the temptation. And then, there was him. He radiated nobility. She just knew Rodrigo Valderrama would never poach on another man’s grounds, never cross the lines of honor, no matter how much he wanted her or how dishonorable the other man was.
But there was one paramount proof that told her they’d never been intimate. Her body. It burned for him but knew it had never had him. It would have borne his mark on its every cell if it had.
So what did it all mean? He had to tell her, before something beside memories short-circuited inside her brain.
He finally spoke. “What did you remember?”
“Who I am. That I’m married.” He showed no outward reaction. So he had known. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“You didn’t ask.”
“I asked about family.”
“I thought you were asking about flesh-and-blood relatives.”
“You’re being evasive.”
“Am I?” He held her gaze, making her feel he was giving her a psyche and soul scan. Maybe trying to steer her thoughts, too. “So you remember everything?”
She exhaled. “I said I remembered ‘a few things.’ Seems I’m a stickler for saying exactly what I mean.”
“You said you remembered who you were, and your marriage. That’s just about everything, isn’t it?”
“Not when I remember only the basics about myself, the name you told me, that I went to Harvard Medical School, that I worked at St. Giles Hospital and that I’m twenty-nine. I know far less than the basics about my marriage. I remembered only that I have a husband, and his name and profession.”
“That’s all?”
“The rest is speculation.”
“What kind of speculation?”
“About the absence of both my family and husband more than a week after I’ve been involved in a major accident. I can only come up with very unfavorable explanations.”
“What would those be?”
“That I’m a monster of such megaproportions that no one felt the need to rush to my bedside.” Something flared in his eyes, that harshness. So she was right? He thought so, too? Her heart compressed as she waited for him to confirm or negate her suspicions. When he didn’t, she dejectedly had to consider his silence as corroboration, condemnation. She still looked for a way out for herself, for her family. “Unless it is beyond them financially to make the trip here?”
“As far as I know, finances are no issue to your family.”
“So you told them I was at death’s door, and no one bothered to come.”
“I told them no such thing. You weren’t at death’s door.”
“It could have gone either way for a while.”
Silence. Heavy. Oppressive. Then he simply said, “Yes.”
“So I’m on the worst terms with them.”
It seemed he’d let this go uncommented on, too. Then he gave a noncommittal shrug. “I don’t know about the worst terms. But it’s my understanding you’re not close.”
“Not even with my mother?”
“Especially with your mother.”
“Great. See? I was right when I thought I was better off not remembering. Not knowing.”
“It isn’t as bad as you’re painting it. By the time I called your family, you were stable, and there really was nothing for any of them to do but wait like the rest of us. Your mother did call twice for updates, and I told her you were doing very well. Physically. Psychologically, I suggested it might not be a good thing in this early phase for you to be jogged by their presence or contact, any more than you already are.”
He was making excuses for her family, her mother. If they’d cared, they wouldn’t have been satisfied with long-distance assurances. Or maybe he had discouraged them from coming, so he wouldn’t introduce an unpredictable emotional element into her neurological recovery?
The truth was, she didn’t care right now how things really stood with her family. What she was barely able to breathe from needing to know was her status with her husband.
“And that’s my not-so-bad situation with my family. But from my husband’s pointed absence, I can only assume the worst. That maybe we’re separated or getting divorced.”
She wanted him to say, Yes, you are.
Please, say it.
His jaw muscles bunched, his gaze chilled. When he finally spoke it felt like an arctic wind blasting her, freezing her insides with this antipathy that kept spiking out of nowhere.
“Far from being separated, you and your husband have been planning a second honeymoon.”
Cybele doubted the plane crashing into the ground had a harder impact than Rodrigo’s revelation.
Her mind emptied. Her heart spilled all of its beats at once.
For a long, horrified moment she stared at him, speech skills and thought processes gone, only blind instincts left. They all screamed run, hide, deny.
She’d been so certain…so…certain.
“A second honeymoon?” She heard her voice croaking. “Does that mean we …we’ve been married long?”
He waited an eternity before answering. At least it felt that way. By the time he did, she felt she’d aged ten years. “You were married six months ago.”
“Six months? And already planning a second honeymoon?”
“Maybe I should have said honeymoon, period. Circumstances stopped you from having one when you first got married.”
“And yet my adoring husband isn’t here. Our plans probably were an attempt to salvage a marriage that was malfunctioning beyond repair, and we shouldn’t have bothered going through the motions….”
She stopped, drenched in mortification. She instinctively knew she wasn’t one to spew vindictiveness like that. Her words had been acidic enough to eat through the gleaming marble floor.
Their corrosiveness had evidently splashed Rodrigo. From the way his face slammed shut, he clearly disapproved of her sentiments and the way she’d expressed them. Of her.
“I don’t know much about your relationship. But his reason for not being at your bedside is uncontestable. He’s dead.”
She lurched as if he’d backhanded her.
“He was flying the plane,” she choked.
“You remember?”
“No.
