“You need to kiss it,” Maya had insisted. So he had.
He was going to be a magnificent father. She knew that deep in her bruised heart.
She believed he wanted to be a supportive husband, too. That was why he was trying to keep her safe. He did care about her. He had demonstrated that in countless ways, but she had let her insecurities get in the way. She had jumped straight to being used because it was easier to believe that was where her worth to him lay than that he valuedher.
She was still devaluingherself. Acting as though she was silly Dorry Whitley, whom people saw as a conduit to power and money, when Dorry Whitley was actually a powerful badass in her own right. Everyone online was saying so.
Joaquin had let her go, though. The same way he had let Esperanza go when her feelings grew deeper than he was comfortable accepting.
He didn’t love her.
Or did he?
What do you want me to do? Tell you I love you and beg you to stay here until I get back. You’re better off as far away from me as you can get.
Had hewantedto beg her to stay? And only pushed her away and left because he felt such an urgent need to protect her from his father? She knew what that man was capable of. She had kissed the scars on Joaquin’s skin.
Was she going to make him beg for her to come back? She should have stayed and showed him love really was a healingforce. That it was safe to love her because she would stand by him no matter what.
Oh, God. She had made a terrible mistake.
Joaquin brushed past the tired-looking maid who opened the door of Lorenzo’s Madrid town house and walked straight into his father’s den.
Lorenzo was in his recliner, holding a cigarette and glass of brandy. He didn’t lower the footrest, only squinted at Joaquin through the smoke.
The smell was both pungent and stale. Sickeningly familiar, bringing back too many memories of being called on the carpet for beratement or punishment.
Joaquin refused to think of that now. He was as cold and detached as the man before him.
“I wondered why you were diddling your assistant. Do you really think threats from her family will scare me?”
“They should.” Joaquin set his phone next to the ashtray and sat on the chair beside his father’s. “You’re threatening an innocent woman who has nothing to do with you or me.”
“She left you? That’s too bad.” His father puffed smugly on his cigarette.
A deep, aching emptiness had opened in his chest on his way here. Joaquin had never been so terrified in his life as when he had watched Siobhan flip that man into the water. Then he had seen her pulling away from him because she believed he had betrayed her.
I thought it was safe to love you, but it’s not.
When she had said those words, they had lashed the back of his heart in the most painfully sweet way. All of him had stung as he absorbed something that ought to feel foreign. Threatening, even. Instead, his response had borne a strong resemblance to asoft, new tenderness that had been germinating inside him. He had wanted to catch her close and explore that, but no, loving him was not safe.
Until he left his father in a pile of his own ruin, Siobhan would never be safe.
So he had let her go, even though he had thought it might kill him. Even though walking out on her could break all those tiny threads that had begun to bind them together.
This had to be done. This bully would not rest until his ass was in the dirt and that was where Joaquin would put him, once and for all.
“I want the proceeds off the patent for the relay I designed.”
Lorenzo snorted. “Cash running low now you don’t have the backing of the Sauveterres?”
Joaquin didn’t bother correcting him on his very healthy bank balance. “Would you rather I sued you to prove I’m the rightful owner? That you stole that design from me?”
“Who would believe you? You were a child.”
“And yet I did it.”
“With the education I paid for.”
