The Twelve-Month Mistress by Kate Walker

Author:Kate Walker
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2004-02-01T23:00:00+00:00

Joaquin had spent an uncomfortable couple of days in which he hadn’t known quite what was real, and what was part of the weird, heightened dreams that had haunted the sleep into which he fell with a disturbing regularity. They were so vivid, so confusing, that he would have described them as delirium, even though he had been assured that he was not running a temperature.

People came and went and he never quite knew when or why. Sometimes he would open his eyes and his father was there, or Ramón, and then another time it would be Mercedes who was sitting in the chair by the bed—and occasionally Alex. He seemed to recall that Alex had said something about a baby, but it had blurred into the haze in his head and he couldn’t recall any details.

Sometimes it would be bright day, with the warm sunshine pouring in through the windows; at other times, clearly night had fallen without him noticing and the world beyond the glass was dark, the room lit softly by the bedside lamp. He’d eaten sometimes, just a bit, not tasting anything, and he’d drunk the water people kept offering him and found that that tasted surprisingly good.

But every time his eyes opened, it was always Cassandra that he saw. Day or night. Early or late. She was there. Sitting by the bed, or on the bed. Silent and watchful or talking about something that he couldn’t always take in. She was a calm, reassuring presence in a world that seemed to be always out of focus. And she was always there.

That was fine with him.

More than fine.

He knew that he had spoken to the other visitors, murmuring something that they had seemed to accept as the answer to whatever they had asked, but he couldn’t really recall just what he had said. The one thing he actually registered, the one thing he remembered saying, was that he had asked Cassandra to stay.

He had asked her to stay, and she had stayed.

And that was fine too.

In the end, after three hazy days, the fog that had clouded his brain finally started to clear. He no longer drifted asleep at totally unexpected moments, his eyes focused much better, and he could actually understand what people were saying to him. To his intense relief, he was also let out of the damn bed, and felt decidedly more human once he was sitting in a chair, wearing proper clothes and with his jaw shaved free of the impossibly luxuriant growth of beard that had resulted from three days’ lack of attention.

He would feel even better if the doctors would only let him go home.

If he went home, then he could be alone with Cassandra.

But: ‘You have had a very nasty knock on the head,’ they said. ‘We need to be sure that there’s no permanent damage. What can you remember about the accident itself?’

‘Remember? The honest answer is not a damn thing—but that’s not so unusual, is it? I

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