Page 38 of Shock Marriage for the Powerful Spaniard
Sofia stared. ‘But—but that can’t be right,’ she stammered. ‘No, you have to be lying...mistaken...’
‘I kept the ring. I have it. I never put it on the finger of the woman I stupidly married because I was hurting. I still look at that ring.’
‘But you dumped her... Jon James told her that you couldn’t face telling her yourself but it was over. He told her to leave the hotel immediately before it became a public scandal. He said that there would be no references if the whole truth came out. She left and never looked back.’
The silence settled over them.
Restless in her own skin and thoughts all over the place, Sofia was dimly aware that she was asking questions, and lots of them, voice jerky and shaking as she pieced together a tale of a jealous colleague who had lied to both parties because the woman he wanted, her mother, had rejected his advances. Jon James, it turned out, was long gone but he had left behind a legacy that had outlived him because he had played with the truth and told enough lies with sufficient conviction to make sure he destroyed what could have been.
As proof of David’s unrequited love, she was eventually shown the ring her father had bought for the woman he had intended to marry. It was ornate, engraved, and her mother would have loved it. She’d always had a soft spot for the garish.
Sofia stared at it for such a long time that she felt as though she was freezing on the spot.
‘I should go,’ she said, eventually. When she looked at him she saw the man she had slowly been accepting over time—a strong, kind man who would have made her mother happy.
‘I want you to have the ring,’ David said. ‘It was only ever mine on loan, waiting for its rightful owner, and that rightful owner should now be you.’
‘But I already have a ring. And, besides, this is a marriage in name only...’
‘Then hang on to it, my dear, until the real thing happens. All these misunderstandings...a terrible waste, a terrible shame, and yet to know that I was loved. It’s a comfort, just as it would be a comfort for you to take what was destined for your dear mother.’
In the dim recesses of her brain, Sofia felt that she should want to telephone her aunt immediately and share this tumultuous development, but the person who beckoned to her as confidante was Rafael, and she was waiting for him when he returned to his apartment a scant half-hour after she had arrived back.
He paused in the doorway and her heart leapt in her chest as she stared at him, drinking in the lean lines of his body and that oddly endearing state of semi-dishevelment in which he returned every evening: tie off, shirt cuffed to the elbows, staging a war against the waistband of his handmade trousers, black hair tousled.
‘You’re back.’ He looked at her narrowly while absently hanging his tie over the banister.
‘It’s been...it’s been draining,’ Sofia whispered, moving towards him and not caring what he thought as she stepped into his arms. After just the briefest of hesitations, he wrapped his arms around her and breathed into her hair.
‘Tell me.’
‘I feel terrible,’ she all but sobbed when she had recounted every detail of the afternoon, leaving nothing out. Somehow, without letting her go, they had worked their way to the kitchen and he broke apart to pour her a small amount of brandy in a goblet.
‘Drink this,’ he urged. ‘You’ve had a traumatic afternoon and there’s nothing better for a bout of trauma than a swig of brandy.’
‘I don’t want you to let me go,’ Sofia confessed in a raw undertone, creeping back into his arms and sipping some of the fiery liquid before setting the glass down on the kitchen counter.
She didn’t care what he thought of that statement. She just knew that his arms around her filled her with a sense of well-being and a feeling ofrightness.
This was where she belonged, she thought wonderingly. Just like that, her mind flashed back to all the times they had spent in one another’s company. She had summed it all up astwo people uniting between the sheetsbut now she recalled the conversations they had had, the laughter they had shared, and now this...
Wanting him and only him at a time when she had needed soothing.
She loved him and she didn’t know how that had happened or when. She just knew that all her thoughts were of him. He was in her head from the moment she opened her eyes to the second she closed them, and she couldn’t imagine a time when he might not be there. David had said to hold on to the ring for a time whentherealmarriage happened. What a joke!
Could he ever love her? It happened, didn’t it? People got accustomed to someone and love crept up and ambushed them, wiped out all their cynicism, took them by surprise...
She would never tell him how she felt because she knew that he’d run a mile.
But there were other ways of reminding him that she was a part of his life and perhaps more invaluable than he might ever have expected.
‘Let’s go upstairs,’ he murmured.
‘I should cook us something to eat. I wouldn’t mind some comfort food. I don’t want any of that fancy stuff we order in from those restaurants.’
But she was winding her arms around his neck and stretching up to kiss him.
He adored her breasts and never stopped telling her.
