Page 4 of A Diamond for My Forbidden Bride

I couldn’t take my eyes off him. I couldn’t breathe.

What was he doing here? What had happened to him? How was he alive? His body had been identified in the burned-out wreck of a car on the outskirts of Madrid. An accident, the police had determined.

There had been rumours he’d been trying to escape from Domingo, about whom rumours of violence had swirled, though everyone knew him to be a perfectly charming if arrogant kind of man. Rumours that perhaps it hadn’t been entirely an accident.

And yet...he was here, right in front of me.

He hadn’t been in that car, had he?

‘You’re dead.’ Constantine’s voice was a dark, icy wind, as if somehow saying the words would make Valentin’s presence less real. ‘You died fifteen years ago.’

Valentin’s sardonic smile remained. ‘Apparently reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated. As you can see.’

People were whispering, shock echoing and rebounding through the room.

I dug my nails harder into my palms, the cold seeping through me, unable to keep from staring at him, cataloguing all the changes the years had made.

He wasn’t the same. I could see that now.

There had been a warmth to the boy I’d known and a calm patience I’d found so reassuring and steadying. My father had had no patience with my ‘girlish tantrums’, as he’d termed them, but Valentin had never minded.

We’d met on a secret beach on that Caribbean island and had become friends. And, as we’d grown older, we’d become something more.

He’d always had time for me. He’d always been kind too, and funny. He hadn’t seemed to care that I was only a girl.

But there was no trace of the boy in the man standing there with his hands in the pockets of his black trousers, his expression amused. He appeared casual and yet every line of him blazed with intensity.

He wasn’t a flame now; he was a furnace.

The whispering grew louder.

‘Silence,’Constantine ordered, that wind becoming a low, howling gale.

The whispering stopped.

The tension that had gathered in the room the moment Valentin had appeared pulled so tight it was nearly unbearable.

I forced my gaze away from Valentin to look at my fiancé instead, because I had the oddest feeling that Constantine wasn’t so much shocked at his brother’s appearance as he was angry.

Incandescently angry.

I wanted to say something, to stop whatever was going to happen next, because I knew it would be terrible; I just knew it. But I felt paralysed by shock, my throat too thick to force words through.

‘You look perturbed,’ Valentin observed casually, strolling closer to his brother. ‘Understandable, what with me coming back like Lazarus, on top of managing this farce of a funeral. Well, don’t worry, I won’t take up too much more of your valuable time. I’ll just take what’s mine and then be on my way.’ That intense black gaze of his flicked back to me and he held out a peremptory hand in my direction. ‘Come, Olivia.’

I stared at him, my head full of memories.

Memories of the last time I’d seen him, on the small hidden beach, the one that no one else had known about; the one that had been our special place. It had been night, the black sky above scattered with jewel-bright stars, and he’d kissed me for the first time.

He’d whispered in the dark that one day, when we were both old enough and free of our families, we’d get married and be together for ever.

I’d never wanted anything so badly.

We’d lain in the sand, still warm from the day’s heat, talking about how our life together would look and what we’d do. Marry, have a family, be free.

I’d loved him so much.

Then the next day he hadn’t come down to the beach as he’d promised and it wasn’t until later that I’d heard he and Constantine had been sent back to Madrid.

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