A Price Worth Paying - By Trish Morey Page 0,47
saw it was almost noon and didn’t even have to feign surprise. Her cup rattled against the saucer as she sat up urgently, still clutching the bedclothes to her. ‘I need to call the hospital and check on Felipe.’
‘I already have. He is resting comfortably.’ He tossed her a robe—his robe, she realised, and it was all she could do not to lift it to her face and breathe in his scent. ‘I thought you’d want to visit so I said we’d be in to see him before lunch.’
She shrugged the robe around her shoulders, strangely touched, finding the armholes. ‘You didn’t have to do that.’
‘You don’t want to see your grandfather?’
‘No, I mean you didn’t have to call. I didn’t expect you to.’
He shrugged, looking out of the window at the view. ‘You were asleep. I thought you would want to know. Do you have a problem with that?’
‘Aren’t you worried I might think you were actually capable of being nice?’
She was half joking, but he didn’t seem to take it that way. He blinked. Slowly. ‘Whatever you think of me, I am not a beast. I am certainly capable of extending common courtesy where it is merited. Besides, don’t you think it would look odd if I did not ask after my new grandfather-in-law?’
He turned and stared at her for a moment, one wholly unsettling moment under an intensely dark gaze, that had her putting a hand to her unruly hair and imagining he must be wondering what he’d done to be stuck with her.
Then he crossed to the bed, lifted her chin and kissed her briefly on the lips. A peck, nothing more.
‘Besides,’ he said, her chin still in his hand, his eyes still searching her face, ‘you know better than to read too much into it.’
He left her then to get up, leaving her utterly bewildered and baffled, and yes, sore when she made a move to get out of bed. So it was all part of the act of being a dutiful husband to his granddaughter? Nothing more than common courtesy?
Still, he hadn’t had to call. He didn’t need to impress anyone now. The deal had been made and they were married. There was no getting out of it for her. He didn’t have to be thoughtful. And yet he had been.
She padded barefoot to the bathroom and wondered anew about the man she had married. The man who was now not only her husband, but her husband in every sense of the word.
Their deal was temporary, their marriage fated to last a few months, no more. But after a night like last night, when Alesander had blown her world apart and then bothered to kiss it back together again, he seemed almost the perfect package. And at times, almost a man she might even think about choosing for her husband—in some parallel universe where they had met under different circumstances without the history of deal-making and blackmail that lay festering between them.
Damn, damn and damn!
What was he doing to her, that she could even think of wanting him for her husband? Was she so blinded by his lovemaking that she had forgotten that this was nothing more than a business arrangement? Was she so blindsided that she had forgotten the sheer terror of a missed period?
She should never forget that feeling, not if she wasn’t to be taken in again by someone who didn’t care for her—who had never loved her—who she never wanted to see again.
Still cursing, she slipped out of the voluminous robe and stepped into the shower, lifting her face up into the spray.
Why had Alesander insisted on having sex? Why had he had to complicate things when their arrangement had been fail-safe? She’d known sex would complicate things. Sex always did.
But the land hadn’t been enough for him and sex was the price he’d exacted from her.
A price she’d agreed to.
And no matter how mind-blowing the sex and the redemptive power of a potent kiss, was it a price worth paying?
The hospital let Felipe go home the next day, but only, they said, because Alesander had arranged a nurse to be there around the clock for him. But, they warned, it would not be for ever.
Still, Felipe seemed positive after the wedding. At least for a few weeks.
Winter was closing in around the vineyard, the leaves falling from the vines when she found him sitting in his usual chair, looking out over the near barren vineyard, his eyes half shuttered.