Billionaire Boss MD

She spluttered at the sight of him, so virile and formidable and poised, making that goofy expression and pop culture gesture.

He headed into the barbecue house and she melted back in her chair, replete and blissful. She’d never laughed like that before him. Before being here with him in his paradise of a home.

He’d only left her side to fly to work-literally, via helicopter-and had cut down on his working hours, to be there for her. She’d insisted he shouldn’t, that she was perfectly all right on her own or with Consuelo, Gustavo and their children.

But she’d stopped objecting, certain he wasn’t neglecting his work, had everything under control. And she couldn’t get enough of being with him. Against all resolutions, she reveled in his pampering, wished with all she had in her that she could repay him in kind. But he had everything. Needed nothing. Nothing but to heal emotionally.

So she contented herself with being there for him, hoping to see him heal. And he was healing. His moroseness had dissipated and his distance had vanished, had become a closeness like she’d never known, as they discovered each other, shared so many things she’d never thought she’d share with another.

She kept waiting for him to do something to annoy her, to disappoint her, as all human beings inevitably did. But the impossible man just wouldn’t. Then he went further into the realm of impossibility, kept doing things that shocked her by how much they appealed to her, delighted her.

He was everything his foster parents had said they’d picked him for and far more. Everything she admired in a human being and a man, and the most effective power for good she’d ever had the fortune to meet. And that was what he was to the world.

To her, he was all that resonated with her preferences and peculiarities. They agreed on most everything, and what they disagreed on, they discussed, came out conceding a respect for the other’s viewpoint and thrilled to have gained a new awareness.

And when she added up everything he’d done for her, had been to her-her savior, protector and support-he was, yes, just incredible.

Which was why every now and then the question popped into her head-where had this man been before the accident?

From the tatters she remembered, besides his reported promiscuity, he’d treated Mel with fed-up annoyance and everyone else with abrasive impatience. His treatment of her had been the worst. He’d barely spoken to her, had watched her with something almost vicious in his eyes, as if he’d thought her beneath his friend-his brother.

And every time there was one answer. The conclusion she’d made the first day she’d come here. Her memories had to be faulty. This, he, must be the truth. The magnificent truth.

“Ready to go back to your keeper?”

Everything became more beautiful with his return. She surrendered to his effortless strength, let him draw her to feet that barely touched the ground because he existed, was near.

She ended up ensconced in his protective embrace. His face clenched with the intensity she now adored, his freshness and potency filling her lungs. And it was as necessary as her next breath that she show him what he was to her.

She moved against his solid heat and power, raised her face to him, the invocation that filled her with life and hope and the will to heal, to be, trembling on her lips. “Rodrigo…”

Eight

Cybele’s whisper skewered through Rodrigo, wrenching at all the emotions and responses he’d been repressing.

From every point where her body touched his, torrents of what felt like molten metal zapped through his nerves, converging to roar through his spine, jamming into his iron-hard erection.

Nothing was left in his raging depths but the need to crush her to his aching flesh, claim her, assimilate her into his being.

And he couldn’t.

But how could he not-and remain sane?

Not that he was sane anymore. He hadn’t been since the first time he’d laid eyes on her. And with every moment in her company, he’d been surrendering any desire to cling to sanity.

He’d plunged into the wonder of experiencing her, discovering her, sharing with her everything from his daily routines and professional pressures to his deepest beliefs and slightest whims.

And she was far more than anything he’d ever dreamed of. She was the best thing that had ever happened to him.

But whenever he was away from her, he kept dredging up the past, the suspicions and antipathies that had at once poisoned his existence and fueled his resistance. He’d wanted to hate and despise her, to believe the worst of her then. Because she’d been the only woman he’d ever truly wanted-and she’d been forever off-limits.

She was no longer off-limits. Not on account of Mel, nor on that of his objections to her character.

He’d moved from condemning her for tormenting Mel with her volatility to suspecting that the instability had been created in Mel’s twisted psyche. Now that he was no longer jumping on anything to paint her as black as possible, and had seen all the evidence to the contrary, it made sense that a man in Mel’s condition could have interpreted her acts of love-which he couldn’t reciprocate in any healthy fashion-as emotional pressure and blackmail.

Later on, after their relationship had deteriorated further under the harsh realities of Mel’s disability, it stood to reason that the money Mel had asked Rodrigo for to buy her things hadn’t been things she’d hinted that she’d wanted. Mel had said he’d understood her demands, that she deserved some compensation to cheer her up in their endlessly trying situation.

But it could have been Mel who’d tried to satisfy any material desire of hers to placate her, to express his love in the only way he’d ever known how, and then to keep her from walking out on him in a fit of despair. And when that, too, had failed, he’d been down to the last thing he could do to prove to her that he didn’t consider her his live-in nurse-give her a baby.

Rodrigo now thought her memory loss was probably her mind’s way of protecting itself from being pulverized by grief if she remembered Mel and the desperate, traumatic love she’d felt for him.

After he’d reached that conviction, he’d fluctuated between thinking she was being so wonderful to him because she subconsciously saw him as all she had left of Mel, to thinking she treated him as she did because she didn’t remember loving Mel, and that when she did she’d become cold and distant again. He’d thought her coolness had been a reaction to his own barely leashed antipathy. But maybe she’d really disliked him, for reasons that were now gone with her memory. Or maybe the injury had caused some radical changes in her personality.