Enamored (7 page)

She came to in the hospital, surrounded by white-coated figures bending over her.

The resident physician was American, a blond-haired, blue-eyed young man with a pleasant smile. “There you are,” he said gently when she stirred and opened her eyes. “Minor concussion and a close call for your baby, but I think you’ll survive.”

“I’m pregnant?” she asked drowsily.

“About two and a half months,” he agreed. “Is it a pleasant surprise?”

“I wish it were so.” She sighed. “Please don’t tell my husband. He’ll be worried enough as it is,” she added, deliberately misleading the young man. She didn’t want Diego to know about the baby.

“I’m sorry, but I told him there was a good chance you might lose it,” he said apologetically. “You were in bad shape when they brought you in,
señora.
It’s a miracle that you didn’t lose the baby, and I’d still like to run some tests just to make sure.”

She bit her lower lip and suddenly burst into tears. It all came out then, the forced marriage, his family’s hatred of her, his own hatred of her. “I don’t want him to know that I’m still pregnant,” she pleaded. “Oh, please, you mustn’t tell him, you mustn’t! I can’t stay here and let my baby be born in such hostility. They’ll take him away from me and I’ll never see him again. You don’t know how they hate me and my family!”

He sighed heavily. “You must see that I can’t lie about it.”

“I’m not asking you to,” she said. “If I can leave in the morning, and if you’ll just not talk to him, I can tell him that there isn’t going to be a baby.”

“I can’t lie to him,” the doctor repeated.

She took a slow, steadying breath. She was in pain now, and the bruises were beginning to nag her. “Then can you just not talk to him?”

“I might manage to be unavailable,” he said. “But if he asks me, I’ll tell him the truth. I must.”

“Isn’t a patient’s confession sacred or something?” she asked with a faint trace of humor.

“That’s so, but lying is something else again. I’m too honest, anyway,” he said gently. “He’d see right through me.”

She lay back and touched her aching head. “It’s all right,” she murmured. “It doesn’t matter.”

He hesitated for a minute. Then he bent to examine her head and she gave in to the pain. Minutes later he gave her something for it and left her to be transported to a private room and admitted for observation overnight.

She wondered if Diego would come to see her, but she was half-asleep when she saw him standing at the foot of the bed. His face was in the shadows, so she couldn’t see it. But his voice was curiously husky.

“How are you?” he asked.

“They say I’ll get over it,” she replied, turning her head away from him. Tears rolled down her cheeks. At least she still had the baby, but she couldn’t tell him. She didn’t dare. She closed her eyes.

He stuck his hands deep in his pockets and looked at her, a horrible sadness in his eyes, a sadness she didn’t see. “I…am sorry about the baby,” he said stiffly. “One of the nurses said that your doctor mentioned the fall had done a great deal of damage.” He shifted restlessly. “The possibility of a child had simply not occurred to me,” he added slowly.

As if he’d been home enough to notice, she thought miserably. “Well, you needn’t worry about it anymore,” she said huskily. “God forbid that you should be any more trapped than you already were. You’d have hated being tied to me by a baby.”

His spine stiffened. He seemed to see her then as she was, an unhappy child who’d half worshiped him, and he wondered at the guilt he felt. That annoyed him. “Grandmother had to be tranquilized when she knew,” he said curtly, averting his eyes.
“Dios mío,
you might have told me, Melissa!”

“I didn’t know,” she lied dully. Her poor bruised face moved restlessly against the cool pillow. “And it doesn’t matter now. Nothing matters anymore.” She sighed wearily. “I’m so tired. Please leave me in peace, Diego.” She turned her face away. “I only want to sleep.”

He stared down at her without speaking. She’d trapped him and he blamed her for it, but he was sorry about the baby, because he was responsible. He grimaced at her paleness, at the bruising on her face. She’d changed so drastically, he thought. She’d aged years.

His eyes narrowed. Well, hadn’t she brought it on herself? She’d wanted to marry him, but she hadn’t considered his feelings. She’d forced them into this marriage, and divorce wasn’t possible. He still blamed her for that, and forgiveness was going to come hard. But for a time she had to be looked after. Well, tomorrow he’d work something out. He might send her to Barbados, where he owned land, to recover. He didn’t know if he could bear having to see the evidence of his cruelty every day, because the loss of the child weighed heavily on his conscience. He hadn’t even realized that he wanted a child until now, when it was too late.

He didn’t sleep, wondering what to do. But when he went to see her, she’d already solved the problem. She was gone…

* * *

As past and present merged, Diego watched Melissa’s eyes open suddenly and look up at him. It might have been five years ago. The pain was in those soft gray eyes, the bitter memories. She looked at him and shuddered. The eyes that once had worshiped him were filled with icy hatred. Melissa seemed no happier to see him than he was to see her. The past was still between them.

Chapter Four

M
elissa blinked, moving her head jerkily so she could see him. Her gaze focused on his face, and then she shivered and closed her eyes. He pulled himself erect and turned to go and get a nurse. As he left the room, his last thought was that her expression had been that of a woman awakening not from, but into, a nightmare.

When Melissa’s eyes opened again, there was a shadowy form before her in crisp white, checking her over professionally with something uncomfortably cold and metallic.

“Good,” a masculine voice murmured. “Very good. She’s coming around. I think we can dispense with some of this paraphernalia, Miss Jackson,” he told a white-clad woman beside him, and proceeded to give unintelligible orders.

Melissa tried to move her hand. “Pl-please.” Her voice sounded thick and alien. “I have…to go home.”

“Not just yet, I’m afraid,” he said kindly, smiling.

She licked her lips. They felt so very dry. “Matthew,” she whispered. “My little boy. At a neighbor’s. They won’t know…”

The doctor hesitated. “You just rest, Mrs. Laremos. You’ve had a bad night of it—”

“Don’t…call me that!” she shuddered, closing her eyes. “I’m Melissa Sterling.”

The doctor wanted to add that her husband was just outside the door, but the look on her face took the words out of his mouth. He said something to the nurse and quickly went back out into the hall.

Diego was pacing, and smoking like a furnace. He’d shed his jacket on one of the colorful seats in the nearby waiting room. His white silk shirt was open at the throat and his tie was lying neatly on his folded jacket. His rolled-up sleeves were in dramatic contrast to his very olive skin. His black eyes cut around to the doctor.

“How is she?” he asked without preamble.

“Still a bit concussed.” The doctor leaned against the wall, his arms folded. He was almost as tall as Diego, but a good ten years younger. “There’s a problem.” He hesitated, because he knew from what Diego had told him that he and Melissa had been apart many years. He didn’t know if the child was her husband’s or someone else’s, and situations like this could get uncomfortable. He cleared his throat. “Your wife is worried about her son. He’s apparently staying at a neighbor’s house.”

Diego felt himself go rigid. A child. His heart seemed to stop beating, and for one wild moment he enjoyed the unbounded thought that it was his child. And then he remembered that Melissa had lost his child and that it was impossible for her to have conceived again before she’d left the
finca.
They had only slept together the one time.

That meant that Melissa had slept with another man. That she had become pregnant by another man. That the child was not his. He hated her in that instant with all his heart. Perhaps she was justified in her revenge. To be fair, he’d made her life hell during their brief marriage. And now she’d had her revenge. She’d hurt him in the most basic way of all.

He had to fight not to turn on his heel and walk away. But common sense prevailed. The child wasn’t responsible for its circumstances. It would be alone and probably frightened. He couldn’t ignore it. “If you can find out where he is, I will see about him,” he said stiffly. “Will Melissa be all right?”

“I think so. She’s through the worst of it. There was a good deal of internal bleeding. We’ve taken care of that. There was a badly torn ligament in her leg that will heal in a month or so. And we had to remove an ovary, but the other one was undamaged. Children are still possible.”

Diego didn’t look at the doctor. His eyes were on the door to Melissa’s room. “The child. Do you know how old he is?”

“No. Does it matter?”

Diego shook himself. What he was thinking wasn’t remotely possible. She’d lost the child he’d given her. She’d been taken to the hospital after a severe fall, and the doctor had told him there was little hope of saving it. It wasn’t possible that they’d both lied. Of course not.

“I’ll try to find the child’s whereabouts,” the doctor told Diego. “Meanwhile, you can’t do much good here. By tomorrow she should be more lucid. You can see her then.”

Diego wanted to tell him that if she was lucid Melissa wouldn’t want to see him at all. But he only shrugged and nodded his dark head.

He left a telephone number at the nurse’s station and went back to his hotel, glad to be out of Tucson’s sweltering midsummer heat and in the comfort of his elegant air-conditioned room. A local joke had it that when a desperado from nearby Yuma had died and gone to hell, he’d sent back home for blankets. Diego was inclined to believe it, although the tropical heat of his native Guatemala was equally trying for Americans who settled there.

He much preferred the rain forest to the desert. Even if it was a humid heat, there was always the promise of rain. He wondered if it ever rained here. Presumably it did, eventually.

His mind wandered back to Melissa in that hospital bed and the look on her face when she’d seen him. She’d hidden well. He’d tried every particle of influence and money he’d possessed to find her, but without any success. She’d covered her tracks well, and how could he blame her? His treatment of her had been cruel, and she hadn’t been much more than a child hero-worshiping him.

But Diego thought about the baby with bridled fury. They were still married, despite her unfaithfulness, and there was no question of divorce. Melissa, who was also Catholic, would have been no more amenable to that solution than he. But it was going to be unbearable, seeing that child and knowing that he was the very proof of Melissa’s revenge for Diego’s treatment of her.

The sudden buzz of the telephone diverted him. It was the doctor, who’d obtained the name and address of the neighbor who was caring for Melissa’s son. Diego scribbled the information on a pad beside the phone, grateful for the diversion.

An hour later he was ushered into the cozy living room of Henrietta Grady’s house, just down the street from the address the hospital had for Melissa’s home.

Diego sat sipping coffee, listening to Mrs. Grady talk about Melissa and Matthew and their long acquaintance. She wasn’t shy about enumerating Melissa’s virtues. “Such a sweet girl,” she said. “And Matthew’s never any trouble. I don’t have children of my own, you see, and Melissa and Matthew have rather adopted me.”

“I’m certain your friendship has been important to Melissa,” he replied, not wanting to go into any detail about their marriage. “The boy…”

“Here he is now. Hello, my baby.”

Diego stopped short at the sight of the clean little boy who walked sleepily into the room in his pajamas. “All clean, Granny Grady,” he said, running to her. He perched on her lap, his bare toes wiggling, eyeing the tall, dark man curiously. “Who are you?” he asked.

Diego stared at him with icy anger. Whoever Melissa’s lover had been, he obviously had a little Latin blood. The boy’s hair was light brown, but his skin was olive and his eyes were dark brown velvet. He was captivating, his arms around Mrs. Grady’s neck, his lean, dark face full of laughter. And he looked to be just about four years old. Which meant that Melissa’s fidelity had lasted scant weeks or months before she’d turned to another man.

Mrs. Grady lifted the child and cuddled him while Matthew waited for the man to answer his question.

“I’m Matthew,” he told Diego, his voice uninhibited and unaccented. “My mommy went away. Are you my papa?”

Diego wasn’t sure he could speak. He stared at the little boy with faint hostility. “I am your mama’s husband,” he said curtly, aware of Matthew’s uncertainty and Mrs. Grady’s surprise.

Diego ignored the looks. “Your mama is going to be all right. She is a little hurt, but not much. She will come home soon.”

“Where will Matt go?” the boy asked gently.

Diego sighed heavily. He hadn’t realized how much Melissa’s incapacity would affect his life. She was his responsibility until she was well again, and so was this child. It was a matter of honor, and although his had taken some hard blows in years past, it was still as much a part of him as his pride. He lifted his chin. “You and your mama will stay with me,” he said stiffly, and the lack of welcome in his voice made the little boy cling even closer to Mrs. Grady. “But in the meantime, I think it would be as well if you stay here.” He turned to Mrs. Grady. “This can be arranged? I will need to spend a great deal of time at the hospital until I can bring Melissa home, and it seems less than sensible to uproot him any more than necessary.”

“Of course it can be arranged,” Mrs. Grady said without argument. “If there’s anything else I can do to help, please let me know.”

“I will give you the number of the phone in my hotel room and at the hospital, should you need to contact me.” He pulled a checkbook from the immaculate gray suit jacket. “No arguments, please,” he said when she looked hesitant about accepting money. “If you had not been available, Melissa would certainly have had to hire a sitter for him. I must insist that you let me pay you.”