Harvest Moon (9 page)

Her eyes narrowed, holding his steady gaze. “What is it you want from me, other than
El Cielo?
”

He leaned forward and lowered his voice. “I’m very surprised that you have to ask me that. You should know.”

Regina went completely still as she stared wordlessly at him. An oddly primitive warning shouted at her that she wasn’t quite ready to offer herself to a man—especially Aaron Spencer. She had been on a roller-coaster ride for the past ten years, and even though she had finally gotten off she still hadn’t fully recovered from the harrowing emotional experience.

Swallowing several times to relieve the dryness in her throat, she said softly, “Why don’t you tell me
exactly
what it is you want from me?”

His gaze softened as he flashed her a sensual smile. Reaching across the table, he captured her fingers and held them firmly within his warm grasp. How could he tell her that he was no different than his father, because he, too, could not resist her, that he wanted her in his life?

“I want to protect you, Regina,” he stated instead. “And to do that I need you to come back to Brazil with me. I know I’ll
never be able to repay you for what you’ve been to my father, but I hope to be able to offer you a little of what you’ve had to sacrifice over the years. Spending some time with me in Bahia will give you the opportunity to relax and see another part of the world. I’ll rearrange my work schedule at the institute and show you a Brazil that is a primordial, tropical paradise.”

A nervous laugh escaped her parted lips at the same time she slumped back against her chair in relief. Luckily, he did not want to sleep with her.

“I can’t go back with you now.”

“Why?”

“Because I have to go home. I’ve been away too long. I’ll be all right once I’m with my family.”

“When do you think you can come?” There was no mistaking the disappointment in his voice.

“I don’t know. I need time to get used to living on American soil once again.”

He released her fingers. “Whenever you decide to visit, I just want you to know the invitation will always be open to you. You don’t have to call me in advance. Just come down.”

“Thank you.” Her soft tone matched her smile.

He shrugged his broad shoulders, the gesture so elegant that Regina had found herself watching for it. She wondered how a man as tall and muscular as Dr. Aaron Spencer could appear so masculine and graceful at the same time.

She sipped her coffee, listening intently as Aaron told her of a Brazil she had never learned about in her geography classes. He related the mad passion of Carnival to the enormity of the dark Amazon. He told her of the vast size of a country encompassing nearly half of South America, whose population was clustered around the Atlantic coast, leaving much of the country and the massive Amazon Basin scarcely populated and inaccessible.

Regina and Aaron talked for hours, unaware of the tightening bond in which they were unable to know where one began and the other ended.

R
egina and Aaron stared at Ernesto Morales, both astounded by the contents of Oscar Clayborne Spencer’s will. It was a simply worded document, but its stipulations were shocking: she was awarded the house and all of its contents, but she was restricted from selling
El Cielo
and the surrounding property for twenty years; the fourteen paintings by Pablo Vasques, appraised at over a million dollars, were also left to her, but were not to be sold during her lifetime; the three people who made up the live-in domestic staff would continued to reside at
El Cielo
, maintaining its upkeep while earning their full annual wages for the twenty years; cash, stocks, and bonds worth more than one million, eight hundred-fifty thousand dollars would be used to set up a medical foundation in the names of Oscar and Arlene Spencer at the
São Tomé Instituto de Médico Pesquisa
in Bahia, Brazil. The funds would be disbursed over a ten-year period with Regina Cole-Spencer as the foundation’s sole administrator.

It had taken Ernesto less than three minutes to confirm that
Oscar was still controlling; he had become the master puppeteer, pulling the strings and manipulating lives from his grave.

Regina rose to her feet, the two men also rising. Leaning across the table, she extended her hand to Ernesto. “Thank you for everything.”

He grasped her slender fingers, coming around to stand next to her. “It’s been my extreme pleasure. If you need legal advice setting up the foundation I’ll be available for you.”

She smiled. “Thank you for the offer, but I’ll have someone at my father’s company do it. ColeDiz accountants are experts in setting up tax-exempt, not-for-profit foundations.”

Aaron moved closer to Regina, curving his left arm around her waist, while offering Ernesto his right hand. “I want to thank you for the trust my father placed in you.”

Shaking the proffered hand, Ernesto seemed genuinely surprised by Aaron’s approval. “It’s been my honor to have known a man such as your father.” He turned his attention to Regina. “I will need your power of attorney if you want me to manage the payment of wages for your employees.”

“Thank you again, but I’ll continue to pay them.”

He successfully concealed his disappointment behind a polite smile. Now that he had revealed the contents of Oscar Spencer’s will, there was no reason for his widow to continue their association. He did not blame Regina as much as he blamed Aaron Spencer. He did not know why, but since the man’s arrival he had felt as if he had waged an undeclared war with the younger Spencer. Within a span of days Aaron had appointed himself as his stepmother’s protector. Who did he expect to protect her from? Certainly not Ernest Morales de Villarosa.

Regina picked up her handbag. “I will be in touch with you before I leave Mexico.”

Ernesto flinched noticeably as his face paled under his deep tan. “You are
leaving
Mexico?” There was no mistaking his surprise.

She nodded. “I’m going home to see my family.”

“When—when will you return?”

“I honestly don’t know.”

His dark eyes showed disbelief and confusion. Regina Spencer’s decision to leave Mexico had turned his world upside down. “Please keep in touch.”

“I will,” she whispered softly.

Turning, she walked out of the attorney’s office, Aaron following closely behind her. He held her arm and escorted her to the parking lot. It wasn’t until they were seated in the rear of the car and their driver had maneuvered out of the lot that they stared at each other; both had elected to conceal their emotions behind a mask of indifference. Oscar Spencer had skillfully bound them together.

Regina Cole-Spencer would become a part of Dr. Oscar Spencer’s future, and he hers.

The return trip to
El Cielo
was accomplished in complete silence as she seethed inwardly, wanting to resurrect Oscar so she could scream at him for being a Machiavellian miscreant. She couldn’t sell
El Cielo
, she couldn’t sell the paintings—whose strange and macabre images disturbed her rather than soothed—and she would be responsible for disbursing and approving funding for a foundation named for Aaron Spencer’s late parents.

She wanted to design gardens, not become a foundation administrator.
Damn you, Oscar
, she cursed silently. Damn him for forcing her to become involved with Aaron, because it had only taken two weeks for her to realize that her feelings for her stepson went beyond logic and reason. As she lay in bed before the sun rose to signal the beginning of another day, she knew she could not ignore the truth: she wanted to lie with Aaron; she wanted her first sexual encounter to be with him.

The driver pulled into the courtyard at
El Cielo
, and she did not wait for him or Aaron to help her from the car as she stepped out and made her way to the garden. Ignoring the blinding rays
of the intense sun, she sat on the low stone bench facing Oscar’s gravesite.

“You had to do it,” she whispered angrily.
You just had to force us to be together, didn’t you?
she continued in a virulent, silent tirade.

Squeezing her eyes tightly shut, she tried to fathom why Oscar would draw up a will with so many restrictions. Why had he made it so complicated, when their marriage hadn’t been?

She shuddered, opening her eyes; she detected someone standing behind her. Without turning around she knew it was the man whose presence had disturbed her the moment he stepped from the taxi and onto the property of
El Cielo
.

Patting the space beside her, she said, “What do you think, Aaron?”

He sat, stretching his long legs out in front of him. His gaze was fixed on the headstone, which had been placed on the grave a week ago. “Oscar was a class act up until the very end. He didn’t have to leave me anything.”

Regina smiled. As annoyed as she was with Oscar, she had to agree with his son. “He left it to your research institute.”

“It’s the same thing. He knew how much medical research means to me. That’s all I ever talked about when I was in medical school.”

“If you liked research so much, why didn’t you specialize in microbiology instead of pediatrics?”

He turned and smiled at her. “At the time I loved pediatrics more.”

Who or what do you love more now, Aaron?
she mused, watching a tiny lizard making its way over the cool, pale pink marble marking Oscar Clayborne Spencer’s final resting place. His father had left him a considerable amount of money to continue his research projects, and she wondered if he would relax enough to make time for something or someone else in his life.

“We’ve made a breakthrough in predicting cerebral palsy in
newborns,” he continued, the pride in his voice clearly evident. “A team of neurologists at the institute detected that high levels of key markers in the blood of newborns may predict who will go on to develop cerebral palsy, a motor disability that affects a half million Americans.”

“What is the cause of the disease?”

“We’re not certain of the cause. There have been theories that cerebral palsy is linked to maternal or fetal infections during pregnancy, but there’s no proof of this.”

Nodding, she smiled. “You’re very lucky, Aaron. You’ve executed a marriage of pediatrics and medical research with wonderful results.”

“We have a long way to go before we can prove our theory.”

“One of these days I’ll read about you accepting your Nobel Prize for Medicine, and I’ll tell everyone that I know that doctor.”

He concealed a smile. “It’s not about prizes or awards. It’s about making human life worth living.”

For the first time she saw Aaron Spencer as the healer he had been trained to be. It was the first time he had broached the subject of his research.

“I’ll arrange for the transfer of
El Cielo
to you as—”

“Don’t bother,” he interrupted. “You can’t sell the property for twenty years, so let it remain as it is. As long as you own it I know I’ll always be able to come back here.”

“Twenty years sounds like a long time.”

“It is, and then it isn’t.” And it wasn’t. The twelve years he had been estranged from his father seemed more like three. He still could recall everything about his last volatile encounter with Oscar as if it had been two weeks ago.

Regina stared at his impassive expression. “When do you plan to leave for Brazil?”

He turned his head slowly and stared at her, his gaze cataloging
and committing to memory the exquisite features of her incredibly beautiful face. “I’ll wait for you.”

“It may take me a month before I finalize everything.”

He shrugged a broad shoulder. “It doesn’t matter. I’ll still wait.”

“But what about your research, your plantation?”

“They will be there when I get back.”

She twisted the circle of flawless diamonds around the third finger on her left hand in a nervous gesture. “But you told me that you would not leave your research or your plantation. Not for anyone or for anything.”

Aaron crossed his arms over his chest, resting the forefinger of his right hand alongside his jaw, his eyes narrowing as he quickly read the letters carved into the marble headstone. “That was then, Regina.” His voice was low, rumbling sensuously in his chest.

“And now?”

Her pulse was racing so uncontrollably that she doubted whether she could stand if called upon to do so. She knew what Aaron was going to say before the words left his lips.

“Now there’s you.”

Closing her eyes, she bit down hard on her lower lip. “What about me?” She jumped, startled, when his fingers curved around the slim column of her neck.

He leaned closer, their shoulders touching. “I have to take care of you.”

“I don’t need your protection. I don’t need any man’s protection. Not anymore.”

Placing a finger under her chin, he raised her face to his. The bright sunlight illuminated the liberal sprinkling of gray in his close-cropped hair, and she wondered what he would look like if he allowed his hair to grow. Had he cut it short to conceal the fact that he was graying prematurely? It would not have mattered to
her, because all of the men in her family were mixed gray before their fortieth birthdays—her father, uncles, and male cousins.

His lids lowered over his expressive slanting eyes as he flashed the sensual smile that always sent shivers racing up and down her spine. “What if I tell you that I
want
to take care of you?”

Her eyes widened. “Why?”

The sound of her husky voice floated around Aaron like a cloaking fog, drawing him under and seducing him with its hypnotic timbre. How could he tell her that what he was beginning to feel for her was so different and foreign that it frightened him? That he did not know what drew him to her as if he had been caught in a spell from which there was no escape—a spell he did not want to escape?

“I don’t know,” he replied truthfully.

Reaching for his hand, she laced her slender fingers between his. “Everything will fall into place in its own time,” she predicted sagely.

Will it? he wanted to ask her.
Will you come to love me as much I think I love you at this time?

The realization that he was falling in love with his father’s widow was not as traumatic as it had been when he first recognized the emotions which had not permitted him to feel completely at ease in Regina Cole-Spencer’s presence.

He found her more secure at twenty-seven than most older women he had been involved with. She also challenged him in a way he had never permitted a woman to challenge him.

He also realized that he was more like Oscar Spencer than he wanted to admit, because he, too, wanted Regina Cole for himself. Oscar had appointed himself her protector to keep her from the clutches of a perverted movie producer, while he wanted to protect her from anything seen or unseen which would cause her harm. And to do that he would have to marry her.

He would remain in Mexico with her, hoping it would give
him the time he needed to help her grieve, heal, and then love again.

“I want you to understand something, Aaron.”

“What is it?”

“I’m going to leave
El Cielo
,” she predicted quietly, “and when I do everything I will have shared with you
here
will end.”

He successfully concealed a smile. She had challenged him again, and this time he would accept the challenge.

“Point taken,” he replied in a dangerously soft tone.

Pulling her hand from his, she stood up and walked out of the garden and back to the house. She did not tell Aaron that she had grown to depend on him more than she had thought she would, that she hadn’t wanted him to return to Brazil because then she would be alone—left to the demons who attacked relentlessly while she woke up screaming for someone to rescue her.

He had offered to remain in Mexico with her until she verified a date for her return to the United States. She would take the time given them, then walk away from Aaron Spencer and not look back.

Regina sat on a chair in the sitting room of her bedroom, staring out at the mountains as she spoke to her father. “I know he left me with a lot of responsibility, but I can handle it.”

“Have your lawyer fax me all of the particulars and I’ll have Philip Trent set up everything for the foundation.” The soft-spoken, efficient attorney who had headed ColeDiz’s legal department for the past twenty years had been responsible for filing the legal documents changing Regina’s name from Simmons to Cole.

“I also need another favor, Daddy.”

“What else, Cupcake?”

“I have fourteen paintings I want shipped to the States.”

“What are they appraised at?”

“In excess of a million.” Martin whistled softly under his
breath. “I hate them,” she said. The lifeless looking subjects and dark colors depressed her.

“Why did you buy them?”

“I didn’t. They were Oscar’s.”

“Why don’t you sell them?”

“I can’t. Not as long as I’m alive.”

There was a swollen silence before Martin Cole’s soft, drawling Southern cadence came through the wire again. “Oscar Spencer is lucky he’s dead, or I would break his neck. What the hell kind of life did you have with him where—”