Page 30 of The Spanish Daughter (The Lost Daughters #5)

29

ARGENTINA, 1940

Valentina stopped when she saw Felipe ahead of her. She’d tried so hard since she’d last seen him not to cross paths with him, to avoid the feeling of their eyes meeting or having to make small talk when her heart was still healing. But today, it was inevitable.

‘I was hoping to see you,’ he said.

And I was hoping not to see you . ‘Felipe,’ she said, leaning into the open doorway of the stable building.

‘You look well,’ he said, and she could tell by the hesitation in his voice that he was as nervous about seeing her as she was him.

‘Thank you.’

‘Are you riding?’ he asked.

Valentina shook her head. ‘No. I haven’t ridden since…’ Her voice trailed off and she found that she didn’t want to finish her sentence. ‘It’s not the same, riding alone.’

Felipe stared at her, and she wondered if he felt the same, gnawing pain inside as she did from standing so close and yet so far from him.

‘Valentina, I need you to know?—’

‘Please, stop,’ she said, holding up her hand. ‘You don’t need to say anything.’

But Felipe didn’t stop. He came closer, taking her hand in his and not letting her pull away when she half-heartedly tried.

‘Valentina, please let me say this. I promise that I won’t come looking for you again, but I need to tell you this.’

She looked down at her hand in his, closing her eyes for a beat, before finally looking up at him.

‘If I’d known there was even a chance of you coming back, if I’d thought there was a possibility of us being together again, I would have waited for you,’ he said, tears shining from his eyes as he spoke. ‘You will always be the love of my life, Valentina. I need you to know that I will never love anyone in the way I loved you. But I thought you were lost to me.’

Valentina had been so careful not to see Felipe, because she didn’t trust herself around him. And now that he was so close, she couldn’t help but lift a hand to touch his cheek, her palm resting softly against his skin.

‘Will you ever be able to forgive me?’ he whispered.

She smiled. How could she not smile when she was looking into the eyes of the man she loved? ‘There are people in my life whom I will never forgive, Felipe, but you are not one of them,’ she said, surprised at how strong her voice sounded when inside she was breaking. ‘But if you need to hear me say it, then I forgive you.’

‘I don’t know what to do,’ he said. ‘I?—’

‘You don’t need to do anything,’ she said. ‘You’re married, you’re about to be a father. You have your whole life ahead of you.’ Valentina took a breath. ‘With your wife.’

She could see the pain etched on his face, the haunted way he stared at her as if he couldn’t live with himself; and she only recognised it because she felt the same.

‘I wish things could have been different.’

Valentina sighed, knowing she was only going to be able to hold her tears for so long. ‘So do I. We would have had a beautiful life together.’ But it wasn’t to be .

‘One day, far in the future, if we ever find ourselves alone, if?—’

‘Yes,’ she whispered, not letting him finish. ‘I will always be here. Even if we’re eighty, if we ever have the opportunity to be together, the answer will always be yes.’

Felipe kept his hold on her hand, looking down at their skin touching before letting go of her and placing both his palms to her face. He hesitated, as if waiting for her to pull away, but Valentina was powerless to move. When he kissed her, she let him. It was a slow, warm kiss—a goodbye kiss—and she hoped that his wife would forgive him if she ever found out.

‘I’m going to miss you forever,’ he murmured.

‘I’m going to miss you forever, too,’ she whispered back.

Felipe hovered, his face barely an inch from hers, his breath mixing with hers, until he finally stepped away.

‘Would you like to go for a ride together, one last time?’

She was going to say no, to walk away from him and tend to her broken heart alone, but when she saw the way he was looking at her, she couldn’t help it.

‘Yes.’

One last ride. One last moment in time together before he spent the rest of his life with another woman, another woman to whom Valentina would show the utmost respect. Her marriage might have been a sham, but Felipe’s wasn’t, and she would not be responsible for breaking up a family, or another woman’s heart.

The ride was as beautiful as it was lonely. Valentina couldn’t understand how she could be so close to the man she loved, and yet somehow feel so alone.

They started at a walk and then cantered, and she was grateful for the wind whipping against her cheeks and the sun beating down on her arms as her horse stretched and pulled beneath her. But when they finally slowed, she saw that they’d come to the one place she’d never imagined coming back to—their tree at the farthest reaches of the estate.

She asked her horse to halt and stared at Felipe, who appeared equally as breathless as her.

‘I didn’t intend on bringing you here.’

Valentina nodded. ‘Old habits, or maybe our horses chose for us.’

Neither of them made an attempt to dismount, and she was grateful to stay at a distance from him so that she wasn’t tempted to touch him again.

‘Felipe, I have a daughter,’ she suddenly said, the words falling from her mouth before she had time to think through what she was telling him.

His eyes widened. ‘A daughter?’

‘When I left my husband, when I disappeared, the reason I had to leave was because I was pregnant.’

His eyes never left hers. ‘You knew he would never agree to end your marriage if he found out.’

Valentina swallowed. She could have left it there, but she needed him to know. ‘And I knew I would never find my way back to you if I had to stay married.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Felipe said. ‘I’m so sorry for what I did.’

‘I know you are,’ she replied, forcing a small smile. ‘But it also wasn’t just that. It was about honouring my father, righting the wrongs that had happened after his passing. I had to make everything right.’

They sat a while longer, neither of them talking as they both stared out across the property, as the sun continued to rise higher in the sky. It was moments like these that Valentina knew she’d miss more than anything else—being in Felipe’s quiet company, trusting the person she loved with all her heart.

‘Where is she now? Your daughter?’ he asked.

‘In London,’ Valentina replied, glancing over at him and seeing the hard set of his jaw as he continued to look into the distance. ‘That’s where I went, when I left. I had her at a special home where I was very well cared for, and a family adopted her after I left.’

‘If you’d known about me, that I was married, would you still have left her?’ Felipe asked.

‘Yes,’ Valentina said, immediately. ‘I left her to escape my marriage, to avenge my father, and to allow her to have a life that I didn’t believe I would be able to provide for her.’ A life that I could provide now, if I could find a way to get her back. If I truly believed she would be better with me than the family who adopted her .

Felipe turned his horse around then and met her gaze.

‘Valentina Santiago, I’ve loved you since you were a girl and I was a boy, and I will love you until my dying breath,’ he said. ‘I just wish I knew how to live without you.’

‘Live knowing that your love is returned, and that it’s okay to be in love with your wife and still love me. Just as I will always be a mother even though I will never hold my child in my arms again.’

She watched as Felipe’s tears left his cheeks damp, at the same time as a steely resolve settled over her. She’d fought, and won. She’d loved, and lost. But she was still here, on the land that had meant everything to her father, with her entire future ahead of her.

‘Goodbye, Felipe,’ she said, turning away from him and nudging her heels against her horse’s sides.

But unlike when she said her final farewell to her daughter, this time she did look back. Valentina turned in the saddle and glanced at the man she loved one last time, before urging her horse into a canter and racing back to the stables.

She doubted she’d ever ride again; it was something she had only ever done to be close to Felipe, but she had another idea. She would continue to foster her father’s love of polo and open the estate to retired ponies, breeding only a handful of new horses each year to ensure the bloodlines he’d been so passionate about weren’t lost. And she would sponsor young riders who had the talent but not the finances to play polo, to make the sport accessible to all.

There were dark days ahead, with the war still raging through Europe, but her father would have been the first to tell her to look forward; to visualise a future after the darkest of days. She may have lost the love of her life, but her life was still hers to live, on her terms, with no man dictating to her what her future looked like.

And as she slowed to a walk when the stables came into view, giving her horse time to cool down, Valentina vowed to make the very most of her life.

She would never stop watching over her daughter, and she would never stop loving Felipe, but it didn’t mean her life wasn’t worth living. To the contrary, it meant she knew what true love was, and for that, she would always be grateful.