Page 27 of The Forbidden Cabrera Brother
His jaw clenched. This sort of truth, he thought, was worth imparting. He wished to God someone had saved him months of pointless infatuation with a woman who had turned out to be as pure as mud, by setting him straight at the very outset.
Haltingly, expecting nothing in response, he began to explain.
Alejandro would sleep through it all. Dante was one hundred per cent certain on that point.
He was, however, wrong.
It took ages for Caitlin to get her act together because he had kissed her...no, they hadsharedthat kiss...and everything inside her had gone into free fall.
She had felt his mouth on hers long after he’d disappeared back into the house and it was only when he’d gone that her brain had begun functioning and she’d remembered, with sickening horror, what he had flung at her when he’d walked off.
If he’d had any questions, then they’d been answered.
You didn’t have to be a genius to get the drift. She’d kissed him and the sham of her relationship with Alejandro had been revealed. In a handful of seconds, she had done the one thing she’d been determined not to do. She’d given the game away. Nor could she now be honest. How could she? Alejandro’s secret was his to reveal, so she would have to accept that Dante would now see her as the worst possible candidate for the role of his brother’s fiancée.
She hurried back to her bedroom, fearful that she might bump into Dante somewhere in the house, but she didn’t. Just in case, however, she dressed quickly, and called a taxi to take her to the hospital. While she waited for it to arrive, she remained locked in her bedroom.
She had no idea what was going to happen next, but, playing it out roughly in her head, it involved her going to see Alejandro, where she would just have to explain what had happened and tell him, whether he could hear her or not, that she had no option but to return to London.
She could always leave a text on his mobile phone and he would pick it up as soon as he came to, and, naturally, she would phone the hospital daily, but leaving was her only option when the alternative was to run slap bang into Dante at some unspecified time in the future.
She felt very bad about his parents, but what choice did she have?
On the spur of the moment, she wrote a note, which she left in her bedroom, to be given to his mother, apologising for her abrupt departure and blaming work demands.
She would have some appreciation of what that meant considering at least one of her sons had sold his soul to the workplace.
The minute she thought of Dante, her mind began shutting down and her heart picked up pace and she had to close her eyes and breathe deeply so as not to feel faint.
That kiss.
There had never been anything like it in her life before. Jimmy...solid, reliable, steady Jimmy had never made her heart beat fast. She had liked him and they had fumbled around a bit but neither had had the slightest urge to take things to the ultimate conclusion.
He’d lived with his dad and she’d been living with her parents and it was a small village where everyone knew everyone else. Renting a room in their one and only hotel would have been ridiculous.
They would look forward to really enjoying making love when they were married, they had vaguely told one another. Actually, she wasn’t even sure they had discussed it at all, simply assumed that that would be how things worked out between them.
Afterwards, when he had dumped her for the improbable model, she had been realistic enough to conclude that he hadn’t pushed for sex because, as much as he’d liked her, he hadn’t been attracted to her. Not really.
She hadn’t stopped to ask herself whethershe’dbeen attracted tohim.
She’d nursed her wounded feelings and escaped.
Now, Dante had kissed her and it had been a thunderbolt.Thatwas what passion felt like.Thatwas the sort of aching and yearning that would have been impossible to ignore. She felt as though she had been sleepwalking and now she was fully awake, for better or for worse.
The taxi driver took his time getting to the hospital. On the way, he insisted on having a long conversation with her in Spanish, even though her responses were limited to an array of vaguely interested expressions and non-committal murmuring.
In her head, she was working out how she might get a flight back to London. Bye-bye to yet more money she didn’t have. She would just have to go to the airport with her bag in hand, get to a ticket desk and pay whatever it cost for the first flight out.
Funny thing, she mused, hurrying into the hospital and pausing for a few seconds to get her bearings because the place was just so huge and she couldn’t seem to keep a mental tab on which lift she needed to take to get to his ward, Alejandro would have understood her dilemma.
They would have spent hours laughing and talking about the mess she’d got herself into.
She hit the ward and was heading towards the reception desk when she saw Dante.
His face was grim, drawn. Given half a chance, Caitlin would have fled in the opposite direction, but two things stopped her. The first was the sight of Dante striding towards her, a man on a mission, eyes firmly pinned on her hovering figure even though he was on his phone, talking urgently to someone at the other end.
The other was the fact that there was a commotion happening outside what seemed to be Alejandro’s room, even though it was hard to be completely sure.
