But after she walked back into the house with Imelda and they parted ways, she found herself rushing to the library.
She came out with the book of her choice, feeling agonizingly exposed each time one of the women passed her and commented on her having a book like them.
Then the men came back from the next town, bearing copious amounts of prepared and mouthwatering food. And each man had a red rose for his woman. Rodrigo didn’t have one.
Her heart thudded with a force that almost made her sick.
She had no right to be crushed by disappointment. And no right to embarrass him. She’d give the book to Esteban.
Then she moved, and her feet took her to Rodrigo. Even if she had no claim on him, and there’d never be anything between them, he was the most important man in her life, and everyone knew it.
As she approached him, he watched her with that stillness and intensity that always made her almost howl with tension.
She stopped one step away, held out the book.
“Happy La Diada De Sant Jordi, Rodrigo.”
He took the book, his eyes fixing on it, obscuring his reaction from her. She’d chosen a book about all the people who’d advanced modern medicine in the last century. He raised his eyes to her, clearly uncertain of the significance of her choice.
“Just a reminder,” she whispered, “that in a collation of this century’s medical giants, you’ll be among them.”
His eyes flared with such fierceness, it almost knocked her off her feet. Then he reached for her hand, pulled her to him. One hand clasped her back, the other traveled over her hair to cup her head. Then he enfolded her into him briefly, pressed a searing kiss on her forehead. “Gracias mucho, querida. It’s enough for me to have your good opinion.”
Next second, he let her go, turned to deliver a few festive words, starting the celebrations.
She didn’t know how she functioned after that embrace. That kiss. Those words. That querida.
She evidently did function, even if she didn’t remember anything she said or did during the next hours. Then Rodrigo was pulling her to her feet.
“Come. We’re starting the Sardana, our national dance.”
She flowed behind him, almost hovered as she smiled up at him, her heart jiggling at seeing him at his most carefree.
The band consisted of eleven players. They’d already taken their place at an improvised stage in the terrace garden that had been cleared for the dancers, evidently all of Rodrigo’s family.
“I had the nearest town’s cobla, our Catalan music ensemble, come over to play for us. The Sardana is never the same without live music. It’s always made of four Catalan shawm players…” He pointed toward four men holding double-reed woodwinds. “Two trumpets, two horns, one trombone and a double bass.”
“And what’s with that guy with the flutelike instrument and the small drum attached to his left arm?”
“He plays the flabiol, that three-holed flute, with his left hand and plays that tamborí with the right. He keeps the rhythm.”
“Why not just have twelve players, instead of saddling one with this convoluted setup?”
He grinned. “It’s a tradition some say goes back two thousand years. But wait till you see him play. He’ll make it look like the easiest thing in the world.”
She grimaced down at her casted arm. “One thing’s for sure, I’m not a candidate for a flabiol/tamborí player right now.”
He put a finger below her chin, raised her face to him. “You soon will be.” Before she gave in and dragged his head down to her to take that kiss she was disintegrating for, he turned his head away. “Now watch closely. They’re going to dance the first tirada, and we’ll join in the second one. The steps are very simple.”
Letting out a steaming exhalation, she forced her attention to the circle of dancers that was forming.
“It’s usually one man, one woman and so on, but we have more women than men here, so excuse the nontraditional configuration.”
She mimicked his earlier hand gesture, drawled, “Women rule.”
He threw his head back on a peal of laughter at her reminder, kept chuckling as he watched his womenfolk herding and organizing their men and children. “They do indeed.”
The dance began, heated, then Rodrigo tugged her to join the rotllanes obertes, the open circles. They danced the steps he’d rehearsed with her on the sidelines, laughed together until their sides hurt. Everything was like a dream. A dream where she felt more alert and alive than she ever had. A dream where she was one with Rodrigo, a part of him, and in tune with the music, his family and the whole world.
Then, like every dream, the festivities drew to an end.
After calling good-night to everyone, Rodrigo walked her as usual to her quarters, left her a few steps from her door.
Two steps into the room, she froze. Her mouth fell open. Her breath left her lungs under pressure, wouldn’t be retrieved.
All around. On every surface. Everywhere.
Red roses.
Bunches and bunches and bunches of perfect, bloodred roses.
Oh. God. Oh…God…
She darted back outside, called out to him. But he’d gone.
She stood there vibrating with the need to rush after him, find him wherever he was and smother him in kisses.
But…since he hadn’t waited around for her reaction, maybe he hadn’t anticipated it would be this fierce. Maybe he’d only meant to give her a nice surprise. Maybe he’d had every other woman’s room filled with flowers, too. Which she wouldn’t put past him. She’d never known anyone with his capacity for giving.
She staggered back into her room. The explosion of beauty and color and fragrance yanked her into its embrace again.
The need expanded, compressing her heart, her lungs.
It was no use. She had to do it. She had to go to him.
She grabbed a jacket, streaked outside.
His scent, his vibe led her to the roof.
He was standing at the waist-high stone balustrade overlooking a turbulent, after-midnight sea, a lone knight silvered by the moon, carved from the night.
She stopped a dozen steps away. He didn’t turn, stood like a statue of a Titan, the only animate things his satin mane rioting around his leonine head and his clothes rustling around his steel-fleshed frame. There was no way he could have heard the staccato of her feet or the labor of her breathing over the wind’s buffeting whistles. But she knew he felt her there. He was waiting for her to initiate this.
“Rodrigo.” Her gasp trembled against the wind’s dissipation. He turned then. Cool rays deposited glimmers in the emerald of his eyes, luster on the golden bronze of his ruggedness. She stepped closer, mesmerized by his magnificence. A step away, she reached for his hand. She wanted to take it to her lips. That hand that had saved her life, that changed the lives of countless others daily, giving them back their limbs and mobility and freeing them from pain and disability. She settled for squeezing it between both of her trembling ones. “Besides everything you’ve done for me, your roses are the best gift I’ve ever been given.”