- -
- 100%
- +
“Bless you,” I whispered, and hugged her. “Stay and have coffee,” I called to Alejandro. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.” I started up the stairs, carrying my sleeping baby with me.
Climbing three floors, I reached the attic. It looked even more desolate than I remembered, with only one grimy window, an ancient metal bed frame and stacks of boxes. Setting down the baby, I went straight for the boxes.
“What are you looking for?”
Hearing Alejandro’s husky voice behind me, I turned. “These boxes hold everything from my childhood.”
He stepped inside the attic room, knocking his head against the slanted roof. He rubbed it ruefully. “I can see why Claudie wouldn’t come up here. This place is like a prison cell.”
“This was my home for over ten years.”
His dark eyes widened. “This room?” He slowly looked around the attic, at the rough wood floors, at the naked lightbulb hanging from the ceiling. “You lived here?”
I gave a wistful laugh. “From the time my parents died when I was fourteen, until I left last year when...well. It looked nicer then, though. I made decorations, paper flowers.” A lump rose in my throat as I looked around the bare room where I’d spent so many years. The bare mattress on the metal bed frame where I’d slept so many nights. I gently touched the bare lightbulb and swung it on the cord. “I had a bright red lampshade I bought from the charity shop on Church Street.”
“A charity shop?” he said sharply. “But you’re Claudie’s cousin. A poor relation, I know, but I’d assumed you were well paid for all your work....”
This time my laugh was not so wistful. “I was paid a salary after I turned eighteen, but that money had to go to—other things. So I started earning a little money doing portraits at street fairs. But Claudie allowed me so little time away from the house...”
“Allowed you?” he said incredulously.
I looked at him. “You heard about my inheritance.”
“How much would it have been?”
“If I was still living in this house on my twenty-fifth birthday, a few months from now, I would have inherited thirty million pounds.”
His jaw dropped.
“Thirty...”
“Yes.”
“And you left it all?”
“To protect my baby. Yes.”
“To protect our baby, you sacrificed more money than most people see in a lifetime.”
He sounded so amazed. I shook my head. “Any mother would have done the same. Money is just money.” I glanced down at Miguel, and a smile lifted my cheeks as I said softly, “He is my life.”
When I finally looked up, his dark, soulful eyes were looking at me as if he’d never seen me before. My cheeks went hot. “I expect you think I’m an idiot.”
“Far from it,” he said in a low voice.
He was looking at me with such intensity. Awkwardly, I turned away and started digging through the top box. Pushing it aside, I opened the one beneath it.
“What are you looking for?” he said curiously.
Not answering, I pulled out old sweaters, old ragtag copies of books I’d read and reread as a teenager, Rebecca, A Little Princess, Jane Eyre. Finally, at the bottom of the box, I found the three oversize, flat photo albums. “Thank you,” I whispered aloud when I saw they hadn’t been burned, or warped from being left to rot in the rain or scribbled on with a venomous black marker, or any of the other images I’d tormented myself with. Pressing the albums against my chest, I closed my eyes in pure gratitude.
“Photo albums?” Alejandro said in disbelief. “You begged me to come to London for photo albums?”
“I told you,” I said sharply. “I came for my baby’s legacy.”
“But I never thought...” Frowning, Alejandro held out his hand. “Let me see.”
Reluctantly, I handed them over, then watched as he turned through the pages of the top album, at old photographs pressed against yellowing adhesive pages beneath the clear plastic cover.
“It nearly killed me to leave them behind,” I said. “It’s all I have left of my parents. My home.” I pointed to a picture of a tenement building where the ground floor was a butcher’s shop. “That was our apartment in Brooklyn.”
He turned the page. “And this?”
My heart twisted when I saw my mother, young and laughing, holding a ragtag bouquet of flowers, sitting in my father’s lap. “My parents’ wedding day. My dad was a student in London. He fell in love with a waitress, an immigrant newly arrived from Puerto Rico. He married her against his family’s wishes, when she was pregnant with me....”
Alejandro looked at me for a long moment, then silently turned more pages. My babyhood flashed before my eyes, pictures of me as a tiny baby, getting bathed in the sink, sitting on a towel on the kitchen floor, banging wooden spoons against a pot and beaming with the same chubby cheeks that Miguel had now.
Finishing the first album, Alejandro handed it to me without a word, and thumbed through the second book, then the third. My childhood passed swiftly—learning to ride a bike...my first day at school...
“Why are you interested?” I said haltingly. “Is it—to make fun of me?”
“To make fun?” He looked at me with a scowl. “You think I would taunt you about having a happy childhood?” He shook his head. “If anything, I envy you,” he said softly, looking back at the pages that my tenderhearted mother had made for me when I was a child. Right up to the very last photo, of my father at Christmas, sitting beneath the tree wearing a Santa hat, smiling lovingly at the camera as he held my mother’s homemade gift of a sweater. Two months later, he was dead. There were no more photos. The last few pages of the album were blank. Alejandro said softly, “I have no pictures of myself with my mother. None.”
I blinked. “How is that possible? I mean, I’d think you’d have a million pictures taken....”
He abruptly looked at me. Without answering, he closed the photo album and handed it to me.
“Perhaps you’re not who I thought you were.”
“Who did you think I was?”
“Exactly like all the other women I’ve ever dated. In love with the idea of being a rich duchess.” He looked down at me, his dark eyes infinite and deep as the night sky. “But I’m starting to think you’re different. A woman who would willingly leave thirty million pounds... You were actually in love with me, weren’t you?”
My breath got knocked out of me.
“That was a long time ago.”
Our eyes met, and I suddenly had to get out of the attic. I picked up Miguel’s baby carrier with one arm and carried the albums with the other. “I’ll be downstairs.”
Without looking back, I fled, rushing down the flights of stairs. My teeth were chattering, and I was shaking with strange emotion. Edward, I reminded myself. The other reason I’d come to London. I had to get his help before Alejandro could bully me into going to Spain. Although it actually wasn’t going to Spain that frightened me. It was never being able to leave again. It was being separated from my baby. It was being completely under the control of a man who’d almost destroyed me once, just by making me love him.
As I reached the bottom of the staircase, I heard a car door slam outside. Through the windows, I saw a flash of purple.
Claudie had come home.
I turned to where Hildy was loitering at the bottom of the stairs. “Hildy!”
“Oh, hello,” she said, blushing when she saw me. “I was just dusting the banister, Miss—”
“My cousin is here. Please.” Grabbing Hildy’s arm, I whispered, “I need you to take a message to Edward St. Cyr.”
“Edward St. Cyr?” Hildy’s eyes nearly popped out of her head. “Mr. St. Cyr himself? Are you serious?”
“Tell him I need to see him,” I said with more assurance than I felt.
“Here, miss? You know he and Miss Carlisle hate each other....”
Hearing my cousin fumbling at the door, I shook my head. “Tell him...the Princess Diana Playground in thirty minutes.”
With a quick, troubled nod, Hildy hurried toward the back door. Just in time, too. The front door slammed.
“Well. Look who’s back.”
My cousin’s voice was a sneer. Warily, I turned to face her for the first time in a year.
“Hello, Claudie.” She was wearing a tight, extremely short bandage dress, the kind you might wear to a club if you wanted a lot of attention, in a vivid shade of purple that almost matched the hollows beneath her eyes. “Late night?” I said mildly.
She glared at me.
“If you came to beg for your inheritance, forget it. My solicitors went through the will with a fine-tooth comb,” she ground out. “You’ll never...” Then she saw the baby and gasped in triumph. “You brought the brat here? I knew you’d see reason.” She rubbed her hands together in glee. “Now I’ll either make him marry me, or else I’ll—”
“You’ll what, Claudie?” Alejandro said coolly from the top of the stairs.
My cousin looked up, speechless for the first time in her life. But she recovered almost instantly. Smiling up at him, she put her hand on her hip, setting a pose that showed her figure to advantage, wearing her six-inch heels and skintight purple dress, trailing a cloud of expensive perfume. Her gorgeous, long blond hair tumbled over her shoulders, emphasizing the bone structure of her sharp cheekbones.
But as she licked her big lips, beneath her smile, her eyes were afraid. “Alejandro. I didn’t know you were here.”
He came down the stairs, looking down at her. He stopped in front of her. Even though she wore such high heels, he was still taller.
“You lied to me, Claudie,” he said pleasantly. “Lena wasn’t holding my baby hostage. You were.”
She visibly trembled, then tried to laugh. Reaching into her crystal-encrusted bag, she got out a pack of cigarettes. “Darling, I don’t know what kind of lies my precious cousin might have told you, but...”
He grabbed her wrist almost violently.
“Do not,” he said coldly, “smoke near my son.”
“Your son,” she breathed, searching his gaze, then ripped her arm away. “Are you so sure of that?” Her beautiful blue eyes hardened. “How do you know he’s yours? You should have seen all the men who used to come through here, Alejandro—trooping up to Lena’s bedroom every single night—”
A little gasp escaped me, like an enraged squeak.
Alejandro lifted an eyebrow. “Then they must have been lost, on their way to your room, Claudie.”
Her eyes narrowed. “I don’t like what you’re implying—”
“We did a DNA test,” he said, cutting her off. “The baby is mine.”
For a moment, she stared at him. But you could almost see her gather her forces. “He doesn’t have to be.” She looked from him to me. “If you don’t treat him like your son, no one else will.”
“You think I would abandon my own child?”
“Fine,” she said impatiently. She flung a skeletal finger toward my sweetly sleeping son. “We can take her baby. She’s nobody, Alejandro. She won’t be able to stop us....”
With a gasp, I protected the baby carrier with my body.
“Just think.” Claudie swayed her hips as she walked toward Alejandro with her hypnotic red smile. “Just think how perfect our future could be.” She started to wrap her arms around him. “With your money and title, and my money and connections...the two of us could rule the world.”
He looked down at her coldly. “Do you really think I’d want to rule the world, if the price would be marriage to you?”
Shocked, she let her arms fall to her sides.
“You used Lena for years as an unpaid slave,” he said, “then threatened to take her baby, for the sake of stealing what you wanted—her inheritance. And then you tried to blackmail me into marrying you!”
She licked her lips. “I...”
He held up his hand sharply, cutting her off. His voice was deep and harsh. “For the past year, you’ve lied to me, saying if I ever wanted to see my child, I had to marry you. Blaming Lena, making me think she was the one to blame. For that, you deserve to go to hell. Which I hope you will find—” he gave her a sudden, pleasant smile “—very soon. Adios, Claudie.” Scooping up the baby carrier, he turned to me gravely. “Shall we go?” Without another word, he walked out the front door.
“Alejandro, wait,” Claudie gasped, but I was the only one left to hear. “You.” Her face as she turned to look at me really did look like a snake’s. Or maybe a dragon’s—I could almost see the smoke coming out of her nostrils as her blue, reptilian eyes hardened. “You did this!”
For the past decade, I’d dreamed of what I would say to her if given the chance, after all my lonely years, crying alone in my attic. All the subtle and not so subtle ways she’d insulted me, used me, made me feel worthless and invisible for the past ten years. But in this moment, all those things fled from my mind. Instead, the real question came from my heart.
“Why did you hate me, Claudie?” I whispered, lifting my tearful gaze to hers. “I loved you. You were my only family. Why couldn’t you love me? Why wouldn’t you let me love you?”
My cousin drew herself up, all thin gorgeousness.
“Why?” She lit her cigarette with shaking hands. “Because you’re not my real family.” Taking a long draw on her cigarette, she said in a low, venomous hiss, “And you’re not good enough for Alejandro. Blood always tells. Sooner or later, he will be embarrassed by you, just as I was. He’ll take your child and toss you in the gutter, like you deserve.”
My mouth fell open as her poisoned dart hit me, square in the heart.
“It didn’t have to be this way,” I choked out, and I turned and fled, still holding my photo albums against my chest, like a shield.
Outside, a sliver of sun had split through the dark clouds, through the rain. Stopping on the sidewalk, I turned back and looked up at the Carlisle mansion for one last time.
“Goodbye,” I whispered.
Then I climbed into the limo, where the driver waited with my door open, and he closed it behind me.
“Enjoy a tender farewell?” Alejandro was already in the backseat, on the other side of Miguel, who had woken and was starting to whimper.
“Something like that,” I muttered, trying to surreptitiously wipe my tears.
“I was surprised. It’s not like you to let me walk off with—” His voice cut off as he saw my face. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” I said. Turning to my baby, I pressed his favorite blanket against his cheek and tried to comfort him. Tried to comfort myself. My baby’s tears quieted and so did his quivering little body, as he felt the hum and vibration of the car’s engine beneath him. His eyelids started to grow heavy again.
“What did she say?” Alejandro said. Frowning, he looked closer at my face. “Did she...”
There was a sudden hard knock on his window. Miguel’s little body jerked back awake, and his whimpers turned to full-on crying. Alejandro turned with a growl.
Claudie stood by the limo, her eyes like fire. “Open this window!” she yelled through the glass.
Alejandro’s expression was like ice as he rolled it down a grudging two inches. She leaned forward, her face raw with emotion.
“We could have ruled the world together, Alejandro, and you’re throwing it all away—for that little whore and her brat!”
Alejandro said softly, his face dangerous, “If you ever insult either my son or his mother again, you will regret it.”
Claudie looked bewildered. To be fair, she’d insulted me for so long she’d probably forgotten it wasn’t nice.
“But Alejandro...” Her voice had a strange begging sound I’d never heard from her. “You’ll never find someone with my breeding, my beauty, my billions. I love you....”
“You love my title.”
Her cheeks flushed red. “All right. But you can’t choose her over me. She’s...nothing. No one.”
I swallowed, blinking fast.
“Blood always tells,” she said. “She’s not good enough for you.”
Alejandro looked quickly at my miserable face. Then he turned back to Claudie with a deliberate smile.
“Thank you for your fascinating opinion. Now move, won’t you? I need to take Lena shopping for an engagement ring.”
“You’re—what?” Claudie staggered back. I gasped. Miguel was crying.
The only one who looked absolutely calm was Alejandro. Turning away from her, he sat back in the plush leather seat, and said to Dowell, “Drive on.”
Claudie stared after us, looking stupefied on the sidewalk, and almost forlorn in her tight club dress and bedraggled mascara. Looking back at her through the car window, I felt a strange wave of sympathy.
Because I, too, knew what it felt like to be left by Alejandro Navaro y Albra.
“You didn’t have to be so cruel,” I whispered.
“Cruel?” he said incredulously. “You defend her, after the way she treated you?”
“She’s still my cousin. I feel sorry for her....”
“Then you’re a fool,” he said harshly.
I stroked my crying baby’s cheek. My lips creased sadly. “Love makes us all fools.”
“She doesn’t love me. She doesn’t even know me.”
“That’s what you said to me, too,” I said softly. I met his gaze. “I wonder if any woman will ever truly know you.”
For an instant, I thought I saw hunger, even yearning in his dark eyes as he stared down at me. Then the expression shuttered, leaving me to decide I’d imagined it. But even then, he continued to look at me, as if he couldn’t look away.
“What are you staring at?” I put my hand to my messy ponytail, feeling suddenly self-conscious. “I must look a mess.”
“You look...” His eyes slowly traced over my hand, up my arm, to my neck, to my lips. “You look like a woman who cares more about her baby than a fortune. Like a woman who works so hard and so well—for free—that she’s beloved by the entire household staff. You look,” he said softly, “like a woman who feels sympathy, even for the coldhearted creature who tried to destroy her.”
“Are you—complimenting me?”
He gave a low laugh. “If you’re not sure, I must be losing my touch.”
I flushed. Turning away, I took a deep breath. And changed the subject. “Thank you for bringing me back to London. For these.” I motioned toward the photo albums. “And for giving me the chance to finally ask Claudie something I’ve wanted to know all my life. I always wondered why nothing I did was good enough to make her love me.” I looked out the window at the passing shops of Kensington High Street. “Now I know.”
Silence fell.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
I nodded over the lump in my throat.
“I know how it feels,” he said in a low voice, “to be alone.”
“You?” I looked at him sharply, then gave a disbelieving snort. “No, you don’t.”
His dark eyes were veiled. “When I was young, I was good friends with...our housekeeper’s son. We were only six months apart in age, and we studied under the same governess. Friend? He was more like a brother to me,” he said softly. “People said we looked so much alike, acted so much alike, we could have been twins.”
“Are you still friends?”
He blinked, focusing on me, and his jaw tightened. “He died in the same crash that took the duke, the duchess. The housekeeper. Twenty-three years ago.”
“They all died in the same crash?” I said, horrified.
He looked down. “I was the only one to survive.”
I thought of a young boy being the only survivor of a car accident that took his parents, his best friend. That made him a duke at the tender age of twelve. I couldn’t even imagine the loneliness. The pain. Reaching out, I took his hand and whispered, “I’m sorry.”
Alejandro drew away. “It was a long time ago.” I saw tension in his jaw, heard it in his voice. “But I do know how it feels.”
I swallowed, feeling guilty, and embarrassed, too, for all my complaining when he’d suffered worse, and in silence. “What was his name? Your friend?”
He stared at me, then his lips lifted slightly. “Miguel.”
“Oh.” I gave a shy smile. “So that’s why you don’t mind that I named our baby Miguel—”
“No.” He seemed to hide his own private smile. “I don’t mind at all.”
I frowned, looking at him more closely.
His expression shuttered, and his dark eyebrows came down into a scowl. “His surname, however...”
I sighed. “I thought you might want to change that. But don’t worry.” I gave an awkward smile. “I won’t hold you to your marriage proposal.”
His eyes were dark and intense. “What if I want you to hold me to it?”
My lips parted in shock.
“What?” I said faintly.
His dark eyes challenged mine. “What if I want you to marry me?”
“You don’t want to get married. You went on and on about all the women who tried to drag you to the altar. I’m not one of them!”
“I know that now.” Leaning his arm across the baby seat, he cupped my cheek. “But for our son’s sake, I’m starting to think you and I should be...together.”
“Why?”
“Why not?” He gave a sensual smile. “As you said, I already broke one rule. Why not break the other?”
“But what has changed?”
“I’m starting to think...perhaps I can trust you.” His eyes met mine. “And I can’t forget how it felt to have you in my bed.”
Something changed in the air between us. Something primal, dangerous. I felt the warmth of his palm against my skin and held my breath. As the limo drove through the streets of London, memories crackled through me like fire.
I remembered the night we’d conceived Miguel, and all the other hot days of summer, when I’d surrendered to him, body and soul. I trembled, feeling him so close in the backseat of the limo, on the other side of our baby. Every inch of my skin suddenly remembered the hot stroke of Alejandro’s fingertips. My mouth was tingling, aching....
“That’s not a good reason to marry someone. Especially for you. If I said yes, you’d regret it. You’d blame me. Claim that I’d only done it to be a rich duchess.”
He slowly shook his head. “I think,” he said quietly, “you might be the one woman who truly doesn’t care about that. And it would be best for our son. So what is your answer?”
My answer?
I remembered the darkness I’d fallen into the last time Alejandro wanted me—then stopped wanting me. I’d never let myself be vulnerable to him ever again. I couldn’t. He’d almost destroyed me once. I could never live through that again.
Sooner or later...he’ll take your child and toss you in the gutter, like you deserve.
I couldn’t give him control over me, ever again. I couldn’t be tempted. My only hope was to get away. My only hope was...
Oh, heaven...what time was it?
“I need to...” As I saw the time on the dashboard of the limo, my heart nearly burst in panic. “Stop the car!” I leaned forward desperately toward the driver. “Let me out!”
Looking confused, Dowell pulled over on the side of the busy road.
“What are you doing?” Alejandro demanded, looking at me as if I was crazy. I felt crazy.
I unbuckled our baby, who’d just stopped crying and was looking drowsy. “Miguel needs a walk to help him sleep....”
“Is that a joke?”
I didn’t answer. Cradling our baby, I stepped out on the sidewalk in front of Kensington Palace, and started running into the park, toward the playground. Toward Edward.
CHAPTER THREE
THE PRINCESS DIANA PLAYGROUND was in the corner of Kensington Gardens, just north of the palace. It was still early, and the playground had just opened, but in the midst of August holidays it was already starting to fill with children of every age, laughing and whooping as they raced toward the teepees and leaped on the ropes of the life-size pirate ship. It was a magical place, as you might expect of a children’s playground, near a palace, based around a Peter Pan theme and named after a lost princess.
But I was here desperate for a different kind of magic.
Protection.
Edward St. Cyr had protected me more than once. We’d first properly met three years earlier, when I’d been walking up from the Tube late at night and I’d passed a group of rowdy teenagers on Kensington High Street. I’d been weighed down with groceries, and tried to keep my head down as they passed. But some of the boys had followed me up the dark street, taunting me crudely. As one started to knock the grocery bags out of my hand, there’d been a flash of headlights on the street and the slam of a car door, and suddenly a tall man in a dark coat was there, his face a threatening scowl, and the young men who’d scared me fled like rabbits into the snow. Then he’d turned to me.