“How can I begin to explain, when you don’t even remember how we first met?”

She stared at him, the ferocity of his frustration pummeling her, bloodying her. She gasped, the wish to remember so violent, it smashed at the insides of her skull like giant hammers.

Suddenly, the last barricade shattered. Memories burst out of the last dark chasm in her mind, snowballing into an avalanche. She remembered.

Thirteen

She swung away, a frantic beast needing a way out.

The world tilted, the ground rushed at her at a crazy angle.

“Cybele.”

Her name thundered over her, then lightning hit her, intercepted her fall, live wires snaring her in cabled strength before she reinjured her arm beneath her plummeting weight.

Memories flooded through her like water through a drowning woman’s lungs. In brutal sequence.

She’d first seen Rodrigo at a fundraiser for her hospital. Across the ballroom, towering above everyone, canceling out their existence. She’d felt hit by lightning then, too.

She’d stood there, unable to tear her eyes off him as people kept swamping him in relentless waves, moths to his irresistible fire. All through, he’d somehow never taken his eyes off her. She’d been sure she’d seen the same response in his eyes, the same inability to believe its power, to resist it.

Then Ramón had joined him, turned to look at her, too, and she knew Rodrigo was telling him about her. He left Ramón’s side, charted a course for her. She stood there, shaking, knowing her life would change the moment he reached her.

Then a man next to her had collapsed. Even disoriented by Rodrigo’s hypnotic effect, her doctor auto-function took over, and she’d rushed to the man’s rescue.

She’d kept up her resuscitation efforts until paramedics came, and then she’d swayed up to look frantically for Rodrigo. But he’d vanished.

Disappointment crushed her even when she kept telling herself she’d imagined it all, her own response, too, that if she’d talked to him she would have found out he was nothing like the man she’d created in her mind.

Within days, she’d met Mel. He came with a huge donation to her hospital and became the head of the new surgery department. He offered her a position and started pursuing her almost at once. Flattered by his attention, she’d accepted a couple of dates. Then he proposed. By then, she had suspected he was a risk-taking jerk, and turned him down. But he’d said he used that persona at work to keep everyone on their toes, and showed himself to be diametrically different, everything she’d hoped for in a man, until she accepted.

Then Mel had introduced Rodrigo as his best friend.

She was shocked-and distraught that she hadn’t imagined his effect on her. But she’d certainly imagined her effect on him. He seemed to find her abhorrent. Mel, unaware of the tension between the two people he said meant the most to him, insisted on having Rodrigo with them all the time. And though Mel’s bragging accounts of his friend’s mile-high bedpost notches had her despising Rodrigo right back, she’d realized she couldn’t marry Mel while she felt that unstoppable attraction to his best friend. So she broke off the engagement. And it was then that Mel drove off in a violent huff and had the accident that had crippled him.

Feeling devastated by guilt when Mel accused her of being the reason he’d been crippled, Cybele took back her ring. They got married in a ceremony attended by only his parents a month after he was discharged from hospital. Rodrigo had left for Spain after he’d made sure there was nothing more he could do for his friend at that time, and to Cybele’s relief, he didn’t attend.

But the best of intentions didn’t help her cope with the reality of living with a bitter, volatile man. They’d discussed with a specialist the ways to have a sex life, but his difficulties had agonized him even though Cybele assured him it didn’t matter. She didn’t feel the loss of what she’d never had, was relieved when Mel gave up trying, and poured her energy into helping him return to the OR while struggling to catch up with her job.

Then Rodrigo came back, and Mel’s erratic behavior spiked. She’d confronted him, and he said he felt insecure around any able-bodied man, especially Rodrigo, but needed him more than ever. He was the world’s leading miracle worker in spinal injuries, and he was working on putting Mel back on his feet.

But there was one thing Mel needed even more now. He was making progress with the sex therapy specialists, but until he could be a full husband to her, he wanted something to bind them, beyond her sense of duty and honor and a shared house. A baby.

Cybele had known he was testing her commitment. But was feeling guiltier now that she’d lived with his affliction reason enough to take such a major step at such an inappropriate time? Would a baby make him feel more of a man? Was it wise to introduce a baby into the instability of their relationship?

Guilt won, and with her mother promising she’d help out with the baby, she had the artificial insemination.

Within a week, her conception was confirmed. The news only made Mel unbearably volatile, until she’d said she was done tiptoeing around him since it only made him worse. He apologized, said he couldn’t take the pressure, needed time off. And again Cybele succumbed, suspended her residency even knowing she’d lose her position, to help him and to work out their problems. Then he dropped another bombshell on her. He wanted them to spend that time off on Rodrigo’s estate.

When she’d resisted, he said it would be a double benefit, as Rodrigo wanted Mel there for tests for the surgeries that would give Mel back the use of his legs. And she’d had to agree.

When they’d arrived in Barcelona, Rodrigo had sent them a limo. Mel had it drive them to the airfield where his plane was kept. When she objected, he said he didn’t need legs to fly, that flying would make him feel like he was whole again.

But during the flight, in answer to some innocuous comments, he got nasty then abusive. She held her tongue and temper, knowing it wasn’t the place to escalate their arguments, but she decided that once they landed, she’d face him, as she’d faced herself, and say that their relationship wasn’t working, and it wasn’t because of his turmoil, but because of who he was. A man of a dual nature, one side she’d loved but could no longer find, and the other she couldn’t bear and seemed was all that remained.

But they hadn’t landed.

Now she heaved as the collage of the crash detonated in image after shearing image, accompanied by a hurricane of deafening cacophony and suffocating terror.

Then the maelstrom exchanged its churning motion for a linear trajectory as all trivial memories of every day of the year before the accident burst like flashes of sickening light, obliterating the blessed darkness of the past months.

Everything decelerated, came to a lurching stop.

Her face was being wiped in coolness, her whole self bathed in Rodrigo’s concern. She raised sore eyes to his reddened ones.

His lips feathered over them with trembling kisses. “You remember.”

“My end of things,” she rasped. “Tell me yours.”

The heart beneath her ear felt as if it would ram out of his chest.

Then he spoke. “When I saw you at that fundraiser, it was like seeing my destiny. I told Ramón that, and he said that if anyone else had said that, he would have laughed. But coming from me, I, who always know what’s right for me, he believed it, and to go get you. But as I moved to do that, all hell broke loose. You rushed to that man’s aid and I was called to deal with multiple neuro-trauma cases back here. I asked Ramón to find out all he could about you, so I could seek you out the moment I came back.

“I tried for the last almost eighteen months not to reconstruct what I instinctively knew and didn’t want to-couldn’t face. But the more I knew you, the more inconsistencies I discovered since the accident, the more I couldn’t pretend not to know how it all happened anymore. Mel was there, too, that initial day. He was right behind me as I turned away from Ramón. He must have overheard my intentions. And he decided to beat me to you.”

She couldn’t even gasp. Shock fizzled inside her like a spark in a depleted battery.

“And he did. Using money I gave him to gain his new position, he put himself where he’d have access to you. For the six weeks I stayed away performing one surgery after another, all the time burning for the moment I could come back and search you out, he was pursuing you. The moment you accepted his proposal, he called me to tell me that he was engaged. He left your name out.

“The day I rushed back to the States to find you, he insisted I go see him first, meet his fiancée. I can never describe my horror when I found out it was you.

“I kept telling myself it couldn’t have been intentional, that he wouldn’t be so cruel, that he couldn’t be shoving down my throat the fact that he was the one who’d gotten you. But I remember his glee as he recounted how it had been love at first sight, that you couldn’t get enough of him, and realized he was having a huge laugh at my expense, wallowing in his triumph over me, all the while dangling you in front of me until I was crazed with pain.”

“Was that why…?” She choked off. It was too much.

“Why I behaved as if I hated you? Sí. I hated everything at the time. Mel, myself, you, the world, the very life I woke up to every morning in which you could never be mine.”

“B-but you had so many other lovers.”

“I had nobody. Since I laid eyes on you. Those women were smoke screens so that I wouldn’t sit through our outings like a third-wheel fool, something to distract me so I wouldn’t lose my mind wanting you more with each passing day. But nothing worked. Not my efforts to despise you, not your answering antipathy. So I left, and would have never come back. But he forced me back. He crippled himself, as I and his parents always warned him he one day would.”