“We aren’t, no.”
Rico hung his hands on his hips. “I never expected to see you mope because you weren’t home with your wife.”
“She’s at her mother’s and I’m not moping.”
“Just because the rest of us are incapable of showing a shred of humanity doesn’t mean you can’t admit to affection for your wife. We can all tell you think your son is the most important thing you ever made.”
“He is,” Cesar said, turning to confront his brother.
Rico hitched his shoulder. “Not the way we were raised to think, but Sorcha would agree. Why do you think I offered to marry her? I knew she’d be warmer with her children than Mother was with us. And Diega? Can you imagine her with a child? She’d eat it. Be honest, you knocked up Sorcha to get out of that marriage, didn’t you?”
“I don’t remember that day,” he reminded coldly. He had a very nice replacement memory, but his original motivations remained a mystery.
Rico snorted, rocking back on his heels. “How about all the days leading up to it?” he challenged. “Remember those? Because you were always going to sleep with her. I knew that the first time I met her, when you looked at me with a promise to kill if I didn’t stop flirting with her. If your interest in Sorcha was only physical, why put off having her? You were keeping her around because you liked her. What are you afraid of if you admit you care for her? That she’ll steal company secrets?”
Cesar fisted his hands in his pockets. “No. I trust her implicitly.”
“Ah, it’s me you don’t trust,” Rico said in a tone of enlightenment. “You don’t want to admit you have a weakness where she’s concerned.”
Not even to himself, Cesar thought grimly, but couldn’t deny it. He was missing more than his son. He wanted his wife. He wanted to taste her skin, feel her against him in bed, hear her laugh. He wanted to watch her hands move as she told him a story.
He wanted to know how things were going with her mum. He was worried that she was being treated badly by the locals and hated that he wasn’t there to protect her.
He wanted to hold her, suspecting he might have made her cry. He wanted to reassure her it would be all right, but would it?
How could he make things right if he didn’t love her? How would he even know what love was? Blood didn’t come from a stone. If the raw material wasn’t present, you couldn’t extract it. What they had was chemistry—
He tipped his head back as realization frothed up in him as quickly as bicarbonate foamed in vinegar.
One element could bond to another, forming something that wasn’t present before. He knew that as conclusively as he knew his lungs took in oxygen molecules that could attach to hydrogen and become the water that made up seventy percent of his physical body.
He and Sorcha certainly generated enough heat to support a chemical reaction.
Hell, love wasn’t a substance anyway. It wasn’t something you found and weighed. It acted like an energy, one with enormous power. Sorcha’s love wasn’t sitting within him, taking up space. It was radiating through him, like light, accelerating his own emotions.
He quite suddenly urgently wanted to be with her. His need to feel her and smell her was magnified, expanding like a supernova, wanting to swallow her into him with the understanding they’d both be stronger for the bonding.
And apparently love had the ability to slow time, because the two days before he’d be home to see her suddenly stretched like an eternity. Would she even be there? A black hole opened inside him as he understood what he’d done to her that day.
If she wasn’t there waiting for him, it meant that he’d killed her love.
If you did love me, you’d understand how painful this is.
He did understand. He felt sick at deflecting what had been the greatest possible gift she could give him.
Moving to his phone, he quickly texted, asking if she was on her way home.
Tom wants to meet us. I’m staying for now.
Cesar’s heart stuttered in his chest.
She’d left him once before, but he wasn’t comatose in a hospital this time. He wasn’t going to let it happen again.
* * *
Everything, from the moment her mother had spilled Sorcha’s heart to being home again, where her mum said things like, “See? Falling in love with your boss isn’t a disaster,” was heart-wrenching.
Cesar didn’t love her. Sorcha told herself to be content with what she had. They were closer than they’d ever been.