She stopped, drenched in mortification. She instinctively knew she wasn’t one to spew vindictiveness like that. Her words had been acidic enough to eat through the gleaming marble floor.
Their corrosiveness had evidently splashed Rodrigo. From the way his face slammed shut, he clearly disapproved of her sentiments and the way she’d expressed them. Of her.
“I don’t know much about your relationship. But his reason for not being at your bedside is uncontestable. He’s dead.”
She lurched as if he’d backhanded her.
“He was flying the plane,” she choked.
“You remember?”
“No. Oh, God.” A geyser of nausea shot from her depths. She pitched to the side of the bed. Somehow she found Rodrigo around her, holding her head and a pan. She retched emptily, shook like a bell that had been struck by a giant mallet.
And it wasn’t from a blow of grief. It was from one of horror, at the anger and relief that were her instinctive reactions.
What kind of monster was she to feel like that about somebody’s death, let alone that of her husband? Even if she’d fiercely wanted out of the relationship. Was it because of what she felt for Rodrigo? She’d wished her husband dead to be with him?
No. No. She just knew it hadn’t been like that. It had to have been something else. Could her husband have been abusing her? Was she the kind of woman who would have suffered humiliation and damage, too terrified to block the blows or run away?
She consulted her nature, what transcended memory, what couldn’t be lost or forgotten, what was inborn and unchangeable.
It said, no way. If that man had abused her, emotionally or physically, she would have carved his brains out with forceps and sued him into his next few reincarnations.
So what did this mess mean?
“Are you okay?”
She shuddered miserably. “If feeling mad when I should be sad is okay. There must be more wrong with me than I realized.”
After the surprise her words induced, contemplation settled on his face. “Anger is a normal reaction in your situation.”
“What?” He knew why it was okay to feel so mad at a dead man?
“It’s a common reaction for bereaved people to feel anger at their loved ones who die and leave them behind. It’s worse when someone dies in an accident that that someone had a hand in or caused. The first reaction after shock and disbelief is rage, and it’s all initially directed toward the victim. That also explains your earlier attack of bitterness. Your subconscious must have known that he was the one flying the plane. It might have recorded all the reports that flew around you at the crash site.”
“You’re saying I speak Spanish?”
He frowned. “Not to my knowledge. But maybe you approximated enough medical terminology to realize the extent of his injuries….”
“Ya lo sé hablar español.”
She didn’t know which of them was more flabbergasted.
The Spanish words had flowed from a corner in her mind to her tongue without conscious volition. And she certainly knew what they meant. I know how to speak Spanish.
“I…had no idea you spoke Spanish.”
“Neither did I, obviously. But I get the feeling that the knowledge is partial…fresh.”
“Fresh? How so?”
“It’s just a feeling, since I remember no facts. It’s like I’ve only started learning it recently.”
He fixed her with a gaze that seeped into her skin, mingled into the rapids of her blood. Her temperature inched higher.
Was he thinking what she was thinking? That she’d started learning Spanish because of him? To understand his mother tongue, understand him better, to get closer to him?
At last he said, “Whatever the case may be, you evidently know enough Spanish to validate my theory.”
He was assigning her reactions a perfectly human and natural source. Wonder what he’d say if she set him straight?
She bet he’d think her a monster. And she wouldn’t blame him. She was beginning to think it herself.
Next second she was no longer thinking it. She knew it.
The memory that perforated her brain like a bullet was a visual. An image that corkscrewed into her marrow. The image of Mel, the husband she remembered with nothing but anger, whose death aroused only a mixture of resentment and liberation.
In a wheelchair.
Other facts dominoed like collapsing pillars, crushing everything beneath their impact. Not memories, just knowledge.
Mel had been paralyzed from the waist down. In a car accident. During their relationship. She didn’t know if it had been before or after they’d gotten married. She didn’t think it mattered.
She’d been right when she’d hypothesized why no one had rushed to her bedside. She was heartless.
What else could explain harboring such harshness toward someone who’d been so afflicted? The man she’d promised to love in sickness and in health? The one she’d basically felt “good riddance” toward when death did them part?
In the next moment, the air was sucked out of her lungs from a bigger blow.
“Cybele? ¿Te duele?“
Her ears reverberated with the concern in Rodrigo’s voice, her vision rippled over the anxiety warping his face. No. She wasn’t okay. She was a monster. She was amnesic. And she was pregnant.
Four
Excruciating minutes of dry retching later, Cybele lay surrounded by Rodrigo, alternating between episodes of inertness and bone-rattling shudders.
He soothed her with the steady pressure of his containment, wiping her eyelids and lips in fragrant coolness, his stroking persistent, hypnotic. His stability finally earthed her misery.
He tilted the face she felt had swollen to twice its original size to his. “You remembered something else?”
“A few things,” she hiccupped, struggled to sit up. The temptation to lie in his arms was overwhelming. The urge only submerged her under another breaker of guilt and confusion.
He helped her sit up, then severed all contact, no doubt not wanting to continue it a second beyond necessary.
Needing to put more distance between them, she swung her numb legs to the floor, slipped into the downy slippers that were among the dozens of things he’d supplied for her comfort, things that felt tailored to her size and needs and desires.
She wobbled with her IV drip pole to the panoramic window overlooking the most amazing verdant hills she’d ever seen. Yet she saw nothing but Rodrigo’s face, seared into her retinas, along with the vague but nausea-inducing images of Mel in his wheelchair, his rugged good looks pinched and pale, his eyes accusing.
She swung around, almost keeled over. She gasped, saw Rodrigo’s body bunch like a panther about to uncoil in a flying leap. He was across the room, but he’d catch her if she collapsed.
She wouldn’t. Her skin was crackling where he’d touched her. She couldn’t get enough of his touch but couldn’t let him touch her again. She held out a detaining hand, steadied herself.
He still rose but kept his distance, his eyes catching the afternoon sun, which poured in ropes of warm gold through the wall-to-wall glass. Their amalgamated color glowed as he brooded across the space at her, his eyebrows lowered, his