chapter TWELVE
‘OH MY GOD!’ She was still reeling from her discovery. The last thing she needed was that. She put a hand to her head, recovery mode short-circuited by a panic that unfurled with a vengeance as she remembered another time, another fear that things had come unstuck, even after protection had been used.
But this time there had been no protection. No defence.
Oh God, was she destined to live her life making love to the wrong men, narrowly escaping disaster with one, only to hurtle headlong into catastrophe with the next?
She’d known from the very beginning that having sex with Alesander was a bad idea. Why had he not realised the complications that could result? Had he not realised how serious they could be?
Her panicked brain morphed to anger. ‘How could you do that?’ she cried. ‘How could you be so stupid?’
Her answer was the thwack of the flat of his hand high above her head against the beam supporting her. ‘Did you ask me to put on a condom?’
‘And so it’s my fault—?’ even though she hadn’t given protection a thought, and she knew she hadn’t, but damned if she was going to accept the blame ‘—because you can’t control yourself?’
‘And you didn’t want it?’
‘Did I ask for it? Did I ever ask for sex from you, or did you simply demand it, as you always did?’
‘You enjoyed it. You know you did.’
‘That’s not the same thing and you know it.’
He turned away from her then, his shoulders heaving, and she sensed the loss of him even as she celebrated the relief that came from the distance between them, and she wondered at the tangle of those conflicting emotions and wondered if love made sense of it all.
Ever since that first day in his apartment it had been the same, the relentless push and pull confusing her thoughts and tangling her intentions.
But now there was something else to confuse her thoughts and add to the tangle in her mind.
What if she were pregnant?
She’d lived this nightmare once before—the overwhelming fear of being pregnant to a man who didn’t want her—the fear, the terror of thinking that she was, the utter helplessness at not knowing.
But beyond that, the endless soul-searching at being tempted to do something she knew she could never do. She wasn’t a religious woman, her parents had brought her up with no particular belief systems that told her she should act one way or another and she had grown up believing she could do anything she wanted in the world. But, when push came to shove, she had learned that there were some places she could not go, some lines she could not cross.
What were the chances?
Luck had been with her that time, sending her a belated period that had been accompanied by a torrent of tears—grateful tears. As it was, she had held herself together these last few months by a tenuous thread. She could not have coped if she’d been pregnant with Damon’s child.
And now the nightmare was happening all over again. Again the fear. Again the hoping. Again the anxious, endless wait and the anguished sleepless nights until she knew, one way or the other.
She couldn’t be pregnant. She was leaving when this was over. She had to leave. She had to get away before he discovered the truth.
Because falling in love with Alesander had never been part of the deal.
‘It was wrong of me,’ he admitted suddenly, completely blindsiding her. ‘I should never have made love to you. Not here. Not like this.’
She channelled shock into rational thought and turned her panicked mind to calculating dates, needing to be able to hope. ‘It might be okay,’ she said, needing to believe it. ‘It’s early in my cycle. It would be unlucky.’ But then she’d been lucky last time. Did this kind of luck get balanced out? Was it her turn to be unlucky?
He had his back to her, refusing to look at her.
Two facts that didn’t escape her. ‘Luck does not come into it. It shouldn’t have happened!’
She swiped up her knickers from the ground with as much dignity as she could muster, balling them in her fist, not bothering to further humiliate herself by stopping to tug them on now. ‘You’re so right,’ she said. ‘Maybe you might try remembering that next time.’
Alesander swung around. There wouldn’t be a next time. Damn her, there shouldn’t have been a this time!
He was a man of needs, it was true. He always had been. But never since his first wild encounter with a woman, when he’d barely been a teenager and she was a wanton who’d let his night time fantasies play out in her hot hands and hot mouth and who’d given him a gold-plated initiation to the pleasures of the flesh, had he been so unprepared and made such a mistake. He’d used up all the luck he was planning on ever needing that time.
Because he wasn’t a teenager any more.
There were no excuses.
Except to blame her.
That was the one thing he could do.
Because she did this to him. She was the one who reduced him to his basest level and his basest needs. She was the one who drove him crazy and made him blind with lust when he needed to be thinking straight.
‘There can be no child!’
‘My God, do you actually think I want one?’
‘Why not? When you’re the one who stands to gain the most by prolonging this relationship.’
‘You think? Why the hell would I want to prolong spending time with you? No, I’m going home when this is over. A child of yours is hardly the kind of souvenir I want or need to take with me.’
‘And if it’s already happened? You can’t just wish it away.’
‘Damn you, Alesander. And whose fault would it be if there was? I told you I didn’t want to have sex with you. I told you it was the only way to guarantee there could be no complications. But did you listen to me? No. Because Mr Can’t-Live-Without-Sex couldn’t exercise a bit of self-control.’
‘And you haven’t enjoyed it? You didn’t cry out in pleasure every time you came? Every time I took you there?’
‘And that’s relevant, because? You know damned well that I didn’t want to have sex with you. You were the one who changed the terms.’
‘Terms you agreed to!’
‘Only because you threatened to tell Felipe our marriage was a sham if I didn’t!’
How else was he supposed to get her to agree? ‘You wanted it. You wanted me from that first time in my apartment. Do you think I couldn’t smell your need? Do you think I didn’t know then and there that you were gagging for it?’
The crack of her palm against his cheek punctuated the argument. For a long moment he said nothing, his nostrils flaring, his eyes like dark—angry—pits. ‘You never were very good at dealing with the truth.’
She squeezed her eyes shut. Oh God, the truth. What was the truth any more? She’d told so many lies she was beginning to forget where truth ended and the lies began. She’d lied to Felipe every time she saw him and pretended to be happy in her marriage. She’d lied to herself pretending that she didn’t want Alesander and then burning up with him at night. And now she was slapping a man she’d only just finished convincing herself that she loved. But there was one indisputable truth that he could not argue with. ‘If we are talking truths, then I know of one truth you cannot deny—that if we had kept to the original terms of the contract, if we had never had sex, then we wouldn’t be having this conversation now, because the chances of conceiving a baby would never have been an issue.’
Silence reigned between them, letting in the sounds of the vineyard, the rustle of leaves in the breeze and the cry of seabirds amid the heavy weighted silence of blame and regret.
‘So when will you know?’
She shook her head, dragging in air. ‘Three weeks? Most likely less.’ Hopefully less. She swallowed, a sick feeling roiling in her gut. Would he ask her to make sure? He was a man of the world. He would know there were options. At least there were in Australia …
‘I won’t …’ she started. ‘I can’t …’
‘That is not our way!’ he simply said, putting a full stop on that particular conversation. ‘Three weeks, you say?’
‘It’s early in my cycle, which is good … well … it’s better. Safer.’
‘Sí.’ He frowned. ‘I can wait that long. And meanwhile I will show you that you are wrong, that I can exercise control and live without sex.’
She laughed, the sound bitter. ‘Don’t you think it’s a little late for that?’
Maybe it was, but he could do with the time away from her. He’d enjoyed her in his bed these past few weeks, and perhaps he’d enjoyed her too much. Perhaps that was the problem.
Putting distance between them, putting up barriers, might be the best thing for them. Felipe was growing weaker—the march of his disease relentless, the damage wrought becoming more apparent by the day. Soon she’d be going home and there was no point getting used to having her around.
And he didn’t want her getting used to being around. His women were supposed to be temporary. That was the way he liked it.
That was the way he’d always liked it.
They were almost back at the cottage when they heard it, a crash followed by a muffled cry.
‘Felipe!’ she screamed alongside him, suddenly bolting for the door.
‘They won’t let him come home,’ she sniffed, sitting in a hospital waiting room chair, repeating the words the doctor had just delivered. ‘I should have been there. I should never have left him.’
‘It wouldn’t have made any difference. Felipe is ill. His bones are weak. If it didn’t happen today, it could have been tomorrow or the next day.’
‘But I should have been there.’
He pulled her closer, his arm around her shoulders. ‘It’s not your fault.’
‘Felipe hates hospitals. It will kill him being away from his vines.’
‘Simone, he’s dying. He’s too sick now to be at home. You can’t look after him. You can’t watch him twenty-four hours a day.’
And she sniffed again and knew that there was nothing he could say or do that would make her feel better. Felipe had needed her and she hadn’t been there.
And where she had been and what she’d been doing—oh God—was Felipe to get his wish for a baby after all? Was that to be yet another price she would pay for her lies?
She buried her face in her hands and cried, ‘I should have been there.’
Felipe’s condition steadily deteriorated after that, the break in his hip ensuring he would stay bed-ridden. Simone spent as much time with him as possible. He had moments of great lucidity, where he would talk about Maria and how they had met and the fiestas where he had courted her.
He had moments of rambling confusion, where he would tumble words in Spanish and Basque and English all together and make no sense at all.
At night Alesander would collect her from the hospital and take her back to the apartment and make sure she ate something before she fell into bed and woke up to do it all over again.
He watched her withdraw into herself, watched the shadows grow under her eyes, watched the haunted look on her features and he marvelled at her strength.
And he ached for her.
God, how he ached for her.
He wanted her so much. He wanted to hold her and hug her and soothe away her pain. He wanted to make love to her and put life and light back into her beautiful blue eyes.
But, true to his word, he did not make a move on her.
He doubted she even noticed, and that made him feel no better.
At night he watched her sleeping, watching the steady rise and fall of her chest, her beautiful face at peace for a few short hours until she woke and the pain of grief and imminent loss returned.
‘You don’t have to go in every day,’ he’d said to her after the first week. ‘Have a day to yourself. Relax.’
But she’d shaken her head. ‘I have to go,’ she’d said. ‘I’m all he has. He’s all I have.’
And he’d ached for her that she had lost so much in her short life.
And what she hadn’t lost, he’d taken.
They’d made a deal, he told himself, a contract, and that made him feel no better at all.
‘He’s all I have,’ she’d said.
And it twisted in his gut that he didn’t figure in her deliberations at all. Was there no place for him? Did he mean nothing to her after the months they’d spent together? After the nights when she’d lain so slick with sweat and satisfied in his arms?
Sure, they’d always planned to part and go their separate ways when Felipe died and their contract came to an end. But why should knowing that he meant so little sit so uncomfortably with him?
An ambulance brought Felipe home to die, the two nurses setting up his bed near the window of the cottage where he’d been born so he could look out over the vineyard where he’d lived his entire life. A day, they warned her, she’d have with him. Maybe two at the most.
She spent the first day sitting by his side, talking to him when he was awake enough to listen, about what was going on in the vineyard or about what life was like in Australia. Every now and then she was certain he had taken his last breath, and she would hold her own as he would grow absolutely still, only for the next breath to shudder from the depths of his sunken chest and make her jump. Sometimes his breathing came so fast he could have been running a race. And other times he fidgeted and shifted restlessly, muttering words she couldn’t understand.
On the second day she grew more used to the breathing. Or maybe she just grew used to not knowing which might be his final breath. Still she expected his death to come that day.
On the third day she sat alongside the bed, feeling exhausted. He was eating nothing, drinking less, and still he held on. It was killing her watching him—listening to his stop–start breathing and hearing the bubbling gurgle in his chest. She held his hand, talking to him when it seemed he might be awake, sponging his brow when he seemed upset or agitated.
The fidgeting grew worse. Felipe fidgeted with the blanket again, murmuring words she couldn’t understand. She touched her hand to his to calm him and chided him gently, ‘You’re cold, Abuelo. You should put your hands under the blanket.’
One of the nurses took her aside when he had calmed into a sleep and she had risen to stretch her legs. ‘It’s a sign,’ the nurse said. ‘His circulation is slowing. His whole body is closing down.’
‘But why is it taking so long?’ she cried. She didn’t want her grandfather to die, but neither did she want to see him suffer. ‘And he’s so restless at times. He wanted to go quietly in his sleep. Why does he fidget so much?’
The nurse smiled and took her hands. ‘Sometimes the living can’t let them go. And other times people can’t let themselves go. Sometimes there are loose ends or plans left unfinished. Is there anything you know of that he is worried about? Are there loose ends he wanted tied up?’
Simone shook her head. ‘I thought he wanted to be reunited with Maria.’
‘And there’s nothing else he might feel has been left undone?’
She closed her eyes and sighed. Because there was one thing Felipe had wished for.
But there was no chance of that now. Her period had come the week before. The much anticipated period that would tell her if her passionate encounter with Alesander amidst the vines had resulted in a child.
It had not.
She hadn’t bothered to tell Alesander and he hadn’t bothered to ask, whether because he’d lost count of the days or merely lost interest she didn’t know. Maybe because he’d believed her when she’d assured him it would be okay. Maybe because all he’d ever cared about was the land and any day now it would be his—every day brought him closer to his goal.
Whatever, Alesander had stopped caring. He didn’t want to know.
And then, when it all came down to it, Felipe didn’t need to know either.
She looked over at him, shrunken and tormented on the bed, biting her lip. Would it matter to tell one more tiny lie? One more on top of all the others?
No, she decided, watching his busy fingers worry the bedding again.
One more tiny lie would make no difference at all now.
She sat down beside him, took his cold fingers in her own and squeezed them gently. ‘Abuelo, it’s Simone.’
One of the nurses called him, warning him it was close, and for a while he wondered whether he should even be there. He’d kept his distance the last few days she’d been living at the cottage again. Felipe was her grandfather and after the month they’d had, he wondered if she even wanted him there.
But he couldn’t stay away.
She would be leaving soon. Once Felipe died, there would be no reason for her to stay. She would pack her things and return to her home and her studies in Melbourne.
He would probably never see her again.
He needed to see her again before that happened.
Besides, she was about to lose the only person she cared about in the world. She needed someone to be there for her.
He wanted that person to be him.
He wanted her to know he was there for her, even if she didn’t care.
He stepped into the tiny cottage, his eyes taking a few seconds to adjust to the gloom after being outside, and saw Simone sit down next to the bed where her wizened grandfather lay.
‘Abuelo, it’s Simone.’ She took his cold fingers in hers, wishing him her warmth.
He muttered something low and hard to understand, but he was awake and still listening.
‘Abuelo, I have some good news.’ Tears squeezed from her eyes at the lie she was about to tell. One more lie to follow all the others, but maybe this would be the end of it, she told herself. And if it let him go, maybe this lie was the most important of all of them. ‘You got your wish, Abuelo. I … I am expecting a baby. And I am hoping with all my heart it will be a boy because then we will call him after you. We will name him Felipe.’
‘Ah,’ the old man said on a gasp, his hand jerking, tugging her closer as his jaw worked up and down. ‘Ah!’
She leaned over him. ‘What is it?’ she asked.
‘Happy,’ he gasped. ‘Gracias, mi nieta, gracias.’
The effort almost seemed too much as he sagged back into the pillows, and she thought he was finished until she heard his thready voice. ‘Maria … Maria is here. I must go to her.’
‘Sí,’ she said, nodding as tears filled her eyes and spilled onto the bedding. ‘She has been waiting for you. She will be so happy to see you again.’
How long it was after that she couldn’t tell. She only knew that one of the nurses finally touched her on the shoulder. ‘He’s gone,’ she said, and Simone nodded, because she had sensed the exact moment Felipe had gone to join his wife.
It was done.