He opened them, his breath hissing out and curses in several languages filling the stillness of the room.
“You know it doesn’t do any good to swear in Chinese if I can figure out what you’re saying from your tone of voice.”
“But you don’t know the words I’m using and they aren’t something I would ever repeat in your company.” His jaw clenched, though, as he obviously bit back more angry epitaphs while he went through the pictures. Pain sliced through him.
She wished he’d just go ahead and swear. He was vibrating with anger. She wasn’t sure why, though. The pictures were a stack her agent had sent to her family when she’d gotten so far underweight. They showed her progression from too thin to dangerously starved. They were the reason her family had been waiting for her in the house in California that fateful day.
“Loving you is dangerous for me.”
“Only when I did not recognize my love for you.”
“I almost died, Miguel. Our baby did die.”
“And you blame me as much as you blame yourself…perhaps more.”
“No. Maybe. I don’t know. I just know that I don’t want to love you.”
“You do not have a choice.” His hands gripped the armrests tightly, like he wanted to touch her but had to hold back. “I’m more sorry than I can say that I hurt you,querida, but if I have learned one thing in the last six months, it is that love does not come to order. And finally, I am grateful for it because I cannot live happily without you. We will find our way together again.”
“We won’t.”
“We will. Give me time…show me your new home, share your days with me. Give us a chance.”
“I’m scared.”
“So, am I.”
She stared at him.
He shook his head, still red rimmed eyes boring into her. “Do you think after seeing those photos I am not terrified right out of my arrogance?”
“I don’t understand.”
“Tell me what you would feel if I walked in front of a bus and you came to the hospital to find me on the verge of death.”
Her heart stopped. “Don’t say things like!”
“Exactly. Those pictures scare the hell out of me because they show me how fragile your life was, how fragile it could be again. I will not let that ever happen again.”
“Only I can stop it.”
“I will help you.”
She wanted to believe him and the desire shocked her spitless. She wanted to trust him? “I’ll show you around Boston…a little.”
He smiled at the caveat.
“No sex.”
His eyes filled with pain. “Understood.”
She stood firm that first day, and the next, and the one after that, but he remained…a permanent fixture it felt like…in her father’s home. Miguel was there for breakfast; he was there at the office offering to take her to lunch; he was there when she came home. He shared their family dinners and treated her parents with a friendliness that belied any early animosity between them.
And it felt frighteningly right.
She kept her promise and showed him Boston…or at least a little of it. Their easy camaraderie returned when they played tourist and she looked forward to those times because they didn’t force her to think too hard. Not like when he told her that he loved her…which he did two or three times a day. Each time, it touched something inside she didn’t want touched. Made her feel things she thought she would never experience again.
On the fourth evening, her father took her mom out to dinner and the theater. That relationship was definitely moving forward and while Amber still found it almost mind-blowingly strange that those two should make a couple of it, she was very happy for them.