They were finally able to leave the door and move into the crowd that had spilled out to the lawn and open-sided tents. The orchestra paused so his father could make a toast, welcoming Sorcha into the family.
She smiled, looked as radiant as Cesar had called her earlier, but ethereal. Insubstantial. Her eyes were shiny and the strain behind her expression suggested she was quietly miserable.
And that misery felt like a knee to the groin. He was pleased to introduce her as his wife. Proud. Despite the costs to his family and the impact on their relationship with Diega’s, he had concluded his son was worth it. Once they lived properly as husband and wife, he would no doubt be more than satisfied.
Was she not pleased to call him her husband?
They started the dancing and she was a mannequin in his arms, not the receptive woman from earlier, but a stick figure that held him off.
He reflexively turned himself inward. Aloofness was his comfort zone, but it was difficult to maintain when the promise of physical intimacy had been bending the barbed wire he kept in a perimeter around his inne
r self.
“I should check on Enrique,” she said as the song finished.
He realized she was trembling and tightened his hands on her, trying to still the odd vibrations rolling off her.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, surprised to sense he was being rejected—which was an extraordinary enough circumstance without the heavy dose of reacting to it with a feeling of injury that weighted his insides.
“Nothing.” Her smile was such a blatant lie, it was a slap across the face. “Excuse me.”
He did not follow anyone and beg for affection. He let her go.
* * *
The nanny looked up from where she was reading a book in the sitting room. Enrique was sleeping in the cot next to her.
“I have a headache,” Sorcha choked with a weak smile and pointed to the bedroom, then closed the door behind her.
Sinking onto the foot of the bed, she wrapped her arms across her middle and told herself not to cry.
“Oh, God,” she whispered, more racked with fear and pain than she had been while in labor. Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God. She rocked, trying to ease the agony ripping upward like a tear from the very center of her being into her heart, rending and leaving jagged edges as it climbed to score her throat.
She was going to lose him. This time, when she told him about her father, there would be no sidestepping for a prettier angle. They might have grown closer than they’d ever been over their few weeks of marriage, but she hadn’t found the right way to explain what a pariah she really was.
Was Diega enjoying telling him? Sorcha hadn’t been able to wait and watch him realize what he’d married. Had she honestly imagined it would never come out?
She would have to face his disdain now.
Cesar had gone to school with him. Tom. Her husband’s friend was part of the evil, awful— He didn’t even know who she was! He had never even cared enough to look up a photo or find out his half sisters’ names.
Why would he? They were trash.
Don’t cry, she begged herself, pushing her bent knuckles against her trembling lips.
The door clicked and her husband stood in the opening for a long moment, observing her. His scowl might have edged toward concern, but her eyes blurred and she couldn’t tell.
She rose, wobbling in her shoes as she moved to the box of tissues. Plucking several from the holder, she dabbed her face, trying to stem the pressure beneath her eyes, but tears leaked onto the crumpled tissues, staining them with mascara and eye shadow.
“I did tell you,” she said, like it counted for anything that she’d confessed to being illegitimate. That was a far cry from whatever was being whispered about her downstairs. Tom was one of them and she already knew how quickly she would be exiled as not.
She was right back to that moment of walking across the schoolyard, when everyone had stared. The headmistress at the door had given her a cold look and someone had whispered, “Bastard.”
Her sister had held her hand in a sweaty grip while Sorcha had sought out her best friend, Molly. She’d seen Molly every single day since they’d both been in nappies, but Molly had only mumbled, “Mum says I shouldn’t be friends with you anymore.”
Sorcha had survived it and had stopped caring that people had refused to serve them, but the fact Cesar was going to react the same way had her stomach churning.
“Maybe I should have foreseen this could happen,” she said, voice traveling through razor blades all the way up from her lungs. “You’re both titled. I don’t know why I’m shocked you’re acquainted, but I honestly didn’t mean to—” She sniffed.