Lynne Graham's Brides of L'Amour Bundle

‘Anya wanted to visit you and Roel and apologise but I fouled up to such an extent with you that I thought it would be wiser to let the dust settle first,’ the blonde man confessed heavily. ‘I threatened you and I frightened you. Believe me, that is not how I usually treat women—’

‘I’m sure it’s not,’ Hilary said soothingly.

‘When Roel realised that it was my fault that you had disappeared into thin air, he hit the roof and I don’t blame him—’

‘That wasn’t your fault—’

‘Don’t try to make me feel better,’ Paul groaned. ‘I interfered in something that I should have stayed well back from. In retrospect it was obvious that there was a whole dimension to your relationship with Roel that I knew nothing about. But I went galloping in arrogantly convinced I was coming to his rescue. Roel needing rescue?’ He loosed an embarrassed laugh. ‘As if…’

‘Wires got crossed. That’s all. It’s all over and done with now. Actually I came to see you today about something entirely different,’ Hilary confided, striving to mask her unhappiness with a façade of calm. ‘I need a lawyer to write up some legal stuff for me and to do it fairly quickly.’

When she gave a brief outline of her requirements, Paul could not conceal his dismay. ‘A document of that nature would present me with a conflict of interests. I can’t represent you and Roel. You need independent legal advice.’

Stiff with discomfiture, Hilary got up from her chair. ‘OK.’

‘Off the record…’ Paul Correro hesitated and then pressed on with open concern. ‘As a friend, and I would hope that some day you will be able to regard me in that light, I would advise you against following this route. I’m very much afraid that Roel might misunderstand your motives and be hurt.’

On the drive back to the town house, Hilary conceded that Paul was a very nice bloke. He was the polar opposite of Roel and therefore totally incapable of appreciating how a male of Roel’s ice-cold intellect and emotional reserve operated. No matter how hard she tried she could not think of Roel and the concept of hurt in the same statement. In her opinion, Roel had shown himself inviolable. She was the one who kept on getting hurt.

Now she was asking herself why she had decided to go to such elaborate lengths to disprove Roel’s conviction that she was a gold-digger in the first place. Why did she still care? He didn’t love her. He thought the very worst of

her. Even the sight of her at his breakfast table offended him. It was hard to believe that just a few days ago she had been so happy with him. Even harder to accept that she had believed this was a rough patch that they could survive.

The trouble was that, when it came to Roel Sabatino, she had always been willing to settle for too little. And, deservedly, too little was what she had received. There came a time, though, when she had to be mature enough to stand up for herself, take account of her own needs and bow out of a destructive relationship.

Roel would never tell Emma the truth about their marriage. Indeed, she marvelled that she had ever swallowed that outrageous threat whole. Although he did his utmost to hide it, Roel was very honourable, but he would never parade that reality because he saw it as a weakness. Perhaps she had seized on that threat as an excuse to be with Roel when she’d been desperate to have that excuse. But now it was over and she was lifting her pride back out of the closet where she had hidden it. He was an unhealthy addiction and it was time she got over him.

The car phone buzzed. It was Roel and the very sound of his rich, dark, accented drawl was sufficient to tip her teeming emotions over the edge. ‘Please don’t ask me how I’m feeling because I know you don’t really care,’ she heard herself condemn. ‘I’m leaving you and I hope that you and your precious money live happily ever after!’

She sent the phone crashing down and trembled, shaken by what had erupted from her own lips. But it was the truth and he had deserved to hear it. He had flung her love back in her teeth for the last time. She was going to pour all her love over their child instead. The phone buzzed. She ignored it. Her mobile phone sounded out its tune and she switched it off. There was nothing more to say.

Half an hour later she was in her bedroom packing when the door crashed back on its hinges and framed Roel. ‘You can’t leave…I can’t go through that again!’ he swore with vehement force.

Caught unprepared by that turbulent entrance that was so uncharacteristic of the calm, controlled male she knew, Hilary stared at him. He was ashen, his proud cheekbones tight with tension. Fierce dark eyes locked to her. ‘Have you any idea what it was like for me the last time?’ he demanded. ‘Don’t you know what I went through?’

Numb in the face of a display of more emotion than he had ever shown her he possessed, Hilary shook her head slowly in dumb negative.

‘Santo cielo! That first week before I regained my memories just about killed me. One minute you were there and the next you were gone and I hadn’t a clue why. You walked out on our marriage and left me a four-line-long apology like you’d cancelled a dinner date,’ he breathed in raw wonderment. ‘It was unreal. I didn’t even know where to find you. I almost went out of my mind with worry!’

Hilary was aghast at what he was telling her. ‘I never thought…I didn’t even suspect that you would feel like that—’

‘It should have been you who told me the truth about our marriage.’

Recognising the justness of that censure, she hung her head. She had been a coward and she had made excuses for herself. But what all those excuses came down to in the end was the simple fact that she had chosen to save face at his expense. How too could she have been so insensitive that she had not foreseen how her disappearance would affect him?

‘I had complete trust in you.’ Roel ensnared her troubled gaze when she would have evaded his scrutiny. ‘Admittedly that was my only option at first. But our relationship developed fast and I let my guard down with you. I believed we were a couple. I learned to think of you as my wife. Then it all blew up in my face.’

Hilary’s throat ached. Ever since he had brought her back from London she had refused to consider how much her own behaviour must have contributed to his angry and cynical distrust. She was ashamed. ‘I must have seemed very selfish to you…but I honestly didn’t think you’d miss me that much—’

Roel released a humourless shout of laughter. ‘Inferno! What do you think I am? A block of wood?’

‘Ice,’ she countered unevenly. ‘Very self-contained and disciplined and proud of it too.’

His beautiful mouth twisted. ‘I was brought up to be strong and well warned never to make myself vulnerable with a woman. Their failed marriages embittered my father and my grandfather. By the time Clemente changed his tune, it was too late for him to influence me. That was why he made that insane will. It was his last-ditch attempt to persuade me that if I would only make the effort and take the risk I could rewrite family history and end up in a happy marriage.’

‘Well…’ her nose wrinkled as she fought back the awful tickle of threatening tears ‘…so much for that hope but at least the castello is still in the family.’

‘I want you to know that I was already on my way home to see you when Paul contacted me—’