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When his gaze met hers, the tight muscle twitching in his jaw contradicted the heat burning in his eyes. ‘Get dressed.’
‘What’s wrong?’ she asked again, his harsh judgemental expression making her shiver despite the sunshine pouring through the bedroom’s open window. And reminding her of the man from her dreams who always seemed to look through her as if she wasn’t there.
‘Do as I ask…’ The command was unmistakable, as if she were one of his employees again and not the woman he had wanted to become his wife. ‘And you can drop the innocent act now. I know who you are.’
Drop the innocent act?
She stood frozen, shocked by the searing tone and the bite of contempt as he disappeared.
She rushed to dress herself, trying to calm the panic in her gut, the sudden feeling of being nothing. Of being nobody.
Who was this man? And what had happened to the man who’d vowed to cherish her the night before? The man who had gone to so much trouble to make her feel safe and protected.
She walked down the stairs ten minutes later, the creased wedding dress making her feel hopelessly self-conscious. Santiago sat in the far corner of the room, the casual combo of jeans and a T-shirt and his forbidding expression reminding her of the morning she had bumped into him fresh from the fields. The burnt-out candles which had looked so magical last night, and the cloying fragrance of the flowers, which were starting to droop in their vases, seemed to mock her too, drying up all the hope and excitement of the previous evening.
‘Wh-what…? What did you mean, you know who I am?’ she asked.
‘Do you recognise this?’ he asked, lifting a red leather book from the coffee table beside his chair.
A wave of sadness and confusion washed over her, swiftly followed by a shocking flash of recognition. Her stomach twisted, the cramping pain like a knife to her gut.
‘That’s… That’s my mother’s journal,’ she gasped.
She gulped in air, her lungs so tight she could hardly breathe. Her mother’s face—bold, beautiful, wreathed in smiles and laughter—swirled in front of her eyes, but then it dissolved, the image becoming shadowed and so sad… Dark earth piled on a freshly dug grave, her father’s unforgiving expression, the cruel words he’d spoken to her on that terrible day so long ago.
‘Don’t cry for her. She’s dead now, and she deserves to be—for what she did to me.’
‘She’s… She’s gone…’ She pressed trembling fingers to her lips to contain the brutal sob, the sudden tidal wave of grief… Her brain was battered by a parade of vivid memories from her nightmares, which now made a sickening sense—as the jagged shards slotted into place. And became real.
Her mother sitting on a hotel balcony scribbling, her face fading into nothingness. Her father, young and angry, then older, always uncaring and indifferent, his eyes flat and cold and remote.
Tears scalded her eyes, her breathing so painful she couldn’t draw enough air into her lungs. But when her gaze rose to meet Santiago’s, and she saw the suspicion in his eyes, she recognised him too. Not as the man she’d first met in thecastillo, the man she had weaved so many dreams about in the last few weeks, but as the man she’d watched so furtively from the shadows of the Plaça Reial—detached, indifferent, and with another woman. His was the same face of the man who had carried her back to an apartment in Barcelona as she drifted in and out of consciousness.
Theirs had never been a chance encounter. She had come to Spain to discover more about the mother she’d lost as a little girl… And the family of the man who had compelled Angharad Jones to make that fateful decision…
The scandal which had disturbed her so much when Ana had recounted the barest of details came back to her now in its entirety, in a grim parade of newspaper headlines and gossip column editorials.
‘So now you remember who you are, Cerys Jones,’ he said, the brittle cynicism bewildering. Why was he looking at her like that, as if he despised her?
He stood, holding the book, and walked towards her. His movements were stiff with outrage and lacked his usual grace.
Hooking a knuckle under her chin, he lifted her face, the angry heat in his eyes scalding her skin.
‘Ironic, is it not? That we share the same destructive passion as our parents,’ he said, the matter-of-fact, almost careless tone only adding to her panic and confusion. ‘Amusing too, that I believed you were unique, when you simply stirred in me the same weakness my father succumbed to. Tell me, when did you recover your memory? Before or after I proposed to you? Or was it ever really lost at all?’
Pain lanced through her. But his ruthless contempt was not as awful as the terrible loneliness which engulfed her. And the yearning for his touch, his approval, which she still couldn’t seem to quell, despite his cruel accusations.
Her mind and body had played a hideous trick on her, eliminating her memory just long enough for her to fall headfirst into the delusion that he cared for her. But worse than that…
She drew back and locked her knees, determined not to collapse, not yet, even as the brutal memories still bombarded her. And her battered brain wrestled with the full impact of how her reality had become so twisted, like a cruel joke, now the truth was staring her in the face.
‘Do you have nothing to say?’ he asked, the tone cutting.
She shook her head, unable to find the words. She hadn’t made up the amnesia. Why would she? To what purpose? But she didn’t have the strength to defend herself.
She’d always believed she had a connection to Santiago, but she realised now the connection had been the scandal that no one talked about. The scandal that had haunted so much of Santiago’s childhood. To realise it had haunted so much of hers too, though, was no comfort. Because what should have brought them closer was ripping them apart.
‘Why do you not answer?’ he asked, the derisive tone matched by the brittle judgement in his eyes.