hated to intrude on the sanctity of his heartache. But she had to make sense of it all. “Rodrigo, I’m sorry, but—”
He rounded on her, his eyes simmering in the rays penetrating the mirrored window. “Don’t say you’re sorry again, Cybele.”
“I’m sor—” She swallowed the apology he seemed unable to hear from her. “I was going to apologize for interrupting your thoughts. But I need to ask. They didn’t ask. About my pregnancy.”
He seemed taken aback. Then his face slammed shut. “Mel didn’t tell them.”
This was one answer she hadn’t considered. Yet another twist. “Why? I can understand not telling them of our intention to have a baby this way, in case it didn’t work. But after it did, why didn’t he run to them with the news?”
His shrug was eloquent with his inability to guess Mel’s motivations. With his intention to drop the subject.
She couldn’t accommodate him. “Why didn’t you tell them?”
“Because it’s up to you whether or not to tell them.”
“They’re my baby’s grandparents. Of course I want to tell them. If I’d realized they didn’t know, I would have. It would have given them solace, knowing that a part of their son remains.”
His jaw worked for a moment. Then he exhaled. “I’m glad you didn’t bring it up. You’re not in any shape to deal with the emotional fallout of a disclosure of this caliber. And instead of providing the solace you think it would have, at this stage, the news would have probably only aggravated their repressed grief.”
But it hadn’t been repressed grief she’d sensed from them.
Then again, what did she know? Her perceptions might be as scrambled as her memories. “You’re probably right.” As usual, she added inwardly. “I’ll tell them when I’m back to normal and I’m certain the pregnancy is stable.”
He lowered his eyes, his voice, and simply said, “Yes.”
Feeling drained on all counts, she gazed up at him—the mystery that kept unraveling only to become more tangled. The anchor of this shifting, treacherous new existence of hers.
And she implored, “Can we go home now, please?”
Six
He took her home. His home.
They’d driven back from the airport to Barcelona city center. From there it had taken over an hour to reach his estate.
By the time they approached it at sunset, she felt saturated with the sheer beauty of the Catalan countryside.
Then they passed through the electronic, twenty-foot wrought iron gates, wound through the driveway, and with each yard deeper into his domain, she realized. There was no such thing as a limit to the capacity to appreciate beauty, to be stunned by it.
She turned her eyes to him. He’d been silent save for necessary words. She’d kept silent, too, struggling with the contradictions of what her heart told her and what her memories insisted on, with wanting to ask him to dispel her doubts.
But the more she remembered everything he’d said and done, everything everyone had said about him in the past days, the more only one conclusion made sense. Her memories had to be false.
He turned to her. After a long moment, he said, deep, quiet, “Welcome to Villa Candelaria, Cybele.”
She swallowed past the emotions, yet her “Thank you” came out a tremulous gasp. She tried again. “When did you buy this place?”
“Actually, I built it. I named it after my mother.”
The lump grew as images took shape and form. Of him as an orphan who’d never forgotten his mother until he one day was affluent enough to build such a place and name it after her, so her memory would continue somewhere outside of his mind and.
Okay, she’d start weeping any second now. Better steer this away from personal stuff. “This place looks …massive. Not just the building, but the land, too.”
“It’s thirty thousand square feet over twenty acres with a mile-long waterfront. Before you think I’m crazy to build all this for myself, I built it hoping it would become the home of many families, affording each privacy and land for whatever projects and pursuits they wished for. Not that it worked
