Chapter Twenty
This is what the Queen had always known, Gabriela thought.
Katalina had been right the first time, to break it up.
It could only cause distress to everyone it touched, and it wasn’t just Gabriela and Enrique involved.
It was Maria and Guido, and even Marcello.
She had to leave the little boy or he might never bond properly with his new mother.
She fought back the tears the very thought of that gave her, when in truth she wanted to drown in self-pity at the enormity of the sacrifice that was being required of her.
But no, self-pity was for tomorrow.
Tonight, there would be one more moment. And she intended to make it a glorious one.
She had never been so certain of anything in her life as when she crossed the path to the secret place in between the hedges that she and Enrique had discovered when they were children.
She slipped through the thick foliage, for the second time tonight, and found herself back in the private courtyard that led off Enrique’s bedroom.
The table they had shared was still set up, the white linen lifting gently in the breeze, though the candle had sputtered.
She found the French doors, still open to the evening air, and slipped through them. She had not put on shoes, and she could feel the cool marble on her feet. Her eyes adjusted to the dark and she went across the room.
He was asleep, naked, a tangle of white sheets around his lower body. He was, painted in moonlight, as beautiful as she had ever seen him.
She drank in all that beauty with all the hunger and desperation of one who was saying goodbye.
She saw a bundle of letters tied with a ribbon beside his bed, and recognized, with a poignant ache, the younger self who had yearned for the same things she yearned for today.
Tonight, finally, she would have it. Not forever, that unrealistic dream of the naive, but for that one glorious moment.
After a long time, Gabriela reached down and touched Enrique’s shoulder. She didn’t shake him, she just laid her hand against the warm, silky texture of his skin, and closed her eyes at the sensation that washed over her.
He didn’t start awake. His eyes blinked open, slowly, and for a moment he looked dazed. And then a smile of pure welcome slid across his lips. In his eyes she saw the truth of what they were to each other.
“Gabriela?” he said, his voice husky with sleep. “What—”
She touched her finger to his lips. At the beach, he had stoked a fire in her by undressing slowly, and now she did that to him.
With only moonlight illuminating her, her fingers moved slowly to each button of the dress.
She undid them, one at a time, then peeled the garment down off her shoulders, over her arms, tugged it down around her waist and then her knees.
Then she stepped out of it, leaving it in a puddle on the floor.
She was only in her underwear now, beautiful underwear that celebrated and honored a woman’s curves, her innate sensuality.
She reached behind herself and flicked the clasp on the bra. It fell away. She stood there, owning the power of herself as a woman. And then she caught the waistband of her panties and pulled them down, stepped out of them.
She never once took her eyes off his. It felt as if the most real part of her was being revealed to both of them.
A woman.
A warrior.
Who knew exactly what she needed.
And was not afraid to take it.
It was a sneak attack against every single defense he had put up between them, and finding him at his most vulnerable worked. Any walls he had crumbled. Any shield he had held was laid aside.
Yet, still, he seemed to be fighting some fight.
“I need you,” she whispered hoarsely.
And his fight was over. He untangled the sheet from around his legs, and held it open, inviting her in. She slid into the bed beside him.
A sound came from his lips—of wonder, almost of worship—the sound of a man holding out his sword for her to take, a man who could fight no more, a man in complete surrender.
“Gabriela.” He whispered her name, and it was like a benediction.
She leaned up on her elbow, ran her finger down the hollow of his throat, circled the pucker of his nipple, opened her whole palm to lay it over the hard washboard of his stomach, feeling the rise and fall of the life force in his belly.
She had a sense of having lived, her whole life, for only this moment. Every single thing had led to here.
She touched him, in this new way. Not as the child-woman she had once been, not as a woman subject to the whims of his family, not as a nanny to his son, but as his complete equal. Her exploration of the hard, beautiful male surfaces of him—skin, bone, muscle—were possessive, intimate, confident.
Every touch made him hers, branding him, as she herself would be branded, for all time.
Finally, when they were both trembling beneath her touch, she sought his lips. These were not the sweet good-night kisses they had shared. This was not the chaste relationship he seemed committed to.
No, this was a veil torn away to what was real between them. Recognition in each of the other’s power, beauty, courage, passion.
She tasted his lips lightly, at first, testing, tasting, teasing. She ran her tongue over the edge of his lip, and then over the edge of his teeth, and then over the edge of his tongue.
A groan so primal it might have been born at the beginning of time escaped him. His hands found the back of her head, and he drew her lips more completely to his own.
A fierce note of pure need overshadowed any tenderness between them. The barrier that had held them back from each other broke with all the ferocity of a swollen river breaching a dam.
Just as with that, they were swept up in the current, raging and ravenous, devouring everything in its path.
Then, as currents do, it would calm, slow, meander, only to build intensity again as it found its way back to the rapids where it churned, and foamed and then raged.
The surging energy was hurtling toward an edge, and beyond that unknown edge it felt as if complete dissolution, complete destruction, the certain obliteration of both of them, yawned, waiting.
But no, when that wall of pure flowing energy burst its banks, it did not destroy. Instead, it flowed outward, it oozed into every crack and crevice of a parched land that had waited and waited and waited. For this. Rebirth.
The culmination of their loving each other brought not destruction, after all, but life.
She lay on top of him, after, feeling an exhaustion and exhilaration, both in their purest form. His arms locked around the small of her back, their skin hot and slippery, their bodies made to be joined like this.
She freed a hand, touched his face, and said it.
Her voice husky with emotion, she whispered, “Enrique.”
He swallowed hard.
And she said it fiercely, huskily, from the place inside her that was joined to everything, the future and the past, life and death.
She said, “I love you.”
She watched the tears pool in the darkness of his eyes, spill over and run silently down the rugged, extraordinary planes of his beautiful face.
She caught one with her thumb, lifted it to her mouth and tasted the salty, sweet bitterness of a man who did not want to say goodbye.
And knew he had to.
Enrique, whether he realized it or not, was a warrior being called to a battle that he must go to, even if he had no wish to fight.
She kissed his cheek, lingeringly, slipped off him, and he gathered her to his side, put his arm possessively over her midriff, buried his nose in her hair, kissed her neck.
She waited until he fell asleep and then she slid out from under the weight of his arm.
She could not resist the temptation of looking at him, once more for a long, long time, trying to memorize every line, every curve, the rise and fall of his chest with each breath.
And then, finally, she pulled on the clothes she had left in a heap on the floor.
She looked around his bedroom, taking in the details of it for the first time.
It was expansive. The four-poster bed was exquisitely carved, probably at least six hundred years old.
The bureau—presumably where he kept the shorts he did not buy for himself—was also old and exquisite.
She compared it with the small room that her parents had spent their entire married life in.
Gabriela realized how far apart their worlds were. She saw, sadly, that Queen Katalina had been right all along.
She could never fit in this world.