“She talks too much, that Dolores.”
“She didn’t mean any harm, Antonio.”
He sighed. “No,” he said after a moment, “no, I suppose she did not. It is true. I had a mother and a father. But they did not raise me.”
“Why? What happened to your parents?” Kyra felt Antonio stiffen beside her. “I’m sorry,” she said quickly. “It’s none of my bus—”
“My father was in South America on business.” He shrugged. “I have the story only secondhand, from my grandmother. He and my mother met…” He shrugged again. “Perhaps he never knew he had made my mother pregnant. She gave birth to me and it was the last anyone in the village saw of her.”
Kyra’s throat constricted. “Oh, Tonio,” she said softly, “how awful for you.”
His arm dropped away from her. “I do not tell you this to ask for pity,” he said coldly. “I tell it to you only because—because you asked me about my family”
She had not asked him; he had volunteered. It was a subtle difference, yet Kyra knew it somehow held a world of meaning. But there was no time to think about it, not just now. Now, she was too busy forcing herself not to put her arms around Antonio and tell him there was nothing wrong with feeling compassion, especially when you loved someone.
She cleared her throat. “I see.”
But she didn’t see, not at all. Who had raised him, if not his parents? Had he been given into the care of relatives? Had he been handed over to an orphanage? Whatever had happened, she was almost painfully relieved she hadn’t told him about a father who’d tried to think for her or about the three big brothers who’d always made her a mascot but never a member of their silly clubs.
All of it was true, all of it had shaped her life…but how petty it would sound to a man whose childhood had lacked the love and warmth of people who cared about him.
Kyra longed to ask a dozen questions, but the set of Antonio’s face warned her that this wasn’t the time. Instead, she put her hand on his arm, and when he looked at her, she rose toward him and kissed his mouth.
“I wish I’d known you when you were a little boy,” she said softly.
Antonio looked at her for a long moment. Then he gathered her into his arms so tightly that she could hardly draw breath.
”Querida,” he whispered, “come to bed with me now.”
Kyra felt a blush rise in her cheeks. “But—but Dolores…”
He smiled. “She has been on this earth many years. She knows how it is between lovers.”
Lovers, Kyra thought, her heart lifting, lovers It was such a beautiful, wonderful word.
“Say the other name,” he murmured, his mouth inches from hers. “Let me hear it on your lips.”
She smiled. “Tonio,” she whispered, “my Tonio…”
He kissed her, his mouth open and hot against hers, until she was clinging helplessly to him, her hands curled into the front of his shirt.
“Come to bed, querida,” he said thickly. “I need you now.”
“Yes,” she breathed, and he caught her in his arms, carried her through the house and up the stairs to his room. He kicked the door shut, and the night and the stars closed down around them.
Hours later, Antonio stirred and awoke.
It was very late, that time in the darkness when the silence of the night is as heavy as the silence of the soul He turned his head on the pillow and gazed at Kyra, lying curled in the circle of his arm.
Gently, so as not to disturb her, he bent and brushed his lips over hers. She sighed and snuggled closer into his embrace.
It hurt his heart just to look at her. She was so beautiful. He smiled to himself. And so spirited. No woman had ever stood up to him as she had. No man, either. People had been deferring to him for a decade; he was Antonio Rodrigo Cordoba del Rey, and even if someone, somewhere, suspected the truth, that he had created himself out of a boy who had almost not grown up to become a man, that the father whose names he bore had never known or cared about his existence, what did it matter? He was wealthy, he was important…no one dared defy him.
No one but Kyra. She was the only living soul in a dozen years he had told about himself, not all of it but enough. Even the things Jessamyn had known about him had not come from his lips; her father had told her the story of Antonio’s origins and—and—
And Jessamyn had almost destroyed him. Antonio’s smile faded. He had thought himself in love with her. How foolish he’d been! He should have known that the lessons learned in childhood never really change. Love was a lie created by poets for fools to believe in.
Now, at thirty-two, he knew love for the hoax it was. It would be so easy to think himself in love with Kyra. She was beautiful. Vibrant. Exciting. The sound of her voice, the scent of her skin, aroused a hunger in him that could not be sated. And she had given him the gift of her virginity.
He was touched. He was happy. But he wasn’t stupid enough to try to call what he felt “love”.
He looked at her again, asleep in his arms. A fist tightened around his heart. No, he thought, no, this was not love. They would enjoy what they had for as long as it lasted. A week. A month. And then…
Kyra murmured in her sleep, sighed, and rolled onto her back. Antonio waited, then hiked himself up on one elbow. Slowly, he drew down the light blanket and let his eyes skim her lush, lovely curves.
The hunger that swept through him didn’t surprise him. What followed—the throat-catching tendernessdid. He fought against the desire to waken her, to take her in his arms not to stir her to passion but to see her smile as her eyes focused on his face, to feel the warmth of her against his skin.
He frowned, drew the blanket over her again, and eased his arm out from beneath her shoulders. He rose from the bed, walked to the partially opened French doors opposite, and stepped out onto his balcony.
The night breeze carried the tang of the sea on its warm breath. He shut his eyes, remembering another scent, the almost overpowering smell of camellias that he had, for years, identified with Jessamyn.
Por Dios, what was wrong with him tonight? He had put Jessamyn out of his heart years ago yet tonight he couldn’t get her out of his head. Antonio sighed. Perhaps it was best to let himself remember every detail. That might put the memories to rest once and for all.
A Peace Corps volunteer had plucked him from his village and a life in which he had fought for scraps like a street mongrel and brought him to a Jesuit missionary school where three meals a day, a roof over his head, and a corner to call his own had been like a little piece of heaven.
At seventeen, he’d been told that he’d won a scholarship to an exclusive American university.
A week later, he was in Boston.
He knew no one, spoke stilted, textbook English and a Spanish dialect almost incomprehensible to others. He was almost always broke. And he had an attitude that made it clear he had a very large, very precariously balanced chip on his shoulder.
One of his professors, a Boston Brahmin with a bloodline as pure as his family fortune was large, had taken pity on him. In a burst of egalitarian generosity, he took Antonio under his wing.
Within weeks, Antonio found himself absorbed into the bosom of the man’s patrician family.
Or so he thought.
He blossomed. He learned to smile, to talk, to share, to let others see what the Peace Corps volunteer and the missionaries had seen—the bright mind, the clever wit lurking just under the sullen exterior.
And, inevitably, he fell in love with the professor’s daughter.
Her name was Jessamyn. She was blond and terribly sophisticated. Antonio confined himself to sidelong glances and sweaty dreams. The professor was his mentor, he had no wish to do anything that would presume on the man’s kindness.
But Jessamyn made such lofty ideas impossible. She touched his thigh under cover of the dining-room table; on the frequent occasions that he spent the night in the room opposite hers, she “forgot” to close her bedroom door as she prepared f
or bed.
Eventually, Antonio took what was so blatantly offered. In his naivete, he assumed Jessamyn loved him just as he was sure he loved her. He added a second job to the one that was already necessary to supplement his scholarship money, saved enough to buy her a ring with a stone even he knew was painfully small, and promised himself he would someday replace it with the perfect diamond she deserved.
That was what he told her when he proposed.
Jessamyn laughed in his face.
Antonio shut his eyes against the night, the sea and the pain of that memory.
“Marriage?” she’d said. “To you? Antonio, darling, surely you know that could never happen!”
And then she lifted up her skirt, put his hand on her flesh, and shuddered with pleasure.
He left school the next day, made his way back to South America, and traded the price of the nng for the equipment he needed. Then he trekked into the jungle for months of backbreaking labor on a mining claim that was the butt of a hundred different jokes.
A year later, he knew he had never really loved Jessamyn. He was also a millionaire ten times over.
After that, he had his choice of women, all of them with blood as blue as Jessamyn’s. It was interesting how a man’s bank account could ultimately matter more than his lineage. Any one of his conquests would have married him, but Antonio only smiled, took what was offered, and moved on.
And then, one night in Colorado, a woman with hair the colors of autumn had flashed him a look that carried a message he had almost forgotten. Unlike the others, she hadn’t cared that he had money, and power. Her silver eyes had said it all.
“I know who you really are,” those eyes had said, “and what you are. And try as you like, you can’t have me.”
But he had had her. Antonio drew a harsh breath of the sea-scented night air. He had made love to Kyra Landon, and now, and now—now, he didn’t want to let her go…
“Antonio?”
His heart lifted at the sound of that sleepy voice. He turned and found Kyra sitting up against the pillows, the blanket at her waist. The waning light of the ivory moon lay pale on her face and breasts.