But it can’t be the plan now.
I can’t just let her get handed over to the authorities like she’s nothing more than just another cartel thug, because I really don’t think she is. Maybe I’m stupid. I’ve been called that enough in my life to believe it’s probably true. So maybe Iam, but I think Natalia is a victim of the cartel in almost the exact same way Isla was. After all, they went through a lot of effort to make her look like she was in on their elaborate plans to take down my father once and for all. If they did that to her, what would stop them from doing it to any other woman?
That’s what I think is the real truth of this situation.
And when Natalia and I have a candid conversation about this tomorrow, I’ll find out if I’m right or wrong, but she’s going to find out that I love her despite all this and that I’m going to do everything in my power to keep her from getting swept up in the consequences waiting for Xavier and his band of thugs.
Setting the supplies on the bed, I take a knee in front of her, kind of like I might have done to propose if any of this had actually been real, and I hold her hands to pull them away from her face. “Look at me,querida.”
Her gaze slides to meet mine.
“I love you. I do. You can trust me. I’m telling you the truth right now, but I’m going to show you, too. Okay?”
Her smokey blue-gray eyes are a little glossy, and the rims of her eyes are red, but she doesn’t actually cry and offers me a nod.
Standing up, I pick up a tube of herbal ointment that’s supposed to reduce inflammation and swelling. “Can I put some of this on you, or do you want to do it?”
Natalia’s expression turns patently skeptical, and she fixes her eyes on me. “You would do that for me?”
It sounds like an accusation, and my gaze shifts. “Yeah. Of course.” I wag the tube at her. “It’s not a big deal.”
She stares for another moment and then unties the robe. It falls open, exposing her spectacular, yet spectacularlybatteredbody to me, and then she gingerly inches backward on the bed and lies down.
Sitting on the edge of the bed, I squeeze some of the ointment into my palm, rub my hands together, and then hold them up above her torso. “Might be a little cold, okay?”
Her eyes are still skeptical, but she moves her hands to lay them at her sides and nods. “It’s okay.”
I start by gently smoothing my hands over her ribs, just below her breasts, and then down her stomach and around her waist to her back. She sucks in a quiet hiss through her teeth, and I can’t tell if it’s from the cold or the pain. Given how tender, inflamed, and swollen the dozens of welts are, I’m guessing it’s the latter, and I can’t help gritting my teeth.
“God damn, baby,” I mumble. “This is fuckingawful. I’ve never seen anything this awful in my whole fucking life.”
“That is because you are a very sheltered man,” she murmurs, leveling me with her gaze.
I huff as I continue to gingerly rub in the ointment. “Maybe so, but I—”
“The fact that you are so sheltered is what has made you such a good man,” she adds. “You have had the luxury of being able to care about the basic humanity of people you don’t even know.”
I press my mouth shut to avoid speaking impulsively because it’s not quite time to clear the air about everything.
“Maybe,” I hedge, focusing on my hands and her battered, discolored skin.
The sight of it is so distressing that the same possessive rage starts to roil in my veins again, but this time it morphs into inarticulable helplessness that just makes me sad. The sadness intensifies to the point that it compels me to slide my hands under her back and lower my forehead to her navel.
“I’m so sorry, Natalia.”I breathe the words against her stomach, my mouth brushing her skin, picking up a bit of the ointment, but also allowing the hyper-tactile flesh of my lips to communicate even further how tender and inflamed everything is. “God damn. I’m just so sorry.”
“I don’t understand why you apologize for things you had nothing to do with,” she clips, her tone aggressive, but with a slight quaver in the back of her throat.
I pick up my head and meet her misty gaze. It’s only then that I catch a glimpse of whoI thinkshe really is behind this façade she’s built and maintained. Someone who might have been soft before they were forced to become hard. Just a normal person who was probably in the wrong place at the wrong time and then got beaten into submission of a life that’s way out of their control.
I feel like I can see her as a little girl with nobody there to protect her, nobody to provide for her, nobody to even care. I have no idea if any of that is true, but with all the secret and not-so-secret evidence I’ve encountered, I feel like it’s probably accurate enough. It’soverwhelming, and I remove my hands from her torso, wiping the remaining ointment on my jeans, and then lean over her face.
Bracing my forearms on either side of her head, I lean down and kiss her cheek, then meet her eyes. “Because I love you. Because I don’t wantanythingto hurt you,ever.Because it doesn’t matter if I had nothing to with whatever bad thing happened to you. If something bad happens to you, I feel it, too.”
Natalia fights the tremble of her chin with a clenched jaw, but there’s a tiny, unmistakable, involuntary quiver of her bottom lip. “You don’t even know me, Joaquin.”
The unspoken truth is so thick in the small distance between our faces that I could cut it with a knife. That’s probably as blatant a reference to it as I’m going to get until I sit her down tomorrow and throw back the curtain. It’s probably as honest as she feels like she can be given everything, and I appreciate that.
I press a kiss to her trembling bottom lip. “I know you enough,amor. I know you as much as I need to to feel that way. I know you enough that you can trust me to take care of youno matter what.”
