Enamored by Diana Palmer Read Free Book Online

together when Melissa began to feel a stirring inside, a frightening certainty that she was pregnant. She was nauseated, not just at breakfast but all the time. She hid it from Diego’s grandmother and sister, although it grew more difficult all the time.
    She spent her days wandering miserably around the house, wishing she had something to occupy her. She wasn’t allowed to take part in any of the housework or to sit with the rest of the family, who made this apparent by simply leaving a room the moment she entered it. She ate alone, because the
señora
and the
señorita
managed to change the times of meals from day to day. She was avoided, barely tolerated, actively disliked by both women, and she didn’t have the worldliness or the sophistication or the maturity to cope with the situation. She spent a great deal of time crying. And still Diego stayed away.
    “Is it so impossible for you to accept me?” she asked Señora Laremos one evening as Juana left the sitting room and a stiff-backed
señora
prepared to follow her.
    Señora Laremos gave her a cold, black glare from eyes so much like Diego’s that Melissa shivered. “You are not welcome here. Surely you realize it?” the older woman asked. “My grandson does not want you, and neither do we. You have dishonored us yet again, like your mother before you!”
    Melissa averted her face. “It wasn’t my fault,” she said through trembling lips. “Not completely.”
    “Had it not been for your father’s insistence, you would have been treated like any other woman whose favors my son had enjoyed. You would have been adequately provided for—”
    “How?” Melissa demanded, her illusions gone at the thought of Diego’s other women, her heart broken. “With an allowance for life, a car, a mink coat?” Her chin lifted proudly. “Go ahead,
señora.
Ignore me. Nothing will change the fact that I am Diego’s wife.”
    The older woman seemed actually to vibrate with anger. “You impudent young cat,” she snarled. “Has your family not been the cause of enough grief for mine already, without this? I despise you!”
    Melissa didn’t blink. She didn’t flinch. “Yes, I realize that,” she said with quiet pride. “God forbid that in your place I would ever be so cruel to a guest in my home. But then,” she added with soft venom, “I was raised properly.”
    The Señora actually flushed. She went out of the room without another word, but afterward her avoidance of Melissa was total.
    Melissa gave up trying to make them accept her now that she realized the futility of it. She wanted to go home to see her father, but even that was difficult to arrange in the hostile environment where she lived. She settled for the occasional phone call and had to pretend, for his sake, that everything was all right. Perhaps when Diego had time to get used to the situation, everything would be all right. That was the last hope she had—that Diego might relent. That she might be able to persuade him to give her a chance to be the wife she knew she was capable of being.
    Meanwhile, the sickness went on and on, and she knew that soon she was going to have to see a doctor. She grew paler by the day. So pale, in fact, that Juana risked her grandmother’s wrath to sneak into Melissa’s room one night and ask how she was.
    Melissa gaped at her. “I beg your pardon?” she asked tautly.
    Juana grimaced, her hands folded neatly at her waist, her dark eyes oddly kind in her thin face. “You seem so pale, Melissa. I wish it were different. Diego is—” she spread her hands “Diego. And my grandmother nurses old wounds that have been reopened by your presence here. I cannot defy her. It would break her heart if I sided with you against her.”
    “I understand that,” Melissa said quietly, and managed a smile. “I don’t blame you for being loyal to your grandmother, Juana.”
    Juana sighed. “Is there something, anything, I can do?”
    Melissa shook her head. “But thank