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Diego turned back, a snarl on his face. ‘What do you know about it? You stand there taunting me, but you know nothing. Ask her if I’m damned. Ask her!’
His voice was harsh, tearing from his throat.
The blood drained from Portia’s face.
The light in Diego’s eyes was vicious.
‘Ask her what I did to her,’ he said, his voice low.
The priest turned to Portia, studying her stricken face.
‘Is he damned?’ he asked her, almost conversationally.
Her eyes slid past the old priest, back to Diego Saez. Her heart was slumping in her chest, her breathing ragged. She stared at Diego’s face. It was stark, pulled tight with tension.
It was him—and it was not him.
An image laid itself in her mind. The Diego she knew. Sleek, powerful, rich—reaching out for her to peel her clothes from her, lower her down beneath him on the bed…
Possessing her. Buying her.
Another image intruded. The photograph of the boy sleeping rough that had, for some reason she had never understood, so worked on her that she had walked away from everything she had once thought she had to come out here. A world away from all she knew. All she took for granted.
A world Diego Saez had destroyed for her.
The two images collided, then dissolved, one into another.
The man and the boy.
The vice around her heart squeezed unbearably.
Something poured into the space around her heart, filling it. An emotion so powerful she could not block it.
‘Portia—’ Diego said her name, his voice low, cracked. ‘Don’t look at me like that. Por Dios! Don’t look at me like that! After everything I did to you I don’t deserve your pity! Only your contempt!’
She couldn’t speak. Could only slowly shake her head.
He closed his eyes, then opened them again.
‘Don’t make excuses for me. I did what I did to you knowingly—I thought you deserved it. I thought you were like—’
His voice broke off. Then, ‘Like Mercedes de Carvello.’ His voice was flat. His eyes dead. ‘She was the wife of the man who owned the estancia I was born on—where my parents worked. They poisoned my father. She killed my mother. Ran her down like a dog in her sports car, when she was drunk. I accused her of murder and she had me thrown off the estate. I walked to San Cristo. Father Tomaso found me, living on the streets. Years later, a lifetime later, when I’d made money as I’d vowed I would do, I bought the estancia from Esteban de Carvello—he’d run through all his money. His wife came to me in my hotel room and offered herself to me—the son of her maid—to persuade me to let her go on living at the estancia. I threw her out.’
His voice shuddered to a halt. Then he spoke again.
‘I thought you were like her—willingly giving yourself to protect your wealth. I thought your reluctance was because, like Mercedes de Carvello, you thought yourself too good for me—you didn’t want to soil your hands on me. So I…I made you want to soil them…’
Faintness drummed through her.
Diego’s voice came to her from very far away. ‘They say that deeds bring their own justice. I can attest to that. I wanted you so much—wanted you for my bed. But you would not come. You thought yourself too good for me. So I gave you an…incentive.’ He took another painful, ragged breath. ‘But justice had been meted out to me—a terrible justice.’ He fixed his eyes on her. They were dark and hollow. ‘Content yourself, Portia, in your contempt for me, for what I did to you. What I thought you were. Content yourself and know that justice has been done. I have my punishment for what I did to you.’
He looked at her, his face like death.
‘I fell in love with you, Portia. Fell in love with you, who can only loathe and hate and damn me for what I did to you. And every day, every day of my existence, I wake knowing that you hate me—can only ever hate me. All my life. That—’ he let his eyes rest not on Portia but on the still face of Father Tomaso ‘—that is damnation. So whatever I do now with the rest of my life—here or anywhere else—it means nothing to me.’ His face was shuttered. ‘Nothing.’
He turned away.
A sound broke from Portia. A tight, broken cry.
