CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER SEVEN
A noise shocked Rose awake. In an instant she’d thrown her duvet off and was padding quietly to the adjoining door. Her racing pulses already knew before she reached it that it hadn’t been the girls who’d woken her. It had been Diaz closing his bedroom door.
He was back from Sweden.
Heart in throat, she tiptoed back to bed and buried herself under the duvet.
This was the last time she would sleep under this duvet.
From tomorrow night she would be sharing Diaz’s bed.
It destroyed her to know the hot, knotted sickness low in her belly was the sickness of anticipation. Excitement.
It destroyed her even more to know that, even in sleep, her subconscious had been waiting for him.
* * *
Early the next morning, Rose sat on the sill of her bedroom window hugging her knees as she waited for the rest of the world to wake up. Her room overlooked the sprawling, romantic garden and she watched the flowers respond to the rising sun. She knew how they felt.
She’d spent half the night awake, on tenterhooks that Diaz would come to her. She still didn’t know if she was relieved or disappointed that her door remained closed.
There would be no closed door between them tonight.
She hugged herself tighter and tried to breathe through the ripples of her thumping heart.
A real marriage. That’s what he wanted. What she’d agreed to, even if only for a few months. What her tingling body yearned for.
If she could separate her body from her heart she would have few qualms about the agreement, would happily go to his bed and use him with the same shamelessness that he’d used her until the summer ended and she took the girls back to England and divorced him.
When it came to Diaz though, Rose’s heart and body were inextricably linked, and she had no idea how she was going to sever that link when she was sharing his bed every night.
Movement in the grounds caught her eye.
Her breath caught in her throat.
Striding over the path towards the swimming area, a towel slung around his neck, Diaz, wearing nothing but grey swim shorts.
As if sensing her stare, he stopped and looked up.
She ducked out of sight.
A few moments later her racing heart skipped wildly to see his name flash on the screen of her phone. A simple message.
Join me?
The longing that ripped through her…
It was a longing reawoken on her arrival to Spain and now back with a vengeance.
His absence had brought no respite. He was always there in the back of her mind by day and weaving through her dreams at night, just as she’d long weaved through his dreams.
He’d been the one to reject those dreams. He only wanted to live them now to provide their daughters and himself with the real family he’d never had.
Rose turned her phone off without replying.
* * *
Breakfast was mercifully Diaz free, and Rose snatched the opportunity for more Diaz-free time by taking the girls for a walk on the beach before the sun burned away the thinning clouds gathered above them.
For the first time she wished she were back home in Devon, just so she could walk along the unpredictable sea. The picture-perfect blue Mediterranean was too perfect for her mood. She needed a tempest to match her emotions and help quell it before she came face to face with him again.
Since she’d arrived in Spain, a wide ramp had been installed next to the marble steps that led up to Diaz’s gardens, and she pushed the double buggy back up it thinking there was nothing he hadn’t thought of…
She almost stopped in her tracks.
Had that really been the first time she’d wished herself back home?
She never got the chance to answer herself for a tall figure appeared in the distance and scrambled her thoughts before he’d taken his first stride towards her.
* * *
Diaz hadn’t known it was possible that two days’ absence could enhance beauty so greatly, not until he stood before Rose, dazzling under the rising sun in a short pale blue summer dress, dirty blonde hair wild and loose.
He’d thought about her every minute of his time away. Recalled over and over how she’d lost control in his arms, turning from passionate fury to passionate desire in a breath.
As their daughters had fallen asleep, he simply stood there and soaked her in, filling his senses with the woman who would, finally, after all these years of fighting and all these months of waiting, be sharing his bed.
Whether she would be sharing it on a permanent basis was something he could not predict. From the defiance ringing out of the brilliant blue eyes soaking him in with the same degree of intensity, she was far from reaching the point of acceptance he’d reached all those months ago.
She’d given him her word to try and make their marriage work but she wasn’t going to pretend it was what she wanted. Rose never put on a front. In that respect, she hadn’t changed since she was eleven. She was doing it for their daughters, not for herself and definitely not for him.
But at one point she had wanted a real marriage with him, something she’d unwittingly admitted between furious kicks to his shins.
His actions that early morning had hurt her greatly, a knowledge that sat increasingly heavy in him, but if he could put the past behind him and separate Rose, the mother of his children, from the Rose who’d led his sister on the path to destruction, then in time she would learn to make a similar separation too. It was the only way to make it work. Draw a line in the sand and step into the territory marked future .
A future where neither of them had to hide away from the passions and desires that had bound and repelled them for so long.
‘I take it from the happiness on your face that you are thrilled at my return,’ he commented, breaking the silence and its accompanying tension, and was rewarded with a twitch of Rose’s wide, perfect lips.
‘Ecstatic.’
‘I thought as much. I was nearly convinced by the way you rushed to join me for a swim earlier but now it has been confirmed.’
‘I would have joined you but I had a prior engagement with a book.’
Chest lightening at her irreverence, he laughed. ‘Is it one of those big photography tomes you always used to have your nose stuck in?’
‘It’s a thriller, about a woman on a quest for vengeance.’
He raised an eyebrow. ‘Reading it for tips?’
Her laugh was a short melodic burst that stopped almost as soon as it started.
It was a sound he hadn’t heard since his grandmother died. Not like that. Unforced.
‘Assuming you don’t already have a prior engagement with your book, I thought we could take the girls to a nature reserve for the day,’ he casually suggested, watching her reaction closely.
‘Today?’
‘The weather is supposed to remain relatively cool and it is never too early to introduce them to the joys of nature.’
He could see the internal war she was fighting, see her scrambling for a reasonable excuse to refuse and coming up with nothing.
No longer looking at him, she gave a short nod of her head. ‘Sure. When do you want to leave?’
‘As soon as we have everything we need packed for the girls.’
* * *
The nature reserve, a thirty-minute drive away, turned out to be a twenty-square-mile wildlife park with free roaming, endangered species living the best lives they could outside their natural environments.
Diaz drove, and in the reserve itself they took a child each onto their laps and pointed out the exotic creatures, some basking in the sun, others hiding in the shade, as they crawled along with the air conditioning keeping them nice and cool.
For the first time in a long time, Rose wished she had her camera to hand. For years, she’d kept it almost permanently around her neck, always ready to take a shot if something caught her eye. Although the park, created out of a former open-pit iron mine, was filled with beautiful and diverse natural colours that contrasted brilliantly with the cobalt sky and had a real air of tranquillity that it would be a pleasure to immortalise in one snapshot of time, it pained her to admit it was Diaz her camera hands itched to immortalise. Diaz, exactly as he was in that moment: sexy, relaxed and engaged with their daughters, filling their heads with knowledge they were way too young to remember. They were too young to appreciate any of it and there was zero chance of them ever remembering any of it, and yet they seemed to be taking everything in, so surely they had to be getting something out of it, whatever that something might be.
She wondered if her own father had ever engaged with her like Diaz did with their daughters. She’d never thought about it before. He’d moved back to his native Australia before her first birthday and while they’d kept in touch over the years, the original intention of him making regular visits back to England to see her had never materialised. Flights from one side of the world to the other were expensive. That was the reason she’d always been given. The reason she’d always accepted. The reason she had no memories of her father in the flesh.
It was painful to admit that if her father had loved her like Diaz loved their daughters, he would have found the money.
Diaz would always be a true father to their girls. He was hands-on with them because he wanted to be. Because he loved them.
He would never do as her father had done. Or as his parents had done to him, leaving him to be dragged up by nannies until he was old enough to be shoved off to an English boarding school. She remembered Rosaria telling her Mrs Martinez had initially moved back to Devon from Madrid so someone was close by if Diaz needed them.
Whether the widowed Mrs Martinez had known she would become his and later Rosaria’s de facto parent was something Rose had never thought to ask. Having known and loved her, she strongly suspected that not only had Mrs Martinez known it would happen but that she’d wanted it to happen, for the children’s sake, so they could have stability and continuity in their lives.
For all Mrs Martinez’s love and attention, it was his parents’ love and attention he’d needed.
Diaz loved their daughters so much that he was prepared to tie himself to his nemesis for life for their sakes, so they could have the full family he’d always craved. And it was for this reason that when they returned to the villa, all Rose’s stuff would have been moved into his bedroom.
Was she being selfish for being so emotionally resistant to his wishes for them to have a proper marriage and be a family? Rose wondered miserably as she made sure to keep her happy face on and pointed to a warthog rooting about, closer to their car than any of the other animals had been.
Once they’d finished driving around the wildlife reserve, they parked up and took a walk around the reservoir to the picnic area. While Diaz pushed the girls in their double stroller, shades on, his height, athleticism and rugged good looks turning heads from all who passed them, Rose found her camera hands tingling again.
It felt strange to be out and about. Since the girls had been born, she’d only left her home for medical appointments and walks along the beach with them. Diaz had come along on a couple of the walks but those had been in the days of newborn baby brain fog and all she’d seen him as was a capable extra pair of hands.
It was frightening how quickly everything had turned around; old feelings and desires resurfacing, old hurts freshly wounding.
And it was terrifying that her awareness of Diaz’s every movement and gesture was more acute than it had ever been.
Even more terrifying that the excitement of what the night would bring buzzed in her pulses at a rapidly increasing tempo.
* * *
The rest of the day had to rank as the longest hours of Rose’s life. She went through the motions of behaving like a functional human being but beneath the skin she was a bag of heightened emotions living on her nerves.
Soon, very soon, she would be climbing the stairs and opening the door to her new bedroom. She would be sharing a mattress and bedsheets with Diaz.
How— how —was she supposed to separate her heart from her body and protect herself? she despaired for what had to be the hundredth time.
‘Do I need to have a talk with my chef?’ he asked lightly, interrupting her despairing thoughts. ‘This is the third meal we’ve shared that you’ve hardly touched.’
That evening they were dining under the stars. Diaz, sitting excruciatingly close to her, had been holding a steady stream of conversation about his plans to open a hotel in Iceland and steadily clearing his plate whilst Rose pushed the fresh seafood paella around hers.
Beneath the amiable conversation ran a strong undercurrent that pulled and tugged at the nerves in her stomach making it impossible to eat, no matter how divine the food tasted.
So strong were the nerves that she was close to wishing they’d skipped the pretence of dinner and gone straight to bed once the girls had fallen asleep. Got it over with.
It was the thought of it feeding the undercurrent. Tugging her nerves into a frenzy.
Not that it had to happen. Nothing did. If she chose, she could get into the bed and turn her back to him. If she trusted him with anything, it was that. He wouldn’t force her.
‘No, it’s lovely,’ she refuted. ‘I’m just not very hungry.’
Warm fingers touched her hand.
She didn’t want to look at him but his touch compelled her.
The green eyes that captured hers were stark but steady, his hand warm as he enveloped her clenched fist. ‘Relax, Rose. It’s just me.’
Her short burst of laughter contained no mirth. ‘And that’s exactly why I can’t relax. We’ve never had the kind of relationship where we relax around each other.’
‘Point taken.’ He gazed at her a long moment before raising his wine glass with a wry smile. ‘To being able to relax in each other’s company.’
She didn’t think she was imagining his accent had become more pronounced as the meal had gone on. Usually, it was barely detectable.
The undercurrent was pulling and tugging at them both.
Slipping her hand away from his, she lifted her glass of untouched wine. ‘To getting through the summer without wanting to kill each other.’
His eyes glittered, amusement and something less definable. He took a drink. ‘We have made it this far. I will take that as a win.’
‘Always best to take your victories where you can.’
‘Undoubtedly… Are you going to eat any more?’
She glanced at her mostly full plate and shook her head.
‘Would you like dessert? Coffee?’
Another wordless refusal.
After a beat, he gave a sharp, decisive nod and pushed his chair back. ‘In that case, I shall go up to bed.’
Her stomach crashed to her feet, her heart, which had been incapable of beating a normal rhythm the whole day, flipping over on itself.
On his feet, he extended an open hand to her and, his voice even, said, ‘Are you going to come up too?’
His meaning was clear. The meaning ringing in his eyes was clear.
The thrashing of her heart and the longing in her veins were even clearer.
Rose picked up her glass of wine and drank the contents in two giant swallows. And then she pushed her own chair back.