Lost and Found Groom by McLinn, Patricia (most difficult books to read .TXT) 📗

frightened, even when he put them in an airplane and flew them far away where strangers with a strange language treated them in hospitals. This should be a snap after that.”

“Those children had nothing.” The words came out in low, uneven spurts. “Food, clothing, the hope of health–Taumaturgio brought them those things. I understood those kids. But Matthew . . . he’s perfect. He’s strong and well-fed and clean and . . . loved. I can’t give him anything he needs. He has everything.”

Her reaction came immediately and from somewhere deeper than thought.

“He doesn’t have a father.”

He looked at her, his dark eyes fierce, as if her words had pushed aside the doubts of a moment ago. “He does have a father. What he doesn’t have is a family. That’s what I want to give him. That’s what I want us to be.”

“Visitation and–”

“No. Not visitation.” He straightened away from the wall and took her hand in both of his. The motion brought him close enough that she felt the temperature around her rise and she drew in a scent her pulse recognized as his. Until this instant, she hadn’t realized she’d carried that scent with her these past three years, that it had lived in her memory or her senses or her heart.

The deep murmur of his voice captured her attention.

“Marry me, Kendra.”

“Wh–What?”

“Marry me.” He cupped her cheek with his palm. “We’ll be a family with our son.”

He’d touched her this way during the hurricane. The gentle strokes of sensation against her skin. The comforting, stirring touch that had opened the flood of desire in her. At first the need to celebrate, to validate that they still lived. But even at the time she’d known the other times they’d made love could not be so readily defined or limited.

There’d been something deeper, wider–

No . . . Whatever had happened on Santa Estella had been with Paulo, a man who’d never existed. Daniel Delligatti, the man who stood before her now, was not the same man . . . even if her body reacted as if he were. She knew nothing about him.

“No . . . No! Marry you? That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard.”

It had to be his touch that had allowed even those fleeting thoughts, those memories of better-forgotten sensations to pass through her mind.

She moved away from that heat and temptation. But stepping back resembled retreat. She pivoted and took a seat in the end chair. Her knees might have been a bit unsteady.

“Do you remember the hurricane, Kendra? Do you remember when the roof collapsed?”

Yes, she remembered. That was the danger.

“We made a pledge, Kendra.”

“A pledge?” She tried a laugh that rasped against her throat. “We didn’t make any pledge. We didn’t even speak the same language.”

Without releasing her gaze, he advanced the two steps to her chair. He took her hand again and, before she could resist, he brought it to his chest, and opened it, so her palm absorbed the rhythm of his heart. Her pulse remembered that rhythm, adapting to it, amplifying it, until it drummed in her ears.

“It’s a pledge I intend to keep, Kendra.”

“That storm–that storm wasn’t real life.” She pulled her hand free, and he dropped his hands to his side, still standing in front of her. “That person wasn’t really me. Like being drunk or . . . being drugged. In an altered state. Not reality.”

“Is that what you think?”

Why should she sense danger in that quiet question? Why should those soft words make the hair on her arms stir?

She defied him and her reaction.

“Yes.”

He tipped his head back, letting the light from the ceiling fixture stream down on him, highlighting his strong nose and sharp bones, dropping shadows into the lines around his mouth and at the corners of his eyes. Lines born of squinting into the sun, lines of laughing, lines of concentrating. On life and death.

He nodded once, as if agreeing with his own thought, then slowly leveled his gaze on her. She didn’t shrink back. She sat there, solid and steady, ignoring the stirring of fine hairs not only on her arms but up the back of her neck.

He leaned over her, close now but his face less readable because the angle of his head shadowed them both from the light. Closer. Ever closer, his hands resting on the back of her chair. Close enough that he could kiss her if he wanted, his lips brushing against hers or taking her mouth deeper, taking it completely, and she would have nowhere to go to evade him. Nowhere . . .

“The storm drugged you?”

How could such a question feel seductive? How could it fire images and sensations into her mind and body? She swallowed, but she stayed still.

“Yes.”

“Ah.” His soft breath stirred the hair at her temple. His gaze locked with hers. “All over the world, people are drugged to make them give up a truth they would give up no other way. That is what the storm did to you, Kendra. To us.”

He didn’t wait for a response, but straightened and pivoted away in one easy motion, his triumph complete. He’d outtalked her and outmaneuvered her and outreasoned her.

Only as the sound of the door closing informed her he’d left did Kendra realize it had not been triumph she’d seen in his eyes.

Not triumph at all, but pain.

*

The phone in his motel room rang, pulling Daniel from sleep to alertness before the first ring finished. Only one person he knew who’d be calling him here–Kendra.

He’d pushed too hard, too fast last night. Acting, when waiting might have been wiser.

He intended to give Matthew the family he deserved, but it had been much too soon to hit Kendra. He’d already seen how she’d retreated that afternoon–so what had he been thinking?

Obvious answer: He wasn’t thinking.

The phone rang a second time.

If she was calling him–he checked the clock–before eight-thirty, maybe he hadn’t blundered after all.

“Hello.”

“Daniel? This is Robert. Your brother.”

Robert invariably identified himself that way. Daniel wondered if Robert doubted Daniel would recognize his voice from one infrequent phone conversation to the next, or if Robert needed