“So you believe in love, but don’t believe that everyone can...feel it?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I’ve seen it,” he said. “It’s not a secret...” He cleared his throat. “It is not a secret that my father murdered my mother, tesoro.”
“What?”
“My father is a murderer.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
DIEGO HAD NO idea why he was telling her this. Especially after what they had just shared. He should make it about pleasure. About spending the night exploring her beautiful body. He could be more careful the next time they made love. Could withdraw before he climaxed. Though, part of him rebelled at the idea. Still, when the subject of birth control had come up Liliana did not seem as horrified as he had imagined she might.
But they were not making love again. They were talking about his father instead.
“Tell me,” she said.
“My mother was a wonderful woman. I think we should start there. She was my introduction into the idea that there was good in the world. Believe me when I tell you there was little evidence of that elsewhere in my house. My brother and I were terrified of our father. He was a tyrant. If he had one emotion in his body beyond selfishness and rage, I would be surprised. He was like a black hole. Consuming and destroying everything in his path. And so, we did our very best to stay out of his path. Matías, he tried to be a good son. And for a while I did too. But then our mother had an accident. She was out riding and she... She fell from her horse. That was the story.”
He paused, looking away from Liliana. From her impossibly beautiful, innocent face that was so shocked to hear such a story. It was his reality. His childhood. He had never been shocked by it. He had been broken the day he’d found out his mother was dead. Had cried the last tears he had in him. Even as a man, when he had endured hideous loss, he hadn’t been able to weep. He had expended every last tear back then. But he had not been surprised.
What must it be like to not immediately assume the worst of people? She would. After this. After him. He had kidnapped her, for heaven’s sake. Had brought her here. Was holding her... Well, it wasn’t exactly against her will, not now. But... She would learn. She would learn at his hand. And this story would be part of it.
“She didn’t fall from her horse?”
“She did. But my father was in pursuit of her. He shot her. I do not believe that it killed her. But the horse was spooked and threw her. Her official cause of death was a broken neck.”
“Diego...”
“My father told me all of this in a drunken rage only two days later. I was eleven years old. And after that... After that I didn’t care, Liliana. I did not care if he killed me. I tempted it. I welcomed it. I found my matching darkness and I let it bleed free. He had a shop with classic cars inside. I lit it on fire.”
She was staring at him still, her blue eyes round.
“And I laughed as everything he cared about burned.”
You must learn to let go of things when they’re broken, Father.
He remembered saying those words back to the older man, defiant and filled with his own murderous rage.
“I really did think he would kill me that day,” Diego continued. “He beat me within an inch of it. But then, he laughed. He laughed, because he said he knew my anger. He said if I would only feed it, I would become just like him. Matías... He did not understand him. But me... I’m a chip off the block.”
“You aren’t,” she said ferociously.
“No. It’s true.” He would not go into Karina. He would not speak of her at all. It didn’t matter. Not now. Not now that this marriage was temporary. “And I did not tell you this story in order for you to talk me out of my vision of myself. But you asked what I think of love. Love is why my mother married my father. A misguided sense of love is why she stayed with him. And love is what killed her. It did not change him. It did not shine a light on his dark places. Instead, his darkness consumed her. They say that love redeems people, but there are those who are past redemption.”
“Didn’t you say you were Catholic? Shouldn’t you believe that too?”
“I’m into Catholicism mainly for the guilt.”
“Don’t you think you deserve something other than guilt?”
“No,” he said. “In fact, I cling to the guilt. That might be the one thing that separates me from my father. The fact that I have the capacity to feel it. Even if it is difficult.”
“Do you feel guilty for kidnapping me?”
A strange bleakness flooded him. “No,” he said honestly. “And that is a concern.”
“But, here we are.”
“Yes. Because whatever I feel, it’s not strong enough to make me want to give you back. You’re mine, tesoro.”
“Yes. You continually remind me of that.”
“Does it bother you? Do I scare you?”
She shook her head. “No. But you have to realize... If I’m yours... I believe that makes you mine.” She kissed him then. He should stop her. He should yell at her and ask her if she had heard the story at all. Tell her not to speak to him again of love. To not kiss him so tenderly when he was trying to make sure she understood that he was a monster.
But he didn’t.
He simply l
et her kiss him.
Let her drag them both to the edge of that place where nothing existed beyond pleasure and need. Where there was no him and no her. No light or dark. Just a brilliant blending of the two.
She had just asked him if he would let himself have something other than guilt.
Well, he would let himself have her.
So he did. All night.
CHAPTER EIGHT
TWO WEEKS IN Diego’s house. Two weeks in his arms. Two weeks in his bed. Liliana hardly knew who she was, and she was all right with it. In fact, she liked this new version of herself better than the old her anyway. She laughed easier, for one. She felt bold.
The night before, at dinner, she had sat on his lap during the meal and fed him meat and cheese with her hands. Then, he had licked her fingers, put her up on the table and licked her everywhere else.
He was strange, her man. Complicated and, yes, filled with darkness. But there was something else too. He needed. He needed her to touch him. Periodically, during the day, she could sense restlessness falling over him, and when she placed her hand on him, she could almost instantly feel that unsettled energy leaving his body.
It always made her think of the boy he had been. The boy who had lit his father’s shop filled with cars on fire. The boy who hadn’t known another way to let his anger escape. The boy who had lost his mother. His softness. His reference point for love.
Diego believed in love because to not believe in it would be a dishonor to his mother’s memory. She understood that.
Just as she understood he thought that he was like his father.
Thought that there was something inside of him that meant love was not for him.
She wanted—more than anything—to change that.
She only wished she knew how.
So she touched him whenever she could. Held him at night while he slept. She was his, and she made sure that he knew he was hers.
Today he had been particularly moody, and she wasn’t sure why.
She was sitting in the library reading a book when he stormed in. He had that look on his face like he might throw her down and ravish her, and she was more than ready. But then he stopped, his posture rigid. “Pack a bag.”