Billionaire, M.D. / Secrets of the Playboy's Bride: Billionaire, M.D. / Secrets of the Playboy's Bride

For a long, horrified moment she stared at him, speech skills and thought processes gone, only blind instincts left. They all screamed run, hide, deny.

She’d been so certain…so…certain.

“A second honeymoon?” She heard her voice croaking. “Does that mean we …we’ve been married long?”

He waited an eternity before answering. At least it felt that way. By the time he did, she felt she’d aged ten years. “You were married six months ago.”

“Six months? And already planning a second honeymoon?”

“Maybe I should have said honeymoon, period. Circumstances stopped you from having one when you first got married.”

“And yet my adoring husband isn’t here. Our plans probably were an attempt to salvage a marriage that was malfunctioning beyond repair, and we shouldn’t have bothered going through the motions….”

She stopped, drenched in mortification. She instinctively knew she wasn’t one to spew vindictiveness like that. Her words had been acidic enough to eat through the gleaming marble floor.

Their corrosiveness had evidently splashed Rodrigo. From the way his face slammed shut, he clearly disapproved of her sentiments and the way she’d expressed them. Of her.

“I don’t know much about your relationship. But his reason for not being at your bedside is uncontestable. He’s dead.”

She lurched as if he’d backhanded her.

“He was flying the plane,” she choked.

“You remember?”

“No. Oh, God.” A geyser of nausea shot from her depths. She pitched to the side of the bed. Somehow she found Rodrigo around her, holding her head and a pan. She retched emptily, shook like a bell that had been struck by a giant mallet.

And it wasn’t from a blow of grief. It was from one of horror, at the anger and relief that were her instinctive reactions.

What kind of monster was she to feel like that about somebody’s death, let alone that of her husband? Even if she’d fiercely wanted out of the relationship. Was it because of what she felt for Rodrigo? She’d wished her husband dead to be with him?

No. No. She just knew it hadn’t been like that. It had to have been something else. Could her husband have been abusing her? Was she the kind of woman who would have suffered humiliation and damage, too terrified to block the blows or run away?

She consulted her nature, what transcended memory, what couldn’t be lost or forgotten, what was inborn and unchangeable.

It said, no way. If that man had abused her, emotionally or physically, she would have carved his brains out with forceps and sued him into his next few reincarnations.

So what did this mess mean?

“Are you okay?”

She shuddered miserably. “If feeling mad when I should be sad is okay. There must be more wrong with me than I realized.”

After the surprise her words induced, contemplation settled on his face. “Anger is a normal reaction in your situation.”

“What?” He knew why it was okay to feel so mad at a dead man?

“It’s a common reaction for bereaved people to feel anger at their loved ones who die and leave them behind. It’s worse when someone dies in an accident that that someone had a hand in or caused. The first reaction after shock and disbelief is rage, and it’s all initially directed toward the victim. That also explains your earlier attack of bitterness. Your subconscious must have known that he was the one flying the plane. It might have recorded all the reports that flew around you at the crash site.”

“You’re saying I speak Spanish?”

He frowned. “Not to my knowledge. But maybe you approximated enough medical terminology to realize the extent of his injuries….”

“Ya lo sé hablar español.”

She didn’t know which of them was more flabbergasted.

The Spanish words had flowed from a corner in her mind to her tongue without conscious volition. And she certainly knew what they meant. I know how to speak Spanish.

“I…had no idea you spoke Spanish.”

“Neither did I, obviously. But I get the feeling that the knowledge is partial…fresh.”

“Fresh? How so?”

“It’s just a feeling, since I remember no facts. It’s like I’ve only started learning it recently.”

He fixed her with a gaze that seeped into her skin, mingled into the rapids of her blood. Her temperature inched higher.

Was he thinking what she was thinking? That she’d started learning Spanish because of him? To understand his mother tongue, understand him better, to get closer to him?

At last he said, “Whatever the case may be, you evidently know enough Spanish to validate my theory.”

He was assigning her reactions a perfectly human and natural source. Wonder what he’d say if she set him straight?

She bet he’d think her a monster. And she wouldn’t blame him. She was beginning to think it herself.

Next second she was no longer thinking it. She knew it.

The memory that perforated her brain like a bullet was a visual. An image that corkscrewed into her marrow. The image of Mel, the husband she remembered with nothing but anger, whose death aroused only a mixture of resentment and liberation.

In a wheelchair.

Other facts dominoed like collapsing pillars, crushing everything beneath their impact. Not memories, just knowledge.

Mel had been paralyzed from the waist down. In a car accident. During their relationship. She didn’t know if it had been before or after they’d gotten married. She didn’t think it mattered.

She’d been right when she’d hypothesized why no one had rushed to her bedside. She was heartless.

What else could explain harboring such harshness toward someone who’d been so afflicted? The man she’d promised to love in sickness and in health? The one she’d basically felt “good riddance” toward when death did them part?

In the next moment, the air was sucked out of her lungs from a bigger blow.

“Cybele? ¿Te duele?“

Her ears reverberated with the concern in Rodrigo’s voice, her vision rippled over the anxiety warping his face. No. She wasn’t okay. She was a monster. She was amnesic. And she was pregnant.

Four