Billionaire, M.D. / Secrets of the Playboy's Bride
The images Agnes had weaved were overwhelming. The vision of Rodrigo as a child was painfully vivid. Self-possessed in the face of humiliation and adversity, stoic in a world where he had no one, determined as he proved himself worthy of respect.
“And did he teach him?” she asked.
Agnes sighed. “He tried. But Mel was short-fused, impatient, never staying with anything long enough for it to bear fruit. Rodrigo never stopped trying to involve him, get him to experience the pleasures of achievement. We loved him with all our hearts from the first day, but loved him more for how hard he tried.”
“So your plan that a sibling would help Mel didn’t work?”
“Oh, no, it did. Rodrigo did absorb a great deal of Mel’s angst and instability. He became the older brother Mel emulated in everything. It was how Mel ended up in medicine.”
“Then he must have grown out of his impatience. It takes a lot of perseverance to become a doctor.”
“You really don’t remember a thing about him, do you?” Now what did that mean? Before she pressed for an elaboration, Agnes sighed again. “Mel was brilliant, could do anything if only he set his mind to it. But only Rodrigo knew how to motivate him, to keep him in line. And when Rodrigo turned eighteen, he moved out.”
“Why? Wasn’t he happy with you?”
“He assured us that his need for independence had nothing to do with not loving us or not wanting to be with us. He confessed that he’d always felt the need to find his roots.”
“And you feared he was only placating you?”
Agnes’s soft features, which showed a once-great beauty lined by a life of emotional upheavals, spasmed with recalled anxiety. “We tried to help as he searched for his biological family, but his methods were far more effective, his instincts of where to look far sharper. He found his maternal relatives three years later and his grandparents were beside themselves with joy. Their whole extended family welcomed him with open arms.”
Cybele couldn’t think how anyone wouldn’t. “Did he learn the identity of his father?”
“His grandparents didn’t know. They had had a huge quarrel with his mother when she got pregnant and she wouldn’t reveal the father’s identity. She left home, saying she’d never return to their narrow-minded world. Once they had calmed down, they searched for her everywhere, kept hoping she’d come home. But they never heard from her again. They were devastated to learn their daughter was long dead, but ecstatic that Rodrigo had found them.”
“And he changed his name from yours to theirs then?”
“He never took our name, just kept the name his mother had used. There were too many obstacles to our adopting him, and when he realized our struggles, he asked us to stop trying, said he knew we considered him our son and we didn’t need to prove it to him. He was content to be our foster son to the world. He was eleven at the time. When he found his family, he still insisted we were his real family, since it was choice and love that bound us and not blood. He didn’t legally take their names until he made sure we knew that it just suited his identity more to have his Catalan names.”
“And you still thought he’d walk out of your life.”
Agnes exhaled her agreement. “It was the worst day of my life when he told us that he was moving to Spain as soon as his medical training was over. I thought my worst fears of losing him had come true.”
It struck Cybele as weird that Agnes didn’t consider the day Mel had died the worst day of her life. But she was too intent on the story for the thought to take hold. “But you didn’t lose him.”
“I shouldn’t have worried. Not with Rodrigo. I should have known he’d never abandon us, or even neglect us. He never stopped paying us the closest attention, was a constant presence in our lives—more so even than Mel, who lived under the same roof. Mel always had a problem expressing his emotions, and showed them with material, not moral, things. That’s probably why he… he …” She stopped, looked away.
“He what?” Cybele tried not to sound rabid with curiosity. They were getting to some real explanation here. She knew it.
She almost shrieked with frustration when Agnes ignored her question, returned to her original topic. “Rodrigo continued to rise to greater successes but made sure we were there to share the joy of every step with him. Even when he moved here, he never let us or Mel feel that he was far away. He was constantly after us to move here, too, to start projects we’ve long dreamed of, offered us everything we’d need to establish them. But Mel said Spain was okay for vacations but he was a New Yorker and could never live anywhere else. Though it was a difficult decision, we decided to stay in the States with him. We thought he was the one who …needed our presence more. But we do spend chunks of every winter with Rodrigo, and he comes to the States as frequently as possible.”
And she’d met him during those frequent trips. Over and over. She just knew it. But she was just as sure, no matter how spotty her memory was, that this story hadn’t been volunteered by anyone before. She was certain she hadn’t been told Rodrigo was Mel’s foster brother. Not by Mel, not by Rodrigo.
Why had neither man owned up to this fact?
Agnes touched her good hand. “I’m so sorry, my dear. I shouldn’t have gone on and on down memory lane.”
And the weirdest thing was, Agnes’s musings hadn’t been about the son she’d lost, but the son she’d acquired thirty years ago. “I’m glad you did. I need to know anything that will help me remember.”
“And did you? Remember anything?”
It wasn’t a simple question to ascertain her neurological state. Agnes wanted to know something. Something to do with what she’d started to say about Mel then dropped, as if ashamed, as if too distressed to broach it.
“Sporadic things,” Cybele said cautiously, wondering how to lead back to the thread of conversation she just knew would explain why she’d felt this way about Mel, and about Rodrigo.
Agnes turned away from her. “They’re back.”
Cybele jerked, followed Agnes’s gaze, frustration backing up in her throat. Then she saw Rodrigo prowling in those powerful, control-laden strides and the sight of him drowned out everything else.
Suddenly a collage of images became superimposed over his. Of her and Mel going out with Rodrigo and a different sexpot each time, women who’d fawned over him and whom he’d treated with scathing disinterest, playing true to his reputation as a ruthless playboy.
Something else dislodged in her mind, felt as if an image had moved from the obscurity of her peripheral vision into the clarity of her focus. How Mel had become exasperating around Rodrigo.
If these were true memories, they contradicted everything Agnes had said, everything she’d sensed about Rodrigo. They showed him as the one who was erratic and inconstant, who’d had a disruptive, not a stabilizing, effect on Mel. Could she have overlooked all that, and her revulsion toward promiscuous men, under the spell of his charisma? Or could that have been his attraction? The challenge of his unavailability? The ambition of being the one to tame the big bad wolf? Could she have been that perverse and stupid….?
“Are you ready, Agnes?”
Cybele lurched at the sound of Rodrigo’s fathomless baritone.
Stomach churning with the sickening conjectures, she dazedly watched him hand Agnes out of the car. Then he bent to her.
“Stay here.” She opened her mouth. A gentle hand beneath her jaw closed it for her. “No arguments, remember?”
“I want to do what you’re all going to do,” she mumbled.
“You’ve had enough. I shouldn’t have let you come at all.”
“I’m fine. Please.”
That fierceness welled in his eyes again. Then he gave a curt nod, helped her out of the car.
She didn’t only want to be there for these people to whom she felt such a powerful connection. She also hoped she’d get more answers from Agnes before she and Steven flew back home.
Cybele watched Rodrigo stride with Steven to the hearse, where another four men waited. One was Ramón Velázquez, her orthopedic surgeon and Rodrigo’s best friend—for real—and partner.
Rodrigo and Ramón shared a solemn nod then opened the hearse’s back door and slid the coffin out. Steven and the three other men joined in carrying it to the cargo bay of the Boeing.
Cybele stood transfixed beside Agnes, watching the grim procession, her eyes flitting between Rodrigo’s face and Steven’s. The same expression gripped both. It was the same one on Agnes’s face. Something seemed…off about that expression.
Conjectures ping-ponged inside her head as everything seemed to fast-forward until the ritual was over, and Steven walked back with Rodrigo to join Agnes in hugging Cybele farewell. Then the Braddocks boarded the Boeing and Rodrigo led Cybele back to the Mercedes.
The car had just swung out of the airfield when she heard the roar of the jet’s takeoff. She twisted around to watch it sail overhead before it hurtled away, its noise receding, its size diminishing.
And it came to her, why she knew that off expression. It was the exhausted resignation exhibited by families of patients who died after long, agonizing terminal illnesses. It didn’t add up when Mel’s death had been swift and shocking.
Something else became glaringly obvious. She turned to Rodrigo. He was looking outside his window.
She hated to intrude on the sanctity of his heartache. But she had to make sense of it all. “Rodrigo, I’m sorry, but—”
He rounded on her, his eyes simmering in the rays penetrating the mirrored window. “Don’t say you’re sorry again, Cybele.”
“I’m sor—” She swallowed the apology he seemed unable to hear from her. “I was going to apologize for interrupting your thoughts. But I need to ask. They didn’t ask. About my pregnancy.”
He seemed taken aback. Then his face slammed shut. “Mel didn’t tell them.”
This was one answer she hadn’t considered. Yet another twist. “Why? I can understand not telling them of our intention to have a baby this way, in case it didn’t work. But after it did, why didn’t he run to them with the news?”
His shrug was eloquent with his inability to guess Mel’s motivations. With his intention to drop the subject.
She couldn’t accommodate him. “Why didn’t you tell them?”
“Because it’s up to you whether or not to tell them.”
“They’re my baby’s grandparents. Of course I want to tell them. If I’d realized they didn’t know, I would have. It would have given them solace, knowing that a part of their son remains.”
His jaw worked for a moment. Then he exhaled. “I’m glad you didn’t bring it up. You’re not in any shape to deal with the emotional fallout of a disclosure of this caliber. And instead of providing the solace you think it would have, at this stage, the news would have probably only aggravated their repressed grief.”
But it hadn’t been repressed grief she’d sensed from them.
Then again, what did she know? Her perceptions might be as scrambled as her memories. “You’re probably right.” As usual, she added inwardly. “I’ll tell them when I’m back to normal and I’m certain the pregnancy is stable.”
He lowered his eyes, his voice, and simply said, “Yes.”
Feeling drained on all counts, she gazed up at him—the mystery that kept unraveling only to become more tangled. The anchor of this shifting, treacherous new existence of hers.
And she implored, “Can we go home now, please?”
Six
He took her home. His home.
They’d driven back from the airport to Barcelona city center. From there it had taken over an hour to reach his estate.
By the time they approached it at sunset, she felt saturated with the sheer beauty of the Catalan countryside.
Then they passed through the electronic, twenty-foot wrought iron gates, wound through the driveway, and with each yard deeper into his domain, she realized. There was no such thing as a limit to the capacity to appreciate beauty, to be stunned by it.
She turned her eyes to him. He’d been silent save for necessary words. She’d kept silent, too, struggling with the contradictions of what her heart told her and what her memories insisted on, with wanting to ask him to dispel her doubts.
But the more she remembered everything he’d said and done, everything everyone had said about him in the past days, the more only one conclusion made sense. Her memories had to be false.
He turned to her. After a long moment, he said, deep, quiet, “Welcome to Villa Candelaria, Cybele.”
She swallowed past the emotions, yet her “Thank you” came out a tremulous gasp. She tried again. “When did you buy this place?”
“Actually, I built it. I named it after my mother.”
The lump grew as images took shape and form. Of him as an orphan who’d never forgotten his mother until he one day was affluent enough to build such a place and name it after her, so her memory would continue somewhere outside of his mind and.
Okay, she’d start weeping any second now. Better steer this away from personal stuff. “This place looks …massive. Not just the building, but the land, too.”
“It’s thirty thousand square feet over twenty acres with a mile-long waterfront. Before you think I’m crazy to build all this for myself, I built it hoping it would become the home of many families, affording each privacy and land for whatever projects and pursuits they wished for. Not that it worked out that way.”
The darkness that stained his face and voice seared her. He’d wished to surround himself with family. And he’d been thwarted at every turn, it seemed. Was he suffering from the loneliness and isolation she felt were such an integral part of her own psyche?
“I picked this land completely by chance. I was driving once, aimlessly, when I saw that crest of a hill overlooking this sea channel.” She looked where he was pointing. “The vision slammed into my mind fully formed. A villa built into those rock formations as if it was a part of them.”
She reversed the process, imagining those elements without the magnificent villa they now hugged as if it were an intrinsic part of their structure. “I always thought of the Mediterranean as all sandy beaches.”
“Not this area of the northern Iberian coastline. Rugged rock is indigenous here.”
The car drew to a smooth halt in front of thirty-foot wide stone steps among landscaped, terraced plateaus that surrounded the villa from all sides.
In seconds Rodrigo was handing her out and insisting she sit in the wheelchair she hadn’t used much today. She acquiesced, wondered as he wheeled her up the gentle slope beside the steps if it had always been there, for older family members’ convenience, or if it had been installed to accommodate Mel’s condition.
Turning away from futile musings, she surrendered to the splendor all around her as they reached a gigantic patio that surrounded the villa. On one side it overlooked the magnificent property that was part vineyards and orchards and part landscaped gardens, with the valley and mountains in the distance, and on the other side, the breathtaking sea and shoreline.
The patio led to the highest area overlooking the sea, a massive terrace garden that was illuminated by golden lights planted everywhere like luminescent flowers.
He took her inside and she got rapid impressions of the interior as he swept her to the quarters he’d designated for her.
She felt everything had been chosen with an eye for uniqueness and comfort, simplicity and grandeur, blending sweeping lines and spaces with bold wall colors, honey-colored ceilings and furniture that complemented both. French doors and colonial pillars merged seamlessly with the natural beauty of hardwood floors accentuated by marble and granite. She knew she could spend weeks poring over every detail, but in its whole, she felt this was a place this formidable man had wanted his family to love, to feel at home in from the moment they set foot in it. She knew she did. And she hadn’t technically set foot in it yet.
Then she did. He opened a door, wheeled her in then helped her out of the chair. She stood as he wheeled the chair to one side, walked out to haul in two huge suitcases that had evidently been transported right behind them.
He placed one on the floor and the other on a luggage stand at the far side of the room, which opened into a full-fledged dressing room.
She stood mesmerized as he walked back to her.
He was overwhelming. A few levels beyond that.
He stopped before her, took her hand. She felt as though it burst in flames. “I promise you a detailed tour of the place. Later. In stages. Now you have to rest. Doctor’s orders.”
With that he gave her hand a gentle press, turned and left.
The moment the door clicked closed behind him, she staggered to lean on it, exhaled a choppy breath.
Doctor’s orders. Her doctor …
She bit her lip. Hours ago, she’d consigned her husband’s body to his parents. And all she could think of was Rodrigo. There wasn’t even a twinge of guilt toward Mel. There was sadness, but it was the sadness she knew she’d feel for any human being’s disability and death. For his loved ones’ mourning. Nothing more.
What was wrong with her? What had been wrong with her and Mel? Or was there more wrong with her mind than she believed?
Her lungs deflated on a dejected exhalation.
All she could do now was never let any of those who’d loved and lost Mel know how unaffected by his loss she was. What did it matter what she felt in the secrecy of her heart and mind if she never let the knowledge out to hurt others? She couldn’t change the way she felt, should stop feeling bad about it. It served no purpose, did no one any good.
With that rationalization reached, she felt as if a ten-pound rock had been lifted off her heart. Air flowed into her lungs all of a sudden, just as the lovely surroundings registered in her appreciation centers.
The room—if a thirty-something-by forty-something-foot space with a twelve-foot ceiling could be called that—was a manifestation of the ultimate in personal space.
With walls painted sea-blue and green, furniture of dark mahogany and ivory ceilings and accents, it was soothingly lit by golden lamps of the side and standing variety. French doors were draped in gauzy powder-blue curtains that undulated in the twilight sea breeze, wafting scents of salt and freshness with each billow. She sighed away her draining tension and pushed from the wood-paneled door.
She crossed the gleaming hardwood floor to the suitcases. They were more evidence of Rodrigo’s all-inclusive care. She was certain she’d never owned anything so exquisite. She wondered what he’d filled them with. If the outfit she had on was any indication, no doubt an array of haute couture and designer items, molding to her exact shape and appealing to her specific tastes.
She tried to move the one on the floor, just to set it on its wheels. Frantic pounding boomed in her head.
Man—what had he gotten her to wear? Steel armor in every shade? And he’d made the cases look weightless when he’d hauled them both in, simultaneously. She tugged again.
“¡Parada!”
She swung around at the booming order, the pounding in her head crashing down her spine to settle behind her ribs.
A robust, unmistakably Spanish woman in her late thirties was plowing her way across the room, alarm and displeasure furrowing the openness of her olive-skinned beauty.
“Rodrigo warned me that you’d give me a hard time.”
Cybele blinked at the woman as she slapped her hand away from the suitcase’s handle and hauled it onto the king-sized, draped-in-ivory-silk bed. She, too, made it look so light. Those Spaniards—uh, Catalans—must have something potent in their water.
The woman rounded on her, vitality and ire radiating from every line. Even her shoulder-length, glossy dark brown hair seemed pissed off. “He told me that you’d be a troublesome charge, and from the way you were trying to bust your surgery scar open, he was right. As he always is.”
So it wasn’t only she who thought he was always practically infallible. Her lips tugged as she tried to placate the force of nature before her. “I don’t have a surgery scar to bust, thanks to Rodrigo’s revolutionary minimally invasive approach.”
“You have things in there—” the woman stabbed a finger in the air pointing at Cybele’s head “—you can bust, no? What you busted before, necessitating such an approach.”
From the throb of pain that was only now abating, she had to concede that. She’d probably raised her intracranial pressure tenfold trying to drag that behemoth of a bag. As she shrugged, she remembered Rodrigo telling her something.
She’d been too busy watching his lips wrap around each syllable to translate the words into an actual meaning. She now replayed them, made sense of them.
Rodrigo had said Consuelo, his cousin who lived here with her husband and three children and managed the place for him, would be with her shortly to see to her every need and to the correct and timely discharge of his instructions. She’d only nodded then, lost in his eyes. She now realized what he’d meant.
He didn’t trust her to follow his instructions, was assigning a deputy to enforce their execution. And he certainly knew how to pick his wardens.
She stuck out her hand with a smile tugging at her lips. “You must be Consuelo. Rodrigo told me to expect you.”
Consuelo took her hand, only to drag her forward and kiss her full on both cheeks.
Cybele didn’t know what stunned her more, the affectionate salute, or Consuelo resuming her disapproval afterward.
Consuelo folded her arms over an ample bosom artfully contained and displayed by her floral dress with the lime background. “Seems Rodrigo didn’t really tell you what to expect. So let me make it clear. I received you battered and bruised. I’m handing you back in tip-top shape. I won’t put up with you not following Rodrigo’s orders. I’m not soft and lenient like him.”
“Soft and lenient?” Cybele squeaked her incredulity. Then she coughed it out on a laugh. “I wasn’t aware there were two Rodrigos. I met the intractable and inexorable one.”
Consuelo tutted. “If you think Rodrigo intractable and inexorable, wait till you’ve been around me twenty-four hours.”
“Oh, the first twenty-four seconds were a sufficient demo.”
Consuelo gave her an assessing look, shrewdness simmering in her dark chocolate eyes. “I know your type. A woman who wants to do everything for herself, says she can handle it when she can’t, keeps going when she shouldn’t, caring nothing about what it costs her, and it’s all because she dreads being an imposition, because she hates accepting help even when she dearly needs it.”
“Whoa. Spoken like an expert.”
“¡Maldita sea, es cierto!—that’s right. It takes one mule-headed, aggravatingly independent woman to know another.”
Another laugh overpowered Cybele. “Busted.”
“Sí, you are. And I’m reporting your reckless behavior to Rodrigo. He’ll probably have you chained to my wrist by your good arm until he gives you a clean bill of health.”
“Not that I wouldn’t be honored to have you as my …uh, keeper, but can I bribe you into keeping silent?”
“You can. And you know how.”
“I don’t try to lift rock-filled suitcases again?”
“And do everything I say. When I say it.”
“Uh …on second thought, I’ll take my chances with Rodrigo.”
“Ha. Try another one. Now hop to it. Rodrigo told me what kind of day—what kind of week you’ve had. You’re doing absolutely nothing but sleeping and resting for the next one. And eating. You look like you’re about to vanish.”
Cybele laughed as she whimsically peered down at her much lesser endowments. She could see how they were next to insubstantial by the super-lush Consuelo’s standards.