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‘Go on,’ he said.
Night had descended over Madrid, and the skyline was lit up spectacularly against the inky blackness.
‘They think I was just a few hours old, but they can’t be sure, and it wasn’t long after midnight, so they nominated that date as my birthday. I was wrapped in a blanket. The priest found me.’
‘What happened then?’
Trinity swallowed. ‘The authorities waited as long as they could for my biological parent, or parents, to come and claim me. By the time I was a toddler I was in foster care, and there was still no sign of anyone claiming me, so they put me forward for adoption.’
‘But your file said you grew up in foster homes.’
Trinity was still astounded that he’d looked into her past. She glanced at him, but looked away again quickly. ‘I did grow up in foster homes. But I was adopted for about a year, until the couple’s marriage broke up and they decided they didn’t want to keep me if they weren’t staying together.’
She shouldn’t be feeling emotion—not after all these years. But it was still there...the raw, jagged edges of hurt at the knowledge that she’d been abandoned by her own mother and then hadn’t even managed to persuade her adoptive parents to keep her.
‘Apparently,’ she said, as dispassionately as she could, ‘I was traumatised, so they decided it might be best not to put me through that experience again. That’s how I ended up in the foster home system.’
‘Were you moved around much?’
‘Not at the start. But when I came into my teens, yes. I was in about six different foster homes before I turned eighteen.’
‘Your affinity with Mateo and Sancho... You have no qualification in childcare, and yet you obviously know what to do with small children.’
Trinity felt as if Cruz was peeling back layers of skin. It was almost physically painful to talk about this. ‘For some reason the small children in the foster homes used to latch on to me... I felt protective, and I liked mothering them, watching over them...’
But then the inevitable always happened—the babies and toddlers would be taken away to another home, or put up for adoption, and Trinity would be bereft. And yet each time it had happened she’d been helpless to resist the instinct to nurture. Of course, she surmised grimly now, a psychologist would undoubtedly tell her she’d been desperately trying to fulfil the need in herself to be loved and cared for.
And the twins were evidence that she hadn’t learned to fill that gap on her own yet.
‘Did you ever go looking for your parents?’
Trinity fought to control her emotions. ‘Where would I start? It wasn’t as if they’d logged their names anywhere. I could have investigated pregnant women on record in the local area, who had never returned to give birth, but to be honest I decided a long time ago that perhaps it was best to just leave it alone.’
The truth was that she didn’t think she could survive the inevitable rejection of her parents if she ever found either one of them.
She felt her glass being lifted out of her hands, and looked to see Cruz putting it down on a side table beside his. He turned back and took her hand in his, turning it over, looking at it as if it held some answer he was looking for. The air between them was charged.
‘What are you doing?’ Trinity asked shakily.
Their eyes met and she desperately wanted to move back, out of Cruz’s magnetic orbit, but she couldn’t.
‘You’re an enigma,’ he said, meeting her eyes. ‘I can’t figure you out and it bothers me.’
Feeling even shakier now, she said, ‘There’s nothing to figure out. What you see is what you get.’
Cruz gripped her hand tighter and pulled her closer, saying gruffly, ‘I’m beginning to wonder if that isn’t the case.’
It took a second for his words to sink in, and when they did Trinity’s belly went into freefall. Was he...could he really listen to her now? And believe her?
But Cruz didn’t seem to be interested in talking. His hand was trailing up her arm now, all the way to where the chiffon was tied at her shoulder.
With slow, sure movements, and not taking his eyes off hers, Cruz undid the bow, letting the material fall down. He caressed her shoulder, moving his hand around to the back of her neck and then up, finding the band in her hair and tugging it free so that her hair fell down around her shoulders.
Trinity was feeling incredibly vulnerable after revealing far more than she’d intended, but Cruz was looking at her and touching her as if he was burning up inside, just as she was, making her forget everything. Almost.
She couldn’t let him expose her even more...
It was the hardest thing in the world, but she caught his hand, pulling it away. ‘We shouldn’t do this...’
