CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Rose closed the nursery door until it was slightly ajar and blew out a long breath of air. A week since returning to Devon and she still had trouble breathing properly.
Downstairs, she curled up on the sofa in the living room and switched the TV on with the remote.
Her phone buzzed.
Her heart jumped.
It jumped at all her messages and alerts.
She pulled it out of her cardigan pocket and held her breath as she swiped it, then slumped when it wasn’t Diaz’s name on the screen. It was Rosaria.
He’s on his way. Should land by late afternoon. Wish me luck!
She wrote back an equally jaunty reply.
Good luck!
Reply sent, she grabbed a cushion, held it tight to her belly and closed her eyes. She wished the girls were awake so she could cuddle them.
Knowing Diaz was flying across the Atlantic only made the distance between them feel wider, and not just because the physical distance between them was widening.
A whole week without him.
She supposed it was natural that she would miss him after being in his near-constant company since the girls were born.
The emptiness of the house didn’t feel natural though.
She supposed the emptiness would soon start to feel so natural she wouldn’t even notice it.
She didn’t think she would ever stop noticing the gaping wound in her heart. Not until it healed, which so far it showed no signs of doing. It was a different kind of wound from the wound Diaz had inflicted when he’d abandoned her but the pain from it hurt with equal intensity. And was getting worse, not better.
At least she had the girls. They were as happy back in Devon as they’d been at home in Spain. Happy to be in their new nursery rather than sharing their mummy’s old room.
The twins were always happy as long as they had each other to hold onto.
She couldn’t begin to imagine how much Diaz must be missing them.
Another message pinged.
What do I say to him?
Just tell him that you’re sorry for everything and that you love him.
At least that was one salvageable relationship, she comforted herself. She was glad she’d made that call to Rosaria and told her to stop being a scaredy cat and let her brother back into her life. Within two days of her call she’d received a message from Diaz thanking her and asking if he could visit the girls soon, after his visit to Rosaria and his short trip to Vienna for the monthly high-stakes private poker game.
She’d come within a whisker of calling him and begging him to come to them now.
It had to be this way. They both knew it.
But, God, she missed him desperately.
The distance she’d hoped would ease the gaping wound of her heart had eased nothing.
Her period had finished and she still felt bereft at the conception that had never been. A conception she hadn’t even known she’d been longing for, a deeply rooted yearning from the heart that had never stopped loving Diaz, a yearn for another chain to tie herself to him.
It had to be this way. What chance of a future did they have with their history? How could they just wipe it all out and forget it? How could either of them move on?
But how could she move on without him?
And how could she find the love he said she deserved when her heart belonged in its entirety to him and their daughters?
Her heart suddenly doubled over and she sat up sharply, swiping at her phone to reread her last message to Rosaria.
Just tell him that you’re sorry for everything and that you love him.
What was Diaz doing that very minute? Flying thousands of miles to the sister he’d loved and protected his whole life and who’d cut him from her life as repayment.
The same Diaz whose parents had never shown him the love a child needed to thrive. If his love for Rose was a fraction as strong as her love for him, then no wonder it had terrified him. To his parents he’d been an encumbrance. His sister had rejected his love and protection. Knowingly or not, Diaz associated love with rejection. All things considered, it was a flipping miracle that he’d come to accept his love for Rose.
He’d unflinchingly admitted to his sins against her and set her free even when it had destroyed him to do so. He’d been making amends for those sins all along but she’d been too frightened of waking up again to an empty bed to realise. Too scared to trust him. Too scared of trusting what every single one of her senses had been telling her.
Diaz loved her. Truly loved her. As much as she loved him.
And when you loved someone as much as they loved each other…
Rose jumped to her feet and raced up the stairs to her room.
* * *
Diaz climbed out of the hire car.
The farmhouse was exactly as he’d imagined, a two-storey sprawling wooden ranch with a wraparound porch encircled by a white picket fence, and surrounded by fruit trees.
The front door opened.
A buxom brunette wearing denim dungarees appeared.
If he’d passed her in the street he wouldn’t have recognised her.
Rosaria walked to the porch steps. ‘Hello, Diaz. How are you? Good flight?’
He reached the bottom of the same steps. ‘The flight was good, thanks. You’re looking well.’ Looking healthy.
‘So are you…although you look like you haven’t slept in a month.’
‘More like a week.’
He climbed up the steps.
His baby sister gazed up at his face. He gazed down at hers.
A moment later the years of their estrangement melted away under the force of their embrace.
* * *
Diaz strolled through the Michelin-starred restaurant of his Viennese hotel. He noted with unsmiling satisfaction that every table was occupied, the hum of chatter only slightly higher than the specially chosen melodious background music. A number of diners were taking pictures of their food. Their expressions suggested their social media postings would be favourable. As it should be.
In the kitchen, ordered chaos ensued. The head chef, whose famous name was on the restaurant door, noticed Diaz’s appearance but was too busy to do anything but nod an acknowledgement. As it should be.
In the spacious lobby, he descended the stairs two at a time to the basement, and swept past the doormen and into the hotel’s real money pit. The casino.
Almost nine o’clock on a Saturday evening and already the atmosphere was thrumming. Where the music in the restaurant was kept low-key to enable his diners to relax, the volume in the casino was upped, the tempo fast. In another hour, all the gambling tables would be full and would remain full until the early hours. People would have to wait their turn to play on the slots. As it should be.
Everything in his business empire was exactly as it should be.
It was only in Diaz’s heart that everything was wrong.
Before heading to his security hub, he checked his phone in the faint hope he’d missed it vibrate a message.
Nothing. No reply to the message he’d sent Rose early that morning in reply to her own message. It had been a sweet message saying she hoped his visit to Rosaria had gone well and asking if he still planned to come to Devon after Vienna.
He could not credit how badly he missed her.
It was all he could do to get out of bed each morning.
He could no longer give his soul to have her back. His soul had gone. All that was left was emptiness.
‘Has it started?’ he asked, taking his usual seat in The Hub.
‘Four minutes,’ Jorge replied, not looking up from the screens before him.
Diaz skimmed with disinterested eyes the fool currently being welcomed by Stefan, the evening’s host. ‘The usual faces?’
He barely registered the hesitation before Jorge answered. ‘Yes.’
‘Okay. Coffee?’ He was off his seat and heading for the nearest coffee machine before Jorge could answer.
Coffee made, he placed Jorge’s in front of him and took a sip of his own, wishing it were a large Scotch or bourbon.
Had to maintain the facade that everything was business as usual.
The players had taken their seats. Two tables. Eight players per table…
A jolt of electricity zinged through his veins. He blinked to clear his vision and moved his stare to a different monitor, which was fixed, face on, on players three and four from table one. Player three was a slender woman with long, dirty blonde hair worn loose around her shoulders. She was wearing a sparkling gold strappy-sleeved dress, high breasts showing just a hint of cleavage.
His throat ran dry.
As if sensing his attention, player three lifted her stare to the monitor Diaz was watching her through.
* * *
He’d seen her. She could feel his stare on her.
All her pulses were racing.
The first cards had been dealt. Rose looked at hers and looked at the table cards. Her hand wasn’t as bad as the hand she’d been dealt the last time she’d played poker but it wasn’t a good hand. She didn’t care. She wasn’t here to win money.
She was here to win her husband.
She pushed all her playing chips into the pile. ‘All in.’
There were audible gasps from her fellow players.
Only the Greek player, number seven, matched her. He had a royal flush.
Ten million euros poorer than she’d been ten minutes earlier, Rose smiled gracefully and got to her feet at the same moment the door opened. She’d played her cards with perfect timing.
Head held high, she strolled past the remaining players, all gawping incredulously at her, towards Diaz.
Only when she stood before him did her performance come unstuck and her feet glue themselves to the floor.
His shoulder was propped against the doorway as if he’d fallen into it.
The green eyes that had only looked at her with love for so long she could no longer remember what his loathing had looked like locked onto hers. His handsome features were taut, his chest and shoulders rising and falling in rapid motion.
There was no way of knowing how much time passed before he straightened and stepped aside to let her through the door.
Without exchanging a word or a glance, they crossed the casino floor.
This time, it wasn’t to the administrative offices that he led her. This time it was to an elevator.
Still without either speaking or looking at the other, he pressed the button and in silence they rode up to the penthouse.
Inside his private suite, Diaz slumped against the nearest wall and closed his eyes.
He wasn’t entirely sure he wasn’t dreaming. To dream, though, you had to sleep, and he couldn’t sleep. Hadn’t slept since the night he’d drunk himself into a stupor.
He felt like he was in that stupor again.
A warm hand touched his cheek.
He held a breath he couldn’t exhale.
A warm hand palmed his other cheek.
The soft swell of breasts pushed and rose against his chest as the clasp on his face tightened and then the softest lips in the world brushed fleetingly against his mouth.
Heart thumping intolerably, still unable to breathe, he opened his eyes.
Big blue eyes bored into his.
The softest lips pulled into the softest smile and then she lifted onto her toes and pressed her mouth to his, fingers sliding across his cheeks and ears to bury into his hair as she seduced his lips apart and her sweet tongue slid into his mouth in a slow, deeply passionate kiss that spoke more eloquently than words ever could.
‘Love me, Diaz,’ she whispered.
He gazed into the eyes brimming with the same love and desire consuming him in its flame, and brought his mouth back to hers. ‘Always.’
* * *
Diaz carried Rose to the bed they’d failed to reach before their desperate hunger had overpowered them. She was perfectly capable of walking. He just wasn’t capable of letting her go. He needed to keep the physical connection, a shadow of fear in his head that she would disappear if he stopped touching her.
She cuddled tightly into him. Her silky hair tickled against his throat.
The enormity of what she’d done was just starting to penetrate. What it meant…
He hardly dared believe what it meant.
‘I love you,’ she whispered.
He tightened his hold around her and pressed his mouth tightly to the top of her head. ‘I love you too. So very much.’
But their love had never been in doubt.
‘Where are the girls?’
‘At home with the nannies and staff.’
‘You’ve employed staff?’
She wriggled free enough to raise her head and brush his cheek. ‘I didn’t need to. You’ve already employed enough of them.’ She kissed him gently. ‘They’re at home in Spain, waiting for their mami and papa .’
He stared intently into eyes brightening with a lightness he hadn’t seen in them for so many years. ‘Rose…’
‘I’m really sorry, but I’ve not got any choice,’ she interrupted. ‘We have to move back in with you, I’m afraid, as I’m now officially skint. That hand of poker was the last of my money and now I can’t afford to run the house in Devon and am at the mercy of your generosity to feed myself.’
Incredulity meshed with the spark of realisation.
She sat up and threaded her fingers through his with a beam. ‘Yes, Diaz, I have instigated things so you have no choice but to take me back, and as you have to take me back, we might as well stay married, so I’ve sent instructions to cancel our divorce. If you want to divorce me then you’ll have a proper fight on your hands because I’m not going anywhere.’ She lifted his hand to her mouth and kissed it. ‘I’ve been in love with you for so long I don’t even know when it started, and I’m not going to spend the rest of my life in purgatory just because of our past. You’re the one who said the past doesn’t need to determine the future, and I’ve decided our future is going to be together.’
He raised an eyebrow. ‘You’ve decided?’
Her beam widened, the whole of her face as bright as the lightness in her eyes. ‘Yes, but you decided it first.’
‘I did?’
‘Yep. Remember you said that thing about me deserving the world? Well, you’re my world, so that means I deserve you, which means you’ve got to take me back, whether you like it or not.’
He groaned. ‘Rose, it was never about me. I never wanted to let you go.’
The lightness dimmed a little but the brimming love didn’t. ‘I know. Because you’re selfless when it comes to those you love. And you said something else too, about my father’s neglect not screwing me up, but in a way it did. Not like the number your parents did on you, but I think it’s made me more self-protective. I learned when I was little that the best way to stop someone you loved from hurting you was to build barriers. My father and I will never have a proper relationship partly because I’ve never let my barriers down for him—I wanted him to knock them down and force the relationship, and it took a long time to accept that he never would.’
Gazing into the eyes that still contained the last vestiges of disbelief, Rose pressed his hand to her breast and flattened it right where her heart was beating its love for him. ‘I was so terrified of falling in love with you again and being hurt by you again that I couldn’t see over the barriers I erected to protect myself. I was too frightened to dare trust you again or see you were no longer hiding from your feelings for me and that everything you were doing was for me.’
The hand not pressed against her heart lifted and stroked her chin. The smallest smile of belief began to form.
She leaned down and kissed him. ‘It’s always been you for me,’ she whispered. ‘When you’re not with me, all the lights go out. I don’t want to be in the darkness any more.’
His green eyes were intense with emotion. ‘I swear I will never do anything to hurt you again.’
‘I know,’ she said simply.
‘You are my life, Rose. My heart. My soul. My everything.’
Every atom of her body filling with sensations that fizzed like fireworks were being let off in her, Rose fused her mouth to Diaz’s and, wrapped tightly in his strong, protective arms, let the light fill them both.