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Lily.
It was Lily, standing over him and cradling the sleeping baby in her arms.
Tristan dropped his head into his hands, rubbing his fingers hard into eyes that still felt as if they were full of grit. He wasn’t sure any more if he was asleep or awake. Was this just another scene in his disjointed series of dreams?
He heard the quiet whisper of her skirt as she sat down beside him. The skirt she had been wearing in the garden when the social worker came, he thought randomly; was it a day or a month or a lifetime ago? And then he caught a breath of her clean milk and almonds fragrance and he knew that she was really there.
Slowly he lifted his head and straight ened up, feeling his muscles protest at every movement. Lily said nothing, but she took his hand in her free one, and they just sat like that for a while, his rough, grit-encrusted fingers entwined with her cool, pale, clean ones, her head leaning very lightly against his shoulder, listening to the sound of the baby’s breathing.
‘Why did you come?’ he said at last. His voice was rusty and his throat ached from shouting last night. Shouting in structions to Nico, and Dimitri and hundreds of others who were engaged in the same race against time to free those trapped in the rubble.
She sighed softly and shifted just a little on the pew, so that she was facing him more, her grey eyes serious. ‘Bianca called. Your father had a heart attack yesterday. A serious one. They don’t think he’ll survive.’
Tristan exhaled heavily, tipping his head back again as despair came down like the night. Not for Juan Carlos, but because he had thought, for a moment, that Lily had come because she wanted him. Because she loved him.
‘You came all the way here to tell me that?’
‘I thought you might want to see him, before he died,’ she said quietly. She was rocking the baby very gently, almost imper ceptibly, in an instinctive maternal rhythm as old as time. ‘I wanted you to have that chance, before it’s too late.’
‘I’m afraid it’s been a wasted journey,’ he snapped. ‘Juan Carlos can go to the corner of hell he reserved for himself years ago without any kind of goodbye from me.’ He looked up, frowning as a thought suddenly struck him. ‘How did you know where to find me?’
‘Oh, you know, the usual way wives know where their husbands are,’ she said with gentle irony. ‘There was a report about the earthquake on the news and I saw you in the background.’
He gave a ragged laugh. ‘That’s it, then. Game over. The press will no doubt pick it up and then—’
‘They’re onto it already. Does it matter?’
‘Yes,’ he said very wearily. ‘I don’t know; probably.’
She had been looking down at the child in her arms, but now she lifted her head and looked at him, and the intensity in her beautiful eyes made his sore throat close. ‘Why?’ she said fiercely. ‘Because now everyone will know that Tristan Romero has a heart? That behind the cold façade of the womanising billionaire businessman there’s actually a man who cares about people?’
He leaned back in the hard pew, trying to ease the ache in his back and his arms and his shoulders and his heart. ‘Is there?’ he said cynically. ‘Or is that just a new image, a fresh angle that they’ll use to sell papers?’
‘I think you care,’ she said huskily.
‘OK,’ he admitted, on a heavy outward breath, ‘I care. Dios, Lily, I care so much…but what’s the point when I can’t help the people I care about? I let you down yesterday, by saying too much. I ruined it for you. My toxic past just keeps coming back to poison your life, doesn’t it?’
She got to her feet while he was speaking and stood in front of him, shifting the baby easily up onto her shoulder, cupping the downy hair that was still matted with grit and dust in her hand. Her face was creased with anguish. ‘Tristan, that doesn’t matter,’ she said and her voice was low and urgent. ‘None of that matters. I should never, never have put you through that, but at least it made me realise that the most important thing—’
Just then the door at the back of the church burst open and the tranquillity was momentarily disturbed by the sound of heavy feet hurrying across the tiled floor. People sitting quietly in the pews praying or huddled in little groups giving comfort to each other looked round.
‘Señor Romero!’
Quickly Lily slipped out of the pew and went towards Dimitri, taking his hand. His face was wet with tears.
‘Dimitri, what is it?’
‘Oh, Marquesa,’ he sobbed, ‘they have found Andrei!’
Tristan had got to his feet and was standing perfectly still, his face white and tense beneath the streaks of dirt. Agony shot through Lily as an image of him standing by the window in the hospital suddenly flashed into her head, and she recognised the same desperate attempt to maintain emotional control. How could she have been stupid enough to think he didn’t care?
‘Is he alive?’ Tristan said tersely.
‘Yes. Dehydrated. He is on drip in health centre, but he will be all right soon.’ Dimitri’s expression of tentative joy wavered again as he glanced at the baby against Lily’s chest. ‘How is Emilia?
‘She’s fine,’ Lily soothed. ‘Sleeping peacefully. She’s so beautiful, Dimitri.’
Dimitri looked down at the floor and shuffled his feet in helpless misery. ‘Yes. Just like Irina when she was small.’ His voice broke. ‘They have no one now.’
‘Dimitri, they have you,’ Lily said softly, and she held out the sleeping baby to him. Clumsily he took her into his arms and held her awkwardly, but his hands just seemed too big to manage the fragile bundle and the expression on his fleshy, implacable face was one of pained bewilderment.
‘I cannot care for them,’ he said hope lessly. ‘Khazakismiri men not brought up to look after babies. I not know how to start now, after so many years without a wife and family. If I was younger perhaps…’ He thrust the baby back to Lily almost imploringly. ‘But you could care for them, Marquesa. You and Señor Romero—’
‘It’s out of the question.’
Tristan leapt to his feet and he pushed past Lily, walking a little distance away before swinging round to face them both. Beneath the grime his face was pale and taut with fury. ‘There are legal procedures. It’s not simple.’
‘Sorry, Señor.’ Dimitri looked stricken. ‘Sorry. I should not have asked. It is a miracle that they are safe, but now I worry about what will happen to them…’
Lily laid a hand on Dimitri’s arm. ‘It’s perfectly natural that you’re worried, but try not to think about that now. It’s too early to make any plans for the twins’ future yet, but of course I’ll take care of them for the time being, for as long as it takes to sort something out.’ Dimitri’s face broke into a relieved smile. ‘On one condition,’ she added.
‘Marquesa…?’
‘That you go and get something to eat and some rest.’
After Dimitri had gone, Lily carefully laid Emilia down in the makeshift bed someone had provided for her and went to where Tristan was standing, leaning with his back against a wall by the altar, his eyes closed. The old stone church had withstood the earthquake, but the stained glass window above his head was broken, and coloured shards of glass crunched beneath Lily’s feet as she went towards him. Her heart was hammering, a sickening drumbeat of quiet dread.
‘It seems so obvious, doesn’t it?’ he said bitterly, without opening his eyes. ‘And I know that it’s what you want more than anything, but I can’t do it, Lily.’
She was aware of pain crouching in the corners of her mind, inching forwards, waiting to strike when he said the words that would spell the end, once and for all. She stopped a few feet away from him, clasping her hands together and pressing them to her lips.
‘No. It’s OK. I understand.’
Still his eyes stayed shut, his long lashes dark against his white cheeks. His brow was creased as if he was in pain. ‘Do you?’
‘Yes.’ It was barely more than a whisper. ‘You never wanted to get married. You never wanted children. You said all along you’d never love me. So, yes, I understand why you can’t do it.’
His eyes flew open and he pushed himself violently away from the wall, taking her by the shoulders and staring down into her face with an expression of intense suffering that tore into her, filling her with anguish but also a peculiar kind of hope.
‘No! I love you more than I thought it was possible to love anyone…anything.’ He spoke slowly, clearly, his voice raw with terrible emotion. ‘God, Lily—I love you so much it’s killing me, because I can’t give you the one thing that you want and because loving you means that I have to do what’s best for you, and that’s leave you alone.’
She shook her head, vehemently in denial. ‘No—’
‘Yes.’ Still holding her by the shoulders, he shook her slightly, his eyes searing into hers. ‘Because I can’t risk it. What if I turn out to be like him?’
‘Your father?
‘Yes. Him and all the other Romero men before him.’ He let her go abruptly, stepping back and raising his clenched fists to his temples. ‘You were right when you said I was afraid, though it took me a long time to admit it to myself. But I’m absolutely bloody terrified, Lily. I’m scared witless that somewhere that behaviour has been branded into me, hard wired into my brain, and that whether I mean to or not I’ll just end up repeating the cycle.’
