She staggered backward under the impact of his exasperated aggression. “What did he do? And what do you mean, to ‘us’?”
“How can I tell you? It would be my word against a man who can’t defend himself. It would make me a monster in your eyes.”
“No.” She threw herself in his path. “Nothing would make you anything but the man I love with every fiber of my being.”
He held her at arm’s length. “Just forget it, Cybele. I shouldn’t have said anything…Dios, I wish I could take it back.”
But the damage had been done. Rodrigo’s feelings about Mel seemed to be worse than she’d ever feared. And she had to know. The rest. Everything. Now. “Please, Rodrigo, I have to know.”
“How can I begin to explain, when you don’t even remember how we first met?”
She stared at him, the ferocity of his frustration pummeling her, bloodying her. She gasped, the wish to remember so violent, it smashed at the insides of her skull like giant hammers.
Suddenly, the last barricade shattered. Memories burst out of the last dark chasm in her mind, snowballing into an avalanche. She remembered.
Thirteen
She swung away, a frantic beast needing a way out.
The world tilted, the ground rushed at her at a crazy angle.
“Cybele.”
Her name thundered over her, then lightning hit her, intercepted her fall, live wires snaring her in cabled strength before she reinjured her arm beneath her plummeting weight.
Memories flooded through her like water through a drowning woman’s lungs. In brutal sequence.
She’d first seen Rodrigo at a fundraiser for her hospital. Across the ballroom, towering above everyone, canceling out their existence. She’d felt hit by lightning then, too.
She’d stood there, unable to tear her eyes off him as people kept swamping him in relentless waves, moths to his irresistible fire. All through, he’d somehow never taken his eyes off her. She’d been sure she’d seen the same response in his eyes, the same inability to believe its power, to resist it.
Then Ramón had joined him, turned to look at her, too, and she knew Rodrigo was telling him about her. He left Ramón’s side, charted a course for her. She stood there, shaking, knowing her life would change the moment he reached her.
Then a man next to her had collapsed. Even disoriented by Rodrigo’s hypnotic effect, her doctor auto-function took over, and she’d rushed to the man’s rescue.
She’d kept up her resuscitation efforts until paramedics came, and then she’d swayed up to look frantically for Rodrigo. But he’d vanished.
Disappointment crushed her even when she kept telling herself she’d imagined it all, her own response, too, that if she’d talked to him she would have found out he was nothing like the man she’d created in her mind.
Within days, she’d met Mel. He came with a huge donation to her hospital and became the head of the new surgery department. He offered her a position and started pursuing her almost at once. Flattered by his attention, she’d accepted a couple of dates. Then he proposed. By then, she had suspected he was a risk-taking jerk, and turned him down. But he’d said he used that persona at work to keep everyone on their toes, and showed himself to be diametrically different, everything she’d hoped for in a man, until she accepted.
Then Mel had introduced Rodrigo as his best friend.
She was shocked-and distraught that she hadn’t imagined his effect on her. But she’d certainly imagined her effect on him. He seemed to find her abhorrent. Mel, unaware of the tension between the two people he said meant the most to him, insisted on having Rodrigo with them all the time. And though Mel’s bragging accounts of his friend’s mile-high bedpost notches had her despising Rodrigo right back, she’d realized she couldn’t marry Mel while she felt that unstoppable attraction to his best friend. So she broke off the engagement. And it was then that Mel drove off in a violent huff and had the accident that had crippled him.
Feeling devastated by guilt when Mel accused her of being the reason he’d been crippled, Cybele took back her ring. They got married in a ceremony attended by only his parents a month after he was discharged from hospital. Rodrigo had left for Spain after he’d made sure there was nothing more he could do for his friend at that time, and to Cybele’s relief, he didn’t attend.
But the best of intentions didn’t help her cope with the reality of living with a bitter, volatile man. They’d discussed with a specialist the ways to have a sex life, but his difficulties had agonized him even though Cybele assured him it didn’t matter. She didn’t feel the loss of what she’d never had, was relieved when Mel gave up trying, and poured her energy into helping him return to the OR while struggling to catch up with her job.
Then Rodrigo came back, and Mel’s erratic behavior spiked. She’d confronted him, and he said he felt insecure around any able-bodied man, especially Rodrigo, but needed him more than ever. He was the world’s leading miracle worker in spinal injuries, and he was working on putting Mel back on his feet.
But there was one thing Mel needed even more now. He was making progress with the sex therapy specialists, but until he could be a full husband to her, he wanted something to bind them, beyond her sense of duty and honor and a shared house. A baby.
Cybele had known he was testing her commitment. But was feeling guiltier now that she’d lived with his affliction reason enough to take such a major step at such an inappropriate time? Would a baby make him feel more of a man? Was it wise to introduce a baby into the instability of their relationship?
Guilt won, and with her mother promising she’d help out with the baby, she had the artificial insemination.
Within a week, her conception was confirmed. The news only made Mel unbearably volatile, until she’d said she was done tiptoeing around him since it only made him worse. He apologized, said he couldn’t take the pressure, needed time off. And again Cybele succumbed, suspended her residency even knowing she’d lose her position, to help him and to work out their problems. Then he dropped another bombshell on her. He wanted them to spend that time off on Rodrigo’s estate.
When she’d resisted, he said it would be a double benefit, as Rodrigo wanted Mel there for tests for the surgeries that would give Mel back the use of his legs. And she’d had to agree.
When they’d arrived in Barcelona, Rodrigo had sent them a limo. Mel had it drive them to the airfield where his plane was kept. When she objected, he said he didn’t need legs to fly, that flying would make him feel like he was whole again.