CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER TEN
The helicopter landed on the roof of the private club the party was being hosted in. When Rose stepped out of it, she felt like the heroine of an action movie. All she needed was a gun in her knickers and she’d be ready to take down the villain of the piece.
She didn’t imagine action movie heroines had to make the short walk from helicopter to entrance holding their dress down to stop it lifting from the force of the spinning rotors though.
A short ride down, the elevator opened into a huge gold lobby and then they were climbing winding stairs and walking a wide corridor lined with doors and the kind of arty, atmospheric black and white photos she’d once loved to take herself. Up another set of stairs and then, finally, they entered a sprawling, darkly lit but glittering room with copious mirrors that immediately brought to mind the Hollywood glamorous gangster ideal.
One quick skim revealed an abundance of faces she recognised from the big screen and small, and from the glossy fashion magazines she used to buy to study how photographers created mood and atmosphere in their shoots.
Suddenly feeling every inch the mother of twin babies amongst such glamour, she slipped her hand into Diaz’s and pressed herself closer to him.
‘Relax,’ he murmured, perfectly understanding her nerves without her having to say a word. ‘These people don’t bite. Champagne?’
‘Do they serve it by the bottle?’
Laughing, he swiped two flutes from the tray of a smiling host.
Feeling a bit more grounded with her hand clasped in his, Rose let Diaz lead the way, noticing his nods of greeting at some of the familiar faces and his gestures to others that he would be back to talk to them soon. Once they’d passed the main throng, she realised he was leading her to a large crowd by the bar, and thought how handy it must be to be as tall as Diaz and able to see over everyone’s heads.
A bald, diminutive man wearing horn-rimmed glasses holding court spotted them and immediately stopped whatever he was saying to beam widely. ‘Diaz!’
‘Pedro!’ he replied with an identical beam before embracing him in a bear hug.
So this was the birthday boy and director whose films she so admired. He was exactly as Rose had imagined.
After a short exchange in Spanish, Diaz switched to English. ‘Pedro, meet Rose.’
Pulling her into a tight embrace, Pedro said in heavily accented but perfect English, ‘Thank you for agreeing to come and forcing Diaz here—I have been dying to meet you.’
That took her aback. ‘You have?’
‘Who wouldn’t want to meet the woman who turned Diaz Martinez into a recluse?’ He beamed again. ‘But I understand it. My sister was the same when she had her first baby. Two for you. No wonder you are so slim. They must keep you very busy.’
‘They do,’ she agreed. ‘It’s the first time I’ve left them.’
‘Don’t think about them,’ he urged. ‘Otherwise you will spend the night checking your phone and be boring like my sister.’
‘Rose could never be boring,’ Diaz interjected with a faint wink at her.
Rose’s brain was reeling so much she had no idea how she was able to hold the long conversation that followed between her, Diaz and Pedro, the other guests dipping in and out, the topics ebbing and flowing between movies and scripts and salacious gossip.
She’d never really thought about if or how Diaz had explained their situation to his friends and acquaintances. And now she knew. He’d dropped off the social calendar with the simple truth that he had twin babies and their mother wasn’t ready to leave them.
He’d turned down this party with a man who was clearly a great friend for her sake. He really hadn’t wanted to put her under any additional pressure.
‘How do you know Pedro?’ she asked after Diaz had extricated them with the excuse that they were monopolising Pedro’s time and found them an empty booth to sit in.
‘I was the main investor in one of his films six years ago. None of the studios wanted to touch it because it wasn’t in English. I heard about it from a friend of a friend and approached him. We hit it off and now I provide most of the finance for all his films.’
She thought quickly. ‘La Viuda Blanca?’ It had swept the movie industry awards for best foreign language film.
He raised an eyebrow. ‘You know it?’
‘I love Pedro’s films. They’re all so dark and twisty and have such great cinematography.’
‘I thought you meant his English-speaking ones. I never knew you’d watched his Spanish-speaking ones too.’
Glad the lighting meant he’d be unlikely to see the blush she knew was burning her cheeks, she said, ‘And I never knew you were involved in any of them.’
‘I’m not, I’m just the finance behind them. It’s good to diversify. If you watch the Spanish ones, does that mean you now speak my language?’
‘I use subtitles.’ She drained her champagne so she didn’t find herself admitting that she’d initially started watching Pedro’s films in the wake of her night with Diaz, a form of self-torture, immersing herself in the language he’d whispered to her when he’d made love to her.
That had been in the days when she’d held onto the faint hope that his English whispers had come from his heart and that he would come back to her.
By the time she’d taken the pregnancy test, she’d long come to the crushing acceptance that his words, Spanish and English alike, spoken in the heat of passion and in the stunned aftermath, had all been a lie, and for the first time in so very long, she was unable to block her heart from beating the pain as if the wound were as fresh as it had been all those nights spent curled on the sofa watching films in a language she didn’t understand.
She could have kissed Diaz’s parents for choosing that moment to appear at their booth.
‘There you are!’ Camila said, sliding in beside her son without invitation. ‘Pedro said you’d arrived. Why are you hiding away?’
‘So you wouldn’t find us,’ Diaz replied drolly.
Camila slapped his thigh with a, ‘We need to work on your sense of humour,’ and beckoned a passing hostess for more champagne.
Fresh flutes before them, Diaz put his to his mouth.
‘Wait,’ his mother commanded. ‘We must make a toast.’
‘To what?’ he asked. ‘The joys of grandchildren?’
She fixed him with a beady stare. ‘To family.’
Even Rose winced.
* * *
The beat of the music being played by the famous DJ changed. Bodies began gravitating to the dance floor.
‘How is business going?’ Julio asked his son.
Rose squeezed Diaz’s hand and braced herself for another cutting remark. It never came. Diaz returned the squeeze and answered his father cordially, and soon he was deep in conversation with both his parents, business talk that went completely over Rose’s head. She was grateful for the time it gave her to compose her emotions.
More memories were pushing like a tidal wall at her brain, and the only way to push them back was to concentrate and focus her mind on people watching.
‘You must wish you had your camera with you?’ Camila observed, breaking Rose’s mental attempt to put a name to the Hollywood actor gyrating on the dance floor with three scantily clad women.
‘Could you imagine if I started taking pictures now?’ she said with a wry smile.
‘You would be escorted out and your camera destroyed,’ Camila hooted. ‘When will you start taking commissions again?’
‘I haven’t really thought about it.’
‘But you must miss it, surely?’
‘Having twins doesn’t leave much time for missing things.’ She didn’t add that she hadn’t taken any commissions since Mrs Martinez’s stroke. Caring for her substitute grandmother had been a full-time occupation and one she had never begrudged, not after everything that wonderful woman had done for her.
Diaz had cared for her too. Between the two of them, they’d nursed her through her final months while Mrs Martinez’s son and daughter-in-law had continued their jet-setting life.
She’d always accepted the selfish nature of Diaz’s parents. They weren’t going to change, something she’d pointed out to Diaz just hours ago, but sitting in this booth, absorbing the heat of Diaz’s body, their fingers entwined, a little swirl of anger unfurled at the damage their selfishness had caused.
Camila waved a dismissive hand. ‘You have staff for the twins. It is a crime to let your talent go to waste.’
‘I’m sure I’ll get back into it again one day but, for now, my priority is the girls.’
‘But children are so boring and messy, and a career is so fulfilling. With your talents, you could be travelling the world and making a real name for yourself.’
The little swirl of anger grew but she tempered it into a pointed rebuke. ‘I’m not like you, Camila—I could never leave it for other people to raise my children for me.’
Both her in-laws looked at her in bemused confusion. She had no idea what Diaz’s expression was as her attention was entirely on his parents, but the hand clasping hers had tightened.
Giving a put-upon sigh, Camila finished her champagne. ‘Oh, well, I can see your mind is made up so I will not argue about it, but I think you’re making a mistake. Now, tell us about your wedding. Diaz refuses to tell us anything. Am I right in thinking it was just the two of you and Josephine?’
‘Nearly—we had the registrar and two witnesses there too.’ Rose looked at Julio and, again pointedly, said, ‘Your mother wanted to be a witness but she wasn’t well enough to sign the certificate. She wasn’t well enough because she was dying.’ Something Julio and Camila had both known perfectly well.
They’d known perfectly well, too, that Rose had been Mrs Martinez’s only visitor when she’d been admitted into hospital with the stroke that had been the beginning of the end for the wonderful woman, and she thought back to all the calls she’d made to Julio to enable his mother’s discharge into her care. Thought back, too, to Julio and Camila’s failure to let Diaz know about the stroke and its seriousness for over a week even though they’d promised to let him know immediately.
The moment Diaz had, finally, been informed, he’d dropped everything to be there for the woman who’d been more of a mother than a grandmother to him, and as all these thoughts and memories reeled through Rose’s head, the building anger morphed into pure rage, and she wondered what the hell she’d been thinking spouting about acceptance and moving on to the one who’d most suffered at Julio and Camila’s neglect.
Julio made the sign of the cross and, without an ounce of contrition for neglecting his mother with the same zeal that he’d neglected his children, said, ‘She got to see you two married though.’
‘Which is more than we did,’ Camila added, now the one speaking pointedly, her attention on the son she’d rarely shared a roof with to kiss goodnight or been there for during a single one of his—or her daughter’s—childhood nightmares. ‘We didn’t know anything about it until you told us we were going to be grandparents.’
Rose’s rage-induced impulse to chuck her champagne over the abhorrently narcissistic pair was only thwarted by the fact she had no champagne left to throw.
Diaz was the one to respond, smoothly saying, ‘The last thing we wanted was for our wedding to be turned into a circus, but if you’d made the effort to visit while she was so gravely ill, one of us would have told you about it.’
Naturally, neither of his parents absorbed his reproach any more than they’d absorbed Rose’s.
Rose was right, he realised. They were never going to change. Which made the anger he could feel vibrating from her all the more mystifying.
She’d been the one to stop him exploding in temper at the funeral. His parents had breezed in late to the service and taken their seats next to him. It was the first time they’d set foot in England since his grandmother’s stroke. About to let rip at them, he’d been caught off-guard by the lightest of taps on his thigh.
He’d whipped his head to Rose, sitting to his right. She’d pulled her hand away, shaken her head, and quietly said, ‘Not today.’
Those two words had been enough to bring him to his senses.
A hostess appeared with more champagne. Diaz thanked her with a smile and took a drink, his thoughts drifting even further back, to the evening he’d agreed to marry Rose.
They’d been in the drawing room. It had been three weeks since the hospital had released his grandmother into Rose’s care. Diaz had reworked his diary to keep his international travel to a minimum so he could be there as much as possible. Rose had made them all a simple omelette, something his grandmother could chew without difficulty. Diaz had fed her.
They’d formed an unspoken, temporary truce.
It had been once the plates were cleared and they’d settled in what was by then their usual seats either side of her bed to watch a film that his grandmother had quietly said, ‘I want you two to marry.’
He could still feel the shocked silence that had reverberated around the room.
His grandmother had slowly spread her hands out for them to take one each.
In perfect unison, they’d risen from their seats and carefully sat on the edge of the bed clasping a hand each and facing her. Facing each other too. All three able to see each other clearly.
His grandmother had looked directly at Diaz with a plea in her eyes. ‘Don’t let Rose be alone when I’m gone.’
His stare had darted to Rose. Her face had drained of colour, eyes wide with the same disbelief he’d known resonated in his.
‘Will you marry her?’ his grandmother had rasped, clutching his hand with all her limited strength. ‘For my peace of mind?’
His heart had beaten so hard he could have sworn he’d felt it thumping to escape his ribs. ‘Do you know what you’re asking of me?’
To marry Rose? To make the most toxic woman alive, the woman he held responsible for his sister’s near-death and estrangement, his wife?
His grandmother had nodded and smiled. ‘Grant a dying woman her last wish and marry Rose. Stop this war. The love is there if you will only give it a chance.’
‘You’re not dying,’ he’d denied, lying to them both, too stunned at what was being asked of him to correct her on the love she’d spoken of.
They’d married four weeks and a day later in that same room, the tiny wedding party crowded around his grandmother’s bed so she could bear witness.
Two weeks after that simple wedding where the bride wore black and the groom wore the first suit that came to hand, his grandmother had died with Diaz and Rose holding the same hands they’d held when she’d made her final request to them, and he’d still been blind to the truth of her words.
The love is there if you will only give it a chance.
He hadn’t given it a chance. He’d run from it. And he’d left her on her own.
The truth had only come when Rose had been close to death and even then, knowing he loved her, knowing he needed her, still he’d resisted the fullness of it, still running, running, running from the full truth of his feelings, still letting himself believe her responsible…
His mother’s voice cut through his pounding thoughts. ‘Have you heard from Rosaria lately?’
For a moment he was certain his darkening thoughts had conjured his sister’s name from his mother’s mouth.
She repeated the question.
He stared at her as if she were a stranger. She knew he hadn’t spoken to his sister in almost eight years.
And then Rose quietly answered, ‘A few weeks ago,’ and he felt his whole world lurch.
Rose was very much aware of Diaz’s stiffening beside her. Aware of his thumb, which had been gently stroking the top of her hand, freezing before he slowly pulled his hand from hers. Aware of his stare turning to her.
Bracing herself, she faced him.
His expression was incredulous, his voice hoarse. ‘You are in touch with my sister?’
It was the first time Rosaria had even been alluded to since they’d arrived in Spain. Longer.
But she’d been with them the entire time, one of the eggshells to be avoided, the largest elephant never addressed for fear of the poison that would be unleashed through it.
Quivering inside, Rose nodded and confessed, ‘We’ve always been in touch.’
She held her breath and waited for the explosion. It would be tempered—they were at a party surrounded by his friends and acquaintances—but it would come. It would be in his cutting words and the tone of his voice.
But the green eyes, narrowed as he searched her face, betrayed no hint of anger. Only the pulse ticcing on his jawline betrayed any emotion. ‘How is she? Is she well?’
She expelled the breath with another nod. ‘She’s doing great.’
A crease appeared in his forehead. ‘Really?’
‘She keeps bees.’
The crease in his forehead deepened. ‘Bees?’
‘She’s a complete hippy but where she lives…it’s not a cult or anything. She still smokes pot but doesn’t touch the hard stuff any more.’
He breathed in through his nose. ‘You have seen her?’
She hesitated before admitting, ‘I stayed with her three years ago.’
‘You never said.’
Rose had debated for months whether to tell him that she’d visited Rosaria. She knew Diaz kept tabs on his sister but also knew he would want to hear first-hand how she was doing. The problem was, he wouldn’t want to hear it from the person he blamed for her drug addiction and the estrangement. To tell him she’d visited Rosaria would only reopen wounds that had never fully healed.
Their history was littered with wounds.
Had he become so good at masking his feelings that she couldn’t read his anger and loathing any more?
Or had time and their babies finally…?
Don’t think like that , she told herself with a panicking voice as she downed half her champagne in one swallow. You fell into this trap before and inflicted the deepest wound of all.
The wound was a thread away from being ripped wide open again.
As blissfully unaware of the undercurrent running between his son and daughter-in-law as he’d been of Rose’s surge of anger towards him, Julio laughed and said to his son, ‘And you always said Rose was the wild one of the pair.’
* * *
Rose tried to enjoy the rest of the party but it was hard when she felt herself on tenterhooks for Diaz’s rage and questions when they were finally alone.
She didn’t know how she’d endure the scathing insults. Not now.
Before their night together, a part of her had revelled in standing up to his loathing and matching it with her own.
Too much had passed between them since to find that revelry again.
Thankfully, any talk over the rest of the evening was Switzerland in its neutrality. Shortly after the Rosaria conversation, his parents disappeared to mingle with other guests, their seats taken by a steady stream of famous faces wanting a few minutes with Diaz, most barely hiding their interest at the woman who’d supposedly tamed him.
If only they knew the truth, she thought miserably. She hadn’t tamed him. His love for their daughters had; a love that had seen him settle for and make every effort to build a relationship with his nemesis for the sole reason that she was their mother.
Her tenterhooks sharpened on the drive back home.
She wished they were flying back in the helicopter.
They sat positioned as far from the other as humanly possible, just as they’d done when Diaz had jumped into her taxi after she’d told him she was pregnant.
She sensed his brain whirling through the long silence. Was he condemning her in his thoughts? Remembering all the things he despised her for? Hating her all over again for his sister packing a bag a week after her overdose and, instead of going to the rehab facility Diaz had arranged for her to stay at to straighten out, losing her head and accusing him of being a control freak and saying that she wanted to live the life she wanted and not the life he wanted.
The life Rosaria had wanted included all night partying and as many drugs as she could consume.
‘You want to control everything,’ Rosaria had raged at him. ‘Well, you don’t get to control me any more. This is my life and my choices and if you don’t like it you can go to hell. I’m not going to that stupid facility—the only person there’s anything wrong with is you .’
Even then, Rose had felt a stab of pain for him. Even when he’d blamed her for the life and choices his sister had made.
What had Mrs Martinez been thinking when she’d asked them to marry? Had she really thought fourteen years of bile and acrimony could be consigned to history?
It made her want to weep to remember how her heart had swelled in those months when it had been just the two of them and his grandmother. The months Rose had managed to fool herself that their long history of bile and acrimony could be finally put to bed.
They’d pulled together and worked as a unit to ensure Mrs Martinez’s final months were filled with love and care.
Rose was so lost in her thoughts that she blinked in surprise when they turned into his long driveway.
The driver opened their doors.
The silence that had consumed the drive home broke when they walked into the villa to the sound of one of their daughters’ cries.
They raced up the stairs.
Hearing them, Giselle, one of the on-duty nannies, appeared from the nursery. She had a wailing Amelia in her arms.
‘What’s wrong?’ Rose asked, taking her daughter and cradling her to her chest, her heart rate trebling at Amelia’s obvious distress.
‘Teething,’ Giselle said with kindly authority. ‘I’ve just given her some baby paracetamol and put some of the teething powder on her gums. She should settle soon.’
‘Go back to bed,’ Rose told her gratefully. ‘I’ll look after her.’
Carrying Amelia into her old bedroom, Rose sank onto the rocking chair. Her daughter was already quieting.
After hanging by the door watching them, Diaz came into the room and crouched down to stroke Amelia’s hair.
‘I’ll stay with her until she goes back to sleep,’ Rose whispered.
He glanced up from their daughter’s flushed face and gave a short nod. ‘You’ll wake me if you need me to take over?’
‘I will,’ she promised, blinking back tears.
They’d had that same innate understanding when they’d cared for his grandmother. There had never been a need to discuss any of it. Their minds had been in complete alignment.
He kissed Amelia’s forehead then straightened. ‘I’ll have a glass of water brought to you,’ he told Rose.
‘Thank you.’
It was when he reached the door that he turned back to her and quietly said, ‘We will talk in the morning, yes?’
Her stomach lurched but she met his stare and lifted her chin. ‘Yes.’
It was only when he’d closed the door that a tear rolled down her cheek.
* * *
Rose couldn’t settle. Amelia had gone back to sleep shortly after Diaz left the room but, not wanting to be far from her, Rose had decided to sleep in her old bed even though it was the same distance as the room she shared with Diaz. When she’d crept into their bedroom for nightwear, he’d been awake, staring at the ceiling.
His gaze had captured hers through the light seeping into the room from the landing.
‘I’m going to sleep in my old room in case she wakes,’ Rose had whispered.
His features had tightened but he’d nodded. Thinking, she knew, about the elephants of their past they could no longer ignore.
She’d dozed on and off but her brain refused to switch off enough for proper sleep to take her, and now the birds were singing their early morning chorus.
Climbing out of bed, she slipped her robe on and padded across to the adjoining room.
Her babies were cuddled together, fast asleep.
She messaged the nannies, telling them to call her when one of the twins woke up, then crept out of the silent villa and escaped into the headily scented garden.
For the longest time she stood barefoot on the edge of the sprawling, manicured lawn, soaking in the faint rays of the rising sun, trying to expel all the thoughts crowding her mind.
It felt like every thought and memory she’d ever had had converged and were fighting for supremacy in her head. But there was one memory fighting the hardest, and it was this memory she’d fought the hardest to resist. She’d resisted letting this particular memory form for fourteen months.
She didn’t have the strength to fight it any more.
She’d reached the gate of the fence surrounding the swimming pool area without any awareness of crossing the lawn to it.
Opening it, she stepped to the poolside and dipped a toe into the water. That one little action caused a ripple.
So many ripples, she thought bleakly as she sank onto the poolside and submerged her legs into the cool water.
Some ripples would always be felt, and she closed her eyes and abandoned the fight, and finally allowed herself to relive the night her daughters were conceived.