“But you were marrying her because of the will, weren’t you?” she asked. She didn’t know why she was asking that. Matías clearly cared about Liliana. If he didn’t he wouldn’t be so distressed. And something about that galled her. But she hoped that he didn’t love her. Which was small, and terrible, and she had no right to think such a thing.
“But I intended to make it real,” he said. “I’m not a man given to love. You must realize that. Or perhaps, at your age you do not. Love was never part of the equation for me. But a wife, children, all of that I would have. Why not?” He shook his head. “It was all too easy, and that I should have realized.”
“How long do you have?”
“Only a couple of weeks,” he responded. “Diego is smart. Because by whatever means he accomplished it, he has married her.”
“Perhaps he hasn’t. Maybe all of it’s a lie.”
“No. He would have no reason to lie about that. Because he would know that it would only spur me into action. Better to keep quiet if he hadn’t made arrangements to marry her.”
For some reason, she didn’t know what she was thinking, she reached out across the space between them and touched the top of his hand. And then she drew back as though she had been burned.
Scrambling out of her chair, she stepped toward the fireplace, trying to move herself into the darkness, as if that response wouldn’t make all of this even more out of the ordinary.
That he wouldn’t see the effect he had had on her. That was the last thing she needed. To introduce something so horrific into the equation. He was coping with the fact that his fiancée had been taken by another man—whether by force or by seduction, she felt at this point either was devastating—and eventually they would have a horse to train, to make it to the races.
If she ruined it now by being so stupid...
“Dios mio,” he said, his voice harsh.
She looked over at him, and his face was frozen, a mask of rage, his dark eyes glittering in the firelight.
He stood, gripping her by the arms and drawing her close. “What is your part in this? All this time... Were you a part of this treachery that was committed against me?”
MATÍAS CURSED HIMSELF. He called himself every kind of fool imaginable.
She was a woman.
It was so clear now that he was looking at her. Now that she was standing there, bathed in firelight.
How could he not have seen it? How could it have escaped his notice until now? It was all painfully clear, here in the firelight, in this quiet house with shock coursing through his veins. With that soft touch echoing over his skin, a ripple on the surface of the water that should not have been there.
Then Cam had taken a step backward, and something about the way the light had caught that stubborn face, that strong bone structure, had suddenly revealed what he had missed all this time.
His stable boy was not a boy at all.
And he had spoken to her so openly, freely. As though she were an extension of the wallpaper in the room, because to him she might as well have been. A boy who worked for him was beneath his notice. But this...a liar. A treacherous woman.
He would not have spoken to her so.
“Answer me,” he said, tightening his hold on her arms.
Definitely her arms.
It was so apparent now. She did not possess the frame of a young boy, not really. But of course, when he had held her yesterday after her injury he had been thinking only of her safety, not of the way that she was built.
She was strong. Of course she was. She had become so working with horses, he assumed, but it was not the strength of a rangy youth.
She was soft. And no amount of hard labor could disguise that.
He examined her face, and it struck him with full force. As though he had been looking at one of those trick images and had seen one version of it, only to be shown the other. And now he could not go back to seeing the first. Her face was square, her chin strong, her dark brows thick, and in a very basic sense those things lent her a masculine quality.
Combine that with baggy clothes and the disguised female figure, and he supposed at a glance anyone could be forgiven for mistaking her for a boy.
But not now that he was looking at her. Really looking.
Her cheekbones were too fine. That strong bone structure in her face the kind that supermodels would envy, the kind that with makeup would give a dramatic effect of hollows and angles.
It was not a soft beauty. And in many ways, perhaps it would not be considered beauty by most.
He had no idea what to think as he felt like she had just sprouted a second head. Anger. He felt anger. Because he could not cope with being tricked by two people, not in the same moment. Three, if he counted the treachery of his brother, who did not even have the cojones to make a phone call himself.
Of course, if anyone but Liliana had been on the other end of the line he simply wouldn’t have believed it.
“Did you help my brother gain access to this place? Are you a spy? Is that why you were sent here?”
Suddenly, it all made more sense. The way the boy—no, she was not a boy—the way she had asked him questions. About why he didn’t hire women. About why he needed to marry. She had been gauging the situation. Of course she had been.
He had been infiltrated. And everyone involved would pay.
“I was not,” she said. Her eyes were glittering now, and he noted that she denied nothing. He had leveled no specific accusations against her beyond the possibility of her being a spy, had said nothing of her gender, but it fascinated him to see her nearly transform beneath his touch. It seemed as though her face had softened, her voice slightly higher now. “It had nothing to do with your brother or Liliana. I had nothing to do with that.”
“If that is so, then why are you here?”
“I came because of the horses. That much was true.” She swallowed hard, looking up at him, those dark eyes filled with unshed tears now. “I’m Cesar Alvarez’s daughter. Those horses were mine, and I would do anything to be back with them. Surely you must understand that. It had nothing to do with you. It was all for them. All for me.”
He wasn’t sure if he believed her. If she was truly motivated by her love for the horses. Because what he knew about Cesar Alvarez was that the man had been in incredible debt.
His daughter would have no money to her name at all and would most definitely be susceptible to a man like his brother.
“I swear to you,” she said, her expression getting desperate, “I had nothing to do with Liliana or Diego. I don’t know your brother. I’ve never interacted with him. I came here for my own purposes. Because I would do anything for those horses. To make sure that Fuego’s purpose isn’t squandered. The horses are all I have left. My mother has gone off to Paris. You can check on that and see that it’s true. You can check my phone records, anything that you want, and they will prove that I never spoke to your brother. I have been in contact with no one since I came here, and nobody knows that I’m here.”
She seemed to regret making that admission to him. Seemed to regret letting him know that were she to disappear here on this mission, no one would be any the wiser as to where she had gone. He wondered then if he looked as frightening as his father used to look when he was in a rage.