The Best Of February 2016. Catherine Mann
overturned not by one male, but two. She had had months to mentally prepare for Enrique, though. She’d watched her sister adapt to motherhood and had had an idea what she would be up against.
Now she had Cesar dominating her life all over again and she wasn’t sure how to handle it.
“At the desk,” he elaborated.
“I thought you wanted me to pay. I always used to check us out. You paid for everything else on this trip. I thought I should pick up the room cost.”
He glanced at her. “Are you serious?”
She let out her frustration in a long breath. “I don’t know what you’re thinking! You’ve been glaring at me all morning, like I wasn’t moving fast enough. I feel like I’m back in my first week of work, when I couldn’t make a move without getting yelled at.”
A beat of silence, then he asked, “When have I ever raised my voice at you?”
“Okay, I’m afraid of hearing that tone. The one that suggests I’m the stupidest person who ever breathed. I don’t work for you anymore, you know. I work for him.” She thumbed to where Enrique’s seat was strapped in behind them.
His hands massaged the wheel.
“I didn’t realize that’s why you were running around like it was a fire drill. I was thinking about other things, not impatient with you. I know you don’t work for me. Believe me, I know. If you could come into the office and turn the new PA into half what you were, I might still have hair when I’m forty.”
Sorcha looked at her nails, shaped and polished by her sister for her wedding, trying not to be smug that she was missed.
She sighed. “I liked being your assistant. You were a bear sometimes, but I knew who I was. My role was clearly defined and I had independence away from you.” She lifted her gaze to the gloomy gray sky. “I realized this morning that everything is blurred now. All the decisions I make now have to be sifted through their effect on you and Enrique. Our relationship has to be reconfigured and I don’t know what that will look like. It’s bothering me.”
“It is strange,” he agreed. “I keep thinking I’m supposed to avoid touching you, because you’re my employee. Then I remind myself you’re my wife, but you’re still off-limits. My libido is very confused, guapa.”
“Being ninety percent libido, I can only assume you’re extremely confused.”
“There’s the woman I thought twice about hiring,” he said drily. “Listen. Two things. You’re my wife. I will always pay and you will always expect me to.”
“That’s not—”
“Always. We’re not negotiating. Anything I’m not present to pay for will go on the cards waiting for you in Spain.”
“And if I want to earn my own money and spend it?” she challenged. Her mother’s fatal error had been trusting her husband to leave her something. According to the prenup Sorcha had signed, Cesar had already arranged an income for her, but...
“We’ll discuss your working when the time comes,” he said in a tone that promised he would object and win. “My mother is a busy woman, Sorcha. Don’t underestimate the demands of being a society wife. It is a job in itself.”
She pursed her lips, agreeing that there wasn’t much use arguing this issue before its time, but she had always enjoyed working. On the other hand, his mother did seem to keep busy, always organizing some charity function or other. As long as she felt as if she was making a contribution, she might be okay with letting him support her.
“You said two things,” she prompted.
“Last night you said you don’t want a nanny, but I want you to rethink it. I’ll try to work from home while you’re recovering, but I’ll have to go into the office at least once a week. We’ll have invitations as word gets out that I’m married—”
“Your role hasn’t changed then?”
“What do you mean?”
“I thought marrying Diega was a condition to being put in charge of the family holdings. I’ve been worrying that marrying me had, um, impacted that?” She knotted her hands in her lap.
“My father tried that,” he said dismissively. “I pointed out that whether he left me in the role of president or not—and whether my brother marries Diega or not—I still inherit the title and the family home. He’s practical enough to see more work in changing course than staying it. Rico prefers research anyway and doesn’t want to lead the charge. My mother sees the scandal of disinheriting an errant son greater than his marrying against her wishes, so she’s resigned herself.”
“That’s comforting,” Sorcha snorted.
He shrugged. “My father’s handoff of the corporation was set back half a year by my crash so I still have a lot of work in the next two years on that. It will include some travel. If nothing else, I want you to have someone in during the day for the next few weeks so you can rest if you need to.”
“I don’t want our son raised by a stranger,” she said, repeating what she’d told him when the topic had come up over dinner. She was heartened by his getting up with Enrique last night and his talk of working from home. Surely they could manage.
“If we lived near your mother,” he said, his expression reflecting zero emotion, “and I knew you were able to leave him for an hour to get some rest, that would be different. My mother is never going to offer that sort of respite.”
She supposed she ought to feel scorned, but she just felt sorry for Cesar and his siblings.
“I’ll think about it,” she murmured. Then she said absently, “Octavia has one.” And Octavia was every bit as devoted to Lorenzo as Sorcha felt to Enrique, so maybe she shouldn’t worry that hiring a nanny would break the mother-baby attachment. “I’ll ask her for the name of the agency they used.”
“Octavia?” Cesar prompted.
“The mother of the other boy at the hospital.” Sorcha had texted her friend a selfie in her wedding dress saying, I’m getting married.
Octavia had responded with I’m going to marry my nanny. She’s listening for L while I have a bath.
“Another reason for a nanny,” Cesar said darkly. “We’ll be in legal meetings a dozen times over the next few years.”
They were quiet a few minutes, then he said, “I meant why was that woman at the hotel so nasty?”
Her heart tripped. “Pardon?”
“When we left the hotel, the woman behind the desk was very snotty. Do you know her?”
“Kind of.” She probably should have been more up-front about how the Kellys were viewed by the village, but she preferred him to believe he’d married his working class secretary, not the bastard of a whore—which was what people had called her more than once.
It was so painful she hated to even reference it obliquely, but he was waiting.
“I told you how my father had a legitimate family in England?” She scratched her eyebrow. “We were quite notorious after he died. Treated like... Well, people felt Mum got what she deserved, carrying on with a married man. We were all punished. I went to school with that woman and she was letting me know she hadn’t forgotten where I came from.”
Sorcha looked out the window onto her beautiful country, but felt sick. With one snarky look and a handful of words, she’d been reminded what a pretender she was.
“Your mother is a very warm person. If that’s where you came from, you have nothing to be ashamed of.”
She smiled, touched that he would say something so nice about her mum, but he was missing the point. “Maybe I didn’t get pregnant on purpose, and maybe the father married me, but I still got my husband ‘that