CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Fourteen months ago
The last of the catering vans disappeared. The house that only hours ago had been filled with Mrs Martinez’s family, friends and neighbours sharing food and drink and memories now contained only Rose… And Diaz. Every last trace of the wake had been wiped away by the efficient staff.
Rose sank onto a stool at the kitchen island and hung her head. She felt as drained and bereft as she’d ever felt.
Diaz’s footsteps neared and his shadow appeared in the kitchen doorway before his full figure emerged. He’d showered, changing from his black suit into black jeans and a black V-necked T-shirt. Unshaven, damp hair mussed from a towel being run over it, he looked as drained as she felt.
He held up two crystal glasses in one large hand and a bottle of what looked like Scotch in the other, and raised an eyebrow in question.
Longing filled the ache in her heart. A longing to touch his face. To press herself close to him and find comfort and strength in his strength.
In the two weeks since Mrs Martinez had died, they’d continued sharing the house as they’d done in the months leading up to her death, but the only times they’d come together had been when making all the funeral arrangements and touching briefly on the divorce they would file when the first year of their marriage was up. There had been no debate about it. There had been no debate, either, when they’d divided the house into two territories: his and hers. Only the kitchen had been Switzerland and even then, by more unspoken agreement, they’d only used it when the other wasn’t.
They’d been like two ships deliberately giving the other a wide berth, and yet she’d been acutely aware of Diaz’s course, always knowing where he was in the house, feeling his absence like an ache during the long hours he left to conduct business that needed the personal touch, lying in her bed at night consumed with his physical closeness and tormented by his distance.
Today though, they had come together one last time for his grandmother, and stayed by each other’s side until the last guest left. The need to clasp his hand had, at times, been overwhelming.
And now he was offering her one last drink.
Come tomorrow, it was unlikely their paths would ever cross again.
She nodded and attempted a smile. Her mouth refused to cooperate.
He took the stool beside her. Filled both glasses with a hefty measure of the amber liquid, pushed one in front of Rose and raised the other. ‘To my grandmother.’
She lifted her glass. ‘To Mrs Martinez.’
He smiled faintly. Rose’s insistence on addressing Mrs Martinez formally had been a long running in joke between her and the woman who’d loved and cared for her so greatly, a joke Diaz had come to be part of during the last weeks of his grandmother’s life.
It didn’t feel real that she’d been gone two weeks already.
Glasses clinked together; they drank.
‘Thank you for stopping me earlier,’ he said after a long passage of silence.
Her bruised heart filled again. She didn’t blame him for having wanted to erupt at his parents. They should have been the ones holding Mrs Martinez’s hands when she took her last breath. The ones to organise every aspect of the funeral. Not their son and the dead housekeeper’s daughter. ‘You’re welcome.’
He swirled what was left of the liquid in his glass and grunted a laugh. ‘You would think age would bring perspective but I don’t know how I will ever find perspective over those two.’
‘Now’s not the time to try and find it,’ she pointed out softly, wishing desperately that she could just touch him.
Rose didn’t just ache for comfort from Diaz’s strength but ached to give him comfort of her own. It was an ache that had grown stronger and stronger these last few weeks.
Diaz was her husband and she’d only voluntarily touched him once her whole life, that simple tap to his thigh in the church earlier when she’d instinctively known he was on the verge of erupting at his narcissistic parents.
Every single involuntary brush of their hands and arms as they’d cared for his grandmother in her last months had seared through her skin and into her heart.
And soon it would all be over and she would be all alone in the world without the one person left in it that she loved, and she didn’t know how she could begin to endure it.
He refilled his glass and topped Rose’s up.
Closing her eyes, she inhaled the potent liquid before drinking it in one large swallow and climbing off the stool.
To prolong this moment would be to add to her torment.
‘I’m going up,’ she said, then, as casually as she could muster, added, ‘What time will you be leaving?’
He hesitated before replying. ‘Early. I’ve a meeting in Milan.’
‘If I don’t see you before you go, safe travels.’
‘Thank you.’ A long pause. ‘Sleep well.’
‘And you.’
She didn’t look back.
Her heart ripping and rippling, Rose went up to her bedroom needing to scrub the day from her skin and cleanse her emotions, and took a long shower under the highest temperature she could bear.
Don’t think about him , she told herself despairingly as she scrubbed her face and fought with equal desperation to hold back the tears.
It was a battle she won only until she climbed into her bed and a wave of desolation grabbed her with such strength she could have more easily stopped the sun from rising.
With a moan of despair, the tears poured out in a torrent.
She wept for her mother who she missed desperately. Wept for Mrs Martinez whose loss suddenly felt so very real. And she wept for Diaz and the love that had taken such a strong hold in her heart and the future that could never be hers.
She barely heard the click of her door as it opened or the footsteps padding across the room but her body reacted, huddling even tighter into itself like a small child hiding from the monster in the room, but, in Rose’s case, the monster was the despair she had never wanted Diaz to see, and she buried her face even tighter into her soaked pillow.
The duvet moved and the mattress dipped. A muscular arm wrapped around her waist and then, as if he really were manipulating the small child hiding from the monster, Diaz gently turned her round and enveloped her in his strength.
Her sobs grew stronger.
Clinging to him, Rose bawled into his chest, purging herself of everything she’d been carrying inside her for so long that she couldn’t remember a time when her heart hadn’t hurt. And all the while, Diaz’s mouth tight in her hair murmuring broken words in Spanish, his legs entwined in hers and the palms of his hands stroking her back.
She would never know when the strokes stopped being given for solace and took on a different meaning. Or when she became fully aware that she was exploring the planes and muscles of his back with her hands…his naked back.
She lifted her face out of his chest without thinking and tilted her head back.
Diaz’s gaze locked onto hers, a gaze filled with the same pain that had convulsed her. And with the same longing…
For a time that hung suspended, they simply drank each other in, their faces so close Rose could see every individual dark, stubbly hair covering his strong jaw and feel the heat of his breath with the same strength that she could feel the heat of his body.
With a soft groan of her name, he brought his sensuous lips to hers.
The shock of sensation burst the dam inside her. Inside them both.
His silken tongue swept into her mouth and in an instant Rose tumbled into a dark fusion stunning in its intensity, pinned beneath the hard length of Diaz’s body and being kissed with a passion that sucked the air from her lungs.
The heat that exploded through her burned hot enough to incinerate every ounce of the pain and misery that had gripped her, and she wrapped her arms tightly around his neck and dragged her fingers through his hair as the dark fusion of their mouths took control of her body and drew out all the love and desire she’d so desperately hidden inside herself onto the surface of her melting skin.
In her deepest, most secret dreams, she’d dreamed of Diaz’s kisses, fantasised about the day he would look beyond his loathing of her and see what she saw and feel what she felt, and now it felt like she’d fallen into that most secret dream and her senses were free-falling under the assault of his taste and scent, feeding the need that had been waiting all these years to be woken.
Diaz broke the fusion of their mouths only long enough to lift her up and remove her cami top, the skim of his fingers trailing fire over her skin. There was barely time to breathe before she was pinned back beneath him and the urgent, almost primitive demands of his mouth and tongue.
The world beyond the two of them had ceased to exist. All Rose was aware of was Diaz, kissing her with the hunger of a starving man. Together, they worked impatiently to rid themselves of her cotton pyjama shorts and his undershorts, and then they were naked, lips entwined, her hands clasping the back of his neck, his hands lifting her bottom and his heavy arousal pushing at…
A moment of sanity broke free.
Panic shot through her and made her tense at the exact same moment Diaz murmured her name into her mouth and drove inside her, and when she cried out, it wasn’t with pleasure but with pain.
Shocked to her core, she froze. The last thing—the very last thing—she’d expected was that it would hurt.
Diaz had become very still.
Breathing heavily, he lifted his head. His concerned face hovered over hers. A question creased his forehead. ‘What’s wrong, mi corazón ?’
She couldn’t speak. Could do nothing to stop the tears from leaking.
Understanding rang out as his eyes widened in horror. ‘You’ve never done this before?’
‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered, turning her burning cheek onto the pillow and closing her eyes so she didn’t have to look at him. She couldn’t begin to guess how he was going to react.
Silence enveloped them.
He shifted his position, lifting himself out of her.
She closed her eyes even tighter, waiting for him to lift the whole of himself off her and leave the room.
‘Rose, please look at me,’ he commanded gently.
She didn’t want to obey.
Her body gave her no choice.
Opening her eyes, she turned her face back to him.
He gazed down at her. His expression was troubled but there was so much concern and tenderness in his stare that the fears in her heart evaporated.
This was the Diaz she’d fallen in love with. The gorgeous, sexy hulk of a man capable of such great empathy and tenderness.
Only in her dreams had that tenderness ever been directed at her.
‘I hurt you,’ he said, his voice breaking.
She attempted a smile to ease his self-recriminations. ‘No.’
He raised a disbelieving eyebrow.
Without thinking, she palmed his cheek. The sharp stubble made the most vivid contrast to the softness of his hair. ‘I’m to blame, not you. You didn’t know.’
He placed the gentlest of kisses to her mouth before drawing back again. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘I forgot.’
‘You…? How could you forget that?’
She stared into the green eyes that had haunted her dreams long before she’d accepted her love for him and, her heart turning over, sighed. ‘Because in my head you’ve made love to me a thousand times.’
Shock etched his gorgeous face. Shock and then new understanding.
And still he didn’t run away. Still he continued to drink her in as if she were the most precious thing in his world.
She ran her fingers over the stubble on his jaw. ‘It’s always been you,’ she confessed in a whisper.
Always had been. Always would be. A love born without rhyme or reason but which had stopped her ever looking at another man.
Hate and love bound on the sides of the same coin.
Her heart had bound itself to Diaz before she’d hit adolescence. Her body had bound itself to him that awful day by his parents’ swimming pool. Her soul had bound itself to him during the long weeks spent together nursing his grandmother.
He lowered his weight onto hers without crushing her and threaded his long fingers through her hair. ‘Mi amor…’ he breathed before his sensuous mouth came back down on hers in a featherlight kiss. And then another. And another.
He lifted his head to gaze at her again. ‘Eres muy hermosa.’ At her unspoken question, he breathed in deeply and gave a tortured smile. ‘You are so beautiful. So very beautiful.’ Palming her cheeks, he caressed her lips in another light kiss. ‘I wish I had known. I would have been so gentle and given you the pleasure that should have been yours.’
‘You did give me pleasure,’ she whispered. ‘I didn’t know I could feel like that.’
‘And now I will make you feel much more.’ He pressed his mouth to hers again. ‘And this time there will be no pain.’
Gently, his lips parted hers. All the urgency that had gripped them in the hedonistic madness gone, he explored the contours of her mouth with an unhurried seduction, coaxing her responses, lighting the sparks of her desire back into life and opening the gateway to heaven.
If their kisses before had been a fever of combusting lust and desire, this was restrained softness but its effect on her was equally as powerful, and she ran her hands over his back, still barely able to believe that this was Diaz in her bed, Diaz she was touching, Diaz’s naked body upon her, Diaz’s seductive mouth kissing her as if she were infinitely precious to him.
She’d ached for this for so long. Ached for him. Her only hate. Her only love.
And now there was no hate. Only love.
She moaned in protest when he moved his mouth away, a moan that softened into a sigh as his lips caressed featherlight kisses across her jaw, deepening when he flicked his tongue on the sensitive hollow beneath her ears and over the pulse of her throat, shivers flaming through her skin.
Closing her eyes, she surrendered herself to his lovemaking, soaking in his murmurs of Spanish as he worshipped her with his lips.
The sensation in her breasts when he took them into his mouth and circled the taut peaks with his tongue, achingly bringing each one to life, had her mewing and lifting her chest to him in a wanton plea for more, a plea answered with slow, voluptuous strokes of the tongue and grazing bites.
His lips moved languidly downwards, trailing fire over her ribcage and stomach, his hands stroking and exploring, all the sensations making her writhe at the liquid heat burning inside her.
Only when his mouth reached her silken pubis and she realised where he was headed did she tense, would have automatically pressed her thighs together if Diaz hadn’t been lying between them.
Sensing her fears, he lifted his head and gave her a look of such tenderness that her heart cried.
‘Trust me, Rose,’ he whispered huskily, taking her hand and threading his fingers through hers. ‘I will make this good for you, I swear.’
Tears that came from nowhere and which she would never in a thousand years understand except to know they weren’t tears of unhappiness stabbed the backs of her eyes. Squeezing his hand, she gave a short nod.
A smile pulled at his mouth. ‘Close your eyes, mi amor , and let your mind go. Put your trust in me.’
Her crying heart thrumming loudly, her breaths catching, she put her head back on the pillow at the same moment Diaz shifted himself lower until his face was level with her groin.
With infinite gentleness, he slipped a hand beneath her bottom to raise her, and coaxed her into parting her thighs further.
The liquid in her core had thickened into molten. Her pulses were raging fire as anticipation and fear collided, but the fear weakened at the first caress of her most intimate part.
Slowly, worshipfully, Diaz explored her secret flesh, his tongue probing and flickering, opening her to him.
It was when he sought out her most hidden part and patiently urged it to swollen arousal that the last of Rose’s inhibitions at this most intimate of acts vanished into the ether and she was taken into a world of unknown pleasure.
He’d lied when he’d said there would be no pain, she thought dimly as exquisite, all-consuming sensation built inside her. This was pain. Rose was lost in it, drowning in a maelstrom of the most intolerable, glorious pain imaginable, each stroke of his tongue sweeping her higher and higher on the crest of a giant wave towards an undiscovered pinnacle…
The wave smashed and in the beat of a heart, Rose was thrown into a vortex of shimmering, spasming pleasure that had her crying out and clasping Diaz’s head as she rode the ripples of her climax until her body was nothing but tingling atoms.
She opened her eyes.
Diaz lifted his head.
She opened her arms to him.
He crawled up her until he was covering her with his body.
She wrapped her arms around his neck and gazed into his eyes.
He inhaled deeply, his stare filled to the brim with emotion-laced hunger.
Their chests were so tightly fused she could feel the rapid thumps of his heart.
Her heart soared. All the tingling atoms that made Rose soared with it.
She lifted her head and pressed her mouth to his. ‘Make love to me.’
He closed his eyes and took another deep inhalation. ‘Rose…’
She raised her thighs. His arousal jutted hard against her pubis.
Eyes still closed, he gritted his teeth. ‘Rose…’
‘Make love to me.’
His stare opened back to her. There was a starkness to it. ‘I don’t want to hurt you again.’
She kissed him and whispered, ‘You won’t.’
Not now. Not when she was floating on a cloud of bliss.
She unhooked an arm and slid it down his smooth back. ‘Love me, Diaz.’
His eyes pulsed and he bent his head to kiss her. ‘Always.’
Trailing his fingers down her side, he slid his hand between their groins and took hold of his arousal. Rose could feel it pressing into her opening and raised her hips higher, brand-new anticipation and excitement building inside her.
His stare not leaving hers, Diaz guided his thick length slowly inside her velvet heat, releasing his hand and driving the final few inches in with his hips.
Eyes widening at the new sensations stretching and filling her at this ultimate fusion, she sucked in a long breath.
‘Are you okay?’ he whispered unsteadily.
She nodded. She couldn’t speak. She was trembling. She could feel him throbbing inside her. Could see the restraint he was exerting.
‘Any time you want me to stop, you…’
She cut his words away with a kiss.
He groaned into her mouth, and then, slowly, gently, began to move, raising his head, watching her for signs of discomfort.
There was no discomfort. Her body melted into his possession as if it had been specially made for this moment…made for him.
‘Dios, mi corazón,’ he dragged out raggedly. ‘This feels…’ His words trailed off, left unsaid in a deep moan.
The tempo of his movements increased but still she sensed his restraint, knew he was holding himself back, and her heart swelled all over again in time with the sensations the smooth ebb and flow of his lovemaking was arousing inside her, and as the fire inside grew, the need for more, the need to feel everything, grew, and she cupped the back of his head and pulled him down for a deeply passionate kiss, and wrapped her legs tighter around him.
‘Te amo,’ he groaned raggedly. ‘Dios, te amo,’ and she sensed his control teetering as he thrust even harder into her, a new driving rhythm that swept her to another realm where thoughts ceased to exist and she was aware of nothing but the deep throbbing of sensation building like a tidal wave into a crescendo until the first convulsion had her clinging to him and crying his name as she shattered into ecstasy with the crack of her own name ringing in her ears and Diaz’s shuddering body collapsing onto hers.
It was a long time before Rose was capable of even opening her eyes.
Her brain fired slowly back to life. She stretched out a leg. Her entire body was tingling.
Diaz’s head lay in the crook of her neck, a hand buried in her hair. She could feel the heavy thud of his heart against her breast.
He lifted his head and gently lifted his weight to gaze down at her with dazed eyes. ‘Are you okay?’
She ran her fingers through his hair and smiled, still too stunned to speak.
A smile slowly curved his mouth and then he bent his head for a gentle kiss before attempting to pull himself out of her. She hooked her legs back around his waist to stop him. ‘Stay,’ she croaked.
He smiled more widely and stroked her hair off her damp forehead. ‘Believe me, I’m not going anywhere.’
Her smile widened to match his. ‘Good.’
He kissed her again. ‘Are you sore?’
‘No.’ She was many things but sore wasn’t one of them. ‘That was…’ She couldn’t find the word to describe just how incredible it had been. ‘Is it always like that?’
His smile dimmed into seriousness. ‘No. Rose… I’ve never known anything like that before.’
Her fluttering heart soared anew and she sighed to release it. ‘I love you.’
Eyes glittering, lips twitching, he breathed in deeply through his nose before slowly lowering his face back down to hers.
His tongue slid into her mouth and she closed her eyes…