Melting the Argentine Doctor's Heart / Small Town Marriage Miracle (15 page)

‘I suppose it’s easy enough to do—we marry. Do you have registry offices here? We can do it in a few minutes, although I’ll have to check on the legalities as far as being an Australian is concerned. The embassy could tell me. It’s no big deal, Jorge. We’ll sort it out—you can tell him that we’re onto it.’

Could she really be so casual about it?

Worse, could she really believe a couple of minutes in front of a judge or priest would satisfy his father as a marriage?

Of course, she didn’t know his father as he did. She had no idea what a wedding here entailed.

And knowing it would pain his father more to believe the marriage was a sham—to see it as a sham—he, Jorge, had to somehow backtrack along this conversation and bring the marriage in from another angle.

A marriage of convenience?

Convenient certainly, but a true marriage?

No matter how much he might wish to hold himself apart from Caroline—to continue to hide behind the barriers he’d built up—he couldn’t be part of a sham played out for his father. He also had no doubt the attraction that had existed between them from their first meeting was as strong as ever, so why
not
a marriage in every sense?

But how to put this to Caroline?

Caroline sat very still, thinking maybe if she didn’t move, the world would return to normal.

Although she’d tried to sound as casual as possible, flippant even, as if she fronted up to a judge to get married every day of the week, the thought of marrying Jorge, even if it wasn’t real, made her feel as if a hand had reached inside her body and clutched at her intestines. It clenched around them, tightening her lungs as well, fingers squeezing at her heart.

Marry Jorge—a dream, yet not a dream. Without love would it be a nightmare?

Or could it work?

Could she make it work?

She had no idea.

And from what she could see, watching him go back
to pacing around the library, he didn’t seem overly delighted by her calm acceptance of the strange proposal. In fact, he seemed more perturbed than he had earlier, pacing, muttering under his breath, frowning ferociously as, every now and then, his gaze darted towards her.

‘Sit!’ she finally ordered, and though he started at the command, he eventually sat—directly in front of her once again.

‘What’s the problem?’ she asked him, speaking calmly, ignoring the turmoil in her body and the questions battering her brain. ‘You want us to marry to please your father, I’ve said yes. What’s bothering you now?’

He looked at her in silence for a long moment, then he smiled and her intestines tightened some more, while her heart began to beat out a rhythm she didn’t want to analyse.

Though maybe it was a tango.

‘May I kiss you?’ he said, so formally she wondered if she’d heard the words aright.

Did she nod?

Say yes without realising it?

Was that why he was standing now, his hands holding hers, drawing her up out of the chair, his head bending and his lips brushing hers, feather-soft at first then demanding, seducing, conquering.?

She fell into the kiss with a hunger she couldn’t believe existed, a hunger she’d managed to keep hidden since they’d met again, a hunger that could no longer be denied.

It was only because, in some dim recess of her
brain, she remembered Ella and Carlos, not to mention Antoinette, being in the house that she didn’t begin to rip clothes off—hers, his. Who cared?

This kiss spiralled deep into her body, pushing heat and frustrated desire before it, trailing need and want and passion in its wake. Her blood thundered in her ears, deafening all common sense—all warnings to step back, be sensible, take this one step at a time.

Had that first kiss in the street primed her for this? She had no idea, she only knew that kissing Jorge here and now was like coming home. His body anchored hers, solid, firm, hard where she was soft. His hands roamed her limbs, her back, her waist, her breasts, fingers edging between their bodies to move against her nipples.

Words whimpered from her lips, pleas for more, words of love only just caught back by her teeth—some remnant of common sense must remain! But no other limit held them back as they explored each other’s bodies, touching, pressing, gliding, Jorge’s lips now on her throat, now at her temple, her teeth biting into the hollow of his shoulder as he teased her to madness with his tongue against her ear.

Yet even as the kiss—the word hardly seemed appropriate for the conflagration in the library—reached a panting, breathless, close-to-exhaustion peak, Caroline felt part of herself detach and stand there, watching.

He’s doing this to prove something, that other self whispered, knowing that she was helpless, so when he finally let go of her and stood back a little, his fingers trailing over her flushed face and undoubtedly swollen
lips, and said, ‘Well?’ quite quietly, she allowed herself to nod, knowing the question he hadn’t asked, knowing her response to his kiss had already given him his answer.

C
ARLOS
took over their lives. Barely able to believe that Caroline had agreed to a marriage in every sense, Jorge continued to keep out of her way, half fearing too much exposure to him might change her mind. Half hoping she might change her mind for marriage would certainly break through his defences—physically at least.

Emotionally, could he retain his detachment? Keep at least his heart and all it held hidden from her?

Avoiding Caroline was easy. Ella, though, was a different matter, and he made sure he spent time with her every day—special time when he showed her old toys he’d played with as a child. One day, he took her up into the attic and removed the covers off a dolls’ house that had been his mother’s.

‘Can I play with it, Hor-hay?’ she asked, her voice barely above a whisper as she took in all the details of tiny, perfect furniture—upholstered chairs, beds made up with impossibly small silk sheets and coverlets, tiny dolls that fitted in the rooms, even a baby in the nursery.

‘You can,’ he told her. ‘I will carry it downstairs into
the room where my old toys are and Antoinette will clean it up for you.’

‘Oh, Hor-hay!’ Ella cried out her delight, and flung her arms around his neck, her little body pressed against him, her lips soft against his scarred cheek.

‘But she might break things,’ Caroline protested when she saw the incredible miniature house.

‘I do not think so,’ Jorge argued, ‘but if she does, would it matter so very much? Could we not get them fixed? Is it not something to be used, rather than hidden away in an attic?’

Caroline looked at him and shrugged, but before she could turn away he caught her hand, and while Ella knelt in front of the little house, watching Antoinette lift out each piece and put it on a table, he touched the face of the woman he was to marry soon.

‘You are pale. Is this all too much for you? You only have to say and we can do it more simply.’

Her smile was as pale as she was, a shadowy replica of her usual bright grin.

‘Now? When Carlos has ordered up not only food but clothes and guests, and wedding presents arrive on the hour every hour? I think not, Jorge.’

‘But it is getting you down.’ He was facing her, studying the faint lines drawn beside her lips, the shadows beneath her clear blue eyes. ‘I did not wish for that.’

She touched his cheek with cool fingers.

‘I’ll survive,’ she said, ‘and now I have to go. I have an appointment with a seamstress, would you believe? I didn’t know such people still existed, let alone made house calls.’

Jorge watched her walk away, his body aching with desire for her, the skin on his cheek burning where she’d touched it, his mind a chaos of memory and foreboding. Yes, he wanted this marriage for many reasons, not least of them physical, but what of Caroline? She was too honest to deny the attraction between them, but surely he’d killed the love she’d had for him?

Love wasn’t the issue, he reminded himself, so why did it keep creeping into his mind?

Because he loved her and if she knew or guessed it, would it be a burden to her?

Love.

Back when he’d broken off their relationship, using words so cruel she had to hate him, he’d looked ahead to years of operations, to the possibility of never walking again, to years of being a deadweight on her. His pride had refused to let her see the broken man he’d become, and that same pride was now the cause of his foreboding.

He’d seen her flinch—once long ago—seen horror in her eyes as she’d looked on a man so badly deformed it was a wonder he’d survived, and it was the memory of that flinch that had confirmed he was doing the right thing when he’d pressed the Send button on the email program.

Would she flinch again?

Some wedding night to look forward to, with his mind following these lines!

‘See, Hor-hay! The baby has a little cot all of his own.’

Ella’s voice brought him out of the deep pit of despair
his thoughts had dug for him, and her little hands, as she handed him the tiny cot, made the breath catch in his throat.

He had to forget his own feelings and forebodings. They were doing this for their precious child—for Ella—and as he turned the cot in his hands and helped her fit the baby into it, he knew he had to hide the doubts and pain he felt and go forward into this marriage with, if not confidence, at least a semblance of it.

Caroline stood in her allotted bedroom, the pure white silk of Jorge’s mother’s wedding dress falling almost to the floor. The original Ella must have been shorter and plumper than Caroline, but not by much, so the seamstress had little to do.

Where the dress had come from, Caroline had no idea. She only knew Carlos had handed her the big box, once white but yellowing with age, and though he hadn’t said anything, she knew, when she saw the dress, exactly what he wanted of her.

Part of her wanted to protest, to tell him it was too much. She was already doing this—getting married—for him, but to wear the dress? Pretend it was a real wedding for a real marriage? Surely that was too much to ask of her?

Ella had clinched the deal, coming in as Caroline opened the box with a photo in her hands.

‘Here’s a picture, Mummy, of Ablito and my grandma who’s a star—my first grandma—getting married, and Ablito says you’ll wear this pretty dress and he’ll get a pretty dress for me, like the one the little girl in the picture is wearing.’

Caroline had looked at the picture and realised that for Ella, to be dressed in layered frills like a doll on the top of a wedding cake would be a dream come true.

So, now she stood, pins going in around her waist, thinking not of marrying Jorge but of what would come after it.

Had he been keeping away from her deliberately, knowing that her desire would build and build? Knowing that the kiss had fired her senses to the point where the next kiss would inevitably lead to bed?

Oh, they still promenaded in the evenings, but with Carlos and with Ella, whose bedtime had slowly but surely grown later and later. The night before last they’d even danced in the paved square beyond the gods playing in heaven, danced to the music of a busker with a guitar. And as she’d strutted through the steps of the tango, feeling the heat of the dance, the to and fro of the dangerous flirtation it represented, she had wanted nothing more than to be held in Jorge’s arms for ever.

It’s a pretence, she reminded herself, pulling away as the music ended and other couples moved into the deep shadows of the trees.

‘Is it danced at weddings?’ she asked, hoping he would take the flutter in her voice for pre-wedding nerves, not wound-tight wanting—lust, almost. Although she hadn’t ever thought to feel something as earthy as the word lust suggested.

‘Of course,’ he said, leading her back to where Ella and Carlos waited by the fountain. ‘It is like foreplay.’

His eyes held hers as he said the word, the glint in them telling her he, too, was tightly wound. Caroline
shivered in the warm night air. It was okay for a man to feel lust, but for a woman? Weren’t women supposedly beyond such basic emotions? And was it an emotion or simply a biological imperative?

‘You are cold. We will return to the house.’

Jorge slipped his jacket around her shoulders and the smell of him—man-smell, definitely earthy—nearly proved her undoing. She clutched the lapels, pulling them close, hoping he wouldn’t see the trembling of her body as she imagined not the jacket but the man himself, wrapping around her, enveloping her this way.

Somehow she got back to the house. Somehow she sat on Ella’s big four-poster bed while Jorge read her nightly story. Somehow she held her child up at the window while she said goodnight to the moon and stars, but when it came to going down to dinner, to sitting with Carlos and Antoinette and Jorge and pretending life was normal, Caroline backed out.

She found Antoinette in the kitchen.

‘I know I have to eat something,’ Caroline told her, ‘but my stomach isn’t up to dinner. May I take some biscuits and cheese up to my room?’

Antoinette turned around and, to Caroline’s surprise, gave her a big hug.

‘Everyone is pretending a wedding is just another business activity while for you it is emotional storm, no?’ she said, and it took Caroline all her willpower to hold back her tears. She was
not
going to her wedding with red eyes.

‘I’ll be okay,’ she assured Antoinette, who moved away, fussing in the pantry, pulling out tins and bottles,
assembling a tray of tasty treats for Caroline to take up to her room.

‘And wine,’ Antoinette said firmly. ‘A mellow red to help you sleep. See, a small bottle, you must drink it all. Tomorrow there are caterers for the party so I will help you dress and take care of Ella too.’

Then, to Caroline’s surprise, the housekeeper cupped her hands around Caroline’s face and looked into her eyes.

‘There are worse things than marrying when unsure about love,’ she said. ‘At least you are getting a chance to show him how you feel.’

The words rang in Caroline’s head as she carried the tray up to her room.

Was her love for Jorge so obvious that Antoinette had picked up on it? And could she, Caroline, afford to show Jorge how she felt? Might he not reject her love again?