Enamored (6 page)

Melissa missed her father and Estrella. She missed the warmth of her home. But most of all, she missed the man she’d once loved, the Diego who’d teased her and laughed with her and seemed to enjoy having her with him for company when he’d ridden around the estate. The angry, unapproachable man she’d married was a stranger.

It was almost six weeks from the day she and Diego had been together when Melissa began to feel a stirring inside, a frightening certainty that she was pregnant. She was nauseated, not just at breakfast but all the time. She hid it from Diego’s grandmother and sister, although it grew more difficult all the time.

She spent her days wandering miserably around the house, wishing she had something to occupy her. She wasn’t allowed to take part in any of the housework or to sit with the rest of the family, who made this apparent by simply leaving a room the moment she entered it. She ate alone, because the
señora
and the
señorita
managed to change the times of meals from day to day. She was avoided, barely tolerated, actively disliked by both women, and she didn’t have the worldliness or the sophistication or the maturity to cope with the situation. She spent a great deal of time crying. And still Diego stayed away.

“Is it so impossible for you to accept me?” she asked Señora Laremos one evening as Juana left the sitting room and a stiff-backed
señora
prepared to follow her.

Señora Laremos gave her a cold, black glare from eyes so much like Diego’s that Melissa shivered. “You are not welcome here. Surely you realize it?” the older woman asked. “My grandson does not want you, and neither do we. You have dishonored us yet again, like your mother before you!”

Melissa averted her face. “It wasn’t my fault,” she said through trembling lips. “Not completely.”

“Had it not been for your father’s insistence, you would have been treated like any other woman whose favors my son had enjoyed. You would have been adequately provided for—”

“How?” Melissa demanded, her illusions gone at the thought of Diego’s other women, her heart broken. “With an allowance for life, a car, a mink coat?” Her chin lifted proudly. “Go ahead,
señora.
Ignore me. Nothing will change the fact that I am Diego’s wife.”

The older woman seemed actually to vibrate with anger. “You impudent young cat,” she snarled. “Has your family not been the cause of enough grief for mine already, without this? I despise you!”

Melissa didn’t blink. She didn’t flinch. “Yes, I realize that,” she said with quiet pride. “God forbid that in your place I would ever be so cruel to a guest in my home. But then,” she added with soft venom, “I was raised properly.”

The Señora actually flushed. She went out of the room without another word, but afterward her avoidance of Melissa was total.

Melissa gave up trying to make them accept her now that she realized the futility of it. She wanted to go home to see her father, but even that was difficult to arrange in the hostile environment where she lived. She settled for the occasional phone call and had to pretend, for his sake, that everything was all right. Perhaps when Diego had time to get used to the situation, everything would be all right. That was the last hope she had—that Diego might relent. That she might be able to persuade him to give her a chance to be the wife she knew she was capable of being.

Meanwhile, the sickness went on and on, and she knew that soon she was going to have to see a doctor. She grew paler by the day. So pale, in fact, that Juana risked her grandmother’s wrath to sneak into Melissa’s room one night and ask how she was.

Melissa gaped at her. “I beg your pardon?” she asked tautly.

Juana grimaced, her hands folded neatly at her waist, her dark eyes oddly kind in her thin face. “You seem so pale, Melissa. I wish it were different. Diego is—” she spread her hands “Diego. And my grandmother nurses old wounds that have been reopened by your presence here. I cannot defy her. It would break her heart if I sided with you against her.”

“I understand that,” Melissa said quietly, and managed a smile. “I don’t blame you for being loyal to your grandmother, Juana.”

Juana sighed. “Is there something, anything, I can do?”

Melissa shook her head. “But thank you.”

Juana opened the door, hesitating. “My grandmother will not say so, but Diego has called. He will be home tomorrow. I thought you might like to know.”

She was gone then, as quickly as she’d come. Melissa looked around the neat room she’d been given, with its dark antique furnishings. It wasn’t by any means the master bedroom, and she wondered if Diego would even keep up the pretense of being married to her by sleeping in the same room. Somehow she doubted it. It would be just as well that way, because she didn’t want him to know about the baby. Not until she could tell how well he was adapting to married life.

She barely slept, wondering how it would be to see him again. She overslept the next morning and for once was untroubled by nausea. She went down the hall and there he was, sitting at the head of the table. The whole family was together for breakfast for once.

Her heart jumped at just the sight of him. He was wearing a lightweight white tropical suit that suited his dark coloring, but he looked worn and tired. He glanced up as she entered the room, and she wished she hadn’t worn the soft gray crepe dress. It had seemed appropriate at the time, but now she felt overdressed. Juana was wearing a simple calico skirt and a white blouse, and the
señora
had on a sedate dark dress.

Diego’s eyes went from Melissa’s blond hair in its neat chignon to her high-heeled shoes in one lightning-fast, not-very-interested glance. He acknowledged her with cool formality. “Señora Laremos. Are you well?”

She wanted to throw things. Nothing had changed, that was obvious. He still blamed her. Hated her. She was carrying his child, she was almost certain of it, but how could she tell him?

She went to the table and sat down gingerly, as far away from the others as she could without being too obvious. “Welcome home,
señor,
” she said in a subdued tone. She hardly had any spirit left. The weeks of avoidance and cold courtesy and hostility had left their mark on her. She was pale and quiet, and something stirred in Diego as he looked at her. Then he banked down the memories. She’d trapped him. He couldn’t afford to let himself forget that. First Sheila, then Melissa. The Sterlings had dealt two bitter blows to the Laremos honor. How could he even think of forgiving her?

Still, he thought, she looked unwell. Her body was thinner than he remembered, and she had a peculiar lack of interest in the world around her.

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.