“Please don’t.”
“I must. It is for the best. Tomorrow we will go home.”
And with that, the conversation was over.
In that he was determined.
Chapter Thirteen
HE WAS COMPLETELYinaccessible to her now. Whatever had been building between them had shattered the night that his memories had returned. And she didn’t know what to do. She didn’t know how to reach him.
But he had shut the door so firmly it was impossible for her to even have a conversation with him.
It didn’t make her inclined to go to his bed, and he hadn’t asked. The one night she had woken up, her heart in her throat, she had gone in and peered into his chamber, and had seen him sleeping on the floor.
A prisoner of the past.
And yet he wouldn’t even acknowledge it.
And this was where she decided to do something that she would never normally do.
She decided to call her brother.
Ricardo was the least awful of her brothers. The middle of them, and extraordinarily handsome. He was also very well-connected. A bona fide man-whore who slept with anything that moved, had extracted information from each and every one of his partners.
He was the most terrible gossip in all the world, and all of that information tended to keep him in the lifestyle that he had become accustomed to.
He wasn’t the least bit trustworthy.
Which was exactly why she wanted to talk to him.
“Hola,” she said, speaking quickly to him in Spanish.
“Fernanda? I’m surprised to hear from you.”
“Not that you bothered to check in with me.”
“You become a whole queen. What a boon.”
“I guess.”
“Are you going to invite me to come and visit?”
“That depends. I don’t know that I want state secrets to end up splashed all over the global news.”
“You wound me,” he said, but he didn’t sound the least bit wounded.
“Well, I imagine that you’ll recover. But I do have something to ask you.”
“A favor? You haven’t even spoken to me casually in ages.”
“I was sequestered in a convent, not that any of you ever asked.”
He sighed heavily. “I’m sorry. I find it best never to ask about what our father is up to. There are certain things I don’t want to know, because I don’t want it to be incumbent upon me to keep any secrets for him.”
“That I can understand.”
“What is it you need?” he said, sounding much softer.
