One Night Of Consequences Collection. Annie West
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I reached the attic. It looked even more desolate than I remembered, with only one grimy window, an ancient metal bed frame and stacks of boxes. Setting down the baby, I went straight for the boxes.
“What are you looking for?”
Hearing Alejandro’s husky voice behind me, I turned. “These boxes hold everything from my childhood.”
He stepped inside the attic room, knocking his head against the slanted roof. He rubbed it ruefully. “I can see why Claudie wouldn’t come up here. This place is like a prison cell.”
“This was my home for over ten years.”
His dark eyes widened. “This room?” He slowly looked around the attic, at the rough wood floors, at the naked lightbulb hanging from the ceiling. “You lived here?”
I gave a wistful laugh. “From the time my parents died when I was fourteen, until I left last year when...well. It looked nicer then, though. I made decorations, paper flowers.” A lump rose in my throat as I looked around the bare room where I’d spent so many years. The bare mattress on the metal bed frame where I’d slept so many nights. I gently touched the bare lightbulb and swung it on the cord. “I had a bright red lampshade I bought from the charity shop on Church Street.”
“A charity shop?” he said sharply. “But you’re Claudie’s cousin. A poor relation, I know, but I’d assumed you were well paid for all your work....”
This time my laugh was not so wistful. “I was paid a salary after I turned eighteen, but that money had to go to—other things. So I started earning a little money doing portraits at street fairs. But Claudie allowed me so little time away from the house...”
“Allowed you?” he said incredulously.
I looked at him. “You heard about my inheritance.”
“How much would it have been?”
“If I was still living in this house on my twenty-fifth birthday, a few months from now, I would have inherited thirty million pounds.”
His jaw dropped.
“Thirty...”
“Yes.”
“And you left it all?”
“To protect my baby. Yes.”
“To protect our baby, you sacrificed more money than most people see in a lifetime.”
He sounded so amazed. I shook my head. “Any mother would have done the same. Money is just money.” I glanced down at Miguel, and a smile lifted my cheeks as I said softly, “He is my life.”
When I finally looked up, his dark, soulful eyes were looking at me as if he’d never seen me before. My cheeks went hot. “I expect you think I’m an idiot.”
“Far from it,” he said in a low voice.
He was looking at me with such intensity. Awkwardly, I turned away and started digging through the top box. Pushing it aside, I opened the one beneath it.
“What are you looking for?” he said curiously.
Not answering, I pulled out old sweaters, old ragtag copies of books I’d read and reread as a teenager, Rebecca, A Little Princess, Jane Eyre. Finally, at the bottom of the box, I found the three oversize, flat photo albums. “Thank you,” I whispered aloud when I saw they hadn’t been burned, or warped from being left to rot in the rain or scribbled on with a venomous black marker, or any of the other images I’d tormented myself with. Pressing the albums against my chest, I closed my eyes in pure gratitude.
“Photo albums?” Alejandro said in disbelief. “You begged me to come to London for photo albums?”
“I told you,” I said sharply. “I came for my baby’s legacy.”
“But I never thought...” Frowning, Alejandro held out his hand. “Let me see.”
Reluctantly, I handed them over, then watched as he turned through the pages of the top album, at old photographs pressed against yellowing adhesive pages beneath the clear plastic cover.
“It nearly killed me to leave them behind,” I said. “It’s all I have left of my parents. My home.” I pointed to a picture of a tenement building where the ground floor was a butcher’s shop. “That was our apartment in Brooklyn.”
He turned the page. “And this?”
My heart twisted when I saw my mother, young and laughing, holding a ragtag bouquet of flowers, sitting in my father’s lap. “My parents’ wedding day. My dad was a student in London. He fell in love with a waitress, an immigrant newly arrived from Puerto Rico. He married her against his family’s wishes, when she was pregnant with me....”
Alejandro looked at me for a long moment, then silently turned more pages. My babyhood flashed before my eyes, pictures of me as a tiny baby, getting bathed in the sink, sitting on a towel on the kitchen floor, banging wooden spoons against a pot and beaming with the same chubby cheeks that Miguel had now.
Finishing the first album, Alejandro handed it to me without a word, and thumbed through the second book, then the third. My childhood passed swiftly—learning to ride a bike...my first day at school...
“Why are you interested?” I said haltingly. “Is it—to make fun of me?”
“To make fun?” He looked at me with a scowl. “You think I would taunt you about having a happy childhood?” He shook his head. “If anything, I envy you,” he said softly, looking back at the pages that my tenderhearted mother had made for me when I was a child. Right up to the very last photo, of my father at Christmas, sitting beneath the tree wearing a Santa hat, smiling lovingly at the camera as he held my mother’s homemade gift of a sweater. Two months later, he was dead. There were no more photos. The last few pages of the album were blank. Alejandro said softly, “I have no pictures of myself with my mother. None.”
I blinked. “How is that possible? I mean, I’d think you’d have a million pictures taken....”
He abruptly looked at me. Without answering, he closed the photo album and handed it to me.
“Perhaps you’re not who I thought you were.”
“Who did you think I was?”
“Exactly like all the other women I’ve ever dated. In love with the idea of being a rich duchess.” He looked down at me, his dark eyes infinite and deep as the night sky. “But I’m starting to think you’re different. A woman who would willingly leave thirty million pounds... You were actually in love with me, weren’t you?”
My breath got knocked out of me.
“That was a long time ago.”
Our eyes met, and I suddenly had to get out of the attic. I picked up Miguel’s baby carrier with one arm and carried the albums with the other. “I’ll be downstairs.”
Without looking back, I fled, rushing down the flights of stairs. My teeth were chattering, and I was shaking with strange emotion. Edward, I reminded myself. The other reason I’d come to London. I had to get his help before Alejandro could bully me into going to Spain. Although it actually wasn’t going to Spain that frightened me. It was never being able to leave again. It was being separated from my baby. It was being completely under the control of a man who’d almost destroyed me once, just by making me love him.
As I reached the bottom of the staircase, I heard a car door slam outside. Through the windows, I saw a flash of purple.
Claudie had come home.
I turned to where Hildy was loitering at the bottom of the stairs. “Hildy!”
“Oh, hello,” she said, blushing when she saw me. “I was just dusting the banister, Miss—”
“My cousin is here. Please.” Grabbing Hildy’s arm, I whispered, “I need you to take a message to Edward