couldn’t help himself—he reached out, pressing his hand over hers and squeezing it. ‘And yet you turned out okay,’ he said, the praise too faint, too light, but he wasn’t sure what else he could offer.
She wrinkled her nose again and shrugged. ‘I had examples of everything I didn’t want to become. It was odd, growing up that way. Lots of people might think fame is aspirational, but oh, how I hated it.’ She shook her head. ‘Photographers going through our trash, Mum being in those gossipy magazines every time she got dumped or stumbled out of a nightclub. When I was old enough, I did my best to protect her from it, but there was only so much I could do.’
‘You must have still been a child, even then.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘You were only twelve when she died...’
‘Yes.’ She shook her head. ‘But I think having a mother like mine forces you to grow up a lot sooner.’
With a visible effort to clear her thoughts, she stretched an uneven smile across her beautiful face. ‘So that’s my story. What of yours?’
He didn’t want to stop talking about her—having opened Pandora’s Box, he wanted all the secrets, all the mysteries. ‘Far less interesting,’ he promised.
‘I doubt that.’
The waiter appeared and they ordered—a simple lunch, vegetarian for Amelia and seafood for Antonio—and then they were alone once more.
‘Your mother died when you were young?’ she prompted.
Antonio expelled a breath, wondering if it was impolite to discuss such a thing with a pregnant woman. ‘In childbirth,’ he said at length—there was no way to sugar-coat it. ‘But from very rare complications.’
‘Oh, I hadn’t realised,’ she said, looking away from him. ‘That’s awful.’
‘As I said, it was extremely rare.’
‘I’m not worried about myself,’ she rushed to assure him, angling her face to his, and now she turned her hand upside down, capturing his and lacing their fingers together, templing them on the table.
She looked at their interwoven fingers as she spoke—it was an intoxicating contradiction—his fingers so tanned and long, hers fair and small, with the wedding ring he’d given her sparkling back at him. ‘But how awful, that she never got a chance to know you. To be a mother. And she must have been so excited.’
That had him arching a brow. ‘Are you excited?’
‘Are you kidding?’
He laughed then. ‘No. I’m curious.’
‘Of course I’m excited!’ Her free hand curved over her stomach and his eyes followed the betraying gesture with curiosity. ‘Aren’t you?’
It was an excellent question. At no point had he stopped to analyse his feelings. He had discovered her pregnancy and known only that he had to make her his, and that the baby would be raised a Herrera, right here in Spain.
‘I’m...’
‘Yes?’ She blinked at him, a smile tickling the corners of her lips, as though she were trying to suppress it—and failing.
‘I’m curious.’
She burst out laughing. ‘That’s it?’
‘Well, is it going to be like you, or like me?’ he said, uncharacteristically sheepish. ‘A boy, a girl, tall, short, with blue eyes that shine like the Aegean? Or dark like mine?’
She sighed. ‘And isn’t that...exciting? I mean, we have no idea about any of this, and yet this is our baby! No matter what, they’ll be part me, part you. I can’t wait to meet them.’
Her excitement was contagious and he found himself nodding, trying to fathom what their baby would be like. Their food arrived and she pulled her hand from his—he regretted the separation, and wondered at that. But for weeks he’d kept his distance and then, after last night and the magic of seeing their baby’s heartbeat on the screen, suddenly, he didn’t want to keep his distance any longer.
‘And you were close to your dad, obviously,’ she murmured, bringing the conversation back to something calmer and more grounded in the present. ‘I mean, the park, the puppets, football...’
‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘We were close. I idolised him.’
Her eyes were speculative, loaded with questions she didn’t voice. She was tentative in a way he couldn’t stand. They’d been sharing so much of themselves a moment ago, he didn’t want her to withdraw from him again. ‘You look like you wanted to ask me something,’ he said softly, and her eyes widened with surprise.
She nodded gently. ‘Is he...?’
‘Yes,’ he confirmed, unprepared for the rush of emotion that filled him. ‘He’s dead.’ He frowned. ‘Saying that is strange. I haven’t...talked about him in the past tense yet.’ A frown stretched across his handsome face. ‘My father was an incredibly dynamic man—larger than life. I still find myself forgetting that he is gone sometimes.’
‘I’m sorry.’ She speared a small tomato and lifted it to her lips. ‘You must miss him a lot.’
‘Yes.’ He reclined in his chair, taking in the view, his expression unknowingly sombre. ‘When your brother set out to destroy Herrera Incorporated, it was very hard on my father. He’d spent his life building the company up, making it bigger and better than it had been under his father, and to have that in jeopardy—’ He turned back to face her and for a moment he recalled she was a diSalvo, and he remembered all the reasons he had for keeping her at a distance.
But then she sighed, a soft, small noise, and she was so sympathetic that he couldn’t throw her in the same box as her brother and father. She was different—lacking the killer instincts that had brought his father to his knees.
‘I imagine that must have been very difficult for you.’
‘Yes,’ he drawled, and at her look of pain he grimaced, making an effort to soften his expression. ‘The markets were weak and confidence was low. His investors deserted him—he was left with barely anything.’
‘But you rebuilt it,’ she said.
His nod was short.
‘That must have taken an incredible amount of work.’
He shrugged laconically. ‘It’s what I’m good at.’
Her smile was just a shiver across her lips. ‘I can see that.’
‘I needed him to know that Herrera Incorporated was valuable again. It’s more than a business, hermosa. This is a birthright. A legacy. No one wants to leave something worse than when they inherited. But my father...’ he said, breaking off, not quite sure why he felt so free to confide in Amelia when he generally made a point of holding his private matters close to his chest. But she waited patiently, her enormous eyes promising him discretion, encouraging him to finish his sentence.
