Cassie felt as if she were swimming through a dark, clouded sea, getting nowhere, or perhaps going round and round in circles. She couldn’t see where she was going and so she couldn’t begin to guess which way was right and which was wrong.
Had she got this all wrong? Was it possible after all that Joaquin had actually meant his proposal of marriage? That he really didn’t want her to go? But if that was the case, then why had he couched it in those appalling terms? There had been no real warmth, no hint of affection or even care in those coldly casual words.
‘I see it as the only way to hold onto you. You claimed you were happy with what we had—but you obviously were not. I was content with the way things were—’
‘And that was…?’
Wasn’t it obvious? the scathing glance he turned on her demanded. Did he have to explain?
Well, yes, he did, so she remained stubbornly silent until he was forced to speak again.
‘We had a great thing together—the best. You know what it was like that last night.’
‘The—’
Cassie’s stomach heaved nauseously as she struggled with the word, forcing herself to say it.
‘The sex.’
‘Of course. What else, amada?’
His tone turned the last word into something that was exactly the opposite of the ‘beloved’ it actually meant.
‘I wanted you from the start—and you never disappointed me. I still want you. But I want you all to myself. I’m not prepared to share you with any man—even my brother. If marriage is the price of that, then I’m prepared to pay it.’
‘You’d marry me—even though you believe I’ve been with Ramón all this week?’
Joaquin’s casually dismissive shrug was even more appallingly unfeeling than the callous way he had declared he wanted her sexually and nothing more.
‘It’s only a week. I can forget a momentary aberration if it’s nothing more than a few days. But after this—no more! You will be mine and you will not give Ramón even a second look.’
Cassie knew that she was staring. She even suspected that her mouth was gaping slightly in stunned horror, but she couldn’t shake herself out of the almost catatonic state into which his cold-blooded declaration had thrown her.
He couldn’t mean this! He just couldn’t!
He had to be joking—but then, if he was, it was the most dreadful, sick form of black humour imaginable. It was vicious and cruel and totally hateful.
‘So what’s your answer?’
‘My answer!’
Pushed beyond endurance, Cassie felt that her head might explode. But at least his taunting tone drove the tears away, drying them in an instant. She welcomed the tiny flame of rage that lit inside her, fanning it until it flared into a healthy blaze.
‘What do you think my answer is? What would any sane woman answer to such a travesty of a proposal? I don’t know how you even dare to think I might have to consider it.’
Wasn’t that enough for him to get the message? But looking into the bleak darkness of his eyes she saw that no, it wasn’t. He was actually waiting for her response. Waiting for her to say something more—to give him an answer to his hateful suggestion.
‘My answer is no! No! Never! No way! Not in my lifetime! I wouldn’t marry you if you were the last man alive on this earth and the future of the human race depended on it.’
Drawing a deep breath, she locked her blazing blue gaze with his cold jet one and repeated, with insulting slowness and clarity, ‘My answer is no—I will not marry you!’
In the deathly silence that fell as her words died away she tensed instinctively, waiting for the explosion that she was sure was to come. An explosion of anger, or protest, or rejection—she wasn’t sure which. But she was positive that there was no way at all that he was just going to take that and leave it, without coming back at her in some way.
So she was stunned when once again he just shrugged his shoulders in nonchalant dismissal.
‘Fine. Okay, if that’s your answer.’
‘It is.’
She sounded as breathless as if she had been running for hours, the words escaping on shaken gasps.
‘Believe me—it is.’
‘Well, in that case, then, I won’t stay around.’ His tone was as stiff as the muscles in his neck and jaw, drawing his mouth tight and hard. ‘I’m sure—just from looking at you—that you’re expecting my brother any moment now, and it would probably be best if I wasn’t here when he arrived. Buenas noches, Cassie.’
This time Cassie knew she was really gaping, but she couldn’t stop herself. She just didn’t believe what she was seeing as he turned on his heel and marched towards the door.
‘Joaquin…’ she managed, not really knowing what she meant to say.
But her voice had no strength and Joaquin didn’t hear her. Or if he did he ignored her and kept on walking, his head arrogantly high, the broad shoulders and stiff, straight back expressing eloquently his total rejection of her without a word needing to be spoken.
He didn’t look back either, but then she had never expected that he would. And she couldn’t move, the aftereffects of shock and the wild emotional storm that had raged through her leaving her shaken and weak, unable even to think.
She let him go. Let him walk through the door, and watched it slam closed behind him, the terrible, unfocused, dreary sense of inevitability swamping her mind so that there was no room for anything else.
It was a dreadfully bitter irony that now, at last, Joaquin had done what she had wanted most in all the world. He had told her that he wanted her; that he didn’t want to lose her. He had even proposed marriage, for heaven’s sake!
But it hadn’t been for heaven, had it? Instead it had produced Cassie’s own personal form of hell. A hell in which by apparently offering her everything she had ever wanted, a future with him, he had shown that the real truth of the way he was feeling was the exact opposite of what she truly needed.
He wanted her. He didn’t want to lose her. He thought of her as ‘his woman’—but he didn’t love her. He would marry her, but only as a way of possessing her. The offer of marriage had been only to ensure that she had no relationship with his brother.
His brother!
‘Ramón!’ Cassie muttered aloud, the name bringing her out of the trancelike shock and into action again.
Joaquin still believed that she was having a relationship with his brother! He thought that he had left her here awaiting the arrival of her lover—of Ramón!
She couldn’t let that continue; couldn’t let him go on believing that his brother had made a move on ‘his woman’ while, ostensibly at least, Joaquin and Cassie had still been together. It was the sort of thing that Joaquin’s pride could never tolerate. The sort of thing that no man with any sense of honour would do to a friend, let alone a member of his own family.
Joaquin would never speak to his brother again if he continued to believe that was what had happened. And Cassie could not be the cause of anger and division between the two brothers. She knew that they had had a difficult enough time getting to be friends in the past. Joaquin had seen his half-brother as evidence of their father’s adultery, his unfaithfulness to his wife, and so had had to struggle to accept both the younger man and then the other, half-English brother Alex who had appeared later. She had to make sure that Joaquin knew the truth. She couldn’t live with herself if she didn’t at least try.
‘Joaquin!’