Enamored by Diana Palmer Read Free Book Online Page B

feel so terrible? But he did. The laughing, shy young woman who’d adored him no longer lived in the same body with this quiet, unnaturally pale woman who wouldn’t look at him.
    “Perhaps you would like to lie down, Melissa,” the
señora
said uneasily. “You do seem pale.”
    Melissa didn’t argue. It was obvious that she wasn’t welcome here, either, even if she had been invited to join the family. “As you wish,
señora,”
she said, her tone emotionless. She got up without looking at anyone and went down the long, carpeted hall to her room.
    Diego began to brood. He hardly heard what his grandmother said about the running of the estate in his absence. His mind was still on Melissa.
    “How long has she been like this,
abuela?
” he asked unexpectedly. “Has she no interest in the house at all?”
    Juana started to speak, but the
señora
silenced her. “She has been made welcome, despite the circumstances of your marriage,” the
señora
said with dignity. “She prefers her own company.”
    “Excuse me,” Juana said suddenly, and she left the table, her face rigid with distaste as she went out the door.
    Diego finished his coffee and went to Melissa’s room. But once outside it, he hesitated. Things were already strained. He didn’t really want to make it any harder for her. He withdrew his hand from the doorknob and, with a faint sigh, went back the way he’d come. There would be time later to talk to her.
    But business interceded. He was either on his way out or getting ready to leave every time Melissa saw him. He didn’t come near her except to inquire after her health and to nod now and again. Melissa began to stay in her room all the time, eating her food on trays that Carisa brought and staring out the window. She wondered if her mind might be affected by her enforced solitude, but nothing really seemed to matter anymore. She had no emotion left in her. Even her pregnancy seemed quite unreal, although she knew it was only a matter of time before she was going to have to see the doctor.
    It was storming the night Diego finally came to see her. He’d just come in from the cattle, and he looked weary. In dark slacks and an unbuttoned white shirt, he looked very Spanish and dangerously attractive, his black hair damp from the first sprinkling of rain.
    “Will you not make even the effort to associate with the rest of us?” he asked without preamble. “My grandmother feels that your dislike for us is growing out of proportion.”
    “Your grandmother hates me,” she said without inflection, her eyes on the darkness outside the window. “Just as you do.”
    Diego’s face hardened. “After all that has happened, did you expect to find me a willing husband?”
    She sighed, staring at her hands in her lap. “I don’t know what I expected. I was living on dreams. Now they’ve all come true, and I’ve learned that reality is more than castles in the air. What we think we want isn’t necessarily what we need. I should have gone to America. I should never have…I should have stopped you.”
    He felt blinding anger. “Stopped me?” he echoed, his deep voice ringing in the silence of her room. “When it was your damnable scheming that led to our present circumstances?”
    She lifted her face to his. “And your loss of control,” she said quietly, faint accusation in her voice. “You didn’t have to make love to me. I didn’t force you.”
    His temper exploded. He didn’t want to think about that. He lapsed into clipped, furious Spanish as he expressed things he couldn’t manage in English.
    “All right,” she said, rising unsteadily to her feet. “All right, it was all my fault—all of it. I planned to trap you and I did, and now both of us are paying for my mistakes.” Her pale eyes pleaded with his unyielding ones. “I can’t even express my sorrow or beg you enough to forgive me. But Diego, there’s no hope of divorce. We have to make the best of it.”
    “Do we?” he asked,