that he was leaving out part of the story.
But she also knew that he was only saying these things for his own benefit. Here in the near dark library to a boy who didn’t matter.
She was no one. He might as well be speaking to a mirror. And she understood that. At the moment she was grateful she could fulfill that for him.
She heard a buzzing sound, and then he reached for his pocket. He lifted his phone and frowned.
He answered it. “Hello?”
“Matías?” It was a woman’s voice, clearly audible in the relative silence of the room, and Camilla recognized the American accent immediately. “I’m so glad that I reached you.”
“Liliana? Where are you? Where has he taken you?”
“I can’t say,” came the reply, stilted, robotic.
“Why? Because you don’t know? Are you injured?” He issued the questions rapid-fire.
“I’m not injured. I’m perfectly safe. In fact, I need for you to stop looking for me.” The words were thick-sounding, sad. “I didn’t mean to deceive you, and I never meant to hurt you in any way. But I cannot marry you because Diego is the man I really want. I left with him of my own free will. The only reason that I screamed is because he startled me. But it was always my intention to waste your time and make it difficult for you to complete your task, and then marry him. I was not kidnapped. You don’t need to look for me.”
“Liliana...”
“It’s okay, Matías. Truly. I regret my behavior, but there is nothing to be done. Diego and I have already married. And that means... You know what that means. All of it will be his. If you fail to marry, then all of it will be his. It’s too late. We have paperwork. Everything is legally binding. We’re married. It’s too late.”
“Liliana...”
And then the phone line went dead, and Matías was left there glaring ferociously at the phone in his hand as if it were a snake.
“You can’t possibly believe her,” Camilla said. “She sounds as if she’s in distress.”
“She has married him,” Matías said, the words falling heavily in the room. “My brother is a terrible villain, but what he is not is a monster. And what he is not capable of doing is forcing someone to say vows. Even he would not hold a gun to her head.”
“He kidnapped her out of her bedroom window.”
“Or not. If she is to be believed she went with him of her own volition.” He threw his phone down onto the coffee table, the light from the fireplace reflecting off the planes and angles of his face. “I was fooled. I thought that my brother would fade into his own dissolute lifestyle. That he would not attempt to please my grandfather. But I was looking at it through my own eyes. I was going to engage in a real marriage. My brother would think nothing of taking a wife simply to fulfill the terms of the will. A wife he will probably casually discard in the end.”
“But you were marrying her because of the will, weren’t you?” she asked. She didn’t know why she was asking that. Matías clearly cared about Liliana. If he didn’t he wouldn’t be so distressed. And something about that galled her. But she hoped that he didn’t love her. Which was small, and terrible, and she had no right to think such a thing.
“But I intended to make it real,” he said. “I’m not a man given to love. You must realize that. Or perhaps, at your age you do not. Love was never part of the equation for me. But a wife, children, all of that I would have. Why not?” He shook his head. “It was all too easy, and that I should have realized.”
“How long do you have?”
“Only a couple of weeks,” he responded. “Diego is smart. Because by whatever means he accomplished it, he has married her.”
“Perhaps he hasn’t. Maybe all of it’s a lie.”
“No. He would have no reason to lie about that. Because he would know that it would only spur me into action. Better to keep quiet if he hadn’t made arrangements to marry her.”
For some reason, she didn’t know what she was thinking, she reached out across the space between them and touched the top of his hand. And then she drew back as though she had been burned.
Scrambling out of her chair, she stepped toward the fireplace, trying to move herself into the darkness, as if that response wouldn’t make all of this even more out of the ordinary.
That he wouldn’t see the effect he had had on her. That was the last thing she needed. To introduce something so horrific into the equation. He was coping with the fact that his fiancée had been taken by another man—whether by force or by seduction, she felt at this point either was devastating—and eventually they would have a horse to train, to make it to the races.
If she ruined it now by being so stupid...
“Dios mio,” he said, his voice harsh.
She looked over at him, and his face was frozen, a mask of rage, his dark eyes glittering in the firelight.
He stood, gripping her by the arms and drawing her close. “What is your part in this? All this time... Were you a part of this treachery that was committed against me?”
MATÍAS CURSED HIMSELF. He called himself every kind of fool imaginable.
She was a woman.
It was so clear now that he was looking at her. Now that she was standing there, bathed in firelight.
How could he not have seen it? How could it have escaped his notice until now? It was all painfully clear, here in the firelight, in this quiet house with shock coursing through his veins. With that soft touch echoing over his skin, a ripple on the surface of the water that should not have been there.
Then Cam had taken a step backward, and something about the way the light had caught that stubborn face, that strong bone structure, had suddenly revealed what he had missed all this time.
His stable boy was not a boy at all.
And he had spoken to her so openly, freely. As though she were an extension of the wallpaper in the room, because to him she might as well have been. A boy who worked for him was beneath his notice. But this...a liar. A treacherous woman.
He would not have spoken to her so.
“Answer me,” he said, tightening his hold on her arms.
Definitely her arms.
It was so apparent now. She did not possess the frame of a young boy, not really. But of course, when he had held her yesterday after her injury he had been thinking only of her safety, not of the way that she was built.
She was strong. Of course she was. She had become so working with horses, he assumed, but it was not the strength of a rangy youth.
She
