CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER THREE
S ANTOS BLINKED IN the bright morning light as he looked around his cabin in sleep-fuddled surprise. What on earth...? What had happened?
Fragmented memories came back to him in jagged pieces: Mia at the bar; that evening gown, that stupid guy; the haughty way she’d looked him... And then, back at the yacht, the sadness he’d seen her in face; the things they hadn’t said; the crushing sense of impossibility...and then the blazing pain.
How had he got to his cabin? He couldn’t remember. What he did know was he was nearly naked, wearing only boxers, and the yacht was creaking and swaying beneath him. They weren’t moored in Puerto de Ibiza any more. Why not? How long had he been asleep?
Groaning a little, Santos eased himself up. His head still hurt, but it was an echo of the blinding pain from...when?...last night? Surely no longer? His mouth was dry and his tongue felt thick. He glanced at the table by the bed and saw a jug of water, with a glass already poured, and next to it a sticky note with Mia’s familiar, loopy scrawl.
Drink some water! You are probably dehydrated.
He smiled at that, and then felt the ensuing flash of loss. At the start of their brief marriage, she used to leave sticky notes for him everywhere. Nothing too mushy or saccharine; often they’d been practical reminders such as this one, to drink some water. But they’d made him feel loved, and he’d enjoyed the sight of her rounded letters; even her handwriting had seemed carefree and insouciant, just like her. She’d stopped leaving those notes weeks before she’d left. Right after...
But, no; they hadn’t talked about that last night. They’d never talked about it because, Santos suspected, it was simply too painful; there were too many things they didn’t want to voice out loud. And yet it had been at the root of all their problems...hadn’t it?
Or was it really simpler than that—were they just incompatible? Mia wasn’t the woman he’d thought she was, back at that bar. Or maybe he wasn’t who she’d thought he was. Either way, they’d run into trouble pretty soon after they’d said the vows. But they’d said them, and he’d meant them: to have and to hold, for better or worse... He couldn’t go back even if he wanted to, and he wasn’t sure that he did. But what did Mia want?
Santos’s head was starting to ache again. He didn’t want to stir all those memories up like slimy, dead leaves at the bottom of a pond swirling up into an unpleasant, opaque muck, muddying every truth he’d known. He didn’t want to...but maybe he had to. The only way he and Mia could possibly have a future was if they faced the past—as difficult a prospect as that was.
The door creaked open and Santos looked up to see the blue-green of Mia’s eyes gleaming through the crack.
‘Hello,’ he said, his voice coming out in a rusty croak.
‘Hey.’ She opened the door wider and slipped through, then closed it behind her and leaned against it. Her hair was in a loose French plait, a few curly wisps framing her heart-shaped face, and she wore a well-worn T-shirt with some faded logo on it and a pair of cut-off jean shorts. She looked just like she had when he’d first met her: young and free. It made him realise how she hadn’t looked like that for most of their marriage. For most of their marriage, she’d looked pale, tired and worn down. The realisation was an uncomfortable one.
‘How are you feeling?’ she asked, and he gave a small, rueful smile.
‘Better than before, at any rate. I’m sorry to have subjected you to such a sight.’ He didn’t want to think about last night and how he must have collapsed, or as good as, in her presence. He despised such shows of weakness and had hid his incapacitating migraines as much as he could. It was definitely not the way he’d wanted to begin their reconciliation...if such a thing was even possible.
Mia came to perch on the edge of the bed. Her legs in the cut-off shorts were long and golden, lightly freckled, and the end of her plait hung over one slender shoulder. She rested one hand on the bedspread, her fingers spread out. She was still wearing her wedding ring, Santos saw with a pang—a simple platinum band. He was glad.
‘I didn’t know you got migraine headaches,’ she said quietly.
Santos managed a wry grimace. ‘It’s not something I spread about,’ he admitted. ‘And I don’t get them very frequently—maybe once a year, if that. I hadn’t had one for quite a while.’
‘Still.’ She fell silent, gazing down at the bedspread, at her outspread hand...at her wedding ring? He wondered what she was thinking or feeling. Then he registered the purring movement of the yacht beneath them once more.
‘Why have we put out to sea?’
She glanced up at him, her blue-green eyes wide and clear. He could count every freckle on her nose. ‘You’d only reserved the mooring in Ibiza for twenty-four hours.’
‘Surely it hasn’t been more than twenty-four hours?’ he protested in surprised alarm. ‘I arrived last night.’
Mia shook her head, the end of her plait swinging. ‘No, Santos. You’ve been asleep for almost thirty-six hours.’
‘What?’ He tried to sit upright, but it caused his head to hurt again, and he was forced to sink back against the pillows as he stared at her in shock. ‘How can that even be possible?’
‘You were out for the count.’ She smiled. ‘I don’t even think a tropical storm would have woken you.’
The painkillers he had taken had been strong, Santos allowed, and had been mixed with alcohol. Plus, he’d already been exhausted from looking for, and worrying about, Mia. Still, thirty-six hours —a whole day and a night—and he couldn’t remember any of it. What had Mia done for all that time?
‘I can’t believe it,’ he murmured, and then he glanced at Mia, registering what her presence meant. ‘You’re here,’ he said, stating the obvious. She smiled wryly in acknowledgement. ‘I mean...you could have gone, left.’
‘I know.’ The wry smile flickered at its edges, but she kept his gaze.
‘Why?’ Santos asked baldly. ‘Why didn’t you go?’
‘Well, I have to say it’s pretty cushy here, and I’ve never been on a yacht before. You know how I’m always up for new experiences.’ She tilted the smile up again at its corners, but there was something shadowed and sad about her face, and in her eyes, and it tugged at him.
‘I’m serious, Mia.’
She paused, glancing down again, and then admitted, ‘I don’t know why, Santos. I suppose because it felt wrong to leave you when you were sleeping.’
‘You left when I was sleeping last time,’ he reminded her, unable to keep from saying it, and hearing the bitterness in his voice. He’d woken up and felt the emptiness of their bedroom, the whole house, like a wind blowing through him.
‘Maybe,’ she stated quietly, ‘I didn’t want to do that a second time.’
He sifted through that statement, looking for truth, unsure if he could find it. ‘What about your things back in Ibiza?’ he asked, deciding to focus on practicalities. ‘Do we need to go back and get them?’
The smile she gave him was genuine, then full of rueful amusement. ‘We’re about twelve hours out from Ibiza, so I’m not sure that’s practical. But, in any case, I had everything with me.’
‘Just that one back pack?’ he asked in surprise, although really, why should he be shocked? He’d seen the wardrobe full of designer clothes she’d left back in Seville, the velvet cases of diamonds, sapphires and emeralds that she hadn’t taken.
She shrugged, her T-shirt sliding off her golden shoulder. ‘You know I always travel light. I’ll need to give back the dress at some point, but I don’t suppose it’s a matter of urgency.’
Santos stared at her, trying to make sense of what she’d said and what he felt. For the first time since his wife had sneaked out in the night without a word of explanation, he didn’t wonder why she’d gone—something that had confounded, infuriated and hurt him—but why she’d felt she had to, and with only one small, battered back pack.
It was a question that he needed to ask her, he realised...even if he wasn’t sure he wanted to hear the answer.
Why had she stayed?
It was a question Mia had asked herself many times in the thirty-six hours that Santos had been asleep. She had yet to come up with an answer that satisfied her. She’d left him once, after all, so she could surely do it again. It was what she did, what her mother had taught her to do.
‘You always know when it’s time to move on,’ her mother used to say.
How many times had Mia come back to whatever shabby flat or bedsit in which they’d been staying to find her mother chucking things in a bag, barely looking at her? Usually there had been a man involved, a man her mother had to avoid, whether landlord, lover or both. Mia had learned to sense when the sea change was coming; she’d felt it in the air and had braced herself accordingly for the inevitable detachment from the little life she had built for herself.
Maybe that was it, Mia reflected. This time she hadn’t known. Santos’s insistence that she was his wife, that their vows mattered—as well as the fact that he’d wanted her there, in his sleep-fuddled pain—had somehow made a difference. It had made her stay even though, as ever, her instinct had been to run.
But, she’d reflected, maybe they needed to have a reckoning, if not a reconciliation. Mia still couldn’t see a way forward for their marriage, not when at heart she felt it had been a mistake. At the time, she’d been desperate to believe in it, in them. She’d been swept away on a tide of feeling, loving the way Santos made her feel—how he looked at her so wonderingly, as though he couldn’t believe she was real. How he’d touched her...
But since those first heady days they’d both said, done and felt things they couldn’t come back from: hard, hurtful things. Moving on had been the easier choice, but maybe not the right one. Not yet, anyway...until they’d made peace with their past.
Santos dropped his gaze, scrubbing his hands over his face. ‘I think I need a shower,’ he said, and Mia managed a light laugh, even though inside she felt heavy.
‘I think you probably do.’
He dropped his hands from his face and there was no mistaking the sudden, yearning heat in his eyes. Was he remembering the times they’d showered together back at the beginning of their short-lived romance? They’d soaped each other’s bodies, slippery flesh sliding and colliding with the water streaming down, all laughter and kisses until passion had overtaken them.
Mia swallowed. If he didn’t remember that, then she certainly did. She stood up from the bed. ‘Shall I leave you to it?’
‘All right,’ Santos answered after a moment. ‘But, after that, we’ll talk.’
There could be no mistaking the intent in his words—talk with a capital ‘T’, clearly. What did that even mean, though, when they hadn’t talked about the most important things? They hadn’t been able to for weeks and weeks.
‘Okay,’ Mia replied, keeping her voice as light as she could. ‘We’ll talk.’ Her talk was definitely with a ‘t’.
She slipped from his room, walking out to the sun deck at the stern of the yacht, the aquamarine waters of the Mediterranean rippling out behind the boat flecked with white. They’d been hugging the coast of Spain since they’d left Ibiza, presumably going back to the Aguila estate on the outskirts of Seville.
Mia pictured the high, mustard-yellow walls surrounding the Aguila hacienda with its many porticoed porches, the groves of Seville oranges and manzanilla olives stretching out all around in orderly rows of orange and green, and shuddered. She couldn’t go back there. It had far too many painful memories—stilted, awkward encounters as well as heart-rending, blood-soaked ones she had done her best to forget, even though she knew she never, ever would. Not that Santos would ever believe that.
She thought of his mother looking so elegant and remote, trying to be friendly but with an icy hauteur that had never thawed and probably never would. Mia really couldn’t blame her. She was not the expected choice of wife for the heir of one of Spain’s oldest families. She had no pedigree, no breeding, no style or class—far from it.
With a sigh, she rested her hands on the burnished wood of the yacht’s railing. She didn’t have to go back, she told herself. She might be married, but she was still in control of her own destiny. And she and Santos might need to talk—even with a capital T—but she didn’t know if she could believe it might change anything between them. That, perhaps, was why she’d stayed—to convince him to let her go. Surely it wouldn’t be too hard?
‘Se?ora Aguila?’ The voice of one of the yacht’s cabin crew, Gabriela, came softly from behind her. ‘May I get you something to eat or drink?’
Mia turned from the railing, managing a smile for the young, round-faced woman. ‘Se?or Aguila is waking up,’ she said. ‘And after sleeping for so long I’m sure he’s hungry. Could you please prepare something for him to eat? Maybe just some fruit and tapas—I don’t know how much he’ll want.’
Gabriela nodded her assent. ‘Of course, se?ora .’
‘Thank you.’ It still boggled Mia’s mind that Santos’s staff had to cater to her whims. She’d been earning her living waitressing or housekeeping in a variety of low-brow places since she’d been sixteen. The idea that someone would have to serve her , and in such elegant, extravagant surroundings, had seemed ludicrous. In her three months living with Santos at his estate, she’d never really got used to it. She had always felt like an interloper, an intruder.
No one, not even Santos, had made her feel any different. Santos had been too busy, having to make up for the time he’d taken off work when they’d married. His mother had not known what to do with her; maybe she’d been hoping Mia wouldn’t last. The staff had been scrupulously polite without actually being friendly. Mia knew she couldn’t really have expected anything else. Santos had completely shocked everyone by bringing home a wife—a wife he barely knew, a footloose and fancy-free American who was nothing like what they must have been expecting.
Mia straightened, steeling her spine. She was going to convince Santos that they were better off apart—an amicable divorce, maybe even an annulment, if a lawyer could make it stick. There had to be some sort of grounds, considering how brief their marriage was. Then he could go on to marry someone far more suitable—some Spanish heiress, perhaps. And what would she do? Move on, Mia supposed, fighting a sense of desolation at the thought—as usual.
‘Here you are.’
She turned to see Santos standing in the doorway of the lounge, its louvre doors open to the deck. He was wearing a cream linen shirt and loose dark trousers. He looked refreshed and frankly wonderful, his dark hair still damp from the shower, the smell of his cologne spicy and clean. For a second, no more, Mia had an urge to rush into his arms and let them enfold her. She smiled instead, one hand still resting on the railing to anchor her.
‘Here I am,’ she agreed cheerfully. ‘Gabriela was going to put some food out in the dining area. What is that called on a yacht—a galley?’
‘A galley is the kitchen.’ He smiled, strolling towards her. He seemed far more relaxed than he had back in his cabin when he’d been lying in bed, still recovering from the aftereffects of his migraine, as well as purposeful. ‘I think I’d just call it the dining room.’
‘Right. I thought ships had special names for all the rooms, but I guess they don’t.’ How stupid could she sound? Mia cursed herself for feeling so unsteady in his presence. He was standing right in front of her and it was taking all her strength not to step close and curl into him. She wanted to rest her head on his solid chest, wrap her arms his waist, press close and feel both subsumed and safe.
She recalled how safe she’d felt lying next to him that first night, her head on his shoulder as he’d slept. He hadn’t even been aware she was there, but they’d slept the whole night together before she’d slipped away in the morning, not wanting anyone to know, trying to convince herself that she didn’t really miss him.
Santos leaned forward to lift the end of her plait from her shoulder, his fingers brushing her collar bone as he gently placed it behind her back, his fingers sliding along the knobs of her spine. ‘Thank you, Mia,’ he said quietly.
‘Thank you?’ Mia’s voice was unsteady as she stared at him, conscious of the way his fingers had trailed up her spine as he’d removed his hand, trailing sparks of heat wherever he touched. ‘For...for what?’
His golden-brown gaze rested on hers, as molten as a pool of honey. ‘For staying. For being willing to talk things through.’
She was only doing that so he’d let her go, Mia reminded herself. This was about convincing him they should divorce, nothing else, even if she could still feel the brush of his fingertips along her spine, never mind that he was no longer touching her. Even if her head was starting to feel as if it were full of cotton wool, and all she could think about was how he’d touched her, how he looked and even how he smelled—like trees and sunshine with a hint of leather. She wanted to bury her nose in the hollow of his neck and just breathe him in. Once, she’d had that right, but no longer. She wouldn’t let herself.
‘We have unfinished business, Santos,’ she forced herself to state, thankful her voice came out strong...stronger, anyway. ‘If we talk, maybe then we can both move on.’
A frown settled between his dark, straight brows. ‘Is that why you stayed—simply to convince me to move on ?’
‘For both of us to move on,’ Mia amended. ‘It’s for the best, and I think you’ll realise that eventually, if you don’t already. Maybe we both need closure.’
His frown deepened, although when he spoke his voice was mild. ‘So, you still think our marriage was a mistake.’
Mia shook her head slowly, not in denial of what he’d said, but rather in disbelief that he could act as if she was the only one with that notion. ‘Be honest,’ she told him. ‘Never mind what you’ve said about vows and all that—don’t you think it was a mistake?’ How could he not? They’d known each other for just two crazy, passion-filled weeks before they’d married. Admittedly, they’d spent just about every second of those two weeks together, but it had still just been a fling, an infatuation.
The best thing that had ever happened to her.
‘Se?or? Se?ora?’ Gabriela appeared in the doorway. ‘Your meal is ready.’
‘ Gracias , Gabriela,’ Santos murmured before turning back to Mia, his forehead still furrowed. ‘I’m going to answer that question you just asked,’ he promised. ‘And we’re really going to talk—properly—about everything.’
A shiver of apprehension and even fear rippled through Mia. Everything? She wasn’t remotely ready for that, and she didn’t think Santos was either.
With trepidation bordering on terror, she followed him back into the yacht to a meal that was starting to feel like her last.