A Price Worth Paying(24)

Her teeth found her lip. She shook her head. ‘Could I manage it, do you think? I’ve never done anything like this before.’

‘You can help, but the job will be bigger than just you.’

She smiled stiffly. ‘Will you talk to Felipe about it, then? You know so much more than me about what is needed to be done.’

‘You think he will listen to me?’

‘At least you speak the same language. With me, our conversations are limited to the basics. I want him to see that all is not lost, that life goes on, that the vines go on.’

‘Then I will talk with him. I will come up to the house before I go.’

‘Thank you.’

She turned to leave but he caught her hand. ‘I could ask you the same question.’ And when he caught her frown, ‘Why are you doing this?’

‘You know already. So he has a chance to smile before he dies.’

‘Sí.’ He nodded. ‘But why? Why do you care so about a grumpy old man who lives halfway around the world and who you barely know? Why have you given up an inheritance for him?’

She smiled at the ‘grumpy old man’ reference. There was no point in objecting to that. ‘He’s all I have left in the world.’

‘Is that enough to do what you are doing? I ask myself if it is enough and still it makes no sense. Why do you care so much?’

Why did she care? She turned her face up to the wide blue sky. And suddenly she was back, that seven-year-old child with long tangled hair and an even more tangled family and a promise she’d made when her screaming mother had wrenched her in tears from her grandmother’s arms, their one brief attempt at bridgebuilding over, with a vow never to see them again.

Simone had witnessed the pain in her grandmother’s eyes, had witnessed the anguish in her grandfather’s and understood nothing of what was going on, except the raw agony that these new people in her life—people that she had grown to love and know that they were important to her—were feeling.

Anguish that had transferred to her.

‘My parents brought me to Spain when I was seven,’ she said. ‘Felipe paid the fares. He was trying to reach out to my mother but, of course, I know he wanted to meet me too, as his only grandchild. The visit started well. I remember a week or two of relative peace—or maybe they were just trying to hide the worst from me as a child—but then it ended badly. It was always bound to end badly.’

Horribly.

She could still hear her father’s shouting and accusations. She could still hear her mother’s shrill cries that she had never been welcome in her own home.

And most of all she could remember the look of desolation on Felipe’s and Maria’s faces as she’d been ripped from their arms, as if they knew this was the last time they would ever lay eyes on any of them ever again.

She hadn’t understood what was going on, but she’d been torn. She’d loved them all and she couldn’t understand why they couldn’t love each other. And she couldn’t understand the hurt. She would make up for it one day, she’d promised then and there. She would come back and make up for their pain.

‘I said I’d come back,’ she said. ‘In the midst of all the shrieking, I promised them I’d return.’

‘You did,’ Alesander said. ‘You’re here now.’

She dipped her shaking head. No. She’d meant to come back years before now. She’d meant to return when she was old enough to make the travel plans herself. But life and university and lack of funds had meant that promises of years gone by were overtaken by the needs of the present. She would still go back to Getaria, she’d repeatedly told herself—one day.

Except that she hadn’t. She’d let life get in the way of good intentions. And now Maria had died without ever seeing her again, and Felipe was dying too.

And good intentions, she realised, were not enough. Not when guilt that she had done nothing weighed so heavily upon her.

‘I’ll see you back at the house,’ she said.

He watched her go, lonely and sad, and just for a moment he was almost tempted to go to her. But why? What would he say? They were nothing to each other, even if he understood why she was doing what she was doing a little more.

But her demons were her own.

It was not his job to fix them.





CHAPTER SIX



‘HE’S HERE AGAIN,’ Felipe growled as Alesander arrived for the sixth time in as many days, but this time his voice contained less censure, more tolerance. Alesander had called by the vineyard every day. On one day he’d brought the contracts for her to sign and she’d read them in the privacy of his car parked out of sight, carefully checking to ensure the agreement included all the terms she’d asked for—the no sex clause, the termination, the consideration. Then, and only then, she’d put her signature to the contract.