Exotic Nights

He nodded, then glanced over at the sleeping child. “I will be happy if we can find and bring back Ana Luis. Her baby will miss her.”

Francesca’s eyes were shiny with unshed tears. “I don’t understand how she can be happy without him. Perhaps she will miss him so much she’ll come back on her own.”

Marcos studied her. She looked … wistful. As if she longed for a child, no matter that she’d claimed to be afraid of them only yesterday. She’d looked happy enough when he’d found her holding Armando.

“You could be right,” he said, “but I doubt it. She is a sixteen-year-old girl. A baby is probably a burden. She wants to be free, to have fun, and this little one is like a millstone around her neck, I imagine. She may love him, but she has probably convinced herself he is better off without her.”

She blinked, as if she’d never considered such a possibility. “Or maybe her head was turned by this boy she met. Maybe she’ll come to her senses.”

“Is that what you did, querida?” he asked very softly.

“What do you mean?”

“With me. Did it take you very long to come to your senses? Or would you have followed where you thought your heart wanted to go? If I had taken you with me that night, eight years ago, would you have come?”

She looked away, toying with the half-eaten croissant on her plate. “I imagine I would have followed you to the ends of the earth, Marcos. Though I’m sure I’d have figured out the truth soon enough.”

“The truth?”

“That you were only using me.”

“As you were using me.”

“You can continue to believe that if it makes you feel better,” she said. Then she speared him with a glare. “But the truth is, if I had thought that asking my father to buy you for me would have worked, I probably would have done it. Because yes, I was that hopelessly in love.

That deluded.”

Her words pricked him more than he liked. Deluded. “How do you know that you did not ask him? You didn’t have to say those exact words, after all.”

“I never spoke with my father about you. I never spoke with any of them, because I was afraid of what they would say.”

“And what did you think that would be?”

She thrust her chin up, a gesture he was beginning to recognize as a defense mechanism. It was her mantle of self-assurance settling into place, however tattered a mantle it may be.

“That I was delusional, that I wasn’t pretty enough or smart enough, that you would never look at me twice. The list can get quite long if you want to hear it all.”

Anger surged through him at the thought of her family saying such things to her. And they would have, he knew. At least her mother and sister would have. Her father had adored her, which was perhaps why her mother and sister had been so jealous.

“They would have been wrong, Francesca.”

She snorted. “Of course. And you proved how wrong they were by leaving as soon as the ink was dry on the marriage license.”

He leaned forward and caught her face between his hands, kissing her until she began to soften, until he could feel the blood rushing to his groin and feel the pounding of desire in his veins. “They could say none of those things now, and you know it,” he said, leaning his forehead against hers. “Stop picking at old wounds. Life is about forward motion, not regrets.”

She gently disentangled herself from his grasp. Her golden-green eyes were full of sadness as she searched his face. He felt like he’d been shoved beneath a microscope—and the scrutiny was becoming uncomfortable because it went so far beneath the surface.

“Then why don’t you take your own advice, Marcos? Because from where I’m sitting, you’re a man living so deeply in the past you can’t even enjoy the present.”

They had not found Ana and her boyfriend by nightfall. Francesca took turns with Ingrid and another of the women who worked there in playing with Armando. He was a sweet little boy, but he was beginning to get fussy the longer he went without his mother.

Surely, Ana must have done a few things right, or her son would not have bonded with her so strongly as to notice she’d been gone for a very long time. Francesca had just given the child back to Ingrid and decided to go for a walk in the vineyard when Marcos emerged from his office.

She’d not spoken with him since breakfast. Once they’d finished eating, he’d said he had business to attend to and shut himself away. He’d even had his lunch delivered and had eaten behind closed doors.

She’d thought he meant to ignore her completely after what she’d said to him this morning. Looking at him now, her heart contracted. “Have they found her?” she asked, hoping beyond hope that he’d found out something.

He shook his head. He looked so forlorn in that moment, so defeated. She wanted to go to him, wrap her arms around him. Tell him how she felt.