Javier tried to stare her down but she held firm. He let out a savage breath. ‘My father told me he loved me but it didn’t mean a thing. It was conditional, if anything. He wanted me to be a puppet. As soon as I wanted to choose my own path, his love was cut off.’
‘That was wrong of him,’ she said. ‘Parents should never withhold their love, not for any reason.’
He made a scoffing sound in his throat. ‘My father loved his wives, all four of them, and they apparently loved him back, but look where that ended—an early death and two, almost three, very expensive divorces.’
Her brow wrinkled with a frown. ‘So what you’re saying is you don’t believe love can ever last?’
‘It’s not a reliable emotion, Emelia. It changes all the time.’
‘I’m not sure what you’re saying in relation to us…’
‘The things that make a relationship work are common ground and chemistry,’ Javier said. ‘A bit of mutual respect doesn’t go amiss either.’
Her expression was crestfallen and he felt every kind of heel as a result. Was he incapable of loving or just resistant to being that vulnerable to another person? He couldn’t answer with any certainty.
‘Don’t push me on this, Emelia,’ he said into the silence. ‘Our relationship has been through so much of late. This is not the time to be saying things neither of us are certain is true.’
‘But I know I love you,’ she said. ‘I know it with absolute certainty. I loved you from the first moment I met you. I didn’t tell you because I knew you didn’t want to hear it. But I need to tell you now. I can’t hold it in any longer.’
He pinned her with his gaze. ‘You speak of loving me and yet you were leaving me, Emelia, or have you not remembered that part? You had given up on our relationship. You wouldn’t be here now if you hadn’t been injured and lost your memory. You would be back in Australia. You were in that car with Marshall because he was driving you to the airport.’
Her teeth sank into her bottom lip until it went white.
‘Why don’t we wait until all the pieces are in place before you start planning the future?’ he said when she didn’t speak. ‘Unless we deal with the past, we might not even have a future.’
‘You…you want a divorce?’ Her voice sounded like a wounded child’s.
‘I don’t believe we should stay shackled together if one or both of us is unhappy,’ he said. ‘We’ll give it a month or two and reassess. It is early days. You’ve only just come out of hospital after a near-fatal accident. You’re damned lucky to be alive.’
Her mouth went into a pout. ‘No doubt it would have been much better for you if I had been killed.’
Javier ground his teeth as he thought about that moment when Aldana had informed him there was a call from the police in London. His heart had nearly stopped until he had been assured she hadn’t been fatally wounded. ‘My mother died when she was three years younger than you are,’ he said. ‘She didn’t see my first day at school. She didn’t hear the first words I learned to read. I didn’t get the chance to tell her how much I loved her or if I did I was too young to remember doing it. Don’t you dare tell me I would rather have you dead and buried. No one deserves to have their life cut short through the stupidity of other’s actions.’
She sent him a defiant glare. ‘Maybe it suits you to have me alive so you can pay me back for daring to leave you. I bet I’m the first woman who ever has.’
Javier drew in a sharp breath. ‘You’re the one who moved the goalposts, not me.’
‘I can’t be the sort of wife you want,’ she said, her eyes shining with tears. ‘I can’t do it any more. I’m not that sort of person, Javier. I want more from life than money and sex and endless hours in the gym or the beauty salon. I want to be loved for who I am, not for what I look like.’
He snatched up his trousers and zipped himself into them. ‘I care about you, Emelia. Believe me, you would not be here now if I didn’t.’
‘Is that supposed to make me feel better?’ she asked. ‘You care about me. For God’s sake, Javier, you make me sound like some sort of pet.’
He sent her a frustrated look as he grasped the door handle. ‘We will talk about this later,’ he said. ‘You are not yourself right now.’
‘You’re damn right I’m not,’ she said. ‘But that’s the heart of the problem. I have never been myself the whole time we’ve been married. I am a fake wife, Javier, a complete and utter fraud. How long do you expect such a marriage to last?’
He set his mouth. ‘It will last until I say it’s over.’ And then he opened the door and strode out, snapping the door shut behind him.
EMELIA went to bed totally wrung out after her conversation with Javier. She lay awake for hours, hoping he might come in and join her but he apparently wanted to keep his distance. She spent a restless night, agonising over everything, ruminating over all the stupid decisions she had made, all the crazy choices to be with him in spite of how little he was capable of giving her emotionally. No wonder she had grown tired of their arrangement. She was amazed it had lasted as long as it had. She had compromised herself in every way possible. With the wisdom of hindsight, she knew that if she’d had better self-esteem she would never have agreed to such a marriage. But, plagued with insecurities stemming from childhood, she had been knocked off her feet with his passionate attention. His ruthless determination to have her in his bed had curdled her common sense. She had acted on impulse, not sensibly.
When she woke the next morning after snatches of troubled sleep she felt the beginnings of a vicious headache. The light spilling in from the gap in the curtains was like steel skewers driving through her skull. She groaned and buried her head under the pillow, nausea rolling in her stomach like an out of control boulder.
The sound of the door opening set a shockwave of pain through her head and she groaned again, but this time it came out more like a whimper.
‘Mi amor?’ Javier strode quickly towards the bed. ‘Are you unwell?’
Emelia slowly turned her head to face him, her eyes half-open. ‘I have the most awful headache…’
He placed a cool dry hand on her forehead, making her want to cry like a small child at the tender gesture. ‘You’re hot but I don’t think you’re feverish,’ he said. ‘I’ll check your temperature and then call for the doctor.’
Right at that moment Emelia didn’t care if he called for the undertaker. She was consumed with the relentless, torturous pain. The nausea intensified and, before he could come back with a thermometer, she stumbled into the en suite bathroom and dispensed with the meagre contents of her stomach in wretched heaves that burned her throat.
Javier came in behind her. ‘Ah, querida,’ he said soothingly. ‘Poor baby. You really are sick.’ He dampened a face cloth and gently lifted her hair off the back of her neck and pressed the coolness of the cloth there.
Emelia brushed her teeth once the nausea had abated. She slowly turned, embarrassed at her loss of dignity. She felt so weak and being in Javier’s strong, commanding presence only seemed to intensify her feelings of feeble vulnerability. She could not remember a time when she had been sick in front of him before. He was always so robustly healthy and energetic, which had made her feel as if he would be revolted by any sign of weakness or fragility. In the past she had hidden any of her various and mostly minor ailments, putting on a brave face and carrying on her role of the always