CHAPTER TEN
MATIASEXPECTEDHERto head straight to the maternity ward. However, she ignored the signs, moving fast towards the lift and punching a floor number while he kept damn close to her, willing her to talk and yet chilled by her remoteness. She barely seemed aware of his presence as she walked quickly up to one of the nurses at a desk and whispered something urgently to her, before, finally, turning around and registering that he was still there.
Matias looked at her carefully, eyes narrowed. They hadn’t yet exchanged as much as a sentence. He was a guy who had always made it his duty to keep his finger on the pulse and know what was going on around him, because if you knew the lay of the land you were never in for unpleasant surprises, but right now he didn’t have a clue what was going on and he hated that, just as he hated the distance between them.
Was this the point when everything began to fall apart? A sick chill filtered through his veins like poison.
‘What’s going on?’ he asked tightly and Sophie sighed.
‘You’ll find out soon enough and then we’ll need to talk.’ She spun round and he followed as she walked straight towards one of the rooms to gently push open the door.
Matias had no idea what to expect and the last thing he was expecting to see was a young man on the bed, obviously sedated because his movements were sluggish as he turned in the direction of the door, but as soon as he saw Sophie he smiled with real love and tenderness.
Matias hovered in complete confusion. He felt like an intruder. He wasn’t introduced. He was barely noticed by the man in the bed. He was there to watch, he realised, and so he did for the ten minutes she gently spoke to the boy, holding his hand, squeezing it and whispering in soft, soothing, barely audible tones.
She stroked his forehead and then kissed him before standing up and gazing down at the reclining figure. The boy had closed his eyes and was breathing evenly, already falling into sleep.
She glanced at Matias, nodded as she raised one finger to her lips, and only when they were outside the room did she turn to him.
‘You’re wondering,’ she said without preamble. He was so shockingly beautiful and she loved him so much and yet Sophie felt as though they had now reached a turning point from which there would be no going back. She hadn’t considered when the time would berightfor him to meet Eric. Fear of an eventual negative outcome had held her back but Fate had taken matters into her own hand and now here they were.
‘Can you blame me?’ Matias responded tersely, raking his fingers through his hair, his whole body restless with unanswered questions.
‘We need to talk but I don’t think the hospital is quite the right place, Matias.’
Matias was gripped by that chill of apprehension again because there was something final in her voice. ‘My place. It’ll be quicker than trying to get back to the cottage.’ On this one, single matter he could take charge and he did. Within ten minutes they were sitting in the back of his car, heading to his penthouse apartment, to which she had been only a handful of times.
The silence between them was killing him but he instinctively knew that the back seat of a car was not the place to start demanding answers any more than the environs of a hospital would have been.
He glanced at her a couple of times, at her averted profile, but she was mentally a million miles away and he found that incredibly frustrating. He wanted to reach out and yank her back to him. He found that he just couldn’t bear the remoteness.
Caught up wondering how she was going to broach the taboo subject she had successfully managed to avoid so far, Sophie was barely aware of the car purring to a stop outside the magnificent Georgian building that housed his state-of-the-art modern penthouse apartment.
It was an eye-wateringly expensive place, now seldom used because he had become so accustomed to spending time at the cottage. They had fallen into a pattern of behaviour and it was only now, when the possibility of it disappearing was on the horizon, that she could really appreciate just how happy she had been.
Even though she knew that he didn’t love her, he was perfect in so many ways. He just didn’t feel about her the way she felt about him.
The cool, minimalist elegance of his apartment never failed to impress her, although, for her, it was a space she could never have happily lived in.
Now, though, with so much on her mind, she barely noticed the large abstract canvasses, the pale marble flooring, the pale furniture, the subtle, iconic sculptures dotted here and there.
She went directly to the cream leather sofa and sat down, immediately leaning forward in nervous silence and watching as he sat down opposite her, his body language mirroring hers.
‘So?’ Matias asked, his beautiful eyes shuttered and tension making his voice cooler than intended. ‘Are you going to tell me who that guy was?’ He saw the way she was struggling to find the right words and he added, tersely, ‘An ex-boyfriend?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Is he an ex-boyfriend, Sophie?’ Matias demanded icily. ‘The love of your life who may have been involved in an accident? I watched the interaction between the two of you. You love the guy.’ Something inside him ripped. ‘How long has he been disabled? Motorbike accident?’ Every word was wrenched out of him but he had to know the truth.
‘I do love him,’ Sophie concurred truthfully. ‘I’ve always loved him.’
Matias’s jaw clenched as the knot in his stomach tightened. He wasn’t going to lose it but he wanted to hit something hard.
‘And he wasn’t involved in an accident, at least not in the way you mean. Eric has been like that since he was born.’
Matias stilled, eyes keen, every pulse in his body frozen as he tried to grapple with what she was saying.
‘Eric is my brother, Matias,’ Sophie said quietly.
