I told myself that I wouldn’t fall for another one of Rafael’s apologies. I’ve done it before, and look what it got me.
Disappointment. Frustration. Heartache.
I’m done letting him pull me in, only to shove me away the moment things get a little too real between us. It isn’t fair to keep putting myself in that position in the hopes of us moving forward.
He was right all along.
I do deserve the kind of love they write songs about. Not sad ones like the ones I enjoy writing, but the happy kind that people dance to at weddings because they flawlessly describe what it feels like to love and be loved.
“You know what I want?” I ask with a hint of anger.
He seems confused by my question. “What?”
My anger emboldens me. “Someone who cares about me so damn much, they would do everything possible to protect me rather than hurt me, and I’m quickly coming to realize you’re not that man. At least not with me.”
I’ve seen the way Rafael acts toward people he cares about. The way he treats Nico, Julian, his aunt, and the Muñoz family. His support, patience, and loyalty are unwavering, and he trusts them enough to let them in.
Because they never gave him a reason not to, I remind myself, echoing his earlier words.
A deep-rooted sadness takes hold of his expression. “What if I wanted to be that man? For you?”
“What?” Shock replaces whatever frustration I felt before. He was supposed to agree with what I said, not challenge me.
“I did a lot of thinking today.” He lets the statement hang.
I stick to silence.
“Do you mind if we take a seat for this conversation?” He tips his chin toward the sitting area inside my cabin.
“Is that such a good idea?”
“I’d rather not open up to you in the middle of a hallway, if that’s all right.”
I consider telling him no and sending him away, but my curiosity won’t let me. With a sigh, I open the door wider, giving him enough room to enter. “Don’t make me regret this.”
He keeps close, intentionally brushing against me as he walks inside. “You won’t.”
I shut the door harder than necessary, closing us off completely from the rest of the ship. His gaze flicks between the couch and the chair before he chooses the former.
I take a seat on the chair, cross my legs, and wait.
Rafael uncurls his clenched hands and looks up at me. “About what I said earlier…”
I don’t speak. Don’t breathe. Don’t even blink while he gathers the courage to continue.
He stares at his hands like they hold all the answers to the universe. “I have trouble trusting people.”
I nod.
“I’ve always been that way, ever since I was a little kid.” He releases another shaky breath. “I thought if I kept people at a distance, they wouldn’t be able to hurt me.”
I dig my fingers into my knees to stop myself from reaching out and grabbing his hand. “Sounds lonely.”
“It was for a while…”
“But?”
His mouth opens, only to slam shut before he wipes a hand down his face. “I haven’t told anyone this before.”
I blink twice. “No one?”
“Not a single soul besides my previous therapist.”
“What about your family?”
He shakes his head. “I didn’t want them to look at me differently.”
My fickle little heart clenches at the revelation.
At the trust.
But the tiny voice in my head reminds me that I’ve been burned too many times by Rafael to get my hopes up. “Why are you telling me, then? You don’t even trust me.”
He takes a few moments to meet my gaze, but when he does, I can see his guard dropping. It starts with the softening of his frown, followed by the lessening of the tension lines by his eyes, all before he reveals the broken man hiding behind a grumpy exterior.
I see him, not as a weak person, but as someone strong enough to be vulnerable with me, knowing I could possibly hurt him. That I could take his secret and use it against him if I wanted to.
I’ve always thought he was handsome, but in this moment…
He is beautiful.
His short inhale breaks the silence. “I can’t expect you to earn my trust if I don’t give you a chance to keep it.”
I look away first, unable to bear the weight of that particular stare for longer than a few seconds. “Okay.”
Saying anything else would betray how much his statement means to me, and after how he behaved earlier, he hasn’t earned my vulnerability.
Yet.
His deep breath fills the quiet. “I developed this screwed-up mindset at a young age about relationships. That if I became the version of myself that I thought people wanted me to be, then they wouldn’t ever want to leave me.”
My bottom lip wobbles, so I bite down on it to hide just how much his words affect me. Was any of it real, or was the man who caught my attention in high school and earned the Best Smile superlative always faking it solely because he didn’t want to be abandoned again?
The thought of it being the latter makes my heart feel like someone stabbed it with a thousand needles.
He continues, “I was a people pleaser to a fault, but it didn’t feel like a sacrifice because I had what I thought I wanted. Family. Friends. Security.” His upper lip curls. “Moving to Lake Wisteria gave me an opportunity to reinvent myself, and in the process, I convinced myself that I was happy.”
“But you weren’t.”
“No, but I tricked myself into believing I was.”
“Why?”
“Because I didn’t want to give my aunt and uncle a reason to get rid of me.”
My chin trembles.
He looks away. “I’m not telling you this for you to feel bad for me.”
I don’t feel bad. I’m heartbroken, knowing he struggled with so much at such a young age. Knowing how much it still affects him all these years later.
A wrinkle appears between his brows from how hard he frowns. “That kind of mindset applied to a lot of my relationships, including the one with my ex-wife.”
The knot of dread in my stomach tightens.
“I already had trust issues before her, but she only made them worse.”
I can’t speak.
“And then she accidentally got pregnant despite promising me she was on birth control.”
Breathing becomes an impossible task, and my lungs burn as if I just inhaled a bucket of water. The knee-jerk reaction to speak hits me, but I press my lips together and sit quietly while he takes a few more breaths.
His laugh is rough and bitter. “I was already screwed up before, but that made a bad situation ten times worse.” He pauses before speaking again. “But despite the surprise, I felt…happy.”
He looks through me rather than at me, clearly lost in a memory from the past. “I was twenty-two and scared as hell, obviously. It wasn’t like I had a fancy future at an Ivy League university like Julian and Dahlia, and I was fine with that because I never bothered applying to college in the first place, but I still had dreams. The small paychecks I earned while working for my uncle’s construction company were enough when I was only worried about myself, but everything changed after that positive test.”
“Did you want to be a dad?”
“I hadn’t given much thought to it before, but once Hillary told me the news, I realized how much I wanted it. The pregnancy wasn’t planned, obviously, but it didn’t matter to me because I knew from the moment I heard that heartbeat that Nico would change my life forever, and I was right.”
“That you were.” I can’t help my smile.
He tries and fails to match it. “Hillary seemed excited about becoming a mother too, but I eventually realized her reasons were different from mine.”
An eerie chill slithers down my spine. “What do you mean?”
“Before she got pregnant, things were…tense between us.”
Shock steals my ability to speak, so I stare at his face and wait for him to continue.
“We had already broken up twice before—both times because she wanted to—so our relationship wasn’t exactly solid and ready for the next step. If anything, I was the one who was questioning if we could make it long-term.”
“Do you think…”
“That she got pregnant on purpose?”
I nod.
“I had my suspicions, but I never voiced them because it didn’t seem worth the trouble. What was done was done, and I had Nico because of it, so getting angry at her seemed hypocritical when I was so damn excited.”
“You didn’t think it was worth the trouble to find out if the mother of your child tricked you into having one?”
He shrugs, but I can tell the idea bothers him, whether he wants to admit it or not. “She said she forgot to take her pill for a few days, and I took her word for it.” He shakes his head. “Mistake number one, but whatever. We were going to be parents, whether she really thought out her choices or not.”
“But why did you marry her?”
He makes a face.
“What?” I ask.
A flush crawls up his neck and bleeds into his cheeks. “Her parents insisted.”
“What century were they born in again?”
“The one where they would disown her and liquidate her trust if I didn’t do what they wanted. It wasn’t a huge sum of money, but she had enough that getting cut off financially would hurt.”
“What about your uncle’s construction company?” I forgot the name before Julian rebranded it as Lopez Luxury.
“My aunt was struggling with depression after my uncle died so suddenly, and Julian was trying to help her and run a whole company at twenty years old with hardly any experience. I helped as much as I could, but the business was going under.”
“Sounds like a nightmare.”
“Marrying her was a temporary solution anyway. I never wanted a handout, especially from her parents, but with Julian struggling to make the construction company profitable and my first few app ideas being massive failures, it was either accept her parents’ help or become exactly like my parents.”
“That’s…”
“My worst nightmare.” His gaze falls to his empty hands. “Even though I knew I’d never turn to drugs or other vices like them, the idea of struggling with money and bills like they had pushed me to make a desperate decision that I’m not proud of.”
“That’s not fair.” My voice cracks.
His smile doesn’t reach his eyes. “If I learned one thing, it’s that life never is.”
My mom taught me long ago that people make big sacrifices for security and peace of mind, and we can’t judge them for their choices unless we have walked in their shoes, but I can still hurt for him and the fact that he married someone he wasn’t sure about because of his past trauma.
And I hurt a lot.
I stop pulling at a loose thread on my sleep pants. “Why did you stay married to her after you became a billionaire, then? It’s not like you needed her parents’ money anymore.”
He stares at me.
“What?”
“Do you really want to hear that answer?”
“Yes?” Or at least I thought so until he asked me that.
“It took some time, but things got better between us. Nico brought us together, and we were this happy little family for a few years. I thought we were both committed to making the marriage work.” His disapproving laugh cuts through me like a knife. “But once Nico went to Pre-K, cracks started forming again, this time worse than before. She went back to work, and I was focused on managing a construction job while trying to get the Dwelling app off the ground. We were growing apart, but it was easier to ignore the signs and hope things would get better like last time. I even suggested having another child at one point, which seemed to freak her out.”
“But things didn’t get better.”
He shakes his head. “No. They weren’t bad, but only because she was biding her time until my app finally became the success her father claimed it would be.” His voice shakes. “He was my first investor, so he had been there since the beginning. He knew exactly what was happening behind-the-scenes and how much Hillary stood to earn if the company went public, although I had no clue until I filed for divorce.” His bitter laugh sends a chill down my spine.
Bile churns in my stomach. “She stuck around because of money?”
His throat tightens as he nods. “Her parents said she owed them for helping us from the beginning. That’s why she stayed despite falling in love with one of her coworkers.”
Before I speak, he continues, “I think part of me loved her, which is why it hurt so much. I thought she cared about me, only to realize she was a better pretender than I was.”
“Rafael…” I want to pull him into a hug, but I remain seated, my heart physically aching at not being able to provide him with some type of comfort.
I’ve never felt this way before. Never wanted to soothe someone so badly that it pained me to stay away. I don’t know what to make of it, but the burn in my chest doesn’t relent until I walk over and take a seat beside him.
I wind my arms around him and pull until we are pressed against each other. At first, he stiffens, but after a few passes of my hand down the center of his back, his muscles loosen, and he lets out a sigh. His hand rests on the inside of my thigh, sending tingles up my leg that I do my best to ignore.
He tries so damn hard to disguise his shaky breath. “Her affair had been going on for over a year, but I was so focused on my damn company going public that I hadn’t noticed. I should have known it was strange that she kept working since we finally had the money to support her being a stay-at-home mom like she wanted, but I just assumed she liked her job.” His laugh is bitter and full of self-loathing.
I press my palm against his cheek. “It’s not your fault someone took advantage of your trust.”
“I try to tell myself that, but the signs were all there. If I had just stopped to pay attention, I could have saved myself a lot of pain, time, and money.”
“It was an honest mistake.”
“I seem to make a lot of those.”
“Do you know what that makes you?”
“Stupid?”
“Human.”
He stares into the distance while I look at him, taking in every single detail of his face.
Rafael may be handsome, but what makes him truly breathtaking is his heart. It’s no mystery why he wants to protect it, especially after everything he divulged about Hillary and her family.
Do I blame him for his issues trusting others? No. Not at all, especially after what he went through. If I were in his position, I’m sure I’d struggle to do the same, which only makes me empathize with him more.
I’m not sure how long we sit there in silence, but he is the first one to speak.
“What I said about not trusting you earlier…”
“I understand why you can’t.” I didn’t know all the details about his divorce before, but now that I do… No wonder he never wants to get married again. I’m not sure if I could either.
He shakes his head. “That’s not what I mean.”
“Oh.”
His inhale is a long, drawn-out one that makes my heart stutter. “I spoke to Nico today and realized that he and I have a certain thing in common.”
“What?”
“We both struggle to let people get close.”
A small laugh escapes me. “Oh, tell me about it. Do you remember how much hell Nico gave me during his first month of music lessons?” I considered pawning him off to another tutor, but then Burt reminded me of the little terror I was when I first started at The Broken Chord, so I persevered.
Eventually, Nico opened up just like I had hoped, and his love has been a gift ever since.
Rafael’s gaze locks onto mine. “Yeah, which reminded me that if my son learned to let you in, then so can I.”
“You don’t have to.”
“I don’t, but I want to.” He gives my thigh a squeeze that goes straight to my heart, and it has nothing to do with my fear of him noticing the scars hidden underneath my sleep pants. “Just like I want to forgive you for keeping Nico’s worsening vision a secret.”
The pressure valve in my chest opens. “Thank you.”
His head drops back with a sigh as he leans against the couch. “Talking about this…it feels better than I thought.”
“People say the truth will set you free for a reason.”
His laugh is soft yet so damn strong at the same time. My eyes dart toward his lips. The slipup lasts only a second, but Rafael seems to catch it before his mouth pulls into the cockiest smirk to ever exist.
I want to kiss it right off his stupid face.
“You’ve got a terrible poker face,” he says.
I tap my temple. “Maybe that’s what I want you to think.”
“So you don’t want to kiss me right now?”
Well, shit.
