The Spanish Love Deception by Elena Armas (novels for students .TXT) 📕

But then I also hated how much I feared that a part of it was perhaps true. Why hadn’t I been able to trust anybody with my heart otherwise?

“Everything that had happened hurt me, left a scar, but it didn’t break me.” I swallowed the lump in my throat, wanting to believe my own words. “It didn’t.”

A sound, deep and husky and pained, came from behind me. Before I knew what was happening, Aaron’s arms came around my shoulders, and I was engulfed by him. Wrapped into his chest. Warm and hard and safe and … a lot less alone. A lot more complete than I had been seconds before.

Aaron buried his head in the nook of my neck from behind, and I felt the urge to comfort him. So, I did.

“I’m not broken, Aaron,” I told him in a whisper, although perhaps it was for my own reassurance. “I can’t be.”

“You are not,” he said on my skin. Tightening his hold on me. Bringing me closer. “And I know that even if something did break you—because that’s life and no one is invincible—you’d still put the pieces back together and remain the brightest thing I’d ever seen.”

My hands went around that pair of arms wrapped around my shoulders, which pulled me into his chest, as if he were scared I’d go up in smoke if he didn’t. And I hung on to him equally desperately. As if my next breath depended on it.

We remained that way for a long while. And slowly, very slowly, our bodies relaxed into each other. They melted together. I focused on Aaron’s breath, on the earnestness of the moment, on his heartbeat against my back, his strength. On all the things that he’d kept handing to me so freely, like they were nothing. Like he was supposed to give them away and I was entitled to take them from him.

Neither of us said anything as time stretched, our holds gradually loosening as we lost the battle to sleep.

My eyelids eventually fluttered shut, but right before darkness engulfed me, I thought I heard Aaron whisper, “You feel complete in my arms. You feel like my home.”

Chapter Twenty-Two

What an idiot I had been.

A big, dumb, foolish idiot.

Earlier that morning, when my alarm had gone off a little after dawn and I had slipped out of Aaron’s warm embrace quietly—but not panic-ridden—I had immediately regretted agreeing to meet my sister hours before the wedding. So, once I got everything packed and was ready to go, right before sneaking out the door without waking him up—even though I had learned by then that he, too, slept like the dead—I leaned very silently and brushed a soft kiss against his jaw. Because I didn’t want to go, not really, and I was a weak, weak woman when it came to him.

Just in case, I left Aaron a note, telling him that I’d see him in a few hours because I’d be getting ready with Isabel. Charo would be driving him to the wedding venue.

Be strong and don’t succumb, I wrote down.

Then, I signed it with, With love, Lina.

My choice of words had my heart skipping a beat, but I promised myself it wasn’t a big deal and left it there.

Not more than an hour after leaving the apartment, I started to miss him—like properly brooding and sighing and wondering what he was doing—so I texted him.

Lina: Did you get my note?

To which, he replied no more than a couple of minutes later.

Aaron: Yes, I’m hiding in the bathroom. Charo was trying to sneak a photo of me with her phone. Martíns are relentless creatures.

That had me snorting so hard that the makeup artist ended up brushing eye shadow all across my forehead. She tried to play it cool, but I could tell she was pissed.

But none of that was the reason why I was pretty sure I was a big, dumb, foolish idiot.

Somehow, somewhere between slipping into my velvety fawn heels and the graceful, airy burgundy gown I was wearing, my head had started spinning questions. Important ones. Will I be able to find Aaron in the crowd? And also: Will he be okay? Will he get to the venue and find his seat? And the star of the show: Maybe I won’t see him until after the ceremony. What if I can’t find him?

So, when I came to my place to the right of the bride, on a glorious summer day, surrounded by arrangements of peonies in all shades of baby pink and pearly white, in front of the people who had seen us grow and turn into the women we were today, my head turned.

My gaze effortlessly zeroed in on a pair of ocean-blue eyes.

And all those questions immediately died out.

What a big, dumb, foolish idiot I had been to even question that my eyes wouldn’t be drawn to Aaron Blackford in a matter of seconds. How in the world could they not?

He was dazzling, standing under the sun in a navy-blue suit. And when he smiled, that wide and furtive grin that I was beginning to think was only for me, I swore he could have blinded me if I hadn’t blinked. That smile—Aaron’s smile, his handsome face, him completely and entirely—made my knees weak and my chest tight.

That was exactly why, once the ceremony ended and Gonzalo made a show out of eating Isabel’s face right then and there for everybody attending to see, I turned around on shaky legs. The crowd proceeded to throw rice and confetti as the bride and groom made their way down the aisle, and by the time they were jumping inside a yellow Volkswagen Beetle to drive to where they’d have a pre-dinner photo shoot, everybody started shuffling to the restaurant area. A quiet silence was left behind, except for the sound of my heart, which was trying to stumble right out of my throat.

Aaron waited by the exit, standing with his hands in the pockets of