Page 60 of Claiming His Baby At The Altar

He swallowed and squeezed his eyes shut. Then he took a long breath before fixing his desolate gaze back on her.

‘I tried to go,’ he said hoarsely. ‘But I couldn’t. I couldn’t make my body leave. I couldn’t stop the thoughts...’ He grimaced tightly and loosened an arm from around her waist to tap the side of his head. ‘So many thoughts. Memories. The people I have cut from my life. I thought life is too short to give second chances. Not everyone deserves a second chance. Hillier didn’t but he deserved the chance to make amends. I denied him that. Worse... I used him as a weapon to get to you.’

At her shocked stare, he smiled grimly. ‘I think...’ He swallowed again and took her hands in his.

‘Let me start from the beginning because it all starts with you.Querida, I have been in love with you for years. Your twenty-first birthday, that’s when I fell for you. I looked at you and what I felt was like nothing before it. Hillier’s little sister all grown up and so beautiful it hurt my heart. One dance was all you let me have. You trembled the whole time.’ He pressed her hand to his chest. She could feel the strong thuds of his heart against it. ‘I could feel your heart beating against me like a little hummingbird... And then you ran away like a frightened mouse.’

Flora’s heart was beating like a hummingbird now.

Was she dreaming? Had she not actually woken up at all?

Alejandro only opened himself up to her in her dreams.

The eyes gazing into hers were swirling with more emotion than she’d ever seen in her dreams.

‘After that night, I couldn’t get you from my mind,’ he whispered. ‘For months I tried to entice you to me. I would get your brother to invite you to functions with us but you refused them all, apart from my birthday party but you ran away again.’ Sadness shadowed his face. ‘And then your mother’s condition deteriorated when things had been so hopeful. When I visited... I had so much admiration for the way you cared for her. You were like an angel watching over her.’ He smiled wistfully. ‘An angel making jokes that kept a smile on your mother’s face until the end. Hiding your pain for her sake but never hiding your love. And you have so much love in you,querida.

‘When she died, everything changed. The house I had always been welcome in was sold and for a year I saw nothing of you...and then you turned up at my home a week after your brother’s arrest...’ He shook his head, self-disgust emanating off him like a wave. ‘I knew you would come to me to save him. Believe me, please, it was not done on a conscious level, but something was driving me to take the actions I did against him and when I look back I can see that was you. I knew you would come to me.’

Shemustbe dreaming...

‘That night with you blew my mind. To know I was your first...’ He closed his eyes and inhaled deeply before locking his stare back to hers. ‘Turning my back on you is the cruellest thing I have ever done and I do not seek your forgiveness. What I did to you was unforgivable. That night...how you looked at me the next morning... I had dreamt of you looking at me like that for so long. But I am everything you accused me of being. Scared of feelings. Like a child trapped in a man’s body.

‘I went to great lengths to stop you making contact with me again. I told myself it was because I hated you for using me and for snubbing me all those years and only wanting me so you could save him, but it was because, that night, you made me feel too much. You are my one weakness,querida. My Achilles heel. And for all my efforts, I could not stop thinking of you. You were a plague in my head I had no cure for.’ He inhaled deeply and brushed his lips as lightly as a feather over the tips of her fingers. ‘I was your first and you were my last. There has been no one but you since that night.’

Flora’s hummingbird heart jumped into her throat. It wasn’t just the words he was saying but how he was saying them, the fluency of his English more jumbled, his accent more pronounced. Agony and sincerity vibrated in every syllable.

‘I didn’t sleep for weeks before the court case. I knew you would be there and I would see you again and that you would hate me... Deservedly.’ He inhaled through his nose. ‘I had much guilt. Much vengeance but much guilt too. I had pushed the situation with your brother so far—too far—and my conscience was not happy with me. I had nightmares of him as an old man in jail. You were in those dreams too, crying and pleading with me.

‘You carrying my child was the dream I never knew I had come true. I could end the prosecution of your brother without losing face but, more importantly, I had the means to tie you to me for ever, and I took it. I wish I could call it madness, the thing that gripped me and forced you to marry me, but that would be kind. It was monstrous.Iwas monstrous. All night I have been going over that day and asking myself what possessed me to do that to you and I will not insult your intelligence by calling it love. I was in love with you but my actions were not those of a man in love. They were the actions of a monster. Real love came later. It grew in me. Every day it got deeper, but the demons that have lived with me for so long, they were still there. I tried to forget how our marriage was forged. I tried to forget my actions, but just as it is impossible to forgive my actions, it is impossible to forget them too, and deep down I never believed you could forgive or forget them or love me because of them, so when you fled to England and to your brother...

‘Querida, that is when I realised just how much power you have over me. The self-protection that has shielded my heart from hurt since I was a child did what it always does.’

He brought her fingers to his mouth again then smiled tightly and released them. Rising, he sat back on the sofa and rubbed the back of his head before looking back at her. ‘You were right to call it like packing my heart with ice. I don’t know how to be any other way. But I must learn, for Benjamin’s sake. I see that.’ A small, sad smile played on his lips. ‘But I think he will melt the ice like his mother does.’

Alejandro’s eyes squeezed shut and his throat moved. His gaze when he opened them was utterly desolate. ‘Losing you...how I’m feeling now...is the greatest pain I have ever known and there is nothing I can do to stop it. I have to find a way to live with it and accept it as due punishment. When I leave here, I will have the prosecution file on your brother shredded and I will instruct my lawyer to contact you—give him your terms for the divorce and custody of Benjamin. I will not fight you.’ His lips tugged into another small, sad smile. ‘You think I had the power in our marriage?Querida, you had it all. You have complete power over me, and I want you to know the months of our marriage were the best of my life. You are an incredible woman and I will regret the pain I have caused you until my dying day.’

The pumping of her freshly swelling heart was so strong blood rushed to her head, dizzying her.

She felt as if she’d just been spun a thousand times on a Waltzer.

All this time. All these years.

When Alejandro rose to his feet and bowed his head to her, she followed him with her eyes as he walked stiffly to the door, a thousand thoughts filling her head.

All this time...

Snapshots came to her, one after the other, a picture reel of images.

That look between them on her twenty-first birthday. The thrills and terror to be held in his arms when they danced.

The joy on his face when he’d spotted her at his party. The concern when she’d fled so early from it.

The tenderness and compassion in his eyes at her mother’s funeral.

The hunger and need etched on his face the moment before their lips fused together that first time.

The icy fury in his eyes in the court waiting room. The triumph when she agreed to marry him. The flash of panic when he realised the birth was imminent.

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