Page 34 of Orchestrated Love

“Jax and I were together briefly before he broke things off between us.”

“Did he take advantage of you because you were hisstudent?”

Noah’s horrified “No,Papi, no!” echoed around the kitchen. “It was consensual. He never did anything I didn’t want him to do.”

He stood up again and went back to the sink, suddenly needing to occupy his hands to stop them from shaking. Jax had had his whole heart and soul then, and now he realized he wanted that again. Each of them had made mistakes in the aftermath of that office visit where Jax ended things. Both were guilty of causing the other pain. Now Jax was waiting for him to say what he wanted, as he had always done inthe past.

“Did you love him, Noah?”

His father’s voice was right behind him. He hadn’t heard the old man move, but he welcomed the warmth at his back and the hand on his shoulder when he nodded wordlessly. Alvaro squeezed him gently where he held him, then moved to make himself another cup of coffee. Noah washed the few dishes they had used, along with the pan and the utensils. By the time he was wiping down the counter, his father had a full mug of coffee, doctored with his usual fixings, and was heading back tothe table.

He pulled a bottle of water from the refrigerator. He was keyed up enough without adding to it by having morecaffeine.

“Sit down again and talk to me. It is hard to bear the burden of a lost love twice over,mijo.”

He took a loud slurp of his coffee and then rested the mug on the table before speaking again. He had a faraway expression on his face, one that Noah had seen a lot less frequently in the last decade, but one he knew meant his father was remembering somethingpoignant.

“I will tell you a story. Maybe it will help you to decide whether or not you want to take this second chance that the heavens have grantedyou,si?”

Alvaro had always been a romantic, although he had never married anyone after Noah’s mother. He only knew that his mother was a beautiful woman who had died when he was still too young to know her well, and that his father hadloved her.

“Your mama Isabella was a beautiful woman.” Noah smiled, recognizing the words, welcoming them. “We met when she was leaving Florida. She was on the train from Miami to Washington, D.C. At that time, I was working in the cafe car. She came in to buy breakfast, and the coffee spilled as she was moving away. She looked so young, so lost, so alone. I couldn’t leave my station, but I replaced her coffee, paid for it myself because I suspected that she didn’t have money for more. And then I went in search of her on my break and found her sitting next to an old woman who wasn’t pleased that I had come to ask after her.”

“Who was the old woman?”

“Isabella’s grandmother. She was taking her up to D.C. to live with her uncle because her parents had been killed trying to escape from Cuba.”

Noah’s heart clenched. He knew the horror stories about the Cuban refugees and had felt a keen sense of loss whenever he heard of another tragedy. And now he understood why … a part of him lay beneath the Atlantic as well.

“To make a long story short, I was able to get my information to her when they got off the train in Washington. It usually switches engines there, and the bathrooms are cleaned and so on. I took a quick break so I could slip my number into her hand when her grandmother wasn’tlooking.”

Alvaro’s smile was wide and full of love. “Isabella was … I couldn’t resist her beauty. And I could feel her innocence. I worked that route for the rest of the year, hoping to see her, but she never rode the train again, at least not when I wasworking.”

“And she never called?”

“Not for two years. I had just given up hope of ever seeing her again when she called. You have to understand, I was twelve years older than she was, and when we met that first time, she was a mere girl of twenty, though I didn’t know that at the time. I would have waited for her forever if I had to, though, but only if she wanted it. When she was ready, we would be together. My work meant I wasn’t at home often, so I couldn’t be upset if she didn’twant me.”

“But she wanted you?” Noah found he was dying to hear the rest of the story, even though he knew howit ended.

“She did. And when she called, it was because she had been thrown out by her aunt who found out that she had a boyfriend.”

“What?”

Alvaro laughed bitterly. “That boyfriend was me. Isabella used me to get away from them because her uncle started molesting her six months into her time there, and he didn’t stop. It was then she called me to ask for my help. She was twenty-two, alone in a big city and I couldn’t let what happened to her continue, especially as she wasn’t very fluent in English. So, I married her.”

Noah gaped at his father, shock reverberating through him. “So it was a marriage of convenience?”

“I suppose you could call it that. But I felt something more than lust for her. I wanted to protect her, and the best way I knew to do that was to make her mine, so she could remain here with me withoutworrying.”

Noah was trying to do the math in his head. His father was seventy years old, which meant that he was thirty-eight when Noah was born. So they’d been married for six years before he came along.

“Why did you wait so long to starta family?”

“Six years isn’t a long time when you have the kind of relationship that we had in the beginning. Isabella had to get to know me, to trust me with more than her physical safety. And she needed to get qualified to do more than clean office buildings and be an off-the-books nanny to rich people’s bratty kids. We agreed that we’d wait to have kids until she had at least a high school diploma to start with. But then she decided she wanted to be a nurse, so we moved the timeline to include an associate’s degree so she could begin that work as a licensed practical nurse.”

Hearing about his mother after all this time settled something inside Noah that he hadn’t even been aware had been waiting for that knowledge.

“She sounds like she was a really strong woman,Papi.”

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