Enamored by Diana Palmer

lifting his chin.
    She moved closer to him in one last desperate effort to reach him. Her soft eyes searched his. She looked young and very seductive, and Diego felt himself caving in when she was close enough that he could smell the sweet perfume of her body and feel her warmth. All the memories stirred suddenly, weakening him.
    She sensed that he was vulnerable somehow. It gave her the courage to do what she did next. She raised her hands and rested them on his chest, against the cool skin and the soft feathering of hair over the hard muscles. He flinched, and she sighed softly as she looked up at him.
    “Diego, we’re married,” she whispered, trying not to tremble. “Can’t we…can’t we forget the past and start again…tonight?”
    His jaw went taut, his body stiffened. No, he told himself, he wouldn’t allow her to make him vulnerable a second time. He had to gird himself against any future assaults like this.
    He caught her shoulders and pushed her away from him, his face severe, his eyes cold and unwelcoming. “The very touch of you disgusts me, Señora Laremos,” he said with icy fastidiousness. “I would rather sleep alone for the rest of my days than to share my bed with you. You repulse me.”
    The lack of heat in the words made them all the more damning. She looked at him with the eyes of a bludgeoned deer. Disgust. Repulse. She couldn’t bear any more. His grandmother and sister like hostile soldiers living with her, then Diego’s cold company, and now this. It was too much. She was bearing his child, and he wouldn’t want it, because she disgusted him. Tears stung her eyes. Her hand went to her mouth.
    “I can’t bear it,” she whimpered. Her face contorted and she ran out the door, which he’d left open, down the hall, her hair streaming behind her. She felt rather than saw the women of the house gaping at her from the living room as she ran wildly toward the front door with Diego only a few steps behind her.
    The house was one story, but there was a long drop off the porch because of the slope on which the house had been built. The stone steps stretched out before her, but she was blinded by tears and lost her footing in the driving rain. She didn’t even feel the wetness or the pain as she shot headfirst into the darkness and the first impact rocked her. Somewhere a man’s voice was yelling hoarsely, but she was mercifully beyond hearing it.
    She came to in the hospital, surrounded by white-coated figures bending over her.
    The resident physician was American, a blond-haired, blue-eyed young man with a pleasant smile. “There you are,” he said gently when she stirred and opened her eyes. “Minor concussion and a close call for your baby, but I think you’ll survive.”
    “I’m pregnant?” she asked drowsily.
    “About two and a half months,” he agreed. “Is it a pleasant surprise?”
    “I wish it were so.” She sighed. “Please don’t tell my husband. He’ll be worried enough as it is,” she added, deliberately misleading the young man. She didn’t want Diego to know about the baby.
    “I’m sorry, but I told him there was a good chance you might lose it,” he said apologetically. “You were in bad shape when they brought you in,
señora.
It’s a miracle that you didn’t lose the baby, and I’d still like to run some tests just to make sure.”
    She bit her lower lip and suddenly burst into tears. It all came out then, the forced marriage, his family’s hatred of her, his own hatred of her. “I don’t want him to know that I’m still pregnant,” she pleaded. “Oh, please, you mustn’t tell him, you mustn’t! I can’t stay here and let my baby be born in such hostility. They’ll take him away from me and I’ll never see him again. You don’t know how they hate me and my family!”
    He sighed heavily. “You must see that I can’t lie about it.”
    “I’m not asking you to,” she said. “If I can leave in the morning, and if you’ll just not talk to