Risk of Desire (Epilogue)

Risk of Desire: Epilogue is a free extended epilogue for readers who've finished Risk of Desire — six months with Mateo and Emily after the final page, featuring a summer at the Hotel Montemayor, an invitation into the de la Vega family estate, a boat nobody has seen in thirty years, a secret locked in a coach house, one furious argument that lands on Emily's oldest wound, two more scorching scenes, a proposal at twenty to six in the morning — and the first glimpse of the brother whose story comes next.

The hotel is full, the east wing is open, and I still wake at five forty every morning to unbolt my own front door.

That's the part nobody warned me about. Not the ruin. The after.

I spent three years fighting for this house. Now the diary is a hedge of names all the way to next June, Marisol has her pastry section, Raúl has asked — quietly, in the passage by the pantry — whether he might do the wine, and when the power fails on a Thursday in August with every room let, it isn't a catastrophe. It's four hundred candles and a guitar in the courtyard and a Belgian gentleman asking whether we do this every week.

And there's a man in Enrique's old office who has never in his life asked a question without knowing the answer first.

In May, Mateo takes me to Seville — to the estate, to the family, to a boat nobody has seen in thirty years — and I discover that being a guest is far harder than being a hotelier.

In August, a crate the size of a wardrobe arrives in my yard.

The carrier needs a signature. I sign, because I'm always the one who signs.

The docket says M. Calderón.

He has a reason. He always has a reason, and every word of it is true, and that's precisely the problem — because eleven months into loving this man, I go straight to the arrivals register to check for a name that hasn't come through my door since the week he lied about who he was.

The reflex is mine now. He put it there.

What's in the coach house is not what I think it is. What's inside it is older than both of us, it's marked settled in a dead man's hand, and it will tell me something about this building that I have spent thirteen years not knowing.

I don't know it yet, but he's had a ring in his coat since before Seville.

And down on the coast, his brother Diego is standing on the seabed at night under a cathedral of glass he can't finish — three thousand kilometres from a woman in Plymouth he hasn't met yet.