Kate Hewitt - Blackmail & Secrets

Freya closed her eyes, letting the sultry breeze ripple over her. Happiness and sorrow warred within her. She was with Max. What more could she possibly want? Yet memories whispered on the fringes of her mind. Threatened to pull her under.

She’d known it would be difficult, returning to Spain after all these years, but she hadn’t quite prepared herself for the way the very air brought her tumbling back to that old version of herself, innocent and untainted. She wished suddenly, fiercely, that she could go back and change the events of that year, erase the mistakes she’d made. She wished she could be a whole person—untroubled, unscarred—for Max. And maybe even for Rafe. If she was, would things be different now? Would she even be here at all? For surely it was her desperate knowledge that she could never have a child of her own that had derailed her mathematics career and led her to care for Max in the first place?

Freya undressed quickly, exhaustion not just from the flight but from the last week crashing over her in a wave, and slipped beneath the cool, slippery duvet. She fell asleep almost as soon as her head touched the pillow, despite the thoughts and memories churning through her mind and heart.

And she awoke to an unholy scream of terror renting the air.

FREYA bolted out of bed, every nerve on high alert as the scream echoed through the apartment. It was coming, she knew, from Max. She recognised the sound of raw fear, for in the week since Rosalia had died he’d woken up several times with night terrors. She hurried out of her bedroom, stumbling in the unfamiliar surroundings, groping in the dark. And skidded to a halt on the threshold of Max’s bedroom—for Rafe was already there.

She gaped in disorientated surprise as Rafe leaned over Max, whispering soothingly, stroking his hair. Max kept on screaming. His eyes were open, but Freya knew he wasn’t really awake. She had yet to find a way to deal with Max’s night terrors other than time and patience.

‘What is wrong?’ Rafe asked in a low voice. He did not take his gaze from his son. ‘Why will he not stop? What can I do?’

There was a raw note of pleading in Rafe’s voice that tore at Freya’s heart. Rafe Sandoval was not a man used to being helpless.

‘He’s not really awake,’ she said quietly. She moved to sit on the edge of the bed, next to Rafe. Too late she realised how few clothes either of them wore; Rafe was bare-chested, wearing only a pair of drawstring trousers, and because of the warm night she wore only a tank top and shorts. They were very close on the bed, their bare legs brushing, causing gooseflesh to rise all over Freya’s body in an instinctive response of awareness.

She turned to Max, murmuring quietly, stroking his hair just as Rafe had. Now that the terror had run its course—or perhaps because Max recognised her, even in his sleep—he relaxed just a bit, his screams lowering to exhausted moans, and buried his head in Freya’s lap.

‘It’s all right now, isn’t it?’ Freya said, her fingers sliding through his silky hair. ‘You’re all right, Max. It was nothing but a dream.’

Max jerked his head up, his unfocused eyes suddenly trained on Rafe. And he started screaming again.

Rafe tensed, and Freya said, a note of apology in her voice, ‘He’s asleep—he doesn’t—’

‘I’ll go.’ Rafe stood up and walked stiffly from the room. To Freya’s dismay Max’s screams subsided as soon as his father had left. The strange events of the day must have affected him on a subconscious level.

She stayed for a few more minutes as he dropped back into a deeper sleep, and then she tucked the blankets around him. She sat on the edge of the bed for a moment, wondering if she should go back to her own room. Had Rafe gone back to bed? He’d seemed almost hurt by his son’s rejection, and that thought compelled her to tiptoe towards the living room.

Rafe stood by the window, a tumbler of whisky in his hand. He was still shirtless, and Freya could not keep herself from noticing how the moonlight slanting through the windows washed his body in silver, emphasising the sculpted muscles of his back, his broad shoulders and trim hips.

She almost turned around again and hightailed it back to her room, for her brain recognised that there was something dangerous about this situation—about both of them wearing almost nothing in the middle of the night, in a moon-washed room. Her body sensed danger too. Every nerve and sinew was singing to life, to a heightened awareness that was painful in its pleasure. It had been so long since she’d allowed herself to feel … anything.

‘Why is he like that?’ Rafe half turned to her, his face in profile.

Freya swallowed and stayed by the door. ‘They’re night terrors.’

‘A dream?’

‘Not exactly. More severe, I suppose, and harder to comfort because he never actually wakes up.’

‘His eyes were open,’ Rafe said in a low voice. ‘He was looking at me as if.’ He turned back to the window, not finishing the sentence. His throat worked, his pulse beating rapidly, a testament to his anger and fear.

‘It wasn’t you,’ Freya said quickly, perhaps too quickly. She started towards him, stopping halfway across the room, aware that going nearer to Rafe right now might not be the best idea. The safest idea. ‘He doesn’t recognise anyone when he’s like that.’

Rafe did not turn from the window. ‘How long has he been having these terrors?’

‘It’s very common for children his age,’ Freya said, knowing she was hedging. Why did she not want to tell Rafe? She knew the answer already; she didn’t want to hurt him. Stupid, perhaps, and certainly impossible. Life was pain.

Rafe half turned to her again, and even from halfway across the room she saw the black glitter of his eyes. ‘How long?’

‘They’ve certainly been happening more often since Rosalia died,’ she said quietly.

Rafe nodded, accepting. ‘Of course. She was his mother.’ His fingers clenched around his glass. ‘Did she love him? Did she see him, hug him?’

Hug him. The question surprised Freya, and touched her too, for it seemed such a strangely specific and emotional thing for Rafe to be concerned about. Yet she understood the nature of the question, and she knew she had to answer truthfully. ‘She loved him,’ she said quietly, ‘but she didn’t see him that often.’

‘How often?’ Rafe asked in a raw voice, the question a demand.

‘Once every few weeks?’ Freya hazarded a guess. Towards the end it had been even less than that. If she was honest, at least with herself, Max had barely known his mother.

Rafe turned to her, shock and pain etched on his features. His chest rose and fell in a ragged breath, and Freya’s gaze was helplessly drawn to the movement. ‘Then you were his mother,’ he said simply, ‘in all but fact.’

Freya didn’t speak for a moment; she couldn’t. Too many emotions raced through her—hope and need and fear. She was glad Rafe could acknowledge how important she was to Max, and yet she was still dizzily afraid that he would force her to leave, that her closeness to Max would be a threat to his own relationship to his son. And she couldn’t keep need from coiling within her at the sight of Rafe, at the very scent of him—the kind of hungry desire she hadn’t felt in years. Hadn’t let herself feel because she knew where it led. The misery and despair it could cause.

‘Yes,’ she finally said, in no more than a whisper, ‘but it is a rather important fact.’

‘Is it?’ Rafe let out a bark of humourless laughter as he turned back to the window. ‘Sometimes I wonder.’

Freya could not decipher that statement, or what had motivated it, but she heard the bleakness in Rafe’s voice and knew its cause: three years of not knowing about his son, and now being faced with the seemingly insurmountable task of forging that all-important bond.