The Consequence He Must Claim (11 page)

So she was doubly anxious when she came home from the doctor the day they were supposed to go to his mother’s for the evening. Part of her had been wishing for weeks that they could make love and get the suspense over with. Now the moment was at hand and she found herself swallowing her tongue.

She hadn’t reminded him she was seeing the doctor today. He wound up running late, arriving home as she was finishing her makeup. Leaving the ivory tower of his penthouse was enough to deal with, she decided. Aside from her doctor appointments, she had been enjoying this time of seclusion, cocooned with her baby, visiting with her family over the tablet so she didn’t feel isolated.

The thought of fully assuming the title of Señora Montero publicly was intimidating the heck out of her.

Fortunately, she had Octavia. She often texted her new friend at odd hours. It wasn’t unusual to find Octavia giving Lorenzo a midnight feed when she rose to nurse Enrique. Octavia was also riding the ups and downs of new motherhood and she was a terrific resource when it came to living the lifestyle to which Sorcha had socially clambered. Best of all, she made no judgment about Sorcha being a newbie to this stratosphere.

Sorcha texted her:

I need to buy some gowns. The stylist says I need at least ten. That seems excessive.

Octavia texted back:

Conservative. I bought two dozen when I married. I just bought twelve more—thanks, Lorenzo, for the ample hips and bust.

Two dozen? The gowns were four figures each!

This first event was Cesar’s mother’s reception for her new daughter-in-law, however. La Reina Montero was hosting a very civilized affair to introduce her eldest son’s new wife to five hundred of her closest friends and relatives. In a month, La Reina would do it all again when her second son’s engagement to Diega Fuentes was formally announced. One would think Señora Montero had a reduce-reuse-recycle zero-waste attitude, if not for her willingness to feed the same crowd twice.

Sorcha glanced at Cesar, glad he couldn’t read her thoughts.

She had glimpsed these sorts of events from afar as his PA, and had usually been the one to arrange tuxedos to come back from the cleaners and drivers to arrive at the door. When she had asked if those sorts of duties fell to her as his wife, he’d asked, “Do you want them to?”

Much discussion had ensued about her role in organizing his private life—which harkened back to her claim that she might want an outside job again, eventually, but the truth was she was already overwhelmed. Readying their new home was a job in itself and mothering was nonstop. She liked the idea of taking charge of his personal calendar, but wasn’t sure if she could handle it yet.

He wound up suggesting she needed a personal assistant, which had made her laugh outright.

“My mother has one,” he’d said with a negligent shrug. Like it was a handy app you downloaded onto your tablet.

“I’m not on your mother’s level,” she had protested.

“You’re not the Duquesa yet, but you will be. She’ll judge you far more harshly for not wearing the affectations befitting your station than for acting the part out of the gate.”

No pressure to be her absolute highest self tonight or anything.

They arrived earlier than the rest of the guests so they could form part of the receiving line. Sorcha felt as though invisible eyes were on her as she walked up the front steps in her heels, green-and-gold skirt caressing her thighs while she resisted the urge to tug on the strapless bodice to ensure her breasts didn’t make an appearance.

She’d been to this house exactly once, in the days after Cesar’s crash, when she’d brought some things from his office to his father. She’d used the service entrance and had been shown into his office for twenty minutes. She had spent nineteen of those minutes memorizing Cesar’s boyhood face in a family portrait over the fireplace.

Tonight, she was a member of his family. Cesar led her without hesitation up the stairs into the private domain where he had grown up, seeking out his parents in their personal lounge. He made a point of calling them by name when he greeted them. “Sorcha, you remember my parents, Javiero and La Reina.”

“Of course.” Sorcha smiled. As his PA, she had used their titles when speaking to them and their greetings had been touchless. They both held her hands and kissed her cheeks today.

“Welcome.” Javiero was an older version of Cesar, very handsome and still with a full head of dark hair. He stood tall in his tuxedo, jacket not yet on, and moved with economy. He never wasted a word, much like his son. Working closely with him in those first days after Cesar’s crash, doing everything she could to ensure the impact to the corporation was minimized, she had thought Javiero respected and valued her. This evening, he was inscrutable as he glanced at his sleeping grandson.

Sorcha had mostly spoken to La Reina on the telephone, ingratiating herself shamelessly in the first year of her employment. Mothers were worse than wives if you got on their bad side as a man’s assistant. She figured she had one chance as his wife.

“So lovely to have you back with us,” La Reina said, proving she could lie as elegantly as she could dress. “And a son. Such a delightful surprise. I’ve been tied up with planning this party or I would have come to see him. I thought when you’d moved into the new house would be convenient, so I could see both at once.”

Tonight was not, apparently, a convenient time to view her grandson.

“I’m nursing,” Sorcha said, pretending the payoff check hadn’t happened. Or the generous but ironclad prenup. This was how his family did things, right? All business, purely practical, no emotion. “We couldn’t leave him home.”

“Oh, yes. I always thought breastfeeding sounded like such a nuisance,” La Reina murmured.

Sorcha bit her tongue.

“The nanny will watch him in my suite,” Cesar said. “But we won’t stay the night.”

“When you have him settled, join us for cocktails. Rico and Pia are here. They might be downstairs already,” she added.

They left for Cesar’s suite and Sorcha felt as if she could breathe again. At least it hadn’t been ugly. Maybe she could get through this after all.

Thirty minutes later, she accompanied Cesar toward the stairs. He offered a hand as they began to descend and she gratefully took it, even though she kept the other on the rail. It would be just like her to go headfirst, she was so sick with nerves right now.

“Your hand is freezing,” he said, closing his warm one more tightly over hers.

“I’m terrified,” she muttered. “What are people going to say?”

“Congratulations,” he replied. “What else can they say?”

“I suppose,” she mumbled, and told herself to quit frowning, but couldn’t shake her worry. “Are you sure I look all right?”

He was exceptionally handsome in his tuxedo, wearing it like old jeans. He’d shaved and wore the bored expression of a man who’d done this too many times to count.

“I told you before we left that you look beautiful, but Enrique started crying. You might not have heard me.”

“No, I did. I just—” Didn’t believe it. She’d seen him with his lovers in the past. He’d always been so attentive and indulgent, performing foreplay with light fingers on a woman’s skin and nuzzles of his lips against her cheek.

She was his wife and while his compliment had sounded sincere, he’d also seemed stiff when he’d said it. Standoffish. He wasn’t flirty and affectionate with
her
.

They reached the bottom of the stairs and she let go of his hand, turned to face him and made herself confront her worst fear. She had always felt attractive, if wary of her own allure, but the changes of pregnancy had her confidence faltering.

“Be honest. Is the baby weight turning you off? Because I’m trying to drop it as fast as I can, but it’s hard.”

“Sorcha.” He looked genuinely shocked and confused. “What gave you the idea...? Even if you were still out to here—” he stuck his hand in the air at his middle “—it wouldn’t matter. You always look flawless. You’re the most naturally beautiful woman I know.”

“I’m sorry. I’m just really nervous and—” She was such an idiot. She shouldn’t have started this here, now, but this party felt like the official beginning of their marriage and she wouldn’t relax until she at least knew... “I went to the doctor today. She said we could, um...” She looked around. “You know,” she said in an undertone. “If we use, um,” she swallowed and mouthed,
condoms
.

He stared.

She felt as though she grew transparent, skin thinning with heat, clothes incinerating until they flaked off her body in papery curls and she stood naked before him. She had just handed him the power to accept or reject her, leaving her self-worth hanging in the balance. She wished he would—

“You tell me that now? Here?”

“Where else—”

“The shower? An hour ago?” An avid light fired his gaze and his hand wrapped firmly around her arm. He steered her down the hall, but rather than taking her toward the main area of the house, he tugged her past the office she’d seen last time, then into a billiards room.

She scuffled along, fearful she’d be pulled off her heels. “Cesar, you’re scaring me.”

“I wait three damned years, then you disappear for eight months. I
marry
you and still have to wait six weeks...”

He pushed through a frosted door into a humid solarium. The scents of oranges and earth, lilies and herbs, were so pungent, it was almost overwhelming. The room was dark, lit only by the lights surrounding the tents erected outside. The glow filtered through small panes of glass, most of the light kept out by the abundance of greenery growing upward and dangling from hooks.

It was enchanting, but... “You want to, um, here—?”

“I want,” he growled, pulling her into his arms and pressing a hot, openmouthed kiss against her neck. His hand slid low, taking firm possession of her bottom to press her into the hardness of his unquestionable erection.

“Oh!” she cried, clutching at his shoulders for balance.

“I have been wanting and waiting and you finally tell me I can have you, but that I have to wait a little longer? I never took you for cruel, Sorcha.” His breath moved the tiny hairs along the edges of her updo, tickling and stimulating her sensitive nape, sending shivery waves of pleasure through her whole body. Gooseflesh rose on her arms.

She had wondered what had happened to the unabashedly sexual playboy she used to work for and here he was, flicking his tongue against her earlobe before he caught it in his teeth. He was moving his hands all over her waist and hips, sliding the silk against her skin, learning the shape of her thighs and buttocks. It was a disconcertingly familiar touch, kind of shocking in its level of ownership, but it sent tingles of anticipation and excitement through her. It felt really good to be touched. By him. So greedily.

Heat suffused her as she arched her neck and found herself turning her face, seeking his mouth with her own.

A sound tore out of him and he covered her lips with his own, full and knowledgeable. The sweet, occasionally lingering kisses of the past six weeks were gone. This was raw, undeniable passion. His tongue pierced unapologetically and searched for hers. Her abdomen contracted with excitement.

A deeper moan escaped her and she crowded closer to him, loins flooding with a hot ache, dampening with excitement. They stood there barely moving but for caressing each other in erotic pulses of their bodies against each other, mouths mimicking the thrust and reception they both craved.

With a little sob, she tore her lips from his, panting as she said, “I didn’t bring any condoms with me. I left them in the table by the bed. Do you have one?”

He drew back and even in the shadowed light, she could tell he was glaring.

“You had one that day,” she protested. “I thought it was something you always carry, like a credit card.”

“No,” he growled. “I don’t have one and I’m not about to consummate our marriage on a potting table in my parents’ garden shed.”

“Save it for our anniversary?” she suggested.

He looked to the glass panes of the ceiling, shaking his head. His hands were still flexing on her. “This is going to be a very hard,
hard
evening to get through.”

She ducked her head against his chest, sheepishly delighted. The evening ahead began to feel more like a date.

“Thank you,” she murmured. “I feel pretty now.”

“You are more than pretty. You’re radiant,” he said, sounding as if he meant it. They exchanged another kiss that promised a “to be continued.”

A moment later, drunk with arousal, she let him lead her back into the billiards room. They would make love later. The knowledge whispered and sang inside her, like a delicious secret. Like Christmas was coming.

He followed her into the powder room and stood next to her in front of the mirror, swiping her color off his mouth, then expertly refolding his kerchief to hide the stain before replacing it in his jacket pocket.

She eyed the maneuver.

“I won’t ask how many women you’ve dragged into that solarium,” she said as she reapplied fresh lipstick to her tingling mouth. She really didn’t want to know.

“I’ve never fooled around with anyone in there during a party,” he said. “Too much chance of running into my brother.”

CHAPTER SIX

B
UOYED
BY
HER
dalliance with Cesar, Sorcha
felt
radiant. And optimistic.

He made her feel magnetic, looking at her constantly, hand not just resting on her back, but thumb caressing the edge of her gown where her skin was exposed.

Even the thought of having to face down Diega didn’t dent her confidence. She felt rather protected, flanked by Cesar on one side and Rico on the other. Like one of the fold. Rico was cast from the same mold as his older brother and father, dark and handsome, tall and well built, capable of flirting and flattering, but with the same distance from emotional attachments as the rest of them.

“Did Cesar tell you I offered to marry you?” Rico had asked while bringing her a cocktail earlier.

“No,” she had said, stunned. “Why on earth would you do that?” She’d met him several times while working for Cesar, but had rarely exchanged more than appointment details or an offer to fetch him coffee. With Cesar firmly holding her interest from the first, she’d never seen Rico as anything but one of her boss’s high-level associates, never a romantic prospect.

“You’re smart, pleasant and attractive. It was a practical solution. Enrique would have had our name and a proper share in the family fortunes. Diega would have had the title she wanted,” Rico said with a diffident shrug. “You could have relayed the offer,” he added, speaking to Cesar now. “She might have preferred a lower profile. Did you think of that?”

He wasn’t joking.

Neither was Cesar when he said a clear and flinty “No.”

“It’s moot now,” their father said, and the men began discussing the technical properties of new alloy.

“Tell me about the house,” La Reina prompted Sorcha.

She gave a short rundown, carefully filtering everything she said, determined to leave the right impression. “Cesar said I should hire an assistant, but I’ve been interviewing staff for the house and the idea of going through the process for yet one more position right now... I can’t face it. What are your thoughts? Do I need one?”

She mentally laughed at how pretentious she sounded.

“I’ll have mine do the preliminary screening. You’re right, it’s too much when you’ve just had a baby. You have just the one nanny?”

Their nanny was the most underworked caregiver in continental Europe, considering how enamored Sorcha and Cesar were of their son, but Sorcha only said, “For now.”

The small talk wrapped up and they now stood in the foyer of the family mansion, greeting all of Spain as far as Sorcha could estimate.

She might not have been raised in high society, but her father had been titled, educated at Cambridge and a member of the House of Lords. She knew what good manners looked like and had learned early to adopt his posh accent for job interviews, especially in London. Cesar had been taken aback the first time he’d overheard her talking to her mother, falling into their broad Irish accent as she did. Already firmly entrenched as his PA, she had had a moment of insecurity as she danced around explaining that she was actually peasant stock, not the snobby aristocrat she mimicked.

Tonight she was pretending to be exactly that, determined to make Cesar and his family proud to call her a member of their family. At least not ashamed.

It was all going well until, quite suddenly, the Marques de los Jardines de Las Salinas was in front of her, congratulating her on her marriage. He was Diega’s father. Then her mother was in front of her, also offering a distant smile.

“Querido,”
Diega said to Cesar, her smile wide and avaricious as she arrived with her parents. She paused to kiss both his cheeks. “I brought an old friend of yours. I hope you don’t mind. As I said to your mother when I called, perhaps we can make a match for Pia.” She sent a moue down the line, winking at Cesar’s sister before bringing her gaze back to catch at Sorcha’s. Her smile hardened. “Cesar was at school with him,” Diega explained. “Thomas Shelby. The Duke of Tenderhurst. Do you know him?”

Sorcha’s heart stopped. The Duke of—
Her half brother?

“Tom,” Cesar was saying. “Nice to see you.”

Sorcha couldn’t bring herself to look. Her gaze locked to Diega’s triumphant one as Diega moved along to Rico.

Sorcha told herself to breathe, but she was turning to stone, like a spell had been cast, filling her insides with gravel and earth and hardening agents. Clay. Gummy, suffocating sludge.

“Meet my wife, Sorcha,” Cesar said, oblivious.

Her half brother showed not a hint of recognition as he took her limp hand and claimed it was nice to meet her.

His smile faltered until she found a stiff one, then he shook her hand and said something about how happy he was for her and Cesar. He wished them a long life and moved along the line.

Get through this
, Sorcha told herself, grappling for composure.

The worst part was, he looked just like her da.

* * *

Cesar wouldn’t call himself intuitive, but spending time with a baby developed a few skills for reading a mood. He knew what the dismayed precursor to an emotional meltdown looked like and Sorcha teetered for a millisecond on that bubble, obviously knocked off-kilter by Diega’s arrival.

After their stolen moment of passion earlier, he was in a state of sustained tension not unlike the final moments before climax, when his control wanted to unravel. He’d been thinking they were both standing in the fire of sexual awareness, burning with anticipation, but she was no longer with him.

What could he say about Diega being here? He’d forewarned her. He’d chosen Sorcha and his son over her. That ought to count for something.

Sorcha recovered quickly, making him almost doubt he’d seen anything. She now held a smile on her face, greeting people and exchanging pleasantries, but he could tell she wasn’t herself. And her behavior was odd because she had disguised her falter well. He was surprised with himself for noticing the change in her. He hadn’t realized how attuned he’d become to her.

What she looked like, he realized with a hard shock, was like one of them. The natural warmth he took for granted, in the same way he expected her blond hair or blue eyes, was extinguished. It had been replaced by a facade of forced good manners.

They were finally able to leave the door and move into the crowd that had spilled out to the lawn and open-sided tents. The orchestra paused so his father could make a toast, welcoming Sorcha into the family.

She smiled, looked as radiant as Cesar had called her earlier, but ethereal. Insubstantial. Her eyes were shiny and the strain behind her expression suggested she was quietly miserable.

And that misery felt like a knee to the groin. He was pleased to introduce her as his wife. Proud. Despite the costs to his family and the impact on their relationship with Diega’s, he had concluded his son was worth it. Once they lived properly as husband and wife, he would no doubt be more than satisfied.

Was she not pleased to call him her husband?

They started the dancing and she was a mannequin in his arms, not the receptive woman from earlier, but a stick figure that held him off.

He reflexively turned himself inward. Aloofness was his comfort zone, but it was difficult to maintain when the promise of physical intimacy had been bending the barbed wire he kept in a perimeter around his inner self.

“I should check on Enrique,” she said as the song finished.

He realized she was trembling and tightened his hands on her, trying to still the odd vibrations rolling off her.

“What’s wrong?” he asked, surprised to sense he was being rejected—which was an extraordinary enough circumstance without the heavy dose of reacting to it with a feeling of injury that weighted his insides.

“Nothing.” Her smile was such a blatant lie, it was a slap across the face. “Excuse me.”

He did not follow anyone and beg for affection. He let her go.

* * *

The nanny looked up from where she was reading a book in the sitting room. Enrique was sleeping in the cot next to her.

“I have a headache,” Sorcha choked with a weak smile and pointed to the bedroom, then closed the door behind her.

Sinking onto the foot of the bed, she wrapped her arms across her middle and told herself not to cry.

“Oh, God,” she whispered, more racked with fear and pain than she had been while in labor.
Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God
. She rocked, trying to ease the agony ripping upward like a tear from the very center of her being into her heart, rending and leaving jagged edges as it climbed to score her throat.

She was going to lose him. This time, when she told him about her father, there would be no sidestepping for a prettier angle. They might have grown closer than they’d ever been over their few weeks of marriage, but she hadn’t found the right way to explain what a pariah she really was.

Was Diega enjoying telling him? Sorcha hadn’t been able to wait and watch him realize what he’d married. Had she honestly imagined it would never come out?

She would have to face his disdain now.

Cesar had gone to school with him. Tom. Her husband’s
friend
was part of the evil, awful— He didn’t even know who she was! He had never even cared enough to look up a photo or find out his half sisters’ names.

Why would he? They were
trash
.

Don’t cry
, she begged herself, pushing her bent knuckles against her trembling lips.

The door clicked and her husband stood in the opening for a long moment, observing her. His scowl might have edged toward concern, but her eyes blurred and she couldn’t tell.

She rose, wobbling in her shoes as she moved to the box of tissues. Plucking several from the holder, she dabbed her face, trying to stem the pressure beneath her eyes, but tears leaked onto the crumpled tissues, staining them with mascara and eye shadow.

“I did tell you,” she said, like it counted for anything that she’d confessed to being illegitimate. That was a far cry from whatever was being whispered about her downstairs. Tom was one of them and she already knew how quickly she would be exiled as
not
.

She was right back to that moment of walking across the schoolyard, when everyone had stared. The headmistress at the door had given her a cold look and someone had whispered, “Bastard.”

Her sister had held her hand in a sweaty grip while Sorcha had sought out her best friend, Molly. She’d seen Molly every single day since they’d both been in nappies, but Molly had only mumbled, “Mum says I shouldn’t be friends with you anymore.”

Sorcha had survived it and had stopped caring that people had refused to serve them, but the fact Cesar was going to react the same way had her stomach churning.

“Maybe I should have foreseen this could happen,” she said, voice traveling through razor blades all the way up from her lungs. “You’re both titled. I don’t know why I’m shocked you’re acquainted, but I honestly didn’t mean to—” She sniffed.

She hadn’t meant to bring her shame into his mother’s house and attach it to their son. How had she thought this wouldn’t happen?

“I told you she would be here. Resign yourself to seeing her, Sorcha. She and Rico—”

“It’s not her,” she choked, shaking her head. Diega was a catalyst. She was the spark, Tom was the fuse, but Sorcha’s mum taking up with a married man was the keg of dynamite that was causing her life to explode.

Gripping her own elbows, Sorcha looked to the ceiling, trying to stem the tears.

At what point would they be finished paying for her mother’s mistake in loving the wrong man?

“Sorcha, I haven’t seen you like this except for that time with your niece. Has something happened with your family?”

She choked again, this time on hysterical laughter. “Yes. Ha.”

Her voice started to waver and she dug her fingernails into her skin, using the physical pain to overcome the crevasse widening down the middle of her heart.

“I told you my father married for money? To save his estate? He didn’t love his wife. Couldn’t stand her. Once his children went to boarding school, he spent all his time in Ireland, only going back to England when his son and daughter were home. You must have noticed the house on the hill in my village? That’s where we lived with him.”

“You lived there?” He sounded surprised.

Of course he was. It was a showpiece. A far cry from the tiny row house where her mother took in travelers to help pay the mortgage.

“Da spent a lot of money fixing it up. It made him popular in the village, hiring local builders and such. Mum was his maid. He fell in love, no surprise. She was twenty to his thirty-eight. When she became pregnant with me, she moved into the house proper. We lived like a real family, if you overlooked the fact he had another family in England. Most people pretended to, since their livelihoods depended on his keeping the house open.”

She risked a glance at him, dabbing under her nose as she did.

He was listening, probably wondering where she was going.

“He promised Mum the house, but that didn’t happen. It belonged to his ‘real’ family. When he died, they sent a lawyer, told us the property was part of the titled holdings and evicted us.”

“How old were you?” He narrowed his eyes, as if trying to recall if she’d told him this before. “There were four of you, by then? And your mother?”

She shrugged and nodded. “I was almost twelve.”

“That’s a long time to be a man’s pretend wife. Your mother didn’t contest it?”

“How? She sold her jewelry to buy groceries. She wasn’t even allowed to keep the car he’d given her. The whole village turned their backs on us because she’d been living in sin. The only people who were kind to us were the staff we’d lived with at the house. They helped her find a room over a carriage house. We shared it for two years until I was able to start working and help with rent.”

She blew her nose.

He was completely unreadable, arms folded, only the penetrating glacier-blue of his eyes moving as he searched her expression, filing this new information into his mental database.