Billionaire Boss MD

But during the flight, in answer to some innocuous comments, he got nasty then abusive. She held her tongue and temper, knowing it wasn’t the place to escalate their arguments, but she decided that once they landed, she’d face him, as she’d faced herself, and say that their relationship wasn’t working, and it wasn’t because of his turmoil, but because of who he was. A man of a dual nature, one side she’d loved but could no longer find, and the other she couldn’t bear and seemed was all that remained.

But they hadn’t landed.

Now she heaved as the collage of the crash detonated in image after shearing image, accompanied by a hurricane of deafening cacophony and suffocating terror.

Then the maelstrom exchanged its churning motion for a linear trajectory as all trivial memories of every day of the year before the accident burst like flashes of sickening light, obliterating the blessed darkness of the past months.

Everything decelerated, came to a lurching stop.

Her face was being wiped in coolness, her whole self bathed in Rodrigo’s concern. She raised sore eyes to his reddened ones.

His lips feathered over them with trembling kisses. “You remember.”

“My end of things,” she rasped. “Tell me yours.”

The heart beneath her ear felt as if it would ram out of his chest.

Then he spoke. “When I saw you at that fundraiser, it was like seeing my destiny. I told Ramón that, and he said that if anyone else had said that, he would have laughed. But coming from me, I, who always know what’s right for me, he believed it, and to go get you. But as I moved to do that, all hell broke loose. You rushed to that man’s aid and I was called to deal with multiple neuro-trauma cases back here. I asked Ramón to find out all he could about you, so I could seek you out the moment I came back.

“I tried for the last almost eighteen months not to reconstruct what I instinctively knew and didn’t want to-couldn’t face. But the more I knew you, the more inconsistencies I discovered since the accident, the more I couldn’t pretend not to know how it all happened anymore. Mel was there, too, that initial day. He was right behind me as I turned away from Ramón. He must have overheard my intentions. And he decided to beat me to you.”

She couldn’t even gasp. Shock fizzled inside her like a spark in a depleted battery.

“And he did. Using money I gave him to gain his new position, he put himself where he’d have access to you. For the six weeks I stayed away performing one surgery after another, all the time burning for the moment I could come back and search you out, he was pursuing you. The moment you accepted his proposal, he called me to tell me that he was engaged. He left your name out.

“The day I rushed back to the States to find you, he insisted I go see him first, meet his fiancée. I can never describe my horror when I found out it was you.

“I kept telling myself it couldn’t have been intentional, that he wouldn’t be so cruel, that he couldn’t be shoving down my throat the fact that he was the one who’d gotten you. But I remember his glee as he recounted how it had been love at first sight, that you couldn’t get enough of him, and realized he was having a huge laugh at my expense, wallowing in his triumph over me, all the while dangling you in front of me until I was crazed with pain.”

“Was that why…?” She choked off. It was too much.

“Why I behaved as if I hated you? Sí. I hated everything at the time. Mel, myself, you, the world, the very life I woke up to every morning in which you could never be mine.”

“B-but you had so many other lovers.”

“I had nobody. Since I laid eyes on you. Those women were smoke screens so that I wouldn’t sit through our outings like a third-wheel fool, something to distract me so I wouldn’t lose my mind wanting you more with each passing day. But nothing worked. Not my efforts to despise you, not your answering antipathy. So I left, and would have never come back. But he forced me back. He crippled himself, as I and his parents always warned him he one day would.”

A shudder rattled her at the memory. “He said I made him lose his mind, drove him to it…”

He looked beyond horrified. “No. Dios, Cybele…it had nothing to do with you, do you hear? Mel never took responsibility for any problem he created for himself. He always found someone else to accuse, usually me or his parents. Dios-that he turned on you, too, accused you of this!” His face turned a burnt bronze, his lips worked, thinning with the effort to contain his aggression. She had the feeling that if Mel were alive and here, Rodrigo would have dragged him out of his wheelchair and taken him apart.

At last he rasped, “It had to do with his own gambler’s behavior. He always took insane risks, in driving, in sports, in surgeries. One of those insane risks was the gambling that landed him in so much debt. I gave him the money to gamble, too. He told me it was to buy you the things you wanted. But I investigated. He never bought you anything.”

So this was it. The explanation he’d withheld.

“As for the stunt that cost him his life and could have cost yours, it wasn’t his first plane crash but his third. He walked away from so many disasters he caused without a scratch that even the one that cut him in half didn’t convince him that his luck had run out and the next time would probably be fatal. As it was.”

For a long moment, all she heard was her choppy breath, the blood swooshing in her ears, his harsh breathing.

Then he added, “Or maybe he wanted to die.”

“Why would he?” she rasped. “He believed you’d put him back on his feet. He said you were very optimistic.”

He looked as if he’d explode. “Then he lied to you. Again. There was nothing I could do for him. I made it absolutely clear.”

She squeezed her eyes shut. “So he was really desperate.”

“I think he was worse than that.” His hiss felt as if it would scrape her flesh from her bone. “I think he’d gone over the edge, wanted to take you with him. So I would never have you.”

She lurched as if under a flesh-gouging lash.

Rodrigo went on, bitterness pouring out of him. “Mel always had a sickness. Me. Since the first day I set foot in the Braddocks’ house, he idolized me and seethed with jealousy of me, alternated between emulating me to the point of impersonation, to doing everything to be my opposite, between loving and hating me.”

It all made so much sense it was horrifying. How she’d found Mel so different at first, how he’d switched to the seamless act of emulating Rodrigo. So it had been Rodrigo she’d fallen in love with all along. It was unbelievable. Yet it was the truth.