So she thought of the difference between his private apartment and its soaring modern space and the rest of the castillo. So different. It made her wonder what it must have been like to grow up here...and why his mother had left him behind.
Something caught Lexie’s eye through a doorway and she put down her bags for a moment to walk into a long formal room. It was filled with portraits and she shivered a little as she looked at them. They were all so stern and forbidding—much like the dour castillo housekeeper.
She walked around them and came to the most recent ones. Lexie figured they had to be of Cesar’s grandparents. They appeared sterner than all the rest put together and she shivered again.
‘Cold?’
Lexie jumped and put a hand to her heart, looking around to see Cesar lounging against the door frame, watching her. She took him in. He was wearing dark trousers and an open-necked shirt. He looked smart, yet casual. Gorgeous.
‘You startled me.’
He straightened up and came in, hands in his pockets, which made her feel minutely safer. Her skin was hot. And an ache she’d not even been aware of noticing eased. She’d missed him. For one day.
Dragging her eyes away from him, she regarded the portraits again. ‘Are these your grandparents?’
He stood beside her and a frisson of electricity shot straight to her groin.
He sounded grim. ‘Yes, that’s them.’
Lexie was curious. ‘What were they like?’
He was clipped. ‘Cold, cruel, snobbish. Obsessed with the family legacy.’
She looked at him and almost gasped at how hard his face had become. Stark. Pained.
‘What did they do to you?’
He smiled, but it was hard. ‘What didn’t they do? My grandmother’s particular favourite hobby was getting me to compile scrapbooks of newspaper cuttings featuring my mother and half-brothers, further driving home the message that they wanted nothing to do with me.’
Lexie stared at Cesar, too shocked to say anything for a moment. No wonder there was such tension in him when he mentioned his family. And yet he’d gone to that wedding... He glanced at her and she could see it in his eyes: Not up for further discussion. What surprised Lexie was the wave of rage she felt welling inside her at the horrific cruelty he’d endured.
‘What happened to your father? Is it true that he was a bullfighter?’
Cesar looked away again and Lexie thought he would ignore her, but then he said, ‘He rebelled. He wanted out and wanted nothing to do with his inheritance. So he did what he could to ensure that his family would disown him: he became a bullfighter. It was the worst insult to his parents he could think of. And they duly disinherited him.’
‘Your mother...?’
Cesar kept his eyes on the portraits.
‘My mother was from a small town down south, where my father went to train as a bullfighter. She was poor. He fell in love and they got married, had me.’
‘Did she know who he was? Where he’d come from?’
Now Cesar looked at Lexie, and she almost took a step back at the cynicism etched on his face. He seemed older in that moment.
‘Of course she did. That’s why she targeted him. If he hadn’t died she probably would have persuaded him to return home—especially once they’d had me.’
Lexie tried to hide her dismay at seeing this side of him. He seemed utterly unapproachable at that moment.
‘You don’t know that for sure, though...’ she said, almost hopefully.
‘Of course I know,’ he dismissed coldly. ‘As soon as my father died she brought me here, but my grandparents wanted nothing to do with her. Only me. They realised that their legacy would be secure with an heir. Once she knew there was nothing she could gain, she left.’
Lexie put a hand to her belly in a reflexive action as the old pain flared inside her hearing his words. To think of the awful wrench it must have been for his mother to give him up. No matter what he said, she couldn’t have been that cruel.
‘But she came back...? You said that she came back some years later.’
A bleak look flashed across Cesar’s face, but it was so fleeting that Lexie wasn’t even sure she’d seen it.