Billionaire, M.D. / Secrets of the Playboy's Bride
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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. Oh, God.” A geyser of nausea shot from her depths. She pitched to the side of the bed. Somehow she found Rodrigo around her, holding her head and a pan. She retched emptily, shook like a bell that had been struck by a giant mallet.
And it wasn’t from a blow of grief. It was from one of horror, at the anger and relief that were her instinctive reactions.
What kind of monster was she to feel like that about somebody’s death, let alone that of her husband? Even if she’d fiercely wanted out of the relationship. Was it because of what she felt for Rodrigo? She’d wished her husband dead to be with him?
No. No. She just knew it hadn’t been like that. It had to have been something else. Could her husband have been abusing her? Was she the kind of woman who would have suffered humiliation and damage, too terrified to block the blows or run away?
She consulted her nature, what transcended memory, what couldn’t be lost or forgotten, what was inborn and unchangeable.
It said, no way. If that man had abused her, emotionally or physically, she would have carved his brains out with forceps and sued him into his next few reincarnations.
So what did this mess mean?
“Are you okay?”
She shuddered miserably. “If feeling mad when I should be sad is okay. There must be more wrong with me than I realized.”
After the surprise her words induced, contemplation settled on his face. “Anger is a normal reaction in your situation.”
“What?” He knew why it was okay to feel so mad at a dead man?
“It’s a common reaction for bereaved people to feel anger at their loved ones who die and leave them behind. It’s worse when someone dies in an accident that that someone had a hand in or caused. The first reaction after shock and disbelief is rage, and it’s all initially directed toward the victim. That also explains your earlier attack of bitterness. Your subconscious must have known that he was the one flying the plane. It might have recorded all the reports that flew around you at the crash site.”
“You’re saying I speak Spanish?”
He frowned. “Not to my knowledge. But maybe you approximated enough medical terminology to realize the extent of his injuries….”
“Ya lo sé hablar español.”
She didn’t know which of them was more flabbergasted.
The Spanish words had flowed from a corner in her mind to her tongue without conscious volition. And she certainly knew what they meant. I know how to speak Spanish.
“I…had no idea you spoke Spanish.”
“Neither did I, obviously. But I get the feeling that the knowledge is partial…fresh.”
“Fresh? How so?”
“It’s just a feeling, since I remember no facts. It’s like I’ve only started learning it recently.”
He fixed her with a gaze that seeped into her skin, mingled into the rapids of her blood. Her temperature inched higher.
Was he thinking what she was thinking? That she’d started learning Spanish because of him? To understand his mother tongue, understand him better, to get closer to him?
At last he said, “Whatever the case may be, you evidently know enough Spanish to validate my theory.”
He was assigning her reactions a perfectly human and natural source. Wonder what he’d say if she set him straight?
She bet he’d think her a monster. And she wouldn’t blame him. She was beginning to think it herself.
Next second she was no longer thinking it. She knew it.
The memory that perforated her brain like a bullet was a visual. An image that corkscrewed into her marrow. The image of Mel, the husband she remembered with nothing but anger, whose death aroused only a mixture of resentment and liberation.
In a wheelchair.
Other facts dominoed like collapsing pillars, crushing everything beneath their impact. Not memories, just knowledge.
Mel had been paralyzed from the waist down. In a car accident. During their relationship. She didn’t know if it had been before or after they’d gotten married. She didn’t think it mattered.
She’d been right when she’d hypothesized why no one had rushed to her bedside. She was heartless.
What else could explain harboring such harshness toward someone who’d been so afflicted? The man she’d promised to love in sickness and in health? The one she’d basically felt “good riddance” toward when death did them part?
In the next moment, the air was sucked out of her lungs from a bigger blow.
“Cybele? ¿Te duele?“
Her ears reverberated with the concern in Rodrigo’s voice, her vision rippled over the anxiety warping his face. No. She wasn’t okay. She was a monster. She was amnesic. And she was pregnant.
Four
Excruciating minutes of dry retching later, Cybele lay surrounded by Rodrigo, alternating between episodes of inertness and bone-rattling shudders.
He soothed her with the steady pressure of his containment, wiping her eyelids and lips in fragrant coolness, his stroking persistent, hypnotic. His stability finally earthed her misery.
He tilted the face she felt had swollen to twice its original size to his. “You remembered something else?”
“A few things,” she hiccupped, struggled to sit up. The temptation to lie in his arms was overwhelming. The urge only submerged her under another breaker of guilt and confusion.
He helped her sit up, then severed all contact, no doubt not wanting to continue it a second beyond necessary.
Needing to put more distance between them, she swung her numb legs to the floor, slipped into the downy slippers that were among the dozens of things he’d supplied for her comfort, things that felt tailored to her size and needs and desires.
She wobbled with her IV drip pole to the panoramic window overlooking the most amazing verdant hills she’d ever seen. Yet she saw nothing but Rodrigo’s face, seared into her retinas, along with the vague but nausea-inducing images of Mel in his wheelchair, his rugged good looks pinched and pale, his eyes accusing.
She swung around, almost keeled over. She gasped, saw Rodrigo’s body bunch like a panther about to uncoil in a flying leap. He was across the room, but he’d catch her if she collapsed.
She wouldn’t. Her skin was crackling where he’d touched her. She couldn’t get enough of his touch but couldn’t let him touch her again. She held out a detaining hand, steadied herself.
He still rose but kept his distance, his eyes catching the afternoon sun, which poured in ropes of warm gold through the wall-to-wall glass. Their amalgamated color glowed as he brooded across the space at her, his eyebrows lowered, his gaze immobilizing.
She hugged her tender left shoulder, her wretchedness thickening, hardening, settling into concrete deadness. “The things I just remembered …I wouldn’t call them real memories. At least, not when I compare them to the memories I’ve been accumulating since I regained consciousness. I remember those in Technicolor, frame by frame, each accompanied by sounds and scents and sensations. But the things I just recalled came in colorless, soundless and shapeless, like skeletons of data and knowledge. Like headings without articles. If that makes any sense.”
He lowered his eyes to his feet, before raising them again, the surgeon in him assessing. “It makes plenty of sense. I’ve dealt with a lot of post-traumatic amnesia cases, studied endless records, and no one described returning memories with more economy and efficiency than you just did. But it’s still early. Those skeletal memories will be fleshed out eventually….”
“I don’t want them fleshed out. I want them to stop coming, I want what came back to disappear.” She squeezed her shoulder, inducing more pain, to counteract the skewer turning in her gut. “They’ll keep exploding in my mind until they blow it apart.”
“What did you remember this time?”
Her shoulders sagged. “That Mel was a paraplegic.”
He didn’t nod or blink or breathe. He just held her gaze. It was the most profound and austere acknowledgment.
And she moaned the rest, “And I’m pregnant.”
He blinked, slowly, the motion steeped in significance. He knew. And it wasn’t a happy knowledge. Why?
One explanation was that she’d been leaving Mel, but he’d become paralyzed and she’d discovered her pregnancy and it had shattered their plans. Was that the origin of the antipathy she had felt radiating from him from time to time? Was he angry at her for leading him on then telling him that she couldn’t leave her husband now that he was disabled and she was expecting his child?
She wouldn’t know unless he told her. It didn’t seem he was volunteering any information.
She exhaled. “Judging from my concave abdomen, I’m in the first trimester.”
“Yes.” Then as if against his better judgment, he added, “You’re three weeks pregnant.”
“Three weeks …?. How on earth do you know that? Even if you had a pregnancy test done among others before my surgery, you can’t pinpoint the stage of my pregnancy that accurate—” Her words dissipated under another gust of realization. “I’m pregnant through IVF. That’s how you know how far along I am.”
“Actually, you had artificial insemination. Twenty days ago.” “Don’t tell me. You know the exact hour I had it, too.” “It was performed at 1:00 p.m.”
She gaped at him, finding nothing to explain that too-specific knowledge. And the whole scenario of her pregnancy.
If it had been unplanned and she’d discovered it after she’d decided to leave Mel, that would still make her a cold-blooded two-timer. But it hadn’t been unplanned. Pregnancies didn’t come more planned than that. Evidently, she’d wanted to have a baby with Mel. So much that she’d made one through a procedure, when he could no longer make one with her the normal way. The intimate way.
So their marriage had been healthy. Until then. Which gave credence to Rodrigo’s claim that they’d been planning a honeymoon. Maybe to celebrate her pregnancy.
So how come her first reaction to his death was bitter relief, and to her pregnancy such searing dismay?
What kind of twisted psyche did she have?
There was only one way to know. Rodrigo. He kept filling in the nothingness that had consumed most of what seemed to have been a maze of a life. But he was doing so reluctantly, cautiously, probably being of the school that thought providing another person’s memories would make reclaiming hers more difficult, or would taint or distort them as they returned.
She didn’t care. Nothing could be more tainted or distorted than her own interpretations. Whatever he told her would provide context, put it all in a better light. Make her someone she could live with. She had to pressure him into telling her what he knew….Her streaking thoughts shrieked to a halt.
She couldn’t believe she hadn’t wondered. About how he knew what he knew. She’d let his care sweep her up, found his knowledge of her an anchoring comfort she hadn’t thought to question.
She blurted out the questions under pressure. “Just how do you know all this? How do you know me? And Mel?”
The answer detonated in her mind.
It was that look in his eyes. Barely curbed fierceness leashed behind the steel control of the surgeon and the suave refinement of the man. She remembered that look. Really remembered it. Not after she’d kissed him. Long before that. In that life she didn’t remember.
In that life, Rodrigo had despised her.
And it hadn’t been because she’d led him on, then wouldn’t leave Mel. It was worse. Far worse.
He’d been Mel’s best friend.
The implications of this knowledge were horrifying.
However things had been before, or worse, after Mel had been disabled, if she’d exhibited her attraction to Rodrigo, then he had good reason to detest her. The best.
“You remembered.”
She raised hesitant eyes at his rasp. “Sort of.”
“Sort of? Now that’s eloquent. More skeletal headlines?”
There was that barely contained fury again. She blinked back distress. “I remember that you were his closest friend, and that’s how you know so much about us, down to the hour we had a procedure to conceive a baby. Sorry I can’t do better.” And she was damned if she’d ask him what the situation between them had been. She dreaded he’d verify her speculations. “I’m sure the rest will come back. In a flood or bit by bit. No need to hang around here waiting for either event. I want to be discharged.”
He looked at her as if she’d sprouted two more sets of eyes. “Get back in bed, now, Cybele. Your lucidity is disintegrating with every moment on your feet, every word out of your mouth.”
“Don’t give me the patronizing medical tone, Dr. Valderrama. I’m a license-holding insider, if you remember.”
“You mean if you remember, don’t you?”
“I remember enough. I can recuperate outside this hospital.”
“You can only under meticulous medical supervision.” “I can provide that for myself.”
“You mean you don’t ‘remember’ the age-proven adage that doctors make the worst patients?”
“It has nothing to do with remembering it, just not subscribing to it. I can take care of myself.”
“No, you can’t. But I will discharge you. Into my custody. I will take you to my estate to continue your recuperation.”
His declaration took the remaining air from her lungs.
His custody. His estate. She almost swayed under the impact of the images that crowded her mind, of what both would be like, the temptation to jump into his arms and say Yes, please.
She had to say no. Get away from him. And fast. “Listen, I was in a terrible accident, but I got off pretty lightly. I would have died if you and your ultra-efficient medical machine hadn’t intervened, but you did, and you fixed me. I’m fine.”
“You’re so far from fine, you could be in another galaxy.”
It was just wrong. That he’d have a sense of humor, too. That it would surface now. And would pluck at her own humor strings.
She sighed at her untimely, inappropriate reaction. “Don’t exaggerate. All I have wrong with me is a few missing memories.”
“A few? Shall we make a list of what you do remember, those headlines with the vanished articles, and another of the volumes you’ve had erased and might never be able to retrieve, then revisit your definition of ‘a few'?”
“Cute.” And he was. In an unbearably virile and overruling way. “But at the rate I’m retrieving headlines, I’ll soon have enough to fill said volumes.”
“Even if you do, that isn’t your only problem. You had a severe concussion with brain edema and subdural hematoma. I operated on you for ten hours. Half of those were with orthopedic and vascular surgeons as we put your arm back together. Ramón said it was the most intricate open reduction and internal fixation of his career, while Bianca and I had a hell of a time repairing your blood vessels and nerves. Afterward, you were comatose for three days and woke up with a total memory deficit. Right now your neurological status is suspect, your arm is useless, you have bruises and contusions from head to toe and you’re in your first trimester. Your body will need double the time and effort to heal during this most physiologically demanding time. It amazes me you’re talking, and that much, moving at all and not lying in bed disoriented and sobbing for more painkillers.”
“Thanks for the rundown of my condition, but seems I’m more amazing than you think. I’m pretty lucid and I can talk as endlessly as you evidently can. And the pain is nowhere as bad as before.”
“You’re pumped full of painkillers.”
“No, I’m not. I stopped the drip.”
“What?” He strode toward her in steps loaded with rising tension. He inspected her drip, scowled down on her.
“When?”
“The moment you walked out after your last inspection.” “That means you have no more painkillers in your system.”
“I don’t need any. The pain in my arm is tolerable now. I think it was coming out of the anesthesia of unconsciousness that made it intolerable by comparison.”
He shook his head. “I think we also need to examine your definition of ‘pretty lucid.’ You’re not making sense to me. Why feel pain at all, when you can have it dealt with?”
“Some discomfort keeps me sharp, rebooting my system instead of lying in drug-induced comfort, which might mask some deterioration in progress. What about that doesn’t make sense to you?”
He scowled. “I was wondering what kept you up and running.”
“Now you know. And I vividly recall my medical training. I may be amnesic but I’m not reckless. I’ll take every precaution, do things by the post-operative, post-trauma book….”
“I’m keeping you by my side until I’m satisfied that you’re back to your old capable-of-taking-on-the-world self.”
That silenced whatever argument she would have fired back.
She’d had the conviction that he didn’t think much of her.
So he believed she was strong, but despised her because she’d come on stronger to him? Could she have done something so out-of-character? She abhorred infidelity, found no excuse for it. At least the woman who’d awakened from the coma did not.
Then he surprised her more. “I’m not talking about how you were when you were with Mel, but before that.”
She didn’t think to ask how he knew what she’d been like before Mel. She was busy dealing with the suspicion that he was right, that her relationship with Mel had derailed her.
More broad lines resurfaced. How she’d wanted to be nothing like her mother, who’d left a thriving career to serve the whims of Cybele’s stepfather, how she’d thought she’d never marry, would have a child on her own when her career had become unshakable.
Though she didn’t have a time line, she sensed that until months ago, she’d held the same convictions.
So how had she found herself married, at such a crucial time as her senior residency year, and pregnant, too? Had she loved Mel so much that she’d been so blinded? Had she had setbacks in her job in consequence, known things would keep going downhill and that was why she remembered him with all this resentment? Was that why she’d found an excuse to let her feelings for Rodrigo blossom?