The Best Of February 2016. Catherine Mann
to call her a member of their family. At least not ashamed.
It was all going well until, quite suddenly, the Marques de los Jardines de Las Salinas was in front of her, congratulating her on her marriage. He was Diega’s father. Then her mother was in front of her, also offering a distant smile.
“Querido,” Diega said to Cesar, her smile wide and avaricious as she arrived with her parents. She paused to kiss both his cheeks. “I brought an old friend of yours. I hope you don’t mind. As I said to your mother when I called, perhaps we can make a match for Pia.” She sent a moue down the line, winking at Cesar’s sister before bringing her gaze back to catch at Sorcha’s. Her smile hardened. “Cesar was at school with him,” Diega explained. “Thomas Shelby. The Duke of Tenderhurst. Do you know him?”
Sorcha’s heart stopped. The Duke of— Her half brother?
“Tom,” Cesar was saying. “Nice to see you.”
Sorcha couldn’t bring herself to look. Her gaze locked to Diega’s triumphant one as Diega moved along to Rico.
Sorcha told herself to breathe, but she was turning to stone, like a spell had been cast, filling her insides with gravel and earth and hardening agents. Clay. Gummy, suffocating sludge.
“Meet my wife, Sorcha,” Cesar said, oblivious.
Her half brother showed not a hint of recognition as he took her limp hand and claimed it was nice to meet her.
His smile faltered until she found a stiff one, then he shook her hand and said something about how happy he was for her and Cesar. He wished them a long life and moved along the line.
Get through this, Sorcha told herself, grappling for composure.
The worst part was, he looked just like her da.
* * *
Cesar wouldn’t call himself intuitive, but spending time with a baby developed a few skills for reading a mood. He knew what the dismayed precursor to an emotional meltdown looked like and Sorcha teetered for a millisecond on that bubble, obviously knocked off-kilter by Diega’s arrival.
After their stolen moment of passion earlier, he was in a state of sustained tension not unlike the final moments before climax, when his control wanted to unravel. He’d been thinking they were both standing in the fire of sexual awareness, burning with anticipation, but she was no longer with him.
What could he say about Diega being here? He’d forewarned her. He’d chosen Sorcha and his son over her. That ought to count for something.
Sorcha recovered quickly, making him almost doubt he’d seen anything. She now held a smile on her face, greeting people and exchanging pleasantries, but he could tell she wasn’t herself. And her behavior was odd because she had disguised her falter well. He was surprised with himself for noticing the change in her. He hadn’t realized how attuned he’d become to her.
What she looked like, he realized with a hard shock, was like one of them. The natural warmth he took for granted, in the same way he expected her blond hair or blue eyes, was extinguished. It had been replaced by a facade of forced good manners.
They were finally able to leave the door and move into the crowd that had spilled out to the lawn and open-sided tents. The orchestra paused so his father could make a toast, welcoming Sorcha into the family.
She smiled, looked as radiant as Cesar had called her earlier, but ethereal. Insubstantial. Her eyes were shiny and the strain behind her expression suggested she was quietly miserable.
And that misery felt like a knee to the groin. He was pleased to introduce her as his wife. Proud. Despite the costs to his family and the impact on their relationship with Diega’s, he had concluded his son was worth it. Once they lived properly as husband and wife, he would no doubt be more than satisfied.
Was she not pleased to call him her husband?
They started the dancing and she was a mannequin in his arms, not the receptive woman from earlier, but a stick figure that held him off.
He reflexively turned himself inward. Aloofness was his comfort zone, but it was difficult to maintain when the promise of physical intimacy had been bending the barbed wire he kept in a perimeter around his inner self.
“I should check on Enrique,” she said as the song finished.
He realized she was trembling and tightened his hands on her, trying to still the odd vibrations rolling off her.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, surprised to sense he was being rejected—which was an extraordinary enough circumstance without the heavy dose of reacting to it with a feeling of injury that weighted his insides.
“Nothing.” Her smile was such a blatant lie, it was a slap across the face. “Excuse me.”
He did not follow anyone and beg for affection. He let her go.
* * *
The nanny looked up from where she was reading a book in the sitting room. Enrique was sleeping in the cot next to her.
“I have a headache,” Sorcha choked with a weak smile and pointed to the bedroom, then closed the door behind her.
Sinking onto the foot of the bed, she wrapped her arms across her middle and told herself not to cry.
“Oh, God,” she whispered, more racked with fear and pain than she had been while in labor. Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God. She rocked, trying to ease the agony ripping upward like a tear from the very center of her being into her heart, rending and leaving jagged edges as it climbed to score her throat.
She was going to lose him. This time, when she told him about her father, there would be no sidestepping for a prettier angle. They might have grown closer than they’d ever been over their few weeks of marriage, but she hadn’t found the right way to explain what a pariah she really was.
Was Diega enjoying telling him? Sorcha hadn’t been able to wait and watch him realize what he’d married. Had she honestly imagined it would never come out?
She would have to face his disdain now.
Cesar had gone to school with him. Tom. Her husband’s friend was part of the evil, awful— He didn’t even know who she was! He had never even cared enough to look up a photo or find out his half sisters’ names.
Why would he? They were trash.
Don’t cry, she begged herself, pushing her bent knuckles against her trembling lips.
The door clicked and her husband stood in the opening for a long moment, observing her. His scowl might have edged toward concern, but her eyes blurred and she couldn’t tell.
She rose, wobbling in her shoes as she moved to the box of tissues. Plucking several from the holder, she dabbed her face, trying to stem the pressure beneath her eyes, but tears leaked onto the crumpled tissues, staining them with mascara and eye shadow.
“I did tell you,” she said, like it counted for anything that she’d confessed to being illegitimate. That was a far cry from whatever was being whispered about her downstairs. Tom was one of them and she already knew how quickly she would be exiled as not.
She was right back to that moment of walking across the schoolyard, when everyone had stared. The headmistress at the door had given her a cold look and someone had whispered, “Bastard.”
Her sister had held her hand in a sweaty grip while Sorcha had sought out her best friend, Molly. She’d seen Molly every single day since they’d both been in nappies, but Molly had only mumbled, “Mum says I shouldn’t be friends with you anymore.”
Sorcha had survived it and had stopped caring that people had refused to serve them, but the fact Cesar was going to react the same way had her stomach churning.
“Maybe I should have foreseen this could happen,” she said, voice traveling through razor blades all the way up from her lungs. “You’re both titled. I don’t know why I’m