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  Señora Laremos also noticed these things about her unwanted houseguest but she forced herself not to bend. The girl was a curse, like her mother before her. She could never forgive Melissa for trapping Diego in such a scandalous way, so that even the servants whispered about the manner in which the two of them had been found.

  “We have had our meal,” the señora said with forced courtesy, “but Carisa will bring something for you if you wish, Melissa.”

  “I don’t want anything except coffee, thank you, señora.” She reached for the silver coffeepot with a hand that trembled despite all her efforts to control it. Juana bit her lip and turned her eyes away. And Diego saw his sister’s reaction with a troubled conscience. For Juana to be so affected, the weeks he’d been away must have been difficult ones. He glanced at the señora and wondered what Melissa had endured. His only thought had been to get away from the forced intimacy with his new wife. Now he began to wonder about the treatment she’d received from his family and was shocked to realize that it was only an echo of his own coldness.

  “You are thinner,” Diego said unexpectedly. “Is your appetite not good?”

  She lifted dull, uninterested eyes. “It suffices, señor,” she replied. She sipped coffee and kept her gaze on her cup. It was easier than trying to look at him.

  He hated the guilt that swept over him. The situation was her fault. She’d baited a trap that he’d fallen headlong into. So why should he feel so terrible? But he did. The laughing, shy young woman who’d adored him no longer lived in the same body with this quiet, unnaturally pale woman who wouldn’t look at him.

  “Perhaps you would like to lie down, Melissa,” the señora said uneasily. “You do seem pale.”

  Melissa didn’t argue. It was obvious that she wasn’t welcome here, either, even if she had been invited to join the family. “As you wish, señora,” she said, her tone emotionless. She got up without looking at anyone and went down the long, carpeted hall to her room.

  Diego began to brood. He hardly heard what his grandmother said about the running of the estate in his absence. His mind was still on Melissa.

  “How long has she been like this, abuela?” he asked unexpectedly. “Has she no interest in the house at all?”

  Juana started to speak, but the señora silenced her. “She has been made welcome, despite the circumstances of your marriage,” the señora said with dignity. “She prefers her own company.”

  “Excuse me,” Juana said suddenly, and she left the table, her face rigid with distaste as she went out the door.

  Diego finished his coffee and went to Melissa’s room. But once outside it, he hesitated. Things were already strained. He didn’t really want to make it any harder for her. He withdrew his hand from the doorknob and, with a faint sigh, went back the way he’d come. There would be time later to talk to her.

  But business interceded. He was either on his way out or getting ready to leave every time Melissa saw him. He didn’t come near her except to inquire after her health and to nod now and again. Melissa began to stay in her room all the time, eating her food on trays that Carisa brought and staring out the window. She wondered if her mind might be affected by her enforced solitude, but nothing really seemed to matter anymore. She had no emotion left in her. Even her pregnancy seemed quite unreal, although she knew it was only a matter of time before she was going to have to see the doctor.

  It was storming the night Diego finally came to see her. He’d just come in from the cattle, and he looked weary. In dark slacks and an unbuttoned white shirt, he looked very Spanish and dangerously attractive, his black hair damp from the first sprinkling of rain.

  “Will you not make even the effort to associate with the rest of us?” he asked without preamble. “My grandmother feels that your dislike for us is growing out of proportion.”

  “Your grandmother hates me,” she said without inflection, her eyes on the darkness outside the window. “Just as you do.”

  Diego’s face hardened. “After all that has happened, did you expect to find me a willing husband?”

  She sighed, staring at her hands in her lap. “I don’t know what I expected. I was living on dreams. Now they’ve all come true, and I’ve learned that reality is more than castles in the air. What we think we want isn’t necessarily what we need. I should have gone to America. I should never have…I should have stopped you.”

  He felt blinding anger. “Stopped me?” he echoed, his deep voice ringing in the silence of her room. “When it was your damnable scheming that led to our present circumstances?”

  She lifted her face to his. “And your loss of control,” she said quietly, faint accusation in her voice. “You didn’t have to make love to me. I didn’t force you.”

  His temper exploded. He didn’t want to think about that. He lapsed into clipped, furious Spanish as he expressed things he couldn’t manage in English.

  “All right,” she said, rising unsteadily to her feet. “All right, it was all my fault—all of it. I planned to trap you and I did, and now both of us are paying for my mistakes.” Her pale eyes pleaded with his unyielding ones. “I can’t even express my sorrow or beg you enough to forgive me. But Diego, there’s no hope of divorce. We have to make the best of it.”

  “Do we?” he asked, lifting his chin.

  She moved closer to him in one last desperate effort to reach him. Her soft eyes searched his. She looked young and very seductive, and Diego felt himself caving in when she was close enough that he could smell the sweet perfume of her body and feel her warmth. All the memories stirred suddenly, weakening him.

  She sensed that he was vulnerable somehow. It gave her the courage to do what she did next. She raised her hands and rested them on his chest, against the cool skin and the soft feathering of hair over the hard muscles. He flinched, and she sighed softly as she looked up at him.

  “Diego, we’re married,” she whispered, trying not to tremble. “Can’t we…can’t we forget the past and start again…tonight?”

  His jaw went taut, his body stiffened. No, he told himself, he wouldn’t allow her to make him vulnerable a second time. He had to gird himself against any future assaults like this.

  He caught her shoulders and pushed her away from him, his face severe, his eyes cold and unwelcoming. “The very touch of you disgusts me, Señora Laremos,” he said with icy fastidiousness. “I would rather sleep alone for the rest of my days than to share my bed with you. You repulse me.”

  The lack of heat in the words made them all the more damning. She looked at him with the eyes of a bludgeoned deer. Disgust. Repulse. She couldn’t bear any more. His grandmother and sister like hostile soldiers living with her, then Diego’s cold company, and now this. It was too much. She was bearing his child, and he wouldn’t want it, because she disgusted him. Tears stung her eyes. Her hand went to her mouth.

  “I can’t bear it,” she whimpered. Her face contorted and she ran out the door, which he’d left open, down the hall, her hair streaming behind her. She felt rather than saw the women of the house gaping at her from the living room as she ran wildly toward the front door with Diego only a few steps behind her.

  The house was one story, but there was a long drop off the porch because of the slope on which the house had been built. The stone steps stretched out before her, but she was blinded by tears and lost her footing in the driving rain. She didn’t even feel the wetness or the pain as she shot headfirst into the darkness and the first impact rocked her. Somewhere a man’s voice was yelling hoarsely, but she was mercifully beyond hearing it.

  She came to in the hospital, surrounded by white-coated figures bending over her.

  The resident physician was American, a blond-haired, blue-eyed young man with a pleasant smile. “There you are,” he said gently when she stirred and opened her eyes. “Minor concussion and a close call for your baby, but I think you’ll survive.”

  “I’m pregnant?” she asked drowsily.

  “About two and a half mont
hs,” he agreed. “Is it a pleasant surprise?”

  “I wish it were so.” She sighed. “Please don’t tell my husband. He’ll be worried enough as it is,” she added, deliberately misleading the young man. She didn’t want Diego to know about the baby.

  “I’m sorry, but I told him there was a good chance you might lose it,” he said apologetically. “You were in bad shape when they brought you in, señora. It’s a miracle that you didn’t lose the baby, and I’d still like to run some tests just to make sure.”

  She bit her lower lip and suddenly burst into tears. It all came out then, the forced marriage, his family’s hatred of her, his own hatred of her. “I don’t want him to know that I’m still pregnant,” she pleaded. “Oh, please, you mustn’t tell him, you mustn’t! I can’t stay here and let my baby be born in such hostility. They’ll take him away from me and I’ll never see him again. You don’t know how they hate me and my family!”

  He sighed heavily. “You must see that I can’t lie about it.”

  “I’m not asking you to,” she said. “If I can leave in the morning, and if you’ll just not talk to him, I can tell him that there isn’t going to be a baby.”

  “I can’t lie to him,” the doctor repeated.

  She took a slow, steadying breath. She was in pain now, and the bruises were beginning to nag her. “Then can you just not talk to him?”

  “I might manage to be unavailable,” he said. “But if he asks me, I’ll tell him the truth. I must.”

  “Isn’t a patient’s confession sacred or something?” she asked with a faint trace of humor.

  “That’s so, but lying is something else again. I’m too honest, anyway,” he said gently. “He’d see right through me.”

  She lay back and touched her aching head. “It’s all right,” she murmured. “It doesn’t matter.”

  He hesitated for a minute. Then he bent to examine her head and she gave in to the pain. Minutes later he gave her something for it and left her to be transported to a private room and admitted for observation overnight.

  She wondered if Diego would come to see her, but she was half-asleep when she saw him standing at the foot of the bed. His face was in the shadows, so she couldn’t see it. But his voice was curiously husky.

  “How are you?” he asked.

  “They say I’ll get over it,” she replied, turning her head away from him. Tears rolled down her cheeks. At least she still had the baby, but she couldn’t tell him. She didn’t dare. She closed her eyes.

  He stuck his hands deep in his pockets and looked at her, a horrible sadness in his eyes, a sadness she didn’t see. “I…am sorry about the baby,” he said stiffly. “One of the nurses said that your doctor mentioned the fall had done a great deal of damage.” He shifted restlessly. “The possibility of a child had simply not occurred to me,” he added slowly.

  As if he’d been home enough to notice, she thought miserably. “Well, you needn’t worry about it anymore,” she said huskily. “God forbid that you should be any more trapped than you already were. You’d have hated being tied to me by a baby.”

  His spine stiffened. He seemed to see her then as she was, an unhappy child who’d half worshiped him, and he wondered at the guilt he felt. That annoyed him. “Grandmother had to be tranquilized when she knew,” he said curtly, averting his eyes. “Dios mío, you might have told me, Melissa!”

  “I didn’t know,” she lied dully. Her poor bruised face moved restlessly against the cool pillow. “And it doesn’t matter now. Nothing matters anymore.” She sighed wearily. “I’m so tired. Please leave me in peace, Diego.” She turned her face away. “I only want to sleep.”

  He stared down at her without speaking. She’d trapped him and he blamed her for it, but he was sorry about the baby, because he was responsible. He grimaced at her paleness, at the bruising on her face. She’d changed so drastically, he thought. She’d aged years.

  His eyes narrowed. Well, hadn’t she brought it on herself? She’d wanted to marry him, but she hadn’t considered his feelings. She’d forced them into this marriage, and divorce wasn’t possible. He still blamed her for that, and forgiveness was going to come hard. But for a time she had to be looked after. Well, tomorrow he’d work something out. He might send her to Barbados, where he owned land, to recover. He didn’t know if he could bear having to see the evidence of his cruelty every day, because the loss of the child weighed heavily on his conscience. He hadn’t even realized that he wanted a child until now, when it was too late.

  He didn’t sleep, wondering what to do. But when he went to see her, she’d already solved the problem. She was gone…

  * * *

  As past and present merged, Diego watched Melissa’s eyes open suddenly and look up at him. It might have been five years ago. The pain was in those soft gray eyes, the bitter memories. She looked at him and shuddered. The eyes that once had worshiped him were filled with icy hatred. Melissa seemed no happier to see him than he was to see her. The past was still between them.

  Chapter Four

  Melissa blinked, moving her head jerkily so she could see him. Her gaze focused on his face, and then she shivered and closed her eyes. He pulled himself erect and turned to go and get a nurse. As he left the room, his last thought was that her expression had been that of a woman awakening not from, but into, a nightmare.

  When Melissa’s eyes opened again, there was a shadowy form before her in crisp white, checking her over professionally with something uncomfortably cold and metallic.

  “Good,” a masculine voice murmured. “Very good. She’s coming around. I think we can dispense with some of this paraphernalia, Miss Jackson,” he told a white-clad woman beside him, and proceeded to give unintelligible orders.

  Melissa tried to move her hand. “Pl-please.” Her voice sounded thick and alien. “I have…to go home.”

  “Not just yet, I’m afraid,” he said kindly, smiling.

  She licked her lips. They felt so very dry. “Matthew,” she whispered. “My little boy. At a neighbor’s. They won’t know…”

  The doctor hesitated. “You just rest, Mrs. Laremos. You’ve had a bad night of it—”

  “Don’t…call me that!” she shuddered, closing her eyes. “I’m Melissa Sterling.”

  The doctor wanted to add that her husband was just outside the door, but the look on her face took the words out of his mouth. He said something to the nurse and quickly went back out into the hall.

  Diego was pacing, and smoking like a furnace. He’d shed his jacket on one of the colorful seats in the nearby waiting room. His white silk shirt was open at the throat and his tie was lying neatly on his folded jacket. His rolled-up sleeves were in dramatic contrast to his very olive skin. His black eyes cut around to the doctor.

  “How is she?” he asked without preamble.

  “Still a bit concussed.” The doctor leaned against the wall, his arms folded. He was almost as tall as Diego, but a good ten years younger. “There’s a problem.” He hesitated, because he knew from what Diego had told him that he and Melissa had been apart many years. He didn’t know if the child was her husband’s or someone else’s, and situations like this could get uncomfortable. He cleared his throat. “Your wife is worried about her son. He’s apparently staying at a neighbor’s house.”

  Diego felt himself go rigid. A child. His heart seemed to stop beating, and for one wild moment he enjoyed the unbounded thought that it was his child. And then he remembered that Melissa had lost his child and that it was impossible for her to have conceived again before she’d left the finca. They had only slept together the one time.

  That meant that Melissa had slept with another man. That she had become pregnant by another man. That the child was not his. He hated her in that instant with all his heart. Perhaps she was justified in her revenge. To be fair, he’d made her life hell during their brief marriage. And now she’d had her revenge. She’d hurt him in the most basic way of all.

  He had to fight not to turn on h
is heel and walk away. But common sense prevailed. The child wasn’t responsible for its circumstances. It would be alone and probably frightened. He couldn’t ignore it. “If you can find out where he is, I will see about him,” he said stiffly. “Will Melissa be all right?”

  “I think so. She’s through the worst of it. There was a good deal of internal bleeding. We’ve taken care of that. There was a badly torn ligament in her leg that will heal in a month or so. And we had to remove an ovary, but the other one was undamaged. Children are still possible.”

  Diego didn’t look at the doctor. His eyes were on the door to Melissa’s room. “The child. Do you know how old he is?”

  “No. Does it matter?”

  Diego shook himself. What he was thinking wasn’t remotely possible. She’d lost the child he’d given her. She’d been taken to the hospital after a severe fall, and the doctor had told him there was little hope of saving it. It wasn’t possible that they’d both lied. Of course not.

  “I’ll try to find the child’s whereabouts,” the doctor told Diego. “Meanwhile, you can’t do much good here. By tomorrow she should be more lucid. You can see her then.”

  Diego wanted to tell him that if she was lucid Melissa wouldn’t want to see him at all. But he only shrugged and nodded his dark head.

  He left a telephone number at the nurse’s station and went back to his hotel, glad to be out of Tucson’s sweltering midsummer heat and in the comfort of his elegant air-conditioned room. A local joke had it that when a desperado from nearby Yuma had died and gone to hell, he’d sent back home for blankets. Diego was inclined to believe it, although the tropical heat of his native Guatemala was equally trying for Americans who settled there.

  He much preferred the rain forest to the desert. Even if it was a humid heat, there was always the promise of rain. He wondered if it ever rained here. Presumably it did, eventually.

  His mind wandered back to Melissa in that hospital bed and the look on her face when she’d seen him. She’d hidden well. He’d tried every particle of influence and money he’d possessed to find her, but without any success. She’d covered her tracks well, and how could he blame her? His treatment of her had been cruel, and she hadn’t been much more than a child hero-worshiping him.