chapter ELEVEN
‘I BROUGHT YOU COFFEE.’
Simone blinked, still half asleep and only half understanding what she’d heard. Something about coffee? And sure enough, the scent of freshly brewed coffee seemed to flavour air that was otherwise heavily laden with sex. Hardly surprising given they’d spent more time making love last night than sleeping.
But really, coffee? The man was built like a god, made love as if he actually cared that his partner climaxed, and he made coffee for her instead of demanding a beer?
She snuggled back into her pillow. She really must be dreaming.
‘How are you feeling?’
Her eyes snapped open. How am I what? He was freshly showered and wearing crisp, fresh clothes—another of those tops that skimmed the surface of his skin and made you want to peel it off, and trousers that accentuated the long lean contours of his legs—and he really was pouring her a cup of coffee. She sat up, snagging the bedding over her breasts, and pushed hair gone wild back from her face.
Outside, the windows the bay sparkled under a warm sun, a perfect autumn day. Inside her barometer wasn’t anywhere near as controlled.
‘I’m—’ shattered ‘—okay,’ she said, knowing she must look closer to the word she’d left unsaid. After the night they’d just spent, she couldn’t imagine what kind of mess she looked.
‘I thought you might be feeling tender. It was wrong of me to make love to you again this morning,’ he said, as easily as he might have asked her if she wanted milk in her coffee. ‘I should have given you some time.’
‘I’m not … I wasn’t …’
‘A virgin? No, I know, but it’s clear you haven’t had much experience.’
‘I have had sex before, you know. Several times. A lot of times, actually.’ She’d even had the odd orgasm before, although admittedly she’d had to assist, so hadn’t last night been a revelation? ‘I told you I’d been in a relationship.’
He smiled at that. ‘Oh yes. The boyfriend. I remember.’ He sipped his coffee as he looked out over the view of the bay. ‘Perhaps he wasn’t as experienced.’
God, he wasn’t as well endowed, more like it! She stared at her coffee rather than at him, so she wouldn’t be forced to make any more comparisons, beyond the width of their shoulders, or the muscled firmness of their flesh, for instance. She shrugged and slanted her eyes up, feeling his eyes on her, knowing she was expected to say something. ‘He wasn’t put together quite the same as you, that’s all.’
He smiled at her over his shoulder. ‘They say size isn’t important.’
Oh, they’re so very wrong.
And then she made the mistake of looking at the clock and saw it was almost noon and didn’t even have to feign surprise. Her cup rattled against the saucer as she sat up urgently, still clutching the bedclothes to her. ‘I need to call the hospital and check on Felipe.’
‘I already have. He is resting comfortably.’ He tossed her a robe—his robe, she realised, and it was all she could do not to lift it to her face and breathe in his scent. ‘I thought you’d want to visit so I said we’d be in to see him before lunch.’
She shrugged the robe around her shoulders, strangely touched, finding the armholes. ‘You didn’t have to do that.’
‘You don’t want to see your grandfather?’
‘No, I mean you didn’t have to call. I didn’t expect you to.’
He shrugged, looking out of the window at the view. ‘You were asleep. I thought you would want to know. Do you have a problem with that?’
‘Aren’t you worried I might think you were actually capable of being nice?’
She was half joking, but he didn’t seem to take it that way. He blinked. Slowly. ‘Whatever you think of me, I am not a beast. I am certainly capable of extending common courtesy where it is merited. Besides, don’t you think it would look odd if I did not ask after my new grandfather-in-law?’
He turned and stared at her for a moment, one wholly unsettling moment under an intensely dark gaze, that had her putting a hand to her unruly hair and imagining he must be wondering what he’d done to be stuck with her.
Then he crossed to the bed, lifted her chin and kissed her briefly on the lips. A peck, nothing more.
‘Besides,’ he said, her chin still in his hand, his eyes still searching her face, ‘you know better than to read too much into it.’
He left her then to get up, leaving her utterly bewildered and baffled, and yes, sore when she made a move to get out of bed. So it was all part of the act of being a dutiful husband to his granddaughter? Nothing more than common courtesy?
Still, he hadn’t had to call. He didn’t need to impress anyone now. The deal had been made and they were married. There was no getting out of it for her. He didn’t have to be thoughtful. And yet he had been.
She padded barefoot to the bathroom and wondered anew about the man she had married. The man who was now not only her husband, but her husband in every sense of the word.
Their deal was temporary, their marriage fated to last a few months, no more. But after a night like last night, when Alesander had blown her world apart and then bothered to kiss it back together again, he seemed almost the perfect package. And at times, almost a man she might even think about choosing for her husband—in some parallel universe where they had met under different circumstances without the history of deal-making and blackmail that lay festering between them.
Damn, damn and damn!
What was he doing to her, that she could even think of wanting him for her husband? Was she so blinded by his lovemaking that she had forgotten that this was nothing more than a business arrangement? Was she so blindsided that she had forgotten the sheer terror of a missed period?
She should never forget that feeling, not if she wasn’t to be taken in again by someone who didn’t care for her—who had never loved her—who she never wanted to see again.
Still cursing, she slipped out of the voluminous robe and stepped into the shower, lifting her face up into the spray.
Why had Alesander insisted on having sex? Why had he had to complicate things when their arrangement had been fail-safe? She’d known sex would complicate things. Sex always did.
But the land hadn’t been enough for him and sex was the price he’d exacted from her.
A price she’d agreed to.
And no matter how mind-blowing the sex and the redemptive power of a potent kiss, was it a price worth paying?
The hospital let Felipe go home the next day, but only, they said, because Alesander had arranged a nurse to be there around the clock for him. But, they warned, it would not be for ever.
Still, Felipe seemed positive after the wedding. At least for a few weeks.
Winter was closing in around the vineyard, the leaves falling from the vines when she found him sitting in his usual chair, looking out over the near barren vineyard, his eyes half shuttered. He seemed not to notice her presence, even after she’d spoken to him, and so she assumed he was asleep, when she picked up his coffee cup and a gnarled limb reached out, a bony set of fingers grabbed her wrist. ‘Mi nieta!’
She jumped, and then laughed at her reaction. ‘Sí. What is it, Abuelo?’
‘I have something to tell you,’ he whispered. ‘Something I have been meaning to tell you.’ He craned his head around. ‘Is Alesander here?’
She shook her head. ‘He’s out in the vineyard somewhere. Do you want me to get him?’
‘No. What I want to say is for you, and you alone. Sit down here next to me.’
She pulled over a chair. ‘What is it?’
He sighed, his breath sounding like a wheeze. ‘I want to tell you. There is not much time left to me. I must tell you …’
‘No, Abuelo, you mustn’t think that way.’
He patted her hand as if she was the one who needed compassion and understanding. ‘Listen to me, there is nothing the doctors can do for me now, but I can still tell you this, that since you came here, since your marriage, I have never been happier. I have you to thank for making the sun shine in my life again.’
‘Please, Abuelo, there is no need.’
‘There is every need. Don’t you see what you have done? You have given me hope. You have reunited two families who have barely spoken to each other for more than a century.’
She dipped her head. If he only knew, he would not be proud at all. But still she managed a smile and patted his hand. ‘I am glad that you are happy, Abuelo.’
‘More than happy. The rift between our families goes back many years. I never thought to see it end. But Alesander, he is a fine man. He is like the son I never had.’
He stopped on a sigh and his head nodded down, and she thought that he had finished then, already drifting back into his memories and his regrets, when he suddenly looked up, glassy eyes seeking hers. ‘Do you know what happened?’
‘Alesander told me. One of your ancestors—your grandfather, was it?—he ran off and married the bride meant for an Esquivel groom.’
The old man nodded. ‘Ah, sí, he did.’ He laughed then, a cackle of delight, before his face grew serious again. ‘But did he tell you what happened afterwards?’
‘Only that it has resulted in a century of simmering rivalry and a cause of resentment between the two families ever since.’
‘And the rest? Did he tell you the rest?’
She reeled back through her memories of her conversation with Alesander. ‘No, I don’t seem to recall anything else.’
He nodded. ‘Ah, he didn’t tell you, then—probably for the best. Anyway, it doesn’t matter now.’
‘What is it, Abuelo?’ she asked, the skin at the back of her neck crawling. ‘What doesn’t matter now?’
‘Only that when it was too late—when he discovered his bride was married to another, Xalbeder Esquivel vowed revenge and that the Esquivel family would drive the Otxoas from their land once and for all. That has always been their goal. That is why we have had to fight them ever since.’
Felipe peered at her, his watery eyes glistening, his crooked mouth smiling in a way she had never seen before. ‘Don’t you see what you have achieved by your marriage to Alesander? The curse is lifted. The Esquivels can never drive us from our land because the Otxoas will be ones with this estate for ever. I am so proud of you, mi nieta, so very proud.’
She let him pull her to him and hug her, feeling wiry arms around her, feeling bony shoulder blades stripped of flesh through his thick shirt, feeling the earth fall beneath her feet. If he only knew what she had done.
Oh God, what had she done?
By her own hand she had signed away the Otxoas’ last links to this land. And she hadn’t just let it happen—she had made it happen. ‘Please don’t be proud, Abuelo,’ she pleaded, feeling sick. ‘I don’t deserve it.’
‘Bah.’ He waved her objections away with a sweep of one gnarled wrist. ‘You have made an old man with no hope very happy. I am only sorry I did not trust Alesander at first. I thought he was only interested in the land. But he loves you, I can tell. And the way you look at him, with such love in your eyes …’
‘Abuelo …’ she chided with tears in her eyes, trying to gently cut him off. She could not bear to hear more, least of all to hear him talk of a love that had no place in her marriage. ‘Please don’t.’
But Felipe was equally determined to finish. ‘Please, hear me out. There is not much time left to me now, and it is selfish of me to hope for anything beyond a death that lets me slip away quietly in my sleep and rejoin my Maria, that should be all I wish. Yet still I wish for more. I wish with all my heart that there might be news of a child before I go.’
‘You’re not going anywhere, Abuelo!’ she cried, holding his knotted fingers in hers, knowing that his wishes were for nothing, knowing there could never be a child.
‘You will tell me,’ he insisted, ‘if there is news. Promise me you will tell me and put a smile on an old man’s face before he dies.’
‘I will tell you,’ she said as the tears streamed down her face, ‘I promise.’
‘Don’t cry for me,’ he said, misinterpreting her tears. ‘I am not worth crying over. I did not mean to make you sad.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she told him, with one final brief, desperate hug, ‘I am so very sorry.’ And she fled from the cottage in tears.
What had she done?
She ran on and on through the vineyard, her emotions in turmoil, oblivious to the magnificent view and uncaring of the vines snatching on her hair and tugging at her clothes, totally gutted at what she had done.
She’d lied to her grandfather. Yes, to make his last days happy, it was true, but what consolation was that when she’d lost him everything he’d ever held precious in the process? The last of his vines and she’d as good as given them away.
And she’d piled lie upon lie upon lie until he believed so much in this fiction she’d created, that he was building an entire future based on this perfect marriage.
This perfect lie.
And he’d told her he was proud of her and he’d thanked her for saving the family, for breaking a vow of revenge and a curse on them for generations.
When she was the curse.
She’d betrayed Felipe and his trust in her. Betrayed his love for his only remaining relative, the only person he could put his faith and hope for the future in.
Lied to him and betrayed him by giving away all that he had left and held precious.
But seeping up through all the welter of emotions, through the tangle of her despair and her self-recrimination, there was a slow, simmering anger bubbling away inside the guilt and remorse.
For she too had been betrayed.
Because Alesander must have known!
All along, Alesander would have known about the vow to drive the Otxoas from their land. She might as well have offered it to him on a silver platter.
And then the land hadn’t been enough and he’d wanted her too.
Was that part of the revenge? Was he laughing at her the whole time?
She felt sick. He’d played her for a fool.
She’d even imagined he cared.
Oh God.
She came to the edge of the property and the new fence where once she’d come in despair when she’d learned that Felipe was dying, and where she’d come up with a plan to make his last days happy.
A stupid plan.
A stupid woman to ever think it could ever work. A stupid woman to think she could pile lie upon lie and get off scot-free, with no consequences and no price to pay.
And she’d imagined that sex with Alesander was the price she’d had to pay.
No.
Knowing she’d betrayed the love and trust of the only family member she had left, the family member who was relying on her to save the family name from obliteration—this was the price she had to pay.
With a cry of anguish, she sagged, tear-streaked and heaving for air, against a trellis upright, ancient and thick. She clung to it, panting, looking out over the view that had once seemed so magical to her—the spectacular shoreline that curled jaggedly around in both directions, framing a brilliant blue sea, with the red-roofed town of Getaria nestled in behind the rocky headland—and she would swap it in a heartbeat to be back in a cramped student flat with noisy neighbours and lousy weather.
The whole time he would have known. The whole time he would have been laughing at her behind her back, thinking that she had achieved singlehandedly what his family had been unable to achieve in generations.
They would all laugh when she was gone. They were probably all laughing at her now, all in on the joke, just waiting for the old man to die.
And she’d gone to Alesander for help.
How could she ever face Felipe again?
‘Simone!’
Oh God, she thought as his voice rang out again, closer this time. Not him. Anyone but him. She tried to disappear into the tangle of vines but in a blue and yellow sundress she was too easy to spot.
‘Simone!’ he said. ‘At last.’
She turned her back to him, swiping at her tear-streaked face with her hands.
‘Simone, Felipe said he’d upset you.’
‘Go away,’ she said without turning around.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘Just leave me alone.’
He took no notice. He came up behind her and put a hand to her shoulder. A touch she’d become so used to. A touch that had warmed her in places she daren’t confess. A touch that now left her cold. ‘Simone, what’s going on?’
‘Don’t touch me!’ she cried, spinning around and shoving away his hand. ‘Don’t you ever touch me again!’
‘What the hell is going on? What’s happened to make you this way?’
‘What do you think is wrong? Why didn’t you tell me the whole story?’
‘What story?’
‘Your potted history of the troubles between the Esquivels and the Otxoas.’
He frowned. ‘What about it? What am I supposed to have missed?’
‘The bit you so conveniently left out. The bit about the Esquivels vowing to drive the Otxoas from their land!’
He shrugged his shoulders, his hands palm up in the air. ‘What about it? I didn’t think it was important.’
‘What about it? Are you kidding me? Do you think I would have ever married you if I had known that your agenda the entire time was to run Felipe—to run us—off our land?’
‘Dios! This marriage was all your idea. Don’t you forget that. You were the one who came up with it. You were the one who so desperately needed it!’
‘And you were the one who insisted on the land being part of the deal! Because you knew, didn’t you? You knew all along that your family wanted us off. And because you saw a way of getting rid of my family from this land for ever!’
‘Listen to yourself! Do you really think I care about something that happened more than a hundred years ago? Do you honestly believe I set out with the intention of banishing the Otxoas from their land?’
‘What am I supposed to think, when the land is the one thing you expressly demanded? And now my grandfather thinks I’ve saved this family from some kind of curse and all I know is that I’ve made it happen. I’ve brought it down upon us. How do you think I feel about that? How do you think I feel?’
She broke down, her knees collapsing beneath her, sending her limp and sagging into the ground.
His hands caught her at her shoulders, pulling her up, pulling her towards him. ‘What do you care about the land anyway? You’re going home. You said yourself you don’t belong here.’
She pushed with all her might against him. ‘And that makes it okay? That’s your defence?’ She lashed at him with her fists, pounding at his unyielding chest, but he did not let her go and so she punched harder. ‘Don’t touch me!’
He held her at arm’s length and still she managed to lash out at him. He grabbed her wrists, locking them within the iron circle of his own and pulled her in close. ‘What the hell is wrong with you?’
‘You knew,’ she said, angling her face and her accusations higher. ‘You knew all the time about the land and the curse. That land means everything to him and now you’ve taken it.’
His dark eyes gleamed dangerously down at her, his hot breath fanning her face, the cords on his neck standing out in rigid lines. ‘And you made a deal, remember! You were the one who turned up on my doorstep begging.’
Fruitlessly she wrenched against the prison of his hands. ‘But you knew! All the time you knew!’
‘So what? The damned curse means nothing to me!’
‘But it does to him!’ She was so rigid she felt she might snap. She glared up at him. ‘It does to him and I hate you for what you’ve done!’
He growled and shook his head slowly from side to side, his dark eyes like magnets, their pull insistent and strong. ‘Oh no, you don’t. You don’t hate me at all.’
His slow words and his rich accent stroked her like a slow velvet hand, and she felt the first unmistakable frisson of fear.
And the first unmistakable frisson of excitement.
No! That would be to let him win. She tugged desperately at her wrists. ‘Let me go.’
He tugged her back so she ended up even closer to the hard wall of his chest, his mouth turned up at the corners, his eyes never deviating from hers, and she knew what he intended and there was no way …
‘Let me go!’
He stepped closer. She stepped back. He took another step and this time her step was more of a stumble, until she found the old support she’d been clinging to before against her back. She’d welcomed it for its solidity then. Now she cursed it for preventing her escape, leaving her sandwiched between it and him.
He let her hands go then, to frame her face in his hands, his fingers deep in her hair, and she reached back, clinging to the support, keeping her hungry fingers away from him.
‘What are you doing?’ she asked, her heart beating too fast, too frantically, already knowing the answer.
So that when his mouth crashed down on hers it came as no surprise. His vehemence did. There was no remaining unaffected—his hot mouth and tongue seemed to want to plunder her very soul.
What had he done to her? she wondered as his tongue licked like a trail of flames across her throat. What had he reduced her to?
Feelings, the answer came back, as she gave herself up into his kiss and gave him back all he was offering her.
Feelings.
He had awoken her to feeling and she was a slave to it. Slave to him.
Her hands abandoned the support behind her. She was pulling at his clothes as fast as he was pulling at hers. The zip of her dress was undone, the tail of his shirt was tugged free. Her breasts exposed to his mouth, his chest was bared to her seeking fingers.
And his hands were at the hem of her dress, sliding the fabric up her legs, sliding down again once he’d hooked his fingers into her underwear and swept them away.
Air brushed the sensitive folds of her flesh. Cool air against hot torrid flesh.
‘Alesander,’ she cried, half plea, half protest as she battled to release him, a battle made harder because he was so hard.
‘I know,’ he muttered against her throat, her jaw, her mouth as he helped her. ‘I know.’
And then he lifted her and he was right there, at her entrance, and she thought her world could end and she wouldn’t care so long as he was inside her first.
She cried out when he pulled her down onto him. She cried out when he pulled back, knowing she’d been wrong. Because she didn’t ever want her world to end. Not when her world made it possible to feel like this.
He pounded into her, angry and insistent, and angrily, insistently she clenched her muscles and hung onto him, only to welcome him back, her need building with each desperate thrust.
‘Do you hate me now?’ he asked, thrusting again, his voice barely a grunt. ‘Do you still hate me?’
Her body was alive with sensation, her senses dancing wildly along a dangerous line that any moment they might teeter off into an abyss, and there was no way she could not answer honestly.
‘I hate you,’ she said, but not because of Felipe or the land or a vow of revenge that was made more than a century ago, but because of what you do to me. ‘I will always hate you.’
He answered with a thrust that threw her head crashing back against the beam. He followed it with another and then another, each one deeper than the first. Each one more desperate, more insistent. Each one building on that screaming tension building inexorably inside her.
He won’t make me come, she told herself, knowing the assault he was capable of, clamping down on that eventuality with all her muscles and all her might. Knowing what was in store if she just let him. I won’t let him. I won’t give him the satisfaction.
And so she fought and resisted and battled against the torrent of sensations he subjected her to and tried to imagine herself back in her tiny flat in Melbourne, where this man and these feelings would be just a distant memory.
But it was too hard a task, too much to ask, with his mouth at her throat and on her lips, his hands hot on her breasts and fingers tight against her nipples and his hard cock thrusting deep inside her. It was all … impossible.
And like a cough suppressed because you were in polite company, but that refused to be suppressed, so that when it was unleashed it was ten times greater than the original would have ever been, her release came upon her with the relentless force of a tornado, picking her up and spinning her effortlessly into its whirling spout, drawing her higher, ever higher in its never ending spiral until she came in a flash of colour and heated sensation and felt herself spat out of the tornado’s spout. She drifted down to the earth, or maybe that was just her legs as he let them down, her fight gone as she rested limply under the weight of his body against hers.
And she hated that he could do this to her—turn argument into a storm, turn anger into passion.
She hated him because he could reduce her to a whimpering mess of nerve endings.
She hated him because she loved him.
Oh God, where had that come from?
She tried to wish the unwanted thought away. She tried to deny it. But the truth of it refused to be wished away or denied. It floated like a balloon let loose, flying high, freed of the shackles that could pull it down.
She loved him.
The concept was so foreign. So unexpected. And yet it explained so much of why she wanted to be with him and why at the same time she feared it so.
She loved him because of what he could do to her and how he made her feel.
She loved him and she hated him because at any moment he would look at her smugly and declare himself the victor of this particular encounter.
Except not this time, it seemed. ‘Mierda!’ he cursed, and pulled himself free, pulling himself away as if she was poison. ‘You’re not on the Pill.’
She blinked, still in recovery mode, not sure why it was an issue. ‘You know I’m not.’
‘I didn’t use protection.’