CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER TWELVE
Footsteps broke Rose out of the deep reverie she’d fallen into.
She closed her eyes tightly and prayed for control.
She didn’t have to turn her head to know who was approaching her.
* * *
Diaz paused a moment to compose himself.
Rose’s body language told him she knew he was there. It was in her stillness.
Sickness lay heavily in his stomach. Exhaustion soaked his brain.
He hadn’t slept. Too much history being replayed crowding his head until he’d thrown on a pair of jeans without thought and staggered out of his room to find her.
He knew what he had to do.
Without any acknowledgment of his presence, she lifted her legs out of the pool and twisted her body around. Pressing a hand to the tiled flooring for support, she got gracefully to her feet.
One look at her face was enough to know she’d had as little sleep as he’d had.
‘We have coffee coming,’ he told her quietly.
She nodded. There was defeat in the gesture. Defeat, too, in the shadows of her eyes.
A member of staff appeared with a tray of coffee and pastries for them. With quiet efficiency, she laid it on the poolside table for them, then disappeared.
They settled themselves at the table in silence. Diaz poured the coffee. He had to control the tremor in his hand. Control, too, the tightening of his throat to speak.
‘Rosaria brought the drugs she overdosed on, didn’t she.’ It was a statement of fact, not a question.
Bloodshot blue eyes locked briefly on his. There was a hint of deserved accusation in them.
Rose had always denied being the one to buy them. He’d always refused to believe it.
He nodded slowly then quietly said, ‘After you came into our lives, she started shortening her name to yours. I asked her why once, and she said it was because it was prettier than her name.’ He gave a short, bitter laugh. ‘I told her she was being ridiculous to want anything of yours but she was enthralled by you. I never understood it. I would watch the two of you and ask myself what she saw in a skinny child a year younger than she was, who had zero decorum and ran wild about the place barefoot.’
He let his stare fall to Rose’s bare feet. She’d never lost her preference to be free from footwear.
His chest tightened at how pretty her feet were.
Breathing hard, he added a spoonful of sugar to his coffee. Usually he drank it black but that early morning he needed all the sweetness he could get.
‘You thought I was feral,’ she stated expressionlessly.
He turned his gaze back to her.
Her features were tight but her eyes…those expressive big blue eyes brimmed with hurt.
His nausea strengthened.
He’d caused that hurt.
The magnitude of everything he’d put her through had finally hit home to him. Everything he’d done to her. Everything he was continuing to do to her.
He would never forgive himself for any of it.
She blinked and looked away from him.
‘I did think that,’ he admitted, his voice as heavy as his heart. ‘I hadn’t met anyone like you before. I went to an exclusive private school until I was old enough to be sent off to an exclusive English boarding school. I mixed with children from the same kind of monied, privileged background. It was the same for Rosaria. Meeting you was like meeting a creature from another planet. You were just so…free, and unfiltered. I was as fascinated by you as Rosaria was.’
Her voice rose barely above a whisper. ‘You hated me on sight.’
He clasped his coffee cup tightly. ‘No, I hated how my sister fell in love with you on sight. And I hated that my grandmother had fallen in love with you. You were an interloper in the only place I’d ever been able to call a real home and stealing the affection of the only two people in the world who truly loved me.’
Her stare caught his and she tightened the sash of her robe.
He cleared his closing throat. ‘That joint I caught you holding at my parents’? That was Rosaria’s, too, wasn’t it?’
Her chin made the faintest wobble.
‘She made you take the blame.’
‘She didn’t make me.’
‘She let you take all my anger and pretended to be blameless.’
Rose closed her eyes. She was too numb to feel any sense of vindication at Diaz’s acceptance that he’d been wrong about her. Finally allowing the memories of their night together to surface had wrung her dry.
It was all she could do to speak.
‘She knew how you’d react. She knew you would hit the roof and have watched her like a hawk to stop her doing it again. She was angry at the world and drugs were the only way she’d found to blot all her anger out. She didn’t want to stop.’
‘And I did hit the roof,’ he said heavily. ‘I made everything worse with my heavy-handedness and drove her away.’
‘No,’ she disagreed. When it came to Rosaria, Diaz was blameless. ‘You forget she has the same parents as you. All her angst goes back to the neglect she suffered at their hands, but because they’re so indifferent to everything the only person she was able to rail at was you, because you’re the one who loved her most.’ At his disbelieving expression, she dredged a faint smile. ‘You were the one most likely to forgive her.’
She hated to see the pain in his stare. Hated that it had the power to cut through her numbness when the torment of her memories made her never want to feel again.
‘Then why does she still block all my calls and messages and refuse to see me?’ he asked. ‘Why did she boycott our grandmother’s funeral when I made damned sure my mother told her about it?’
‘She wanted to come but she was scared.’
Dismay and pain glittered. ‘Of me?’
‘Of causing a scene. She didn’t know how you would react.’ Cupping the base of her neck, Rose kneaded her thumb into the tensed muscle. She’d never felt this tight before, as if every muscle in her body had seized up and the rest of her had coiled in on itself.
Only her heart felt like it was working properly but the steady erratic increase of the beats was the warning sign that she was a hairpin away from the coil springing free.
She needed to keep it together and keep a tight hold of herself because to release the coil would be to release the clamouring demons and bring the whole world crashing down.
As evenly as she could manage, she said, ‘Diaz, she’s not the nineteen-year-old girl you remember. She’s found her place in the world and she’s happy. She’s a spiritual, beekeeping, pot-smoking hippy, living off her trust fund with a long-term boyfriend, but she still fears your disapproval.’
Rose snatched a breath and willed her phone to buzz with a message from one of the nannies so she could end this conversation and hide away from Diaz until she had the demons under control. ‘I think, too, that she’s deeply ashamed for everything she put you through and that she misses you as much as you miss her, and I think if you were to fly to Nevada waving a white flag, she would embrace you back into her life.’
He sat in silent contemplation for the longest time before turning a bleak stare back to her. ‘How can you be so calm and reasonable talking about this after all the years of blame I put on your shoulders?’
She gripped the sash of her robe. ‘Whatever you did or said to me, you didn’t deserve to be treated like that when all you were doing was trying to save Rosaria from herself.’
‘Don’t tell me you forgive me for my treatment of you,’ he said in scathing self-recrimination.
The beats of her heart had risen to her throat. ‘You both suffered at your parents’ neglect.’
‘You’ve been neglected your whole life by your father but that hasn’t screwed you up and turned you into a monster.’
A pounding had formed in her head. ‘I had my mother. She loved me enough for them both.’
‘And then she died and instead of being a support to the girl who’d been such a large part of my life for so many years…’ Diaz swallowed in an effort to contain the self-loathing consuming him. ‘I was never able to see you truthfully. Always there were emotions mixed in it. It started with jealousy. You infected my whole life and I hated you for it. Even my parents on the few visits they bothered to make to Devon fell in love with you. When I started developing baser feelings for you…’ His lips twisted. ‘I hated myself. I hated that I could do nothing to stop them.
‘Do you remember that weekend when your mother was at the hospice and I drove my grandmother to collect you from it?’
As still as he’d ever seen her, Rose gave the jerkiest of nods.
‘As soon as I walked into the house, I knew you weren’t there. You were always there. For years I’d resented you for that but that one time you were gone, there was an emptiness that I’ve never been able to explain. I insisted on driving my grandmother to the hospice on the pretext that she didn’t like driving, but the truth was that a part of me needed to see you. I think that was when I first started falling in love with you.’
Rose jumped to her feet so quickly she knocked into the table, spilling coffee all over it. ‘Don’t.’
He gazed at her suddenly ashen face. ‘I’m sorry, mi corazón , but this needs to be said. I need to clean my conscience and beg your forgiveness because I can’t do this any more. I can’t put you through this any more.’
She was trembling from head to toe. ‘I don’t want to hear it.’
‘I know you don’t, and I don’t want to cause you any more—’
‘No!’ Spinning on her heels, arms folded tightly across her chest, head bowed, she hurried away from him.
Kicking his chair back, he followed her across the lawn, his longer strides easily closing the distance. ‘Rose, I know I’ve behaved terribly to you.’
Her pace didn’t slow. She gave no impression of hearing him.
‘I know I can never take away the hurt I’ve caused you—’
She came to an abrupt halt. Her back straightened and stiffened, and then, slowly, she twisted around.
Colour crawled over her disbelieving face. ‘Hurt? You call that hurt ?’
His heart splintered, all words of apology lost under the agonised contortion of her face.
‘Hurt? Hurt? ’ she screamed, slamming her hands into his chest. ‘You didn’t hurt me, you bastard, you destroyed me! Do you understand that? Destroyed me. I gave you my heart… I gave you my everything , and you took it all with words of love and then you crept out of my bed and walked out of my life without a backwards glance.
‘You didn’t just break my heart, you broke my soul, and now you want to clean your conscience?’ Tears streaming down her face, she threw her hands in the air. ‘Well go on then, clean it. Purge yourself. Tell me all the lies you’ve dreamed up to justify treating me like the nothing you’ve always thought me to be.’
The sickness in his stomach spread through his veins, infecting the whole of him, and it was all Diaz could do not to throw himself at her feet. ‘I will spend the rest of my life repenting every wound I inflicted on you, but you have never been nothing to me. You’ve been a part of me for so long that I couldn’t even try to tell you when you first seeped into my soul.’
She was swiping at the falling tears, shaking her head. ‘No.’
‘When I left you that morning, I didn’t just destroy you, Rose, I destroyed myself and any chance I ever had of happiness because you are my everything.’ He needed her to know that. Needed her to believe it. Needed her to leave his home with the truth because the truth was the very least she deserved.
‘I woke that morning feeling like I was suffocating. You were asleep in my arms and everything I was feeling was just too much. I couldn’t breathe. I hadn’t intended to come to you that night. I’d spent months— years —doing everything in my power to stop myself stepping into your room. I’d spent years hating you and the toxic allure you’d spun around me, and to admit to myself that I’d been wrong about you was too much to allow myself, not just because I’m an arrogant bastard but because of what it would have led to.’
Her lips were still trembling but the rest of her had frozen.
‘Deep down I always knew that there was no real rationality behind my loathing of you. I turned you into the evil heroine of my mind because I needed to. Once my attraction for you came to life, I was terrified of how deeply my feelings for you ran. But I couldn’t keep it up, not once my grandmother had her stroke. The way you cared for her…’ He shook his head, more memories flooding him. ‘No one could devote themselves to giving such care to someone who wasn’t even of their blood if they had anything but love in their heart, but I would never have come to you if I hadn’t heard you crying.’
Those cries had touched him like nothing else, compelling his feet to her room and compelling his arms to wrap around her and hold her tightly.
‘Nothing could have prepared me for what we shared that night. I cannot tell you how it felt to learn I was your first, and my words of love…they came from my heart, you must believe that, but in the morning I went into denial. I justified walking out on you without saying goodbye and leaving that note by telling myself that we’d got carried away on all the emotions of the funeral. I could not face the depth of my feelings for you or the possibility that your feelings for me could be of the same weight. I had to rebuild you back into the evil heroine to stop myself coming back to you. And then you told me you were pregnant.’
She visibly flinched.
He felt it like a flinch to his own heart.
Pinching the bridge of his nose, Diaz breathed deeply, needing to get control of the emotions boiling inside him.
He wished as hard as he’d ever wished that he could turn back the sands of time.
He had never hated himself as he did then.
It took everything he had not to flinch from confessing the rest. But he needed to say it, and, whatever Rose might say, he knew she needed to hear it.
‘I have never had unprotected sex before and I think the reason neither of us even mentioned contraception that night was because when we were holding each other, the future my grandmother had wanted for us and that we’d been running from was right there for us to take. If I hadn’t run away from it, we would be living that future now, but, coward that I am, I did run, and I did everything humanly possible to block you and the night we’d shared from my thoughts.
‘I couldn’t block you from my dreams though. That has always been impossible, and when the girls were born, that was it. I couldn’t run from my feelings any more.’ He pinched the bridge of his nose again, this time to hold back the stinging tears the mere memory of that day always provoked. ‘I have never experienced such cold fear in the whole of my life.’
Her throat moved and she bleakly croaked, ‘I was terrified they wouldn’t make it too.’
He held her stare and shook his head. ‘No, mi amor , my terror was at losing you .’
Shock widened her eyes, and she hugged her arms around her chest.
‘I thought you were going to die.’ He blinked hard and pressed a hand to his chest, and starkly said, ‘If I had lost you, I don’t know how I would have gone on. It took your near-death for me to come to terms with the fact that a world without you in it is no world at all for me, but even then, even knowing I couldn’t live without you in my life, I still could not bring myself to admit the truth and see you for who you really are rather than the warped version I’d always fed myself.
‘You are my life, Rose. My sun. My moon. My stars. The future I ran away from is the only future I want but I see now that it’s a future I can’t have. I know you still love me but I know now that the hurt I’ve inflicted on you is too deep to heal. I have destroyed any trust you had in me beyond repair. I thought all I would have to do was be patient and you would come to see that my feelings for you are true and unbreakable but I was lying to myself, just as I have always lied to myself about you, and I continued to hurt you just as I have always hurt you.’
Self-loathing filled him like rancid bile. ‘What kind of love blackmails to entrap a heart it had so cruelly rejected and abandoned?’
Her wide eyes flickered and closed.
He took what was possibly the biggest breath of his life. ‘My plane is on standby for you to take the girls home. I will instruct my lawyers to file the divorce papers immediately and have primary custody made over to you.’
There was a long moment of stunned silence before she gave a dazed shake of her head and choked, ‘No, Diaz. No. You can’t do that.’
‘Yes, I can. I see it now.’
‘No.’
‘Rose, yes . It has to be this way. Our history will always be an open wound and there will come a point when it will infect our daughters too. They need stability and they need their mother.’
Her face crumpled. A tear rolled down her cheek. ‘But you’re their father. They need you.’
‘I will always be their father and they will always have me,’ he insisted with a firmness he had to force his vocal cords to make, ‘but this arrangement is the best one for them and the best for you. You deserve the world, Rose, and you deserve your freedom, and this is the only way I can give it to you.
‘I will still be involved in their lives but this means you can start again and live your life as you choose, and one day find someone who can love you how you deserve to be loved without years of toxic history poisoning it. But if…’ He had to swallow to say the next words. ‘If you find you are pregnant, then I will be there for you in whatever capacity you need me to be.’
All those weeks of making love unprotected. Never mentioned between them. His arrogant hope that it meant Rose wanted nature to send her a signal that they were meant to be together and tie her irrevocably to him.
Still shaking her head, she burst into tears, different tears from her earlier sobs, formed by a different kind of pain, a pain he shared right down to his marrow. Without any forethought, he hauled her to him.
‘It has to be this way, mi amor ,’ he said into her silken hair, squeezing his eyes to hold back his own threatening tears. ‘My feelings for you have always been extreme and my reactions in fighting it extreme, and I want you to know that I am beyond sorry. I’ve behaved monstrously to you and now I have to put things right, as much as I can.’
For the longest passage of time they did nothing but hold each other tightly, Rose’s tears slowly subsiding into dry heaves.
He kissed the top of her head. ‘I love you, Rose. I will always love you.’
‘I love you too,’ she choked.
Disentangling their arms, they gazed into each other’s desolate eyes.
‘Please go,’ he whispered. ‘Don’t drag this out.’
Chest and shoulders still heaving, she made a short nod and pressed her fingers to her lips and then pressed her fingers to his mouth. Her voice was barely audible. ‘Goodbye, Diaz.’
He trailed his thumb along a high cheekbone for the final time. ‘Goodbye, Rose.’
* * *
Diaz hauled his leaden legs up the stairs. He’d drunk enough bourbon to tranquillise a horse and could only hope it would have the same effect on him.
He craved oblivion. If not for his daughters, he would crave to never wake up.
The villa was deafening in its silence.
With drunken, blurry eyes, he found the nursery door.
He didn’t know if it was better or worse that much of the girls’ stuff had been left behind. The items left were for when they came to visit him.
From now on, his daughters would only be visitors in his home. He would no longer share the daily routines with them. No longer share their daily life.
No longer share Rose’s life.
He staggered to his bedroom and through to the dressing room.
The dressing table at which he’d watched the Rose he’d fallen in love with all those years ago come back to life just a day ago had been cleared of the beauty products she didn’t need but adored using.
He opened its drawers. All empty…except for the pencil that rolled out of its hiding place at the back of the top right drawer when he started closing it.
Rose’s eyeliner.
He slumped onto the dressing table chair and picked the eyeliner up.
Just to touch it was enough to rip the fissure that had been steadily growing in his heart wide open. Holding the eyeliner tightly to his chest, he opened his lungs to expel all his agony in a roar before he slumped over the table and bawled like a child.
* * *
The girls were settled in their double cot, holding hands and on the cusp of falling asleep.
Rose crept out of the room and crossed the landing to the bathroom.
Even though the cramps that had been gripping her on the flight back to England had told her what was coming, she still found herself shaking to have started her period.
Shaking and then sobbing.