Chapter Seventeen
Siobhan didn’t let herself agonize over whether to leave. She knew she would always have doubts about Joaquin and his motives if she stayed.
So she left.
The safest thing would have been to go south, back to her sister’s, but she didn’t want to pretend for the children and everyone else that she was fine. She wasn’t fine. She was devastated. Brokenhearted.
She wanted to be alone. She felt foolish, exactly as she had after she had trusted Gilbert, so she went north. Home. To her mother’s empty house in London. Where she had gone the last time.
Her eyes stung the whole way, but she fought back the tears. She could accept that Joaquin wanted to vanquish his father, but why hadn’t he told her what he planned? She felt used again. Betrayed again.
And shut out. Why didn’t he ask her to help? She was actually a very spicy bitch when crossed. Had he not seen how she had treated that man who had grabbed her?
That gauntlet of photographers had actually been really frightening. Once she was in the car, all she had wanted was to be home with Joaquin. Safe in his arms.
He had made her feel safe. Until this.
Four hours after hastily packing, she arrived in Hertfordshire.
The house she had grown up in was an older home on a property of mature trees and well-tended flowerbeds.
It had been bordering on shabby when she’d been young.
Their mother had barely been hanging on to it.
They had all worked to keep things afloat.
Cinnia had had her estate practice, the middle girls had worked in pubs and shops.
Siobhan had shared a room with Cin so her mother could rent hers out.
Aside from earning a few pounds babysitting, Siobhan had been too young to contribute, which had always made her feel like a liability.
Once Cinnia married Henri, everything changed, insisting the house receive a complete upgrade so it had top-notch security and a twelve-foot wall around the garden.
As she entered the code for the door, and Qahira moved into the shadows to ensure the house was empty, Siobhan thought of that old song that began, Hello, darkness. Except it wasn’t her friend. It just made her feel melancholy.
“Clear,” Qahira reported.
Siobhan thanked her and moved through the house, turning up the heat and putting on some lights.
The decor had also been refreshed in recent years. The floor was now a posh golden hardwood. There was a piano beneath the floating staircase, and the potting shed was a proper guest cottage where Qahira would stay.
Siobhan went upstairs to unpack, almost turning out of habit into the room she had once shared with Cinnia. Rather than two singles, it now held bunk beds for the twins to use when Cinnia visited their mother here.
That had Siobhan remembering Christmas and the fact Joaquin had attended the festivities with her. At the time, she had thought he had gone for her. Now she was questioning his motives. Had he been wanting to speak to Henri all along?
No. He could have talked to Ramon when Ramon was in Madrid. The fact was he didn’t need her to use the Sauveterres. And Henri wasn’t stupid. He wouldn’t allow himself to be used. He would have had his own reasons for helping Joaquin.
Even if Joaquin had gone there specifically to ask Henri for a favor, he had still helped her work through her anger at herself. He had helped her build memories she would cherish for a lifetime. He had restored her joy in the holiday.
She closed her eyes against emotive tears as she remembered the way he had brushed off Maya’s palm when she had stumbled.
“You need to kiss it,” Maya had insisted. So he had.
He was going to be a magnificent father. She knew that deep in her bruised heart.
She believed he wanted to be a supportive husband, too.
That was why he was trying to keep her safe.
He did care about her. He had demonstrated that in countless ways, but she had let her insecurities get in the way.
She had jumped straight to being used because it was easier to believe that was where her worth to him lay than that he valued her.
She was still devaluing herself. Acting as though she was silly Dorry Whitley, whom people saw as a conduit to power and money, when Dorry Whitley was actually a powerful badass in her own right. Everyone online was saying so.
Joaquin had let her go, though. The same way he had let Esperanza go when her feelings grew deeper than he was comfortable accepting.
He didn’t love her.
Or did he?
What do you want me to do? Tell you I love you and beg you to stay here until I get back. You’re better off as far away from me as you can get.
Had he wanted to beg her to stay? And only pushed her away and left because he felt such an urgent need to protect her from his father? She knew what that man was capable of. She had kissed the scars on Joaquin’s skin.
Was she going to make him beg for her to come back? She should have stayed and showed him love really was a healing force. That it was safe to love her because she would stand by him no matter what.
Oh, God. She had made a terrible mistake.
Joaquin brushed past the tired-looking maid who opened the door of Lorenzo’s Madrid town house and walked straight into his father’s den.
Lorenzo was in his recliner, holding a cigarette and glass of brandy. He didn’t lower the footrest, only squinted at Joaquin through the smoke.
The smell was both pungent and stale. Sickeningly familiar, bringing back too many memories of being called on the carpet for beratement or punishment.
Joaquin refused to think of that now. He was as cold and detached as the man before him.
“I wondered why you were diddling your assistant. Do you really think threats from her family will scare me?”
“They should.” Joaquin set his phone next to the ashtray and sat on the chair beside his father’s. “You’re threatening an innocent woman who has nothing to do with you or me.”
“She left you? That’s too bad.” His father puffed smugly on his cigarette.
A deep, aching emptiness had opened in his chest on his way here. Joaquin had never been so terrified in his life as when he had watched Siobhan flip that man into the water. Then he had seen her pulling away from him because she believed he had betrayed her.
I thought it was safe to love you, but it’s not.
When she had said those words, they had lashed the back of his heart in the most painfully sweet way.
All of him had stung as he absorbed something that ought to feel foreign.
Threatening, even. Instead, his response had borne a strong resemblance to a soft, new tenderness that had been germinating inside him.
He had wanted to catch her close and explore that, but no, loving him was not safe.
Until he left his father in a pile of his own ruin, Siobhan would never be safe.
So he had let her go, even though he had thought it might kill him. Even though walking out on her could break all those tiny threads that had begun to bind them together.
This had to be done. This bully would not rest until his ass was in the dirt and that was where Joaquin would put him, once and for all.
“I want the proceeds off the patent for the relay I designed.”
Lorenzo snorted. “Cash running low now you don’t have the backing of the Sauveterres?”
Joaquin didn’t bother correcting him on his very healthy bank balance. “Would you rather I sued you to prove I’m the rightful owner? That you stole that design from me?”
“Who would believe you? You were a child.”
“And yet I did it.”
“With the education I paid for.”
“And that gave you the right to take it as your own? I have since built up credibility in that field, in case you haven’t noticed.
Meanwhile, everything you released after my design was a second-rate knockoff of a competitor’s design.
Have you ever wished you’d kept me around to continue working for LVG? ”
“No. I don’t like you. I never have.” He jabbed his cigarette stub into the pile of them in the ashtray.
“And why is that?” Joaquin asked, so filled with cold hatred, he no longer cared, but he made himself ask, “What did I ever do to you that I deserved to be put in hospital at eleven?”
“You’re too much like your mother. Fernando looked like me, at least. You…” Lorenzo curled his lip. “And you never knew your place.”
“You disgust me.” He really did. Joaquin’s stomach was turning. “I should have you up on charges for attempted murder. I was a child.”
“A clumsy one.” His father lit another cigarette.
“So you claimed. We both know what happened.”
“I know that you wouldn’t shut up about visiting your mother.”
“Why didn’t you let me live with her if you hated us both so much?” Joaquin was lancing a boil that had sat in him for too long, simply because he couldn’t stand to be in the same room. Tonight, however, he would get the answers he needed, no matter how unpleasant or painful.
“Because that’s what she wanted,” his father said with a cruel curl of his lip. “And so did you.”
“You put me in the hospital so I couldn’t go to her. And refused to let her visit.”
“It shut you up, didn’t it?”
“Do you revel in making people suffer? Is that it?”
“I like to win. It’s not my fault you’ve always been too weak to fight back.”
“I was a child,” he scoffed. “And I’ve never seen decency as a weakness.
Another way I was like my mother, I suppose.
” He twisted his lips with contempt. “But you’re right.
I’ve always deluded myself into believing I could reason with you, but that’s not possible, is it?
I thought cutting you from my life would be enough, but you can’t stand that I have succeeded in spite of you. In spite of your theft.”
“That really sticks in your craw, doesn’t it? Fine. I’ll trade the proceeds on what remains of the patent in exchange for your shares in LVG.”
“There are only a few years left on the patent. No. Go back to when I handed you the drawing and I’ll consider it, since that’s when the real money was made.”