Chapter Four
Santiago
I stare down at my phone screen, at the words in stark black and white. It’s a text from Sofia, my family’s housekeeper, who still manages the Veracruz estate and who has had a soft spot for me ever since I was a child.
Every so often she’d pass on information to me, mostly about my father, since she never agreed with his demonisation of me, and she worried about some of his decisions regarding the estate.
She has no love for the new Duchess either, which is presumably why she just texted me with: Senora Beatrix has been sick for the past six weeks and finally she went to the doctor.
She said nothing when she returned, but the rumours in the village say she’s pregnant.
Something that has been nagging at me for the past four months now hardens into stone, with sharp edges that cut. And I know what it is.
Certainty.
I lean back in my chair and stare unseeing at the opposite wall of my office in the VZ Industries building, trying to force myself to sit still.
There’s no need to leap into a helicopter and fly from Paris straight to Castile immediately, no need whatsoever.
Just because it concerns Beatrix, it doesn’t mean the situation needs my instant and personal attention.
I grit my teeth, forcing the urge to go into submission, and eventually, when it doesn’t, I shove my chair back and start pacing. I always do my best thinking while in motion.
As much as I want to, there’s no point castigating myself for what happened four months ago.
I’m well aware of how badly my self-control failed.
What matters now, though, are the facts and those are that Beatrix is likely pregnant and, while there’s a slight chance that Antonio is the father, the more obvious candidate is myself.
I didn’t use a condom that day at the funeral, too overcome by my own base urges to even think about it. I didn’t even remember not using one, just had that nagging feeling for months that I was missing something.
Turns out, I was missing something and now that lapse of memory has come back to bite me.
A child. My child.
Something flexes and shifts inside me in response, something powerful and possessive. The little piece of my father that I’ve never quite managed to get rid of, that yearns and wants and hungers for things I can’t permit myself to have.
I despise that part of myself, and she called to it back there at the funeral.
She brought it out of me, and I wasn’t strong enough to overcome it.
But that won’t happen again. Emotions always come second to my intellect, since emotions are weaknesses, little vulnerabilities that allow all sorts of other, more primitive things to creep in, such as addiction, sexual excess, violence.
Those things ruined my parents and I won’t permit them to ruin me.
My intellect, on the other hand, is cool and rational. It favours facts, not instincts, and it is only wrong when the facts are wrong. My intellect has saved me more times than I can count, especially when I was growing up, and it’s certainly more trustworthy than my parents ever were.
After all, one of the many reasons I hated my father was that he had no control over himself. He had a ready temper that he’d lose at the slightest provocation, and base sexual urges that led him into the affairs that so humiliated my mother.
She loved him, that was her problem. She’d always been emotionally fragile, and finding out about his affairs broke her.
Some of the blame for that does lie with me, I admit, since I was the one who told her about them, after discovering Antonio with one of his mistresses.
She tried to talk to him, but he was already furious with me for what he deemed ‘a betrayal of trust’ in informing her, and threw her out, throwing me out along with her.
I have some regrets about telling her, since her alcohol addiction started not long after their marriage ended.
But I was only a child at the time—twelve, if not younger—and I was angry at my father for his betrayal and thought she should know he’d been lying to her.
Those regrets are small ones, however, since she’d have found out at some point anyway, and the result would have been the same.
I pace over to the window and stop a moment, staring out at the winding silver strip of the Seine and the spire of Notre Dame.
I could choose to ignore her pregnancy, and tell myself that the child is my father’s rather than mine. Leave her to bring up the baby in the peace of the Veracruz’s Castilian estate. But I know myself. I won’t be able to let this go until I know for sure whose child it is.
The facts need to be ascertained. They’re vital in my work as a scientist. Facts are the building blocks of the universe, they make up the fabric of reality, inexorable as gravity, and more importantly, they don’t lie.
People do, though. People do nothing but lie and most especially when it comes to protecting their own interests.
And they hate the truth, too. My father, for example, did not like me telling the truth, and the fact that he got rid of me when he got rid of my mother made a lie out of all the words of love he once gave us.
He didn’t love us at all. He didn’t love her and he didn’t love me, and so I can never trust those words ever again. People in general can’t be trusted, and so I put my faith in the facts.
I can’t ignore those facts now. The child will either be mine or be my half-sibling, and I must know which it is in order to make a plan about what to do next.
For that I’ll need a paternity test. My father’s widow won’t like that, especially if she’s trying to hide the pregnancy, which she clearly is, considering she hasn’t told anyone about it. But that’s too bad. I will have to insist.
And if the child is yours?
I stare at my reflection in the glass, trying not to see my father’s features looking back at me.
At least my mother’s endless need for attention isn’t visible.
There’s too much of both of them in me for comfort, though.
It’s why I made the decision early on that I would never have children of my own.
I have too many bad genes, too many vulnerabilities to pass on.
Except if this child is mine I’ll need to make a choice about what to do.
I’ve always been a man who takes responsibility for his mistakes.
It’s why I took responsibility for my mother’s health, why I look after her even now, since I’m the one who told her about my father’s affairs.
And, since I’m the one who made the mistake and forgot the condom, I’ll take responsibility for any child resulting from that mistake.
What that responsibility looks like, I can’t determine as yet. What I do know is that I won’t make any decisions until I know for certain who the father of Beatrix’s child is.
Taking out my phone, I scroll through my list of contacts.
I have her number and email address saved after that abortive attempt to convince her that she needed to choose me instead of Antonio.
I should have deleted it long ago, but I didn’t.
I thought it might come in useful one day, and it looks like today is that day.
You saved it because you couldn’t quite let go of her, could you?
Hardly. I let her go the day she married my father.
Is that why you backed her up against the wall in the church the day of your father’s funeral? Because you’d let her go?
I ignore the whispers in my head, they’re not relevant, and hit the call button instead.
‘Hello?’ she says, answering immediately, and no matter how long it’s been since I heard her husky little voice, the effect it has on me is the same.
Every muscle in my body tenses and all I can think about is that same voice begging me in the church as I pushed inside her, ‘Please…oh, please…’
I grit my teeth, forcing my body’s urges back into the box they came from. ‘Miss Morgan,’ I say, deliberately not using her married name. ‘It appears we need to have a little chat.’
There’s a silence down the other end of the phone.
I didn’t tell her it was me calling, but she’ll know. She remembers my voice just as I remember hers. She’ll be shocked to hear from me, no doubt, and is probably hoping that I’m calling her about something else and not the pregnancy she deliberately didn’t tell me about.
‘Santiago,’ she says eventually, her tone admirably cool. ‘Or should I say, Mr Veracruz? How nice of you to call. What would you like to chat about?’
Oh, she’s good. She’s very good. Perfect even, especially with that faint note of surprise at the end. Another person might think she’s being genuine, but I know better.
‘Come, now, Miss Morgan,’ I turn away from the window and pace over to my desk, ‘let’s not pretend. I know about your pregnancy.’
Again, there’s a silence and this time it’s a shocked silence.
I smile as I pull out my chair and sit down. I’m enjoying this. I’m enjoying rattling the ice-queen mask that she likes to pretend is the truth of her. But that’s not the truth. There’s a wild heat in her and now I know that for a fact. I tasted it.
‘What pregnancy?’ She sounds unbothered, but I know she is, indeed, very bothered. There’s a roughness to her voice that she can’t hide. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘Still lying through your teeth, I see,’ I say. ‘Don’t play games with me, Miss Morgan. The rumours are all through the village and you’ve been sick for approximately six weeks. That’s a long time for a stomach bug.’
She’s quiet a moment, then says, with a slight hint of impatience, as if I’m a child pestering her for a sweet, ‘Okay, fine. Yes, I’m pregnant. I was hoping to wait a little longer to announce it formally. Who told you? Sofia, I suppose?’
I ignore this, conscious of a rising fury that she doesn’t seem perturbed to have been caught in a lie. ‘You didn’t think that perhaps I might have wanted to know?’ I demand roughly.
‘And why would you want to know?’ she asks, as if she can’t think of one single reason.
I grip my phone hard, the edges digging into my palms as the fury mixes with the raw desire I always feel for her, eating through my self-control like hydrochloric acid through metal. ‘We had sex without a condom,’ I say bluntly. ‘Why do you think I’d want to know?’
She gives a long-suffering sigh, as if this conversation is boring her. ‘It was once,’ she says. ‘And surely you must know that your father and I shared a bed. The baby is his, not yours.’
It could be. It very well could be. And yet some instinct in me is telling me she’s lying, and this only makes my fury burn even hotter. Is she lying because she thinks I’m not a fit father for the child? That there’s something wrong with me?
You know there is. There always has been.
I almost growl as I shove the thought away. ‘I only have your word for that,’ I say, struggling to keep my temper under control. ‘And I know how much your word is worth.’
‘Are you calling me a liar, Mr Veracruz?’ she enquires coolly.
‘It’s not the first time you’ve been called one, remember?’
This time she says nothing, but I can feel the hot electric current between us pull tight, and it doesn’t matter that she’s thousands of miles away in Spain while I’m here in France. I can feel it, I’m sure she can feel it too, and I’m not above using that to get what I want.
‘Remember how you told me that you didn’t want me?’ I go on, lowering my voice, turning it into a caress. ‘Remember how wet you were and how desperately you begged me to make you come?’
I hear her take a soft, shaken breath and a savage satisfaction twists inside me. ‘You lied about that,’ I say. ‘I wouldn’t put it past you to lie about this too.’
Again, she says nothing.
‘A paternity test.’ I make no effort to hide the demand in my voice. ‘I want one.’
‘Go to hell,’ she says.
And abruptly ends the call.