Enticed by His Forgotten Lover (Pregnancy & Passion #1)(44)

Cam yanked his gaze up and stopped before climbing into the driver’s seat. “What?”

“Shut the hell up.”

Cam got into the car grumbling about flaky friends and vowing all the while never to mix business and friendship again. Rafael rolled his eyes at his friend’s consternation, considering that the four had always done business together.

“So what the hell is going on, Rafael? Dev says you’ve gotten cold feet.”

“I don’t have cold feet,” Rafael growled. “I just think there has to be another way of making this deal go through that doesn’t involve using the property on Moon Island.”

Cam swore again. He went silent as traffic got snarled and he expertly weaved in and out, making Rafael white-knuckle his grip on the door handle.

Anyone riding with Cam deserved hazard pay. Not that he drove often. Cam almost always had a driver and it wasn’t because he was too good to drive himself. Quite simply he was so busy that he utilized every moment of his time to conduct his business affairs and if he had a driver, he had that much more time to work.

Rafael figured Dev must have leaned on him pretty hard to get him to drive himself to the airport to pick up Rafael.

“So you still don’t remember anything?” Cam asked when they’d cleared one particularly nasty snarl. “No. Nothing.”

“And yet you believe her? Have you even started the process for paternity testing yet?”

“It doesn’t matter what happened before. I love her now,” Rafael said quietly.

There was dead silence in the car. Only the sounds of traffic and car horns penetrated the thick silence inside the car.

“And the resort deal?” Cam finally asked.

“There has to be something we can work out. It’s why I’m here. We have to fix this, Cam. My future depends on it.”

“How nice of you to be so concerned about your future,” Cam muttered. “Nothing about the rest of ours, though.”

“Low blow, man,” Rafael bit out. “If I didn’t give a damn about you and Ryan and Dev, I wouldn’t be here. I would have just called off the whole damn thing and told all the investors to go to hell.”

Cam shook his head. “And you wonder why I’ve sworn off women.”

“Planning to play for the other team?” Rafael asked for a grin.

Cam shot him the bird and glowered. “You know damn well what I mean. Women are good for sex. Anything more and a man might as well neuter himself and be done with it.”

Rafael chuckled. “You know I look forward to the day that I get to shove those words down your throat. Even better, I can’t wait to meet the woman who does it for you.”

“Look, I just don’t understand what’s changed. Four months ago you were on top of the world. You got what you wanted. And now suddenly it’s not what you want.”

They pulled to a stop in front of Rafael’s apartment building. Rafael turned to Cam. “Maybe what I want has changed. And how the hell would you know that I got what I wanted four months ago? I didn’t see you until I woke up in a hospital bed after the plane crash.”

Cam shook his head. “You called me the day before you left. You were all but crowing. Said you’d closed the land deal that day and that next you were going to be on a plane back to New York. I asked if you’d had a good vacation since you’d been gone for four damn weeks. You told me that some things were worth the sacrifice.”

Rafe went still. Suddenly it was hard to get air into his lungs. His chest squeezed painfully as pain thudded relentlessly in his head.

“Rafael? You okay, man?”

Still images flashed through his head like photos. The pieces of his lost memory shot out of a cannon. Random. Out of order. It all hurled at him at supersonic speed until he was dizzy and disoriented.

“Rafe, talk to me,” Cam insisted.

Rafael managed to open the car door and stumble out onto the curb. He put a hand back toward Cam when his friend would have gotten out, too.

“I’m fine. Leave me. I’ll call you later.”

He hauled his luggage out of the trunk and then walked mechanically toward the entrance. His doorman swung open the glass doors and offered a cheerful greeting.

Like a zombie, Rafael got into the elevator, clumsily inserted his card and nearly fell when the elevator began its ascent.

Memories of the first time he saw Bryony. Making love—no, having sex with her. The day at the closing agent’s office when Bryony had signed over her land and he’d given her the check. Of the day he’d told her goodbye.

It all came back so fast his head spun trying to catch up.

He was going to be sick.

The elevator doors opened and it took him a full minute to force himself inside his apartment. Leaving his luggage inside the doorway, he staggered toward one of the couches in the living room, so sick, so devastated that he wanted to die.

He slumped onto the sofa and lowered his head to his hands.

Oh, God, Bryony would never forgive him for this.

He couldn’t forgive himself.

“Mamaw, would it really be so terrible if they built a resort here?” Bryony asked quietly as the two women sat on Mamaw’s deck.

Mamaw glanced over at Bryony, her eyes soft with love. “You’re taking on too much, Bryony. You have to decide what’s best for you. It’s not your responsibility to make the entire island happy. If this resort is coming between you and Rafael, you have to decide what is the most important to you. Is it making everyone here happy? Or is it being happy yourself?”