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

“Great language recall and usage. And take your pick.” “I think it’s clear I already did. And whatever you choose to call your offer, I can’t accept it.” “You mean you won’t.”

“Fine. If you insist on dissecting my refusal. I won’t.”

“It seems you have forgotten all about me, Cybele. If you remembered even the most basic things, you’d know that when I make a decision, saying no to me is not an option.”

Cybele stared at him. Life was grossly, horribly unfair. How did one being end up endowed with all that?

And she’d thought he had it all before she’d seen him crook his lips in that I-click-my-fingers-and-all-sentient-beings-obey quasi smile.

Now there was one thought left in her mind. An urge. To get as far away from him as possible. Against all logic. And desire.

Her lips twisted, too. “I didn’t get that memo. Or I ‘forgot’ I did. So I can say no to you. Consider it a one-off anomaly.”

That tiger-like smirk deepened. “You can say what you want. I’m your surgeon and what I say goes.”

The way he’d said your surgeon. Everything clamored inside her, wishing he was her anything-and-everything, for real.

She shook her head to disperse the idiotic yearnings. “I’ll sign any waiver you need me to. I’m taking full responsibility.”

“I’m the one taking full responsibility for you. If you do remember being a surgeon, you know that my being yours makes me second only to God in this situation. You have no say in God’s will, do you?”

“You’re taking the God complex too literally, aren’t you?”

“My status in your case is an uncontestable fact. You’re in my care and will remain there until I’m satisfied you no longer need it. The one choice I leave up to you is whether I follow you up in my home as my guest, or in my hospital as my patient.”

Cybele looked away from his hypnotic gaze, his logic. But there was no escaping either. It had been desperation, wanting to get away from him. She wasn’t in a condition to be without medical supervision. And who best to follow her up but her own surgeon? The surgeon who happened to be the best there was?

She knew he was. He was beyond the best. A genius. With billions and named-after-him revolutionary procedures and equipment to prove it.

But even had she been fit, she wouldn’t have wanted to be discharged. For where could she go but home? A home she recalled with nothing but dreariness?

And she didn’t want to be with anyone else. Certainly not with her mother and family. She remembered them as if they were someone else’s unwanted acquaintances. Disappointing and distant. Their own actions reinforced that impression. The sum total of their concern over her accident and Mel’s death had been a couple of phone calls. When told she was fine, didn’t need anything, it seemed they’d considered it an excuse to stop worrying—if they had been worried—dismiss her and return to their real interests. She didn’t remember specifics from her life with them, but this felt like the final straw in a string of lifelong letdowns.

She turned her face to him. He was watching her as if he’d been manipulating her thoughts, steering her toward the decision he wanted her to make. She wouldn’t put mental powers beyond him. What was one more covert power among the glaringly obvious ones?

She nodded her capitulation.

He tilted his awesome head at her. “You concede your need for my supervision?” He wanted a concession in words? Good luck with that. She nodded again. “And which will it be? Guest or patient?”

He wanted her to pick, now? She’d hoped to let things float for a couple of days, until she factored in the implications of being either, the best course of action….

Just great. A scrambled memory surely hadn’t touched her self-deception ability. Seemed she had that in spades.

She knew what the best course of action was. She should say patient. Should stay in the hospital where the insanities he provoked in her would be curbed, where she wouldn’t be able to act on them. She would say patient.

Then she opened her mouth. “As if you don’t already know.”

She barely held back a curse, almost took the sullen words back.

She didn’t. She was mesmerized by his watchfulness, by seeing it evaporate in a flare of…something. Triumph?

She had no idea. It was exhausting enough trying to read her own thoughts and reactions. She wasn’t up to fathoming his. She only hoped he’d say something superior and smirking. It might trip a fuse that would make her retreat from the abyss of stupidity and self-destructiveness, do what sense and survival were yelling for her to do. Remain here, remain a patient to him, nothing more.

“It’ll be an honor to have you as my guest, Cybele.” Distress brimmed as the intensity in his eyes drained, leaving them as gentle as his voice. It was almost spilling over when that arrogance she’d prayed for coated his face. “It’s a good thing you didn’t say ‘patient,’ though. I would have overruled you again.”

She bristled. “Now look here—”

He smoothly cut across her offense. “I would have, because I built this center to be a teaching hospital, and if you stay, there is no way I can fairly stop the doctors and students from having constant access to you, to study your intriguing neurological condition.”

Seemed not only did no one say no to him, no one ever won an argument with him, either. He’d given her the one reason that would send her rocketing out of this hospital like a cartoon character with a thick trail of white exhaust clouds in her wake.

No way would she be poked and prodded by med students and doctors-in-training. In the life that felt like a half-remembered documentary of someone else’s, she’d been both, then the boss of a bunch of the latter. She knew how nothing—starting with patients’ comfort, privacy, even basic human rights—stood in the way of acquiring their coveted-above-all experience.

She sighed. “You always get what you want, don’t you?”

“No. Not always.”

The tormented look that seized his face arrested her in midbreath. Was this about …her? Was she something he wanted and couldn’t get?

No. She just knew what she felt for him had always been only on her side. On his, there’d been nothing inappropriate. He’d never given her reason to believe the feelings were mutual.

This …despondency was probably about failing to save Mel. That had to be the one thing he’d wanted most. And he hadn’t gotten it.

She swallowed the ground glass that seemed to fill her throat. “I—I think I’ll take a nap now.”

He inhaled, nodded. “Yes, you do that.”

He started to turn away, stopped, his eyes focusing far in the distance. He seemed to be thinking terrible things.

A heart-thudding moment later, without looking back again, he muttered, “Mel’s funeral is this afternoon.” She gasped. She’d somehow never thought of that part. He looked back at her then, face gripped with urgency, eyes storming with entreaty. “You should know.”

She gave a difficult nod. “Thanks for telling me.”

“Don’t thank me. I’m not sure I should have.”

“Why? You don’t think I can handle it?”

“You seem to be handling everything so well, I’m wondering if this isn’t the calm before the storm.”

“You think I’ll collapse into a jibbering mess somewhere down the road?”

“You’ve been through so much. I wouldn’t be surprised.”

“I can’t predict the future. But I’m as stable as can be now. I—I want to go. I have to.”

“You don’t have to do anything, Cybele. Mel wouldn’t have wanted you to go through the added trauma.”

So Mel had cared for her? Wanted the best for her?

She inhaled, shook her head. “I’m coming. You’re not going to play the not-neurologically-stable-enough card, are you?”

His eyes almost drilled a crater of conflicted emotions between her own. “You should be okay. If you do everything I say.”

“And what is that?”

“Rest now. Attend the funeral in a wheelchair. And leave when I say. No arguments.”

She hadn’t the energy to do more than close her eyelids in consent. He hesitated, then walked back to her, took her elbow, guided her back to the bed. She sagged down on it.

He, too, dropped down, to his haunches. Heartbeats shook her frame as he took one numb foot after the other, slid off slippers that felt as if they were made of hot iron. He rose, touched her shoulder, didn’t need to apply force. She collapsed like water in a fountain with its pressure lost. He scooped up her legs, swung them over the bed, swept the cotton cover over her, stood back and murmured, “Rest.”

Without another look, he turned and crossed the room as if he’d been hit with a fast-forward button.

The moment the door clicked shut, shudders overtook her.

Rest? He really thought she could? After what he’d just done? Before she had to attend her dead husband’s funeral?

She ached. For him, because of him, because she breathed, with guilt, with lack of guilt.

She could only hope that the funeral, the closure ritual, might open up the locked, pitch-black cells in her mind.

Maybe then she’d get answers. And absolution.

Five

She didn’t rest.

Four hours of tossing in bed later, at the entry of a genial brunette bearing a black skirt suit and its accessories, Cybele staggered up feeling worse than when she’d woken from her coma.

She winced a smile of thanks at the woman and insisted she didn’t need help dressing. Her fiberglass arm cast was quite light and she could move her shoulder and elbow joints well enough to get into the front-fastening jacket and blouse.

After the woman left, she stood staring at the clothes Rodrigo had provided for her. To attend the funeral of the husband she didn’t remember. Didn’t want to remember.

She didn’t need help dressing. She needed help de-stressing.

No chance of that. Only thing to do was dress the part, walk in and out of this. Or rather, get wheeled in and out.

In minutes she was staring at her reflection in the full-wall mirror in the state-of-the-art, white and gray bathroom.

Black wool suit, white silk blouse, two-inch black leather shoes. All designer items. All made as if for her.

A knock on the door ripped her out of morbid musings over the origin of such accuracy in judging her size.

She wanted to dart to the door, snatch it open and yell, Let’s get it over with.

She walked slowly instead, opened the door like an automaton. Rodrigo was there. With a wheelchair. She sat down without a word.

In silence, he wheeled her through his space-age center to a gigantic elevator that could accommodate ten gurneys and their attending personnel. This was obviously a place equipped and staffed to deal with mass casualty situations. She stared ahead as they reached the vast entrance, feeling every eye on her, the woman their collective boss was tending to personally.

Once outside the controlled climate of the center, she shivered as the late February coolness settled on her face and legs. He stopped before a gleaming black Mercedes 600, slipped the warmth of the cashmere coat she realized had been draped over his arm all along around her shoulders as he handed her into the back of the car.

In moments he’d slid in beside her on the cream leather couch, signaled the chauffeur and the sleek beast of a vehicle shot forward soundlessly, the racing-by vistas of the Spanish countryside the only proof that it was streaking through the nearly empty streets.

None of the beauty zooming by made it past the surface of her awareness. All deeper levels converged on him. On the turmoil in the rigidity of his profile, the coiled tension of his body.

And she couldn’t bear it anymore. “I’m …so sorry.”

He turned to her. “What are you talking about?”

The harshness that flickered in his eyes, around his lips made her hesitate. It didn’t stop her. “I’m talking about Mel.” His eyes seemed to lash out an emerald flare. She almost backed down, singed and silenced. She forged on. “About your loss.” His jaw muscles convulsed then his face turned to rock, as if he’d sucked in all emotion, buried it where it would never resurface for anyone to see. “I don’t remember him or our relationship, but you don’t have that mercy. You’ve lost your best friend. He died on your table, as you struggled to save him….”

“As I failed to save him, you mean.”

His hiss hit her like the swipe of a sword across the neck.

She nearly suffocated on his anguish. Only the need to drain it made her choke out, “You didn’t fail. There was nothing you could have done.” His eyes flared again, zapping her with the force of his frustration. “Don’t bother contradicting me or looking for ways to shoulder a nonexistent blame. Everyone knew he was beyond help.”

“And that’s supposed to make me feel better? What if I don’t want to feel better?”

“Unfounded guilt never did anyone any good. Certainly not the ones we feel guilty over.”

“How logical you can be, when logic serves no purpose.”

“I thought you advocated logic as what serves every purpose.”

“Not in this instance. And what I feel certainly isn’t hurting me any. I’m as fit as an ox.”

“So you’re dismissing emotional and psychological pain as irrelevant? I know that as surgeons we’re mainly concerned with physical disorders, things we can fix with our scalpels, but—”

“But nothing. I’m whole and hearty. Mel is dead.” “Through no fault of yours!” She couldn’t bear to see him bludgeoning himself with pain and guilt that way. “That’s the only point I’m making, the only one to be made here. I know it doesn’t make his loss any less traumatic or profound. And I am deeply sorry for—everyone. You, Mel, his parents, our baby.”

“But not yourself?”

“No.”

The brittle syllable hung between them, loaded with too much for mere words to express, and the better for it, she thought.

Twenty minutes of silence later her heart hiccupped in her chest. They were entering a private airport.

With every yard deeper into the lush, grassy expanses, tentacles of panic slid around her throat, slithered into her mind until the car came to a halt a few dozen feet from the stairs of a gleaming silver Boeing 737.

She blindly reached out to steady herself with the one thing that was unshakeable in her world. Rodrigo.

His arm came around her at the same moment she sought his support, memories billowing inside her head like the sooty smoke of an oil-spill fire. “This is where we boarded the plane.”

He stared down at her for a suspended moment before closing his eyes. “Dios, lo siento, Cybele—I’m so sorry. I didn’t factor in what it would do to you, being here, where your ordeal began.”

She snatched air into her constricted lungs, shook her head. “It’s probably the right thing to do, bringing me here. Maybe it’ll get the rest of my memories to explode back at once. I’d welcome that over the periodic detonations.”

“I can’t take credit for attempting shock therapy. We’re here for Mel’s funeral.” She gaped at him. He elaborated. “It’s not a traditional funeral. I had Mel’s parents flown over from the States so they can take his body home.”

She struggled to take it all in. Mel’s body. Here. In that hearse over there. His parents. She didn’t remember them. At all. They must be in the Boeing. Which had to be Rodrigo’s. They’d come down, and she’d see them. And instead of a stricken widow they could comfort and draw solace from, they’d find a numb stranger unable to share their grief.

“Rodrigo.” The plea to take her back now, that she’d been wrong, couldn’t handle this, congealed in her throat.

He’d turned his head away. A man and a woman in their early sixties had appeared at the jet’s open door.

He reached for his door handle, turned to her. “Stay here.”

Mortification filled her. She was such a wimp. He’d felt her reluctance to face her in-laws, was sparing her.

She couldn’t let him. She owed them better than that. She’d owe any grieving parents anything she could do to lessen their loss. “No, I’m coming with you. And no wheelchair, please. I don’t want them to think I’m worse than I am.” He pursed his lips, then nodded, exited the car. In seconds he was on her side, handing her out. She crushed his formal suit’s lapel. “What are their names?”

His eyes widened, as if shocked all over again at the total gaps in her memory. “Agnes and Steven Braddock.”

The names rang distant bells. She hadn’t known them long, or well. She was sure of that.

The pair descended as she and Rodrigo headed on an intercept course. Their faces became clearer with every step, setting off more memories. Of how Mel had looked in detail. And in color.

Her father-in-law had the same rangy physique and wealth of hair, only it was gray where Mel’s had been shades of bronze. Mel had had the startlingly turquoise eyes of her mother-in-law.

She stopped when they were a few steps way. Rodrigo didn’t.

He kept going, opened his arms, and the man and woman rushed right into them. The three of them merged into an embrace that squeezed her heart dry of its last cell of blood.

Everything hurt. Burned. She felt like strips were being torn out of her flesh. Acid filled her eyes, burned her cheeks.

The way he held them, the way they sought his comfort and consolation as if it was their very next breath, the way they all clung together …The way he looked, wide open and giving everything inside him for the couple to take their fill of, to draw strength from.

Just when she would have cried out Enough—please, the trio dissolved their merger of solace, turned, focused on her. Then Agnes closed the steps between them.

She tugged Cybele into a trembling hug, careful not to brush against her cast. “I can’t tell you how worried we were for you. It’s a prayer answered to see you so well.” So well? She’d looked like a convincing postmortem rehearsal last time she’d consulted a mirror. But then, compared to Mel, she was looking great. “It’s why we were so late coming here. Rodrigo couldn’t deal with this, with anything, until you were out of danger.”

“He shouldn’t have. I can’t imagine how you felt, having to put th-this off.”

Agnes shook her head, the sadness in her eyes deepening. “Mel was already beyond our reach, and coming sooner would have served no purpose. You were the one who needed Rodrigo’s full attention so he could pull you through.”

“He did. And while everyone says he’s phenomenal with all his patients, I’m sure he’s gone above and beyond even by his standards. I’m as sure it’s because I was Mel’s wife. It’s clear what a close friend of the whole family he is.”

The woman looked at her as if she’d said Rodrigo was in reality a reptile. “But Rodrigo isn’t just a friend of the family. He’s our son. He’s Mel’s brother.”

Cybele felt she’d stared at Agnes for ages, feeling her words reverberating in her mind in shock waves.

Rodrigo. Wasn’t Mel’s best friend. Was his brother. How?

“You didn’t know?” Agnes stopped, tutted to herself. “What am I asking. Rodrigo told us of your memory loss. You’ve forgotten.”

She hadn’t. She was positive. This was a brand-new revelation.

Questions heaved and pitched in her mind, splashed against the confines of her skull until she felt they’d shatter it.

Before she could relieve the pressure, launch the first few dozen, Rodrigo and Steven closed in on them. Rodrigo stood back as Steven mirrored his wife’s actions and sentiments.

“We’ve kept Cybele on her feet long enough,” Rodrigo addressed the couple who claimed to be his parents. “Why don’t you go back to the car with her, Agnes, while Steven and I arrange everything.”

Agnes? Steven? He didn’t call them mother and father?

She would have asked to be involved if she wasn’t burning for the chance to be alone with Agnes, to get to the bottom of this.

As soon as they settled into the car, Cybele turned to Agnes. And all the questions jammed in her mind.

What would she ask? How? This woman was here to claim her son’s body. What would she think, feel, if said son’s widow showed no interest in talking about him and was instead panting to know all about the man who’d turned out to be his brother?

She sat there, feeling at a deeper loss than she had since she’d woken up in this new life. Rodrigo’s chauffeur offered them refreshments. She parroted what Agnes settled on, mechanically sipped her mint tea every time Agnes did hers.

Suddenly Agnes started to talk, the sorrow that coated her face mingling with other things. Love. Pride.

“Rodrigo was six, living in an exclusively Hispanic community in Southern California, when his mother died in a factory accident and he was taken into the system. Two years later, when Mel was six, we decided that he needed a sibling, one we’d realized we’d never be able to give him.”

So that was it. Rodrigo was adopted.

Agnes went on. “We took Mel with us while we searched, since our one criteria for the child we’d adopt was that he get along with Mel. But Mel antagonized every child we thought was suited to our situation, got them to turn nasty. Then Rodrigo was suggested to us. We were told he was everything Mel wasn’t—responsible, resourceful, respectful, with a steady temperament and a brilliant mind. But we’d been told so many good things about other children and we’d given up hope that any child would pass the test of interaction with Mel. Then Rodrigo walked in.

“After he introduced himself in the little English he knew, enquired politely why we were looking for another child, he asked to be left alone with Mel. Unknown to both boys, we were taken to where children’s meetings with prospective parents were monitored. Mel was at his nastiest, calling Rodrigo names, making fun of his accent, insulting his parentage and situation. We were mortified that he even knew those …words, and would use them so viciously. Steven thought he felt threatened by Rodrigo, as he had by any child we sought. I told him whatever the reason, I couldn’t let Mel abuse the poor boy, that we’d been wrong and Mel didn’t need a sibling but firmer treatment until he outgrew his sullenness and nastiness. He hushed me, asked me to watch. And I watched.

“Rodrigo had so far shown no reaction. By then, other boys had lashed out, verbally and physically, at Mel’s bullying. But Rodrigo sat there, watching him in what appeared to be deep contemplation. Then he stood up and calmly motioned him closer. Mel rained more abuse on him, but when he still didn’t get the usual reaction, he seemed to be intrigued. I was certain Rodrigo would deck him and sneer gotcha or something. I bet Mel thought the same.

“We all held our breath as Rodrigo put a hand in his pocket. My mind streaked with worst-case scenarios. Steven surged up, too. But the director of the boys’ home detained us. Then Rodrigo took out a butterfly. It was made of cardboard and elastic and metal springs and beautifully hand-painted. He wound it up and let it fly. And suddenly Mel was a child again, giggling and jumping after the butterfly as if it were real.

“We knew then that Rodrigo had won him over, that our search for a new son was over. I was shaking as we walked in to ask Rodrigo if he’d like to come live with us. He was stunned. He said no one wanted older children. We assured him that we did want him, but that he could try us out first. He insisted it was he who would prove himself to us. He turned and shook Mel’s hand, told him he’d made other toys and promised to teach him how to make his own.”

The images Agnes had weaved were overwhelming. The vision of Rodrigo as a child was painfully vivid. Self-possessed in the face of humiliation and adversity, stoic in a world where he had no one, determined as he proved himself worthy of respect.

“And did he teach him?” she asked.