“I know my son. He is a Gallardo through and through.” There was a flash of pride in the pained eyes. “It was better for him that we accept exile in Australia than to stay in Buenos Aires where he would never be trusted. So we came here and Joaquin vowed he would prove them all wrong.”
“How?”
“By making restitution, returning all the stolen money.”
This was the driving force behind his single-minded ambition to make as much money as he could, Nicole realised, stunned by how little she had known about the man she had loved.
“Once we were settled here, he worked very hard. Studied hard,” his mother went on. “He won a special scholarship to a university and got a business degree, then moved straight into a bank to learn how to make money from money.”
“Which he proceeded to do with extraordinary success. The star player,” Nicole commented wryly.
Evita nodded, then eyed her ruefully. “When he met you and left the house my father had provided for us to be with you, it meant his feeling for you was very strong. It worried me that it would pull him away from fulfilling what I had dreamt about—returning to Buenos Aires with great pride in my son and what he had achieved.”
She lifted her hands in an appeal for forgiveness as she added, “I would not meet you. I would not give you any status in Joaquin’s life. I would not let him even speak of you to me. So it is because of my selfishness…”
“You don’t have to go that far, Madre,” Quin interrupted as he carried the cappuccino over to where they sat. “I wasn’t about to let anything prevent me from achieving what I’d resolved to do.” He set the coffee cup down on the table and looked straight at Nicole. “I thought I could have my cake and eat it, too, but in doing so, I lost far more than I’d bargained for.”
Zoe, he meant.
The restitution mission had won out over any commitment to the relationship they’d shared, no matter how strongly he had felt about her. Though she guessed the deep-seated trauma of what had happened when he was thirteen was not something that could be easily set aside, especially when he had the end-goal in his sights.
“I presume you did win respectability back in Buenos Aires since your mother now lives there,” she remarked.
“Yes. All the debts were paid with interest three years ago,” he answered almost cynically, no pride at all in his achievement.
His mother promptly supplied the pride. “It was such an honourable deed, my family finally embraced him as one of their own.”
“Why didn’t you stay?” Nicole asked, curious to know why he’d turned his back on the status of hero.
His eyes flashed mockingly. “My name is Joaquin Luis Sola. I am still my father’s son, and that means nothing in Australia.”
“A clean slate,” Nicole interpreted.
“Not so clean.” His gaze dropped to the carry-bag. “Could we look at the photo albums now?”
His mother’s words—an honourable deed—kept playing through Nicole’s mind as she removed the albums from the bag and stacked them on the table in the right order. Was his not so clean slate centred on Zoe now? Was it a matter of honour for him to be a good father to his daughter?
Honour wasn’t love.
And neither was lust.
She would have to be very, very careful not to colour Quin’s current moves with feelings he didn’t have. That could lead to big mistakes, and it wasn’t just herself who would end up paying for them. She didn’t want Zoe’s innocent acceptance of Quin as her father to result in a long string of hurtful disappointments. Though how she could prevent that now, she didn’t know.
He sat down beside her as she rested the oldest album on her lap, ready to turn to the first baby photograph of Zoe. It meant she was sandwiched between her daughter’s father and grandmother on the long leather sofa, and the sense of inevitable involvement with both of them weighed heavily on her mind and heart, making her feel tremulous inside.
She couldn’t stop her hand from shaking a little as she opened the album and her voice turned husky from a sudden welling of emotion. “This is Zoe on the day she was born.”
She looked so tiny in the hospital baby trolley, all bundled up with only her face showing—a rather red face framed by a surprisingly thick mass of spiky black hair. Her eyes were shut and the crescents of long thick eyelashes were also stunningly black.
“Oh! She looks just like Joaquin when he was born!” Evita marvelled, clasping her hands over her heart as though all her prayers had been answered.
“No, Madre.” Quin’s arm reached out, a finger gently touching the baby’s full lower lip in the photograph. “This perfectly shaped mouth comes directly from Nicole. And Zoe is very much a little girl, not a boy.”
A mouth he knew all too intimately, Nicole thought, feeling his strongly muscled thigh pressing against hers and cravenly wishing there was more than hot sex driving the desire that constantly simmered between them. It hurt that there wasn’t, even more now than it had in the past as she continued to show the baby photographs of their daughter whom she now had to share with him.
After that first correction to his mother, he sat in silence, intently viewing the progression of Zoe’s infancy to the toddler stage. It was Evita who peppered Nicole with questions and made increasingly infatuated comments about her beautiful grand-daughter. Quin just looked, and Nicole grew more and more conscious of tension emanating him, a turbulent tension that swirled with all he restrained himself from saying. She could feel him thinking, I missed out on this, and this, and this…and the bitter vengefulness that had driven many of her thoughts and actions started sliding into guilt.
Had she been terribly wrong to keep Zoe from him?
His silence continued through the second album and almost to end of the third. It wasn’t until Nicole turned a page to reveal a much thinner Zoe standing beside the newly constructed butterfly tree, that he made a sound—a low gravelly rumble in his throat. Then…
“This must be after she was struck down with meningitis.”
“Meningitis!” Evita cried in horror.
Shock rolled through Nicole. She had not told Quin of Zoe’s illness so how did he know? Her head jerked around to look at him and she caught a poignant look of pain and anger in his eyes before he bent forward to answer his mother.
“Fortunately Zoe recovered with no long-term ill effects from it, Madre. And Nicole came up with the brilliant idea of creating a butterfly tree to help her look forward to being completely well again. Which she is. Delightfully so,” he added gruffly.