Page 38 of Spanish Marriage Solution

‘Mateo was jealous,’ he said. ‘And vindictive. And he was furious that I’d spent more time with my biological father than him. He accused me of being as faithless and ungrateful as my mother. Then he told me that she’d had an affair with Javier, that I was Javier’s son and that my mother had died having me. And he told me all of that for no other reason than to hurt me.’

‘Oh, Sebastián,’ Alice breathed, her expression full of deep sympathy and a flickering hurt that he knew was for him. ‘I’m so sorry.’

He wasn’t sure why the rest of the words spilled out, given what they revealed, but they did. ‘He told me I was a poor replacement for her, that I wasn’t who he would have chosen for a son. But I was all he’d had to work with and so I’d have to do.’

Her hands had pressed flat against his chest, the look in her dark eyes making him ache. ‘What a terrible thing to say to a child. And how cruel.’

Yes. Mateo had been cruel and vindictive, and needlessly petty. But Sebastián knew why. He’d loved his wife and she’d been unfaithful to him and had a child by another man. Sebastián’s mere presence hit Mateo in a place where he was most sensitive—his male pride.

Another reason why you can’t love her, no matter how understanding she is. No matter how much you want to.

It was true. He didn’t know if his mother had loved Javier, but they’d clearly formed enough of a bond that she’d been unfaithful to her husband for him. And he had been the result. Just as he was the cause of his mother’s death.

After his father had told him the bitter truth, he hadn’t known what to do. All he’d known was that he was the cause of so much unhappiness and so the only way forward seemed to be trying his hardest to make up for it.

Except Mateo had made it very clear that nothing Sebastián did ever would.

It still doesn’t.

‘I got over it,’ he said, pushing the thought away. ‘Though my father made it very obvious that nothing I could do would make up for her loss. He wasn’t very good at hiding his resentment or his jealousy, and I think if I hadn’t had the horses I might have eventually decided it wasn’t worth it and left. But they were what kept me there.’

Her fingertips were warm on his skin, her gaze dark and deep, piercing him right through. She’d always seemed to see more than he wanted her to. More than Emily had. He hadn’t told Emily about his father, for example, mainly because Emily had never asked.

‘That’s why you care about the horses,’ Alice murmured. ‘Why you love them. They accepted you.’

How she somehow knew that, he wasn’t sure, but it was true nonetheless.

He stroked his thumb across her cheekbone, relishing the feel of her skin. ‘They did. They were much more accepting than my father ever was. All a horse needs is some good hay, clean water and kindness, and maybe an apple now and then. They don’t require anything else and they don’t need you to be anything else.’

‘I understand,’ she said. ‘No wonder you spent a lot of time with them.’ She paused a moment, her dark brows drawing together. ‘You know that your father was wrong, don’t you? And that the horses were right. He should have learned from them. He should have accepted you the way you were, just like you accepted Diego.’

A thread of impatience wound through him. He didn’t want to keep talking about this, because what was the point? The past was immutable. He couldn’t change it now even if he wanted to.

‘Perhaps,’ he said, dismissive. ‘But he didn’t. And in his mind, my mother’s death was my fault and so how could anything I do ever make up for that?’ He’d been bitter once, but he’d lost that over the years, because there was no reason to dwell on it. Mateo hadn’t accepted him and had continued to blame him right up to the day he died, and it was what it was.

Alice reached up and took his face between her hands, her fingertips cool on his cheeks. ‘You’re not supposed to make up for it,’ she said. ‘You were a child. A baby. You didn’t do anything to anyone.’

‘I know that,’ he said. ‘But he blamed me for it anyway.’

‘He shouldn’t have,’ Alice said insistently. ‘He might have been grieving and angry, and all of those things, but that was his issue. He shouldn’t have made it yours.’

But there must have been something bad about you, something wrong. Why else would he have been so cruel? Why else would you have caused such unhappiness to so many people?

Something twisted painfully in his heart, as if she’d touched on an old wound, an old doubt that had festered even though he’d tried to forget it.

‘Perhaps I should have helped him,’ he said, even though he didn’t want to say it. ‘Perhaps there was something I could have done to make it better.’

Alice’s fingers pressed a little harder. ‘Tell me,’ she said, that light in her eyes that had drawn him to her so powerfully flickering. ‘If Emily had died having Diego, would you have told him the same thing eventually? That he killed her? Would you expect him as a little boy to make it up to you?’

A shock went through him, bringing with it a ferocious protectiveness. ‘No,’ he said flatly before he’d even thought it through. ‘Never.’

‘No,’ she echoed. ‘And there was no excuse for him to treat you like that, either. You didn’t deserve it, Sebastián.’

There was so much conviction in her voice, so much warmth in her eyes that he teetered on the edge of the precipice, the wind threatening to take him over. It would be so easy to fall, so very easy. To name what he felt for her as love and let it take him.

But he couldn’t. He already had one person in his life that had a claim on his heart—Diego. The thought of potentially failing him was crushing enough. He didn’t want to add any more weight to the one he was already carrying.

‘Whether I deserved it or not doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘But now you know why I will put Diego and his happiness before everything else. Why I want him to have a mother as well as a father. Why I want him to have a family, somewhere safe where he feels he belongs.’

---