from a handful of boyish pursuits, he and his brother had always been beyond their years. Their sister’s kidnapping when they were fifteen had very quickly matured them, then their father’s early death had forced them to take control of an international investment corporation at twenty-one. They had been carrying tremendous responsibility for a decade. In many ways, Ramon was still too old for her.
“I don’t care that you never wanted to date me.” Lie. She cared. His disinterest had been demoralizing. “What I can’t forgive is that you slept with my mother.”
“I didn’t sleep with her,” he growled.
She snorted and looked away, working to keep her face noncommittal while she was dying inside, aching to believe that, but she wasn’t stupid. The fact he would lie to her face about it made it even worse.
“Did you ask her?” he prompted.
“No!” As if she wanted details about any of the men her mother slept with, most especially him. “I didn’t have to, did I? The evidence spoke for itself.”
“The evidence,” he repeated, tone light yet dangerous, increasing her tension.
“You were half-dressed, wearing a night’s stubble, and the hood of your car was cold. It doesn’t take a forensic scientist to figure out where you spent the night.”
“I’ve never denied spending the night.”
“In her bed. Two pillows were used. I looked.”
“I reclined on her bed while she changed and removed her makeup. We were talking. Nothing happened. We went back downstairs and drank enough that I decided to sleep it off on the sofa. I woke when I heard you come in. I tried to tell you this at your father’s birthday. You walked away.”
“Oh, please. Once she realized I’d come home, she didn’t say, ‘Oh, by the way, Ramon spent the night, but it was completely innocent.’ She asked how long I’d been there and looked guilty as hell.”
“That—” He pointed at her. “That is the real evidence, isn’t it? You don’t think your mother can’t bring a man home without making love with him.”
True, but that was such a complex issue for her, she refused to go there.
“You’ve hit a hard limit, Ramon. The way my mother lives is not up for discussion. I will walk. And that’s not why I think you’re the scum of the earth.”
His head went back as though the cold iron in her tone caught his attention. After a brief pause, he said, “If you’re thinking I’m the one who can’t spend a night with a woman and not have sex, you’re wrong.”
He was talking about Trella, she supposed. Her friend’s struggle with anxiety was something that turned Isidora inside out every single time she thought about it, but she refused to let herself soften with empathy. To give him the benefit of the doubt.
“You want me to believe that’s what you were doing that night?” She burned afresh with outrage and scorn. “Letting my mother cry on your shoulder? Then why didn’t you say so when we met in the lounge? I asked you what you were doing there and you said she had been looking for company so you came home with her. You knew what I took from that. You knew exactly what I was thinking. If you didn’t have sex with her, why did you let me believe you did?”
“Because you were eighteen and still carrying a torch.” His voice was a sledgehammer. “It had to stop.”
This moment was every bit as hard a hit as that moment had been, completely destroying any shred of hope she might have clung to. For a few seconds, she couldn’t breathe. The agony was that all-encompassing.
She wasn’t still carrying a torch, was she? She would swear she hadn’t been.
Until he had kissed her. Something tentative had begun playing in the back of her mind in the last hour, though. She was waiting for time alone to relive that kiss and properly savor it. To build it into something it would never become.
How pathetic.
He was right. This childish yearning had to stop.
As the silence lengthened, something tickled her cheek. She wiped at it, discovering it was a tear.
He released a heavy sigh, which scored, speaking as it did of his impatience with her intense feelings where he was concerned.
She was equally exhausted by it herself. She really was.
Last one, she vowed. That was the last tear she would ever cry over this man.
Because it didn’t matter if he had slept with her mother or not. What he was telling her, then and now, was that he would never be interested in her. Not as anything but a fake fiancée. A prop for one of his PR tricks.
She had to move on.
She nodded with understanding, feeling disconnected from her body. The muscles around her mouth twitched and she thought she might be trying to smile, but it was the kind that came when the tragedy was too great for any other emotion but laughter at how punishing life could be.
“Tough love,” she said, voice jagged beneath the irony.
He swore and she heard him exchange his empty glass for the one she hadn’t touched. He knocked back that shot and his breath hissed again.
“It was a test. You passed.”
“Because I didn’t turn on you and your family?”
Such a cold bastard. What had she ever seen in him? Aside from his incredible devotion to his family, of course. And his unbending will to win, his lust-worthy looks, his charisma, brilliant intelligence and unwavering confidence.
She wanted to turn on him now.
But she couldn’t. It wasn’t in her to walk away from people who needed her. Even when her own heart was twisted beyond recognition by staying.
That was her specialty, in fact. Wasn’t it? Helping her father and mother navigate the pain they caused each other, standing by both of them while they went through it. She carried on, fractured and battered by a heartrending personal life. Why should her professional life be any different?
Forcing herself to move, she closed herself into the powder room and checked her makeup. There was an emotive redness around her eyes and her lipstick was faintly smudged. She smoothed her hair and used a damp tissue to repair her lips, all the while thinking of the times her father had said he was proud of her. Not just for following in his footsteps, but for other things, too.
That love of his had pulled her through a lot—the devastation of learning he wasn’t biologically her father, for instance.
Bernardo was her anchor, her moral compass, her silver lining in a world too often clouded and stormy. He was the parent her mother was incapable of being.
He would never wind up in such a ridiculous position, but if he had to choose whether to work with a Sauveterre or against one, she knew what he would do: whatever was asked.
He would stay loyal to the offspring of the man who had convinced him to accept the child her mother had passed off
