At first, he wasn’t sure he’d heard the whispered words, let alone understood where they came from. Had she said them? Had he? Were they words in his head he wanted to say or hear? In the end, did it matter? If they were a dream, he’d take them any way he could get them.
“Lo siento mucho, mi amor.Por favor, perdóname.” A soft rain of tears followed the plea for forgiveness. “No me dejes, Fanso.”
Weakly, he reached for the hands cradling his head in her lap. “I will never leave you, Leeza. Even when I wasn’t with you, I never left you.”
The rain became a storm. A downpour of Spanish—most of which he couldn’t understand because she was crying so hard—flooded his ears with apologies, recriminations, and regrets.
“You have nothing to be sorry for,belleza.”
It was as if his nickname for her made it worse. Now he could understand nothing she was spewing, and he could feel her grief as palpable as the floor beneath them.
Head swimming, vomit rising to the back of his throat, he mustered every ounce of energy he could as he struggled to sit up. He slid his ass back until he met the wall of their prison, then gathered her to his side.
His memory flashed back to the day they’d lost Tobias. The pain. The anguish. Every heartrending moment of it was back, as painful as when he had experienced it then. If anything, it hurt worse because then he’d been in the initial stages of disbelief. Now, he knew it was truth. He’d spent years trying to bury it so deep that the memory was no more than scar tissue. But the rewind in his brain stabbed at the wound, reopening it and pouring all its poison out over his soul again.
“No more,” he ground out. Using his last bits of strength, he curled his free arm around Daleyza’s waist and hauled her over his lap so she straddled him.
“What are you doing?” The first clear words to come out of her mouth in the last two minutes.
She tried to scramble off his lap.
A primal growl came from him, and his exhaustion became a wounded beast all on its own and clung to her somehow, keeping her close, his head tucked under her chin and pillowed on her chest, his arms locked around her waist.
“Do you know what I’ve dreamed about over the years? Us. You. Me. Tobias.” His voice broke on his son’s name. “I dreamed of holding you as you held our son, but we weren’t touching. It was as if an invisible barrier kept us forever separated, yet still sharing thesame space. It should have been like we are in this moment. Holding each other together as we broke apart.”
She sniffled. “I’m so sorry, Fanso. I didn’t mean to?—”
“No.” The denial came through strong. “It’s not you who should be sorry or ask for forgiveness. It’s me. It’s my fault.”
If he didn’t tell her now, there might not be another opportunity. “It is I who is sorry,belleza. My inability to open up to you has always been what kept us from making that final connection, leaving you to feel as alone as you did before we met. We were married. We were lovers. We lived together. We shared a son. But you never believed we were a true united front because I never told you. Afraid that if I gave you the one thing you wanted, above all else, my family would find some way to use that against us.
“So I kept it inside, locked away, because if I told you, even if you didn’t say a word, you would shine so bright with the knowledge that it would end up destroying you.” He swallowed hard. “I love you, Daleyza. From the moment I lifted your veil, you had my heart.
“My whole life, my father and brothers treated me differently because I was the son of my father’s mistress. From the moment I was born, it was undeniable who my father was. Put pictures of us side by side throughout my life, and I’m a carbon copy of him. Rather than wear that as a badge of his indiscretion, he claimed it was because my mother was his true love, not his wife’s sons. I was favored by him, but a bastard. I was hated by my brothers, but they could do nothing about it openly because he favored me.
“He meant for our marriage to tie me to him. Give me someone to be responsible for, so I’d be less likely to run away again. He knew my sense of honor would not allow me to abandon you, and he was right. I couldn’t.
“But what no one realized was that marrying you also allowed me to claw my way out of the fiction they’d buried me in. When our son was born, I made a vow to get you and Tobias out of that life. Even if it cost me everything. Even if you never loved me, I would make sure you were safe from them… and from me.”
“Fanso,” she whispered. “There was nowhere safer for us than with you. It wasn’t your fault. You did everything you could.”
“But it wasn’t enough,” he murmured against her skin.
“Sometimes, whatever we do, it never will be. You could have had an army of a hundred men behind you that day, and we might have still lost him. But I never, ever blamed you. Only the man who shot him.”
He pressed his mouth to her neck, gently forcing her to stretch the cords and allowing him to suck at the skin she opened to him. He tasted salt, sweat, and traces of her perfume mixed with the grit from where they’d been tossed. Feeling her surround him, even in these dire circumstances, was a gift he’d never imagined.
How did he make her understand that they needed to stand as one?
“The day Tobias died, I held you. You, letting go of your sorrow. Me, holding everything in. My arm was around you, but we were like two separate people, simply sharing the same space. I hate that memory. I’ve always hated it. And I hated the position we were in, figuratively and literally.
“No more,belleza. As we are now, we are together. Intertwined with each other, not beside one another. Even if this is the end, and it’s only for the few remaining hours we have, never again will we sit separately while we break.”
He felt her arms clutch his head to her chest, her tears renewing with his demand. “Together,” she whispered.
Her hands rested against his cheeks, pulling his head from the crook of her neck. He couldn’t see her, but he felt every point of contact where they touched, as if he could see her as clearly as if she were standing in a spotlight. Then her lips were on his—tender, affirming—offering a promise stronger than any wedding vow.
No matter what came from this point on, no matter how close or how far in the future, they were no longer just themselves. They were part of something far greater. Something he’d never understood until he lost her, and never had until now.
