Modern Romance Books September Books 5-8. Annie West

the plate.

      ‘You can’t eat most of this stuff,’ she chided.

      ‘The old witch isn’t around to supervise. Gave her a few hours off. Didn’t want her hovering and glowering.’

      ‘Gladys is one of the nicest people I have ever met.’

      ‘Hmph. Got the kind of thing I thought you’d enjoy, my dear. Your mother always had a soft spot for pastries. Used to enjoy watching her eat them. Delicate as a cat, licking her fingers one by one.’

      Sofia stilled because this was one of those rare occasions when her mother had been mentioned.

      Blushing furiously, she helped herself to what was on offer, very much aware of her father using a walker to return to his favourite chair, chatting about this and that, telling her about all the amazing changes Rafael had already initiated in the company.

      It left her with a burning desire to bring the conversation back round to her mother but not quite knowing how she could achieve that.

      So much the coward, she thought...too scared to let go of past resentments yet too scared to confront them.

      ‘You were talking about my mother.’ She interrupted him mid-sentence, before immediately frowning down at her half-empty china plate. She had poured them both cups of tea and hastily she gulped a hot mouthful, then darted a look at David to find him staring thoughtfully back at her.

      ‘Not if it upsets you, my dear,’ he said gently. ‘And I know it does. You don’t enjoy raking over the past any more than I do and I apologise if I inadvertently said anything to upset you.’

      ‘You haven’t.’ She was beetroot-red, but now that she had embarked on this she couldn’t jump ship. ‘I... I want to talk about it. It’s been festering inside me and I want to know why you dumped my mum. You and Rafael think that I can just shove the past away into a box and pretend it never happened, but she was never the same after you walked out on her. She was...she became...a mess as time went by.’ She looked away but it was taking everything she had inside her not to start crying.

      She cringed as he heaved himself out of the deep chair using his walker, and made the few steps towards her, sinking onto the blue velvet sofa and patting the side for her to join him.

      ‘My dear, I have no idea what you’re talking about,’ he said, bewildered. ‘I never dumped your mother. It was the other way around!’

      ‘That’s not true,’ she whispered.

      ‘You have to listen to me, Sofia. I was called away on urgent family business all those years ago. A life-and-death situation that left me no time to contact your mother, so I left word with a friend and colleague, the only one who knew the details of our relationship in its entirety. I told him to explain to your mother what had happened. I left a letter, all sorts of forwarding details. Told him to tell her that I would be back, that she must wait. I had the ring, my dear. I had dreams.’

      Sofia stared. ‘But—but that can’t be right,’ she stammered. ‘No, you have to be lying...mistaken...’

      ‘I kept the ring. I have it. I never put it on the finger of the woman I stupidly married because I was hurting. I still look at that ring.’

      ‘But you dumped her... Jon James told her that you couldn’t face telling her yourself but it was over. He told her to leave the hotel immediately before it became a public scandal. He said that there would be no references if the whole truth came out. She left and never looked back.’

      The silence settled over them.

      Restless in her own skin and thoughts all over the place, Sofia was dimly aware that she was asking questions, and lots of them, voice jerky and shaking as she pieced together a tale of a jealous colleague who had lied to both parties because the woman he wanted, her mother, had rejected his advances. Jon James, it turned out, was long gone but he had left behind a legacy that had outlived him because he had played with the truth and told enough lies with sufficient conviction to make sure he destroyed what could have been.

      As proof of David’s unrequited love, she was eventually shown the ring her father had bought for the woman he had intended to marry. It was ornate, engraved, and her mother would have loved it. She’d always had a soft spot for the garish.

      Sofia stared at it for such a long time that she felt as though she was freezing on the spot.

      ‘I should go,’ she said, eventually. When she looked at him she saw the man she had slowly been accepting over time—a strong, kind man who would have made her mother happy.

      ‘I want you to have the ring,’ David said. ‘It was only ever mine on loan, waiting for its rightful owner, and that rightful owner should now be you.’

      ‘But I already have a ring. And, besides, this is a marriage in name only...’

      ‘Then hang on to it, my dear, until the real thing happens. All these misunderstandings...a terrible waste, a terrible shame, and yet to know that I was loved. It’s a comfort, just as it would be a comfort for you to take what was destined for your dear mother.’

      In the dim recesses of her brain, Sofia felt that she should want to telephone her aunt immediately and share this tumultuous development, but the person who beckoned to her as confidante was Rafael, and she was waiting for him when he returned to his apartment a scant half-hour after she had arrived back.

      He paused in the doorway and her heart leapt in her chest as she stared at him, drinking in the lean lines of his body and that oddly endearing state of semi-dishevelment in which he returned every evening: tie off, shirt cuffed to the elbows, staging a war against the waistband of his handmade trousers, black hair tousled.

      ‘You’re back.’ He looked at her narrowly while absently hanging his tie over the banister.

      ‘It’s been...it’s been draining,’ Sofia whispered, moving towards him and not caring what he thought as she stepped into his arms. After just the briefest of hesitations, he wrapped his arms around her and breathed into her hair.

      ‘Tell me.’

      ‘I feel terrible,’ she all but sobbed when she had recounted every detail of the afternoon, leaving nothing out. Somehow, without letting her go, they had worked their way to the kitchen and he broke apart to pour her a small amount of brandy in a goblet.

      ‘Drink this,’ he urged. ‘You’ve had a traumatic afternoon and there’s nothing better for a bout of trauma than a swig of brandy.’

      ‘I don’t want you to let me go,’ Sofia confessed in a raw undertone, creeping back into his arms and sipping some of the fiery liquid before setting the glass down on the kitchen counter.

      She didn’t care what he thought of that statement. She just knew that his arms around her filled her with a sense of well-being and a feeling of rightness.

      This was where she belonged, she thought wonderingly. Just like that, her mind flashed back to all the times they had spent in one another’s company. She had summed it all up as two people uniting between the sheets but now she recalled the conversations they had had, the laughter they had shared, and now this...

      Wanting him and only him at a time when she had needed soothing.

      She loved him and she didn’t know how that had happened or when. She just knew that all her thoughts were of him. He was in her head from the moment she opened her eyes to the second she closed them, and she couldn’t imagine a time when he might not be there. David had said to hold on to the ring for a time when the real marriage happened. What a joke!

      Could he ever love her? It happened, didn’t it? People got accustomed to someone and love crept up and ambushed them, wiped out all their cynicism, took them by surprise...

      She would never tell him how she felt because she knew that he’d run a mile.

      But there were other ways of reminding him that she was a part of his life and perhaps more invaluable