CHAPTER TEN
FRANCESCA DIDN’T EVER want to leave the bed again, not when Marcos was in it with her. But hunger finally won out. She slipped from the bed and took a quick shower, her body still aching in places it had not in a very long time. But it was a very pleasurable ache.
She almost hoped Marcos would wake and join her in the shower, but then it would be even longer before she got any breakfast. Frowning, she thought back to the last time they’d made love, when he’d woken from his nightmare. He’d been so intense, so driven. She wanted to take away his pain, and the only way she’d been able to do that was by giving him her body.
Yet she’d wanted more. She’d wanted him to talk to her, really talk to her, and she’d wanted to feel as if she were important to him as more than a bed partner. He’d called her his kitten, and her heart still throbbed when she remembered the way he’d said it, but she had to remind herself it meant nothing in the scheme of things.
This was a temporary arrangement, and she was leaving as soon as it was over. She had to remember that.
But her heart didn’t want to think about it. Her heart, dismayingly, only wanted to think of Marcos.
When she emerged from the shower, she dressed in one of the new outfits, a flattering cream silk tank and pale yellow Capri pants. It surprised her, but she had to admit that Marcos had been right about her clothes. These were far more suitable than the older jeans and blousy tops she’d been wearing.
She felt good, but whether it was the clothes or the afterglow from last night, she wasn’t quite sure. Perhaps a bit of both.
She returned to the bedroom, a little kick of disappointment hitting her in the breastbone when she discovered that Marcos had gone.
Probably, he’d returned to his own room to shower and dress. What would happen now that they’d been intimate? Would he expect her to move into his room? Would he move in here? Or would they keep separate rooms and spend their nights like illicit lovers rather than a married couple?
So many questions, and none she could really answer. Voices issued from the kitchen as she approached. Curious, she peeked inside. Armando sat in a high chair, banging the tray, and Ingrid was gesturing wildly as she spoke to another woman. They turned when they saw her.
“Se?ora Navarre,” Ingrid said. “Buenas tardes. If you would like to go outside, I will serve breakfast there in a few moments.”
“Of course,” Francesca said, though it still jolted her to hear herself referred to as Se?ora Navarre. “But what’s wrong? Is it something I can help with?”
Ingrid sighed and glanced at the other woman. “Ana Luis has run away. She met a boy, and has left to be with him.”
Francesca glanced at Armando. He seemed oblivious to his mother’s absence as he shoved cereal around on his tray. “She left her baby?”
“Yes,” Ingrid said with a sigh.
“Does Marcos know?”
“Se?or Navarre has just been informed. He has sent men to look for her, I believe.”
“When did she go?”
“Sometime in the night. I found Armando alone in his crib when I arrived. Poor baby,” she said, reaching over to tousle his hair. Armando giggled. Francesca’s heart squeezed hard at the sound. He had no idea he’d been abandoned. No idea he wasn’t wanted.
Why could people who didn’t care about children have them when she couldn’t?
Stop. It was no use traveling that road. She’d been down it before, and there were no answers. Only heartache and pain.
Ingrid put a palm to her temple. “I have so much to do today, and no idea how it will all get done when I must watch this little one here.”
“Why don’t I take him?” Francesca said, shocking both herself and Ingrid if the look on the other woman’s face was any indication.
“Oh no, se?ora, I cannot ask you to do that. This is your honeymoon! You must have fun, spend time with your husband. A baby would be a distraction.”
“Nonsense,” Francesca said. Marcos had told people it was their honeymoon? Her heart leapt just a little at that, before she reminded herself it meant nothing. “It’s not Armando’s fault, and I’m not doing anything anyway.”
“You’re certain?”
Hell no, she wasn’t certain, if the reckless pounding of her pulse was any indication. “Of course.”
Ingrid grabbed a rag and wiped Armando’s face, then lifted him from the chair and carried him over to her. For a moment, Francesca wondered if she’d made a mistake, if she knew what she was doing, but Armando smiled and spread his chubby little arms wide. She took him, tears springing to her eyes as he wrapped his arms around her neck.
He smelled like a baby. And like cereal and sunshine. She wanted to squeeze him close and kiss his little cheeks. Instead, she took him to the veranda and bounced him on her lap while she waited for breakfast to arrive.
Someone brought a play pen and popped it open. Francesca thanked the girl, though she was pretty certain by the frown on Armando’s face that he didn’t want to spend any time in it.
“It’s okay, Armando,” Francesca soothed. “You can sit right here with me if you’re a good boy.”
The baby burbled happily. Francesca gazed at him in wonder, her heart expanding so wide it hurt. Her own little girl would have been almost four. She’d stayed away from children because it hurt too much, but holding this little boy right now felt like the best thing she’d done in a long time. Besides making love with Marcos, of course.
As if thinking of him summoned him, he suddenly appeared in the doorway. The expression on his face, she noted, was thunderous. It cleared a little when he saw her, and he even managed a smile when Armando turned to look at him.
“Have you found her?” Francesca asked as he came over and pulled out a chair.
“No.”
Armando reached for Marcos. Oddly, she felt a little reluctant to let him go, but Marcos took him and tickled his belly. The baby laughed uproariously while Marcos made faces.
A pang of longing pierced her soul. She wanted this life. Wanted Marcos and a baby. Wanted nights like the last night, and days that were perfect and stretched endlessly before her like a sea of happiness. She wanted what was, essentially, a beautiful illusion. And she wanted it to be real.
“What will happen if you can’t find her?”
“Ah, Dios, I wish I knew.”
“What about Armando?”
Marcos looked at the little boy in his arms. “He will be taken care of.”
“By whom?”
“I don’t know yet.”
It pierced her to think of this baby without his mother, but what could she say? She and Marcos weren’t in a real relationship, and thoughts of the two of them taking care of Armando if Ana didn’t come back were a pipe dream. “I’m sorry, Marcos. I know it hurts you to have her leave like this.”
His expression was controlled. “I told you I cannot save them all. And Ana has run away with a boy she met. She has not returned to the streets. Perhaps they will even marry.”
“What usually happens with the teens you employ here?” she asked, wishing to distract him just a little bit. To get him to focus on the positive results of what he did.
“Some of them go to university,” he said. “Others choose a trade.”
“Do many of them choose college?”
“Many do, yes. Navarre Industries hires them once they graduate, should they desire to work for us.”
What he did was amazing, and yet he beat himself up so badly over the ones he lost. She didn’t understand it. “And what would happen to them if you did not do this, Marcos?”
He looked solemn. “Drugs, prostitution, gangs, death. Even war,” he added, almost as an afterthought.
One word stood out. “War?”
“Sí. There is much unrest in parts of Latin America. Guerilla warfare against what one perceives to be society’s oppressors can be an attractive option for some.”
Her heart began to pound. “I had no idea.” She thought of the scar on his abdomen, of the way he dreamed so violently. Could he have gotten scarred like that on the streets? Or was it a product of warfare? Suddenly, she had to know the truth. “Is that what happened to you?”
His eyes seemed so hard, so cold, as if his emotions had frozen solid. “Do you really wish to know? Do you think you can save me if only you know what drives me? That the love of a good woman will keep me from reliving the nightmare?”
He was so defensive that she knew she must be right. And it saddened her. Made her ache for the boy he’d been, the young man who’d suffered so much. He hid it away inside, and it was killing him.
But he couldn’t see it.
“Yes, Marcos, I do want to know. But I imagine no one can save you except yourself.”
The food arrived before he could reply. Marcos let Ingrid’s daughter take the baby and put him in the play pen. His little eyes had begun to droop, and soon he was curled up asleep with his thumb in his mouth.
The moment was gone, so she didn’t expect Marcus would answer her now. He surprised her when he did. He looked pensive, a bit lost, as if it wasn’t quite his choice to speak but as though he couldn’t stop himself.
“I am not accustomed to talking about this with anyone,” Marcos said once Ingrid and Isabelle had gone. “But yes, I was a guerilla fighter, Francesca. I saw battle, I saw despair and evil and the worst a man can do to another man.”
“I’m sure you did what you had to do,” she said softly, trying not to let the tears mounding behind her eyes fall. He would not appreciate any show of pity.
He sighed and leaned back in his chair, his food untouched. “I have always done what I thought I had to do to survive. I can’t apologize for any of it, but I wish it had been different.”
“I think I understand why you hated your uncle so much now. And why the Corazón del Diablo is so important to you.” She leaned forward suddenly, grabbed his wrist where it lay on the table. His reaction was immediate. He jerked his arm away so quickly she found herself grasping air and wondering what she’d done wrong.
“Don’t ever do that,” he ground out.
She sat back and folded her hands in her lap. She thought back to how he’d reacted so violently in Buenos Aires when she’d gone to wake him and grabbed his wrist before he could accidentally hit her in his sleep. What was it about his wrists? She wanted to ask him, but she did not. She’d already intruded enough on his memories.
“I was just going to say that I think you are too hard on yourself, that you push yourself too much and don’t take the time to realize all the good you’ve done. You take the failures much harder than you celebrate the successes.”
Marcos shoved a hand through his hair, swearing softly. She opened his wounds wide and didn’t even know it. And she cut so close to the truth that it threatened to crumble all his defensive walls. He was accustomed to success, maybe so much so that he took it for granted.
“You are right,” he said carefully. “I do take the failures personally. Especially the kids. But when I fail them, I lose more than money or prestige. I lose entire lives.”
“But you also save lives.”
He picked up his cup of café con leche and took a drink. Dios, he needed the caffeine. So much was changing, and so rapidly. He’d brought Francesca to Argentina to punish her for taking the Corazón del Diablo, and to cement his possession of it. He’d not brought her here to let her worm her way beneath his defenses. She saw through him, saw to the heart of him in a way no one else seemed to do.
Why was that? Because she paid attention? Because she was more perceptive than others? Or because she’d known him in the past and had years to consider his personality?
He did not know, but he didn’t like it. Didn’t like the way his perception of her was forced to undergo a shift from old beliefs to newer ones.
Yet he knew that if his choices were to put her on a plane this afternoon, or to have her in his bed later tonight, having her in his bed would win the battle. One night with her, and he was addicted to the rush he felt when he made love to her.
The feeling was temporary, he knew that from experience, but it was damned inconvenient as well. Still, he intended to make the most of it while this arrangement lasted.
Even if she did get under his skin with her too-sharp perception and pointed questions.
“Yes, the Foundation saves lives. I am happy with this, but I will be happier when we are no longer needed. I’m not sure we will ever see that day.”
“No, perhaps not,” she said. “But you will never cease working to make it so. Of that I’m certain.”
He nodded, then glanced over at the sleeping child. “I will be happy if we can find and bring back Ana Luis. Her baby will miss her.”
Francesca’s eyes were shiny with unshed tears. “I don’t understand how she can be happy without him. Perhaps she will miss him so much she’ll come back on her own.”
Marcos studied her. She looked … wistful. As if she longed for a child, no matter that she’d claimed to be afraid of them only yesterday. She’d looked happy enough when he’d found her holding Armando.
“You could be right,” he said, “but I doubt it. She is a sixteen-year-old girl. A baby is probably a burden. She wants to be free, to have fun, and this little one is like a millstone around her neck, I imagine. She may love him, but she has probably convinced herself he is better off without her.”
She blinked, as if she’d never considered such a possibility. “Or maybe her head was turned by this boy she met. Maybe she’ll come to her senses.”
“Is that what you did, querida?” he asked very softly.
“What do you mean?”
“With me. Did it take you very long to come to your senses? Or would you have followed where you thought your heart wanted to go? If I had taken you with me that night, eight years ago, would you have come?”
She looked away, toying with the half-eaten croissant on her plate. “I imagine I would have followed you to the ends of the earth, Marcos. Though I’m sure I’d have figured out the truth soon enough.”
“The truth?”
“That you were only using me.”
“As you were using me.”
“You can continue to believe that if it makes you feel better,” she said. Then she speared him with a glare. “But the truth is, if I had thought that asking my father to buy you for me would have worked, I probably would have done it. Because yes, I was that hopelessly in love.
That deluded.”
Her words pricked him more than he liked. Deluded. “How do you know that you did not ask him? You didn’t have to say those exact words, after all.”
“I never spoke with my father about you. I never spoke with any of them, because I was afraid of what they would say.”
“And what did you think that would be?”
She thrust her chin up, a gesture he was beginning to recognize as a defense mechanism. It was her mantle of self-assurance settling into place, however tattered a mantle it may be.
“That I was delusional, that I wasn’t pretty enough or smart enough, that you would never look at me twice. The list can get quite long if you want to hear it all.”
Anger surged through him at the thought of her family saying such things to her. And they would have, he knew. At least her mother and sister would have. Her father had adored her, which was perhaps why her mother and sister had been so jealous.
“They would have been wrong, Francesca.”
She snorted. “Of course. And you proved how wrong they were by leaving as soon as the ink was dry on the marriage license.”
He leaned forward and caught her face between his hands, kissing her until she began to soften, until he could feel the blood rushing to his groin and feel the pounding of desire in his veins. “They could say none of those things now, and you know it,” he said, leaning his forehead against hers. “Stop picking at old wounds. Life is about forward motion, not regrets.”
She gently disentangled herself from his grasp. Her golden-green eyes were full of sadness as she searched his face. He felt like he’d been shoved beneath a microscope—and the scrutiny was becoming uncomfortable because it went so far beneath the surface.
“Then why don’t you take your own advice, Marcos? Because from where I’m sitting, you’re a man living so deeply in the past you can’t even enjoy the present.”
They had not found Ana and her boyfriend by nightfall. Francesca took turns with Ingrid and another of the women who worked there in playing with Armando. He was a sweet little boy, but he was beginning to get fussy the longer he went without his mother.
Surely, Ana must have done a few things right, or her son would not have bonded with her so strongly as to notice she’d been gone for a very long time. Francesca had just given the child back to Ingrid and decided to go for a walk in the vineyard when Marcos emerged from his office.
She’d not spoken with him since breakfast. Once they’d finished eating, he’d said he had business to attend to and shut himself away. He’d even had his lunch delivered and had eaten behind closed doors.
She’d thought he meant to ignore her completely after what she’d said to him this morning. Looking at him now, her heart contracted. “Have they found her?” she asked, hoping beyond hope that he’d found out something.
He shook his head. He looked so forlorn in that moment, so defeated. She wanted to go to him, wrap her arms around him. Tell him how she felt.
And just like that, the truth of what she was feeling slammed into her, stole her breath away. She loved him.
She loved Marcos Navarre. This time it was real, not the childish love of an infatuated teenager. He was far from the selfish, cruel bastard she’d thought him to be. He felt things deeply, and he acted with more dignity and morality than anyone she’d ever known.
Including her own family. Her mother was selfish beyond belief, her sister had always been concerned with herself and the way she looked, and her father indulged them all with bigger and better gifts and trips. Not one of them had ever expressed concern over those less fortunate than they were. She didn’t ever remember any talk about favorite charities or reasons other than tax deductions to give money away.
And she’d been just as bad, living in her shell and worrying about herself and her secret—or not so secret—crush on Marcos.
Yet, in spite of loss and pain and a difficult childhood, Marcos had dedicated himself to helping others.
And she loved him for it.
The thought sent a little shiver of heat and joy racing up her spine all at once. And fear.
Because he did not love her in return, nor was he likely to do so. This was a temporary marriage, based on his desire to reclaim his family birthright once and for all. At the end of their time together, he would stick her on a plane and say goodbye forever.
“How is Armando?” he asked her.
“He seems fine,” she said. “Ingrid has taken him.”
Marcos shoved a hand through his hair. “This has never happened before. I cannot allow that child to go to an orphanage,” he finished fiercely.
Francesca finally conquered her paralysis. She went to him, slipped her arms around his waist and pressed in close, her head on his chest. He did not push her away. Instead, he squeezed her to him.
“Of course you can’t,” she said. “It won’t come down to that.”
“What a tiger you are,” he murmured. “So fierce, so strong in your beliefs. I am thankful you’ve never been disillusioned.”
She pushed back, tilted her head up to look at him. “I’ve been disillusioned plenty, Marcos. But that doesn’t mean I give up.”
He threaded his fingers through her hair. “I do not give up either. Perhaps we are more alike than I thought.”
Heat wound its way through her limbs, sizzling into her nerve endings. All he had to do was touch her—no, all he had to do was look at her—and she was on fire. She dropped her chin, certain he would see her heart in her eyes if she kept looking at him.
A baby’s wail ricocheted through the house. Marcos stiffened, though she knew it wasn’t out of annoyance or anger.
“We should go see what’s happening,” she said. “Maybe Armando will respond to one of us.”
“Sí,” Marcos replied, taking her hand and leading her toward the kitchen.
The scene they entered into was one of controlled chaos. Ingrid was extracting her hands from a pile of dough, her skin too covered in flour and gluten to quickly be free, and Isabelle was cleaning up an oozing pile of spaghetti that had spattered on the floor, the table, her, and Armando. A stoneware bowl also lay on the floor, shattered.
Baby Armando wailed at the top of his lungs in his high chair. Francesca hurried over to help Isabelle while Marcos grabbed a wet rag and wiped off Armando’s face. Then he lifted the toddler out of the chair, uncaring of the tomato sauce that got on his shirt as he held Armando close and began to bounce him up and down.
Armando kept wailing.
“Give him to me,” Francesca said when she’d helped Isabelle pick up the broken stoneware. Marcos handed him over, and though he continued to cry, he began calming down as she crooned a song to him. A song she’d sung to her unborn baby at night when her little girl would kick and keep her awake. It had often worked, or so she’d convinced herself.
It worked on Armando too. He lay his head on her shoulder and stuck his thumb in his mouth, though he still sniffled and hiccoughed.
“He likes you,” Marcos said, shooting her a smile that melted her insides.
“Only this time. Later, it could be you he prefers.”
Marcos’s smiled didn’t waver. “I doubt that, mi gatita. He knows he has found a soft heart in you.”
She turned from her husband, certain her face was red. Ingrid gave her a smile and a wink. Francesca couldn’t help but smile back. She carried Armando into the cavernous living area and sat down on one of the long couches there. Marcos was close behind, his hands in his jeans pockets, his shirt streaked with red sauce.
He’d never looked sexier to her. She could imagine him being so tender and good with his own child, and her heart ached. She loved him, and she could never give him that.
A pain throbbed in her breastbone. He didn’t want that kind of life with her anyway. This was not a true marriage, and she was not a true wife. She’d been so incredibly stupid in not keeping an emotional distance from this man.
But how could she have done so? Each new thing she learned about him was like a nail in the coffin of her determination not to like him.
She’d failed, and she would pay the price when the time came.
Marcos perched on the thick wooden coffee table in front of the couch. “And you said you were scared of children.”
“I’d never been around them, is all,” she replied, stroking Armando’s soft curls. Her eyes filled with tears. She tried to hold them back, but one spilled down her cheek regard less.
Marcos leaned forward, his brows drawing together as he caught a teardrop on his finger. “What is this, querida? You have told me to have faith. Do you not take your own advice?”
“It’s not that,” she whispered, suddenly overwhelmed with all she wanted to say. With all she wanted to share. “I-I was pregnant once.”
Shock rocked him back. “Pregnant?”
She nodded, unable to look at him, her heart throbbing. “I lost the baby at six months. There was a robbery at the store, and I was beaten. They killed my baby.”
“Francesca, my God—”
“She was a girl. Jacques cared for me when all I wanted to do was die as well. It wasn’t just physical, either. He saved me from myself.”
“Your mother? Your sister?”
She shook her head. “He called them, but they’d disowned me. Because of the Corazón del Diablo.”
“Madre de Dios,” he breathed, visibly shaken. “When did this happen? What did they do to the men who did this?”
“It was four years ago, soon after Robert and I split. The men were caught. One of them died in prison, but the other two are still there. There’s one more thing.” She drew in a deep breath. “I can never have children of my own. The doctors say the damage was too great.”