“How?”
“She was with him. And he is alive and well, though he will not tell his version of the story. The truth is he was high and he ran their car into a cliff. The side that Karina was on. And he left her there. He escaped the car, leaving his pregnant mistress to die slowly. Leaving my child to die slowly inside of her. Karina was not innocent—that much is true. But she didn’t deserve that. My child was innocent, Liliana. The only innocent in that entire tangled web. It can’t be escaped. This darkness in me. It doesn’t matter what I do. If I touch it, it dies. I might as well be a murderer.”
“How? How can you possibly come to that conclusion?”
“She preferred the sort of man who would leave her in a car to die over me.”
“I hate to speak ill of the dead,” Liliana said, “but your wife sounds like an idiot of the highest order. Her bad decisions have nothing to do with you.”
“And yet she’s gone. And my child...”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry about your child. And I’m even more sorry that everyone blames you because of your father.”
“They blame me because they know that I must have been a truly terrible husband, whether she died by my hand or leaving me, it doesn’t matter. The evidence of what I am remains. I might as well be a murderer.”
“No,” she said. “You’re not a murderer.”
“A kidnapper. A villain. A blackmailer.”
“You have been gentle with me. You knew that I liked books. You talked to me. You have shown me pleasure. You’ve given me pleasure before you’ve taken your own every time we’ve been together. You have asked me more questions about myself than any person I’ve ever known. Do villains do that, Diego?”
“You are different. You always have been. You... You are the thing that I fear most, Liliana. And yet, I still couldn’t stay away from you. That tells you everything that you need to know about me.”
She frowned. “You are afraid of me?”
“You are that rare piece of light. You remind me of my mother in that sense. Make of that what you will.”
He was trying to make it sound sordid in some way. Trying to take what they had and reduce it. She wasn’t going to let him. “Say what you mean, Diego. Stop making menacing, leading comments. You might as well tie me to the train tracks if you’re going to be this much of a cliché.”
“Why I was drawn to you,” he said. “You remind me of what it’s like to have a light shine in the darkness. But I also know what happens in the end. The light is consumed. And I know what I am.”
“I know what I am,” she said. “And what I am is much stronger than I thought it was. I’m not just a creature created to atone for someone else’s death. I’m not a weak-willed socialite. I am not your kidnapped victim. I’m not Liliana Hart. I’m Liliana Navarro and I am not afraid of you.”
“You should be,” he said, his voice rough. “I consume all that I touch. I destroy beauty. I break delicate things.”
“No. That’s giving yourself way too much power. You’re an angry boy who has never learned to let go of the pain in his past. But that doesn’t make you damaged beyond repair. You think that you were born a certain way and there’s nothing you can do about it. You think that Matías was magically gifted with something that you can never have. That isn’t true. It’s not. You have a choice, and you can make it.”
“A choice to do what?” he asked, his tone dripping with disdain. “What choices do I have in my life? The choice to keep you prisoner for the rest of forever? The choice to date until I fall in love and settle down in a suburb somewhere and have children with my lovely wife? What choices? I learned what men are capable of when I was a boy. I have seen the very worst end to a relationship that exists. I hate my father. And I hate even more the fact that he looked at me and saw not only his blood, but a soul he seemed to understand. I have tried to overcome it. And I will not try again.”
“But you wanted to stay married to me.”
“I wanted to own you, Liliana. I never wanted to love you.”
His words fell flat over the top of all the pain already roiling around inside of her. They didn’t surprise her. Not at all. He was so very committed to this. To this idea that he could not overcome what he was. And again, she saw, with a startling clarity, exactly why. Exactly what he was doing.
He was protecting himself. He had always done that. From the time he was a boy he’d had to. He had endured hideous loss, and the loss of his wife... Of his child... He talked about it now with a kind of defiance, a certainty that it was the darkness in him that had caused it, but she recognized it as the same kind of blame she had taken on herself for her mother’s death all her life.
She had always known that she wasn’t truly the cause of her mother’s death. But there was a comfort in taking on the mantle of that blame. It gave her a purpose. And most of all, it gave her protection. It allowed her to hold herself separate from the world around her. In her case, it had allowed her to justify the fact that she let her father tell her what to do. And by giving her father that kind of power she took away all responsibility for herself. She didn’t take risks. She didn’t make choices. She read books. She observed life rather than participating in it.
And because of that, she never had to risk anything.
Diego was doing much the same, but he didn’t have a father to tell him what to do. He simply had one who had given him a monster’s blood. And he could blame that monster for anything. For everything. And it kept him from ever loving and losing someone again. Yes, she could see him.
That angry, scared little boy who wanted to burn everything down. It was what he still did.
He was afraid. Afraid of being hurt. Afraid of loss.
But he wanted her. And that was the thing. He hadn’t been able to stop himself from taking her. And whatever justification he was using for that now, she could see the truth. He was caught between wanting to protect himself, protect her and keep her locked away on his island.
Whether it made sense or not, her touch did calm him. She made him... Maybe happy wasn’t the word. She didn’t know if she had ever seen Diego truly happy. But he was settled within himself when they were naked, lying in bed together. More at peace with the demons in his soul than he was otherwise.
If she could make him happy, it would be the most amazing thing.
She was strong. And he was good. And those were the two things he did not seem to be able to believe. He was afraid he would break her. But she would not be broken. Moreover, while he might possess the strength to destroy her, he never would. She trusted that. She doubted her father had spent one moment worrying about the darkness in him. Doubted he had ever agonized over the ways in which he had harmed his wife. Yet Diego took on the guilt of every sin committed not only by that man, but by his wife’s paramour. That was not the act of a bad man.
He had sparked something in her from the moment they had first met. It had been like finding another piece of herself. She couldn’t explain why. How something could be so strong and instantaneous with no evidence behind it. But since then, it had proved only to be the truth. He was a man separated from the world by his own fear. A man who had experienced everything, while she had experienced very little. But that common bond of loss, of wrapping themselves in a shield so strong and tight the world could never touch them, remained. “You’re my light,” she said. “Don’t you understand that?”
“No,” he said.
“It’s true. I was just drifting along in the gray. Maybe it wasn’t the blackest night like you’ve experienced, but it was a haze. I didn’t know who I was or what I wanted. And you gave me this... This chance at freedom that I had never once imagined for myself. You shone a light on all these hidden places inside me. You made me understand passion. You are not darkness, Diego. Not in my world.”
“You understand nothing.”
“I understand everything that I need to. Diego...”
“Don’t talk,” he said. “Not anymore. Do not forget who it is you’re dealing with.”
“A man who wants to watch the world burn so that it will all go away and he can be safe from it?”
“If you insist on keeping your mouth so busy, perhaps you could do it in a fashion that I might find more pleasurable.”
She found herself being pushed to her knees in front of him, and she realized what he was doing. The exact same thing he had been doing earlier when he had gone to seek out Camilla before the wedding.
He was trying to put her in her place. And put himself in his. That preferred role of villain, rather than a man who seemed as if he no longer knew who he was or where he fit into the world.
Lost. He was lost. Beneath all that certainty, all of his hardness, he was a man so desperately lost and alone who needed someone to take his hand.
But if he couldn’t accept that yet, then perhaps she could reach him by taking hold of another part of him.
She knew that he expected her to get angry. That he expected her to fight back.
She refused. She would show him just how strong she was.
She lowered her head, her hair falling into her face. Then she looked up, reaching her hands toward his belt and undoing it slowly, then moving to the rest, making quick work of the button and zipper, drawing them partway down his hips before reaching inside his underwear and curving her fingers around his hardened length, drawing him out toward her.
“How could you think this would be anything but my pleasure?” she asked just before she closed her lips around him. He was intoxicating. Masculine and beautiful, and essentially Diego. The man who had become her entire world so very quickly. He forked his fingers through her hair, and pulled at her for a moment, as if he was trying to get her to stop. But she knew the moment that he gave up, surrendered, guiding her head rather than trying to pull her away. A rough groan escaped his lips, and she took pleasure, pride, in the fact that she was reducing this man to nothing. He thought he was so very strong.
He thought that he could break her.
But she was going to break him. Utterly. Completely.