Page 44 of One More Sleepless Night

She wanted to know everything, and now, thank God, it seemed she’d have to wonder and speculate and imagine no longer. ‘Why don’t you start at the beginning?’ she said.

Rafael set his jaw and looked as if he were bracing himself. ‘I met Marina through my younger sister.’

‘Gaby?’

‘The next one up. Elena. She and Marina were best friends. Elena had a party to celebrate her birthday and we were introduced. We dated and three months later we got married.’

Nicky nearly fell off her chair because that didn’t sound like the action of the keen-on-control Rafael she’d come to know. ‘Wow, that was quick.’

‘Too quick with hindsight,’ he said dryly.

‘How long were you married for?’

‘A couple of years.’

‘What happened?’

He grimaced. ‘Once the honeymoon was over—literally—it became pretty clear that we had nothing in common.’

Nothing? She couldn’t believe that. Not when, as she’d discovered, he was intelligent and interesting and had well-formed opinions on an impressively wide range of subjects. ‘You must have had something in common,’ she said, ‘otherwise why get married in the first place?’

He rubbed a hand along his jaw and nodded briefly. ‘OK, there was one thing,’ he conceded and as a pang of jealousy darted through her Nicky wished she hadn’t pressed the point. ‘But naturally it wasn’t enough. We were too different. And too young.’

‘How old were you?’ she asked, dismissing the jealously as entirely normal and ignoring it.

‘I was twenty-three and Marina was twenty.’

‘Didn’t anyone try and stop you?’

‘Of course, but you know how I feel about advice. I’m as bad at taking it as I am at giving it.’ He gave her a tight humourless smile. ‘Besides, I’d just got back from Harvard and, having had the best education on offer, I thought I knew everything.’

‘But you didn’t.’

‘Apparently not. I certainly knew nothing about how to handle the mess we’d got ourselves into. We argued. A lot. In fact,’ he added with a frown, ‘we argued about pretty much everything.’

‘That sounds stressful.’

‘It was.’ He stopped and for a moment he seemed to be completely lost in the memory of it all before giving his head a quick shake and snapping out of it. ‘Anyway, things went rapidly downhill until I ended up virtually living at the office and Marina ended up having an affair.’

Nicky winced. ‘Ouch.’

Rafael sighed. ‘I can’t say I really blame her. We should never have got married in the first place. The whole thing was a disaster from start to finish and it’s not something I’m in a hurry to do again.’

At the thought of him, normally so focused and so in control, so way out of his depth and floundering in the face of such unfathomably emotional upheaval, Nicky felt her heart squeeze. ‘So how did your sister take it all?’

He went very still and a muscle ticced in his jaw. ‘It wasn’t the easiest of times,’ he muttered eventually. ‘We didn’t see all that much of each other for a while. It was…awkward.’

‘Just awkward?’ she asked, thinking that for someone who clearly adored his sisters—even if they did occasionally drive him up the wall—‘awkward’ was more likely to mean ‘gut-wrenching’.

‘OK, yes, it was more than awkward,’ he admitted, ‘but you know all about the healing powers of time.’

She nodded. ‘I do indeed.’

‘We got through it eventually but that isn’t something I’d care to repeat either.’

No, she could see why he wouldn’t want to repeat any of it. And she could equally see why he went to such great lengths to avoid emotional mess now because she’d do the same in the circumstances. Who needed it?

Feeling faintly guilty at having made him relive what had clearly been a difficult time, Nicky decided the situation needed lightening.

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