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A Spanish Affair: Naive Bride, Defiant Wife / Flora's Defiance
LYNNE GRAHAM


These two powerful Spanish men are impossible to forget! NAIVE BRIDE, DEFIANT WIFE Alejandro Navarro Vasquez has long desired revenge. His wife betrayed him with an act that, by this proud Spaniard's code, was unforgivable. His opportunity for justice comes when the private detective he's hired finally pinpoints Jemima's whereabouts. And now Alejandro will settle the score with his runaway wife!FLORA'S DEFIANCE Flora Bennett is determined to adopt her baby niece, despite Angelo van Zaal's assumption he will have guardianship. And, though Angelo's annoyed with himself for wanting her, Flora annoys Angelo even more by avoiding the shimmer of sexual attraction between them. But there is a way he can make her obey all his wishes….







Two glamorous romance stories in one volume—for the first time!—by USA TODAY bestselling author Lynne Graham

Naive Bride, Defiant Wife

Alejandro Navarro Vasquez has long desired revenge. His wife betrayed him with an act that, by this proud Spaniard’s code, was unforgivable. His opportunity for justice comes when the private detective he’s hired finally pinpoints Jemima’s whereabouts. And now Alejandro will settle the score with his runaway wife!

Flora’s Defiance

Flora Bennett is determined to adopt her baby niece, despite Angelo van Zaal’s assumption he will have guardianship. And, though Angelo’s annoyed with himself for wanting her, Flora annoys Angelo even more by avoiding the shimmer of sexual attraction between them. But there is a way he can make her obey all his wishes….


THE BILLIONAIRES COLLECTION

High-powered negotiations, exotic locales and lavish parties…marriages of convenience, surprise pregnancies and undeniable passions. This 2-in-1 collection will take you into the luxurious world of the rich and powerful, where all that you could ever desire is at your fingertips….

But for these irresistible tycoons, the thing they want the most is the thing they’ll have to work the hardest to attain…. Because the stakes are never higher for these passionate, jet-setting men than when they’re fighting for the affection of the women they love.


A Spanish Affair

Naive Bride, Defiant Wife

Flora's Defiance

Lynne Graham






www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)


LYNNE GRAHAM

lives in Northern Ireland and has been a keen romance reader since her teens. Happily married, Lynne has five children. Her eldest is her only natural child. Her other children, who are every bit as dear to her heart, are adopted. The family has a variety of pets, and Lynne loves gardening, cooking, collecting of all sorts and is crazy about every aspect of Christmas. Visit her online at her website at www.lynnegraham.com (http://www.lynnegraham.com).




Contents


Naive Bride, Defiant Wife (#u0f794e6c-240a-57ba-bcac-5de11cad498e)

Flora's Defiance (#litres_trial_promo)



Naive Bride, Defiant Wife




CONTENTS


Chapter One (#u83a813a1-24d2-5821-a166-5c126f52d699)

Chapter Two (#u776d7254-8e1b-5d29-81ae-e968493e6c5e)

Chapter Three (#udf20af56-5aac-5bc9-9aa3-fd453ecc878e)

Chapter Four (#ufb9bc281-49ff-50f9-b525-86e0223109b9)

Chapter Five (#ubc3687cd-18e5-521b-abf1-0105a018dea1)

Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)




CHAPTER ONE


ALEJANDRO NAVARRO VASQUEZ, the Conde Olivares, sat on his superb black stallion in the shade of an orange grove and surveyed the valley that had belonged to his ancestors for over five hundred years. On this fine spring morning, below a clear blue sky, it was a gorgeous view encompassing thousands of acres of fertile earth and woodland. He owned the land as far as the eye could see, but his lean, darkly handsome features were grim as they had often been since the breakdown of his marriage almost two and a half years earlier.

He was a landowner and wealthy, but his family—which every Spaniard cherished far beyond material riches—had been ripped asunder by his imprudent marriage. For a male as strong, proud and successful as Alejandro, it was a bitter truth that undermined his every achievement. He had followed his heart and not his head and he had married the wrong woman, a very expensive mistake for which he was still paying the price. His half-brother, Marco, had taken a job in New York, cutting off all contact with his mother and siblings. Yet if Marco, whom Alejandro had helped to raise after their father’s premature death, had appeared before him at that moment could he have forgiven the younger man and urged him back to his childhood home with sincerity and warm affection?

Alejandro swore under his breath as he pondered that merciless question and the less than acceptable negative answer that he would have had to give it. However, when it came to Jemima, there was no forgiveness in his heart, only outrage and aggression. He nursed a far from charitable desire for vengeance against the wife and the brother who had together betrayed his trust and his love. Ever since Jemima had walked out on their marriage and disappeared, defying his wishes to the last, Alejandro had burned with a desire for justice, even while his keen intelligence warned him that there was no such thing when it came to affairs of the heart.

His mobile phone vibrated and, suppressing a groan of impatience, for it was always a struggle to protect his rare moments of leisure, he tugged it out. His ebony brows rose when he learned that the private detective he had hired to find Jemima had arrived to see him. He rode swiftly back to the castle, wondering impatiently if Alonso Ortega had finally managed to track down his estranged wife.

‘My apologies for coming to see you without an appointment, Your Excellency,’ the older man murmured with punctilious good manners and a promising air of accomplishment. ‘But I knew you would want to hear my news as soon as possible. I have found the Condesa.’

‘In England?’ Alejandro questioned and, having had that long-held suspicion confirmed, he listened while Ortega furnished further details. Then, unfortunately, at that point his mother, the dowager countess, entered the room. A formidable presence, Doña Hortencia settled acid black eyes on the private detective and demanded to know if he had finally fulfilled the purpose of his hire. At the news that he had, a rare smile of approval lightened her expression.

‘There is one more fact I should add,’ Ortega revealed in a reluctant tone of voice, evading the uncomfortably intense scrutiny of his noble hostess. ‘The Condesa now has a child, a little boy of around two years of age.’

Alejandro froze and a yawning silence greeted the detective’s startling announcement.

The door opened again and his older sister, Beatriz, entered with a quiet apology to her brother for the interruption. She was hushed into silence by her domineering mother, who said glacially, ‘That wanton English witch who married your unlucky brother has given birth to a bastard.’

Horrified at such an announcement being made in front of Alonso Ortega, Beatriz shot her brother an appalled glance and hastened to offer the detective refreshments in an effort to change the subject to one less controversial. His discomfited sister, Alejandro appreciated, would quite happily sit and discuss the weather now while he, her more primitive brother, was strongly tempted to seize hold of Ortega’s lapels and force every single fact from the man without further ado. But, possibly sensing his employer’s impatience, the detective handed Alejandro a slim file and hastily excused himself.

‘A…child?’ Beatriz gasped in shock and consternation the instant the door had closed on the detective’s departure. ‘But whose child?’

His profile set like granite, Alejandro answered his sister only with a dismissive shrug. It was certainly not his child, but for him that had to be the biggest badge of ignominy he had ever endured. Yet another metaphorical nail in Jemima’s coffin, he conceded bitterly. Jemima, he had learned the hard way, knew exactly how best to put a man through an emotional and physical wringer. Dios mio, another man’s child!

‘If only you had listened to me,’ Doña Hortencia lamented. ‘The instant I met that wicked young woman I knew she was wrong for you. You were one of the biggest matrimonial prizes in Spain and you could have married anyone—’

‘I married Jemima,’ Alejandro pointed out tersely, for he had never had much time for the older woman’s melodrama.

‘Only because she mesmerised you like the shameless hussy she is. One man was never going to be enough for her. Thanks to her, my poor Marco is living on the other side of the world. That she could have given birth to an illegitimate child while still bearing our name is the most disgusting thing I ever—’

‘Enough!’ Alejandro incised with crushing force to close out that carping voice. ‘There is no point to such recriminations now. What is done is done.’

Doña Hortencia, her lined face full of anger and malice, rested accusing eyes on his lean strong visage. ‘But it is not done yet, is it? You still haven’t begun divorce proceedings.’

‘I will travel to England and see Jemima as soon as the arrangements can be made,’ Alejandro pronounced grittily.

‘Send the family lawyer! There can be no need for you to make a personal trip to England,’ his mother protested with vigour.

‘There is every need,’ Alejandro contradicted with all the quiet, unhesitating assurance of his rich, well-educated and extremely aristocratic background. ‘Jemima is still my wife.’

As Doña Hortencia broke into another barrage of loud objections Alejandro lost patience. ‘I inform you of my intentions only as a matter of courtesy. I do not require either your permission or your approval.’

Alejandro retired to the privacy of his study and poured himself a stiff brandy. A child? Jemima had had a child. He was still in shock at that revelation, not least because he could hardly forget that his wife had miscarried his baby shortly before she’d left him. That was how he knew beyond any shadow of doubt that this child, which she had given birth to since, then could not possibly be his. So, was the boy Marco’s baby? Or some other man’s? Such speculation was sordid, he acknowledged with a distaste that slivered through his lean powerful frame like a knife blade.

He leafed through the file but the facts were few. Jemima was now living in a Dorset village where she ran a florist’s shop. For a moment as he allowed himself to think about his estranged wife memories threatened to overwhelm him, but he shut them out, utilising the fierce intelligence and self-discipline that were second nature to him. Yet where had either trait been when he got involved with Jemima Grey in the first place?

He could make no excuses for his behaviour because he had freely acknowledged the huge and irrefutable differences between them even before he married her. Of course, what had mesmerised him then—to borrow his mother’s expression—was Jemima’s superlative sex appeal. Like many men, he had been more vulnerable to that temptation than he had ever realised he might be. Possibly life prior to that point had spoiled him with too many easy female conquests. His failure to keep a lid on his fierce sexual desire to possess Jemima’s pale slim body had proved to be his fatal weakness, he assured himself with grim conviction. Fortunately, however, the passage of time and the process of hard disillusionment he had experienced during his short-lived marriage had obliterated Jemima’s desirability factor entirely.

His ill-judged marriage had, after all, virtually destroyed his family circle. But in the short term, Jemima had no family support of her own and she was still his legal wife; regardless of his feelings on that score she remained his responsibility. As did her child, whom the law would deem to be his child until a divorce was finalised, Alejandro conceded, irate at that demeaning fact. He had to go to England.

No Conde Olivares since the fifteenth century had ever been known to act as a coward or to shirk his duty, no matter how unpleasant it might be. Even in the most trying circumstances, Alejandro expected no less of himself. He reckoned that Jemima was fortunate to be a twenty-first-century woman, for his medieval ancestors would have locked an unfaithful wife up in a convent or killed her for inflicting such a stain on the family honour. Though at least his less civilised ancestors had possessed the power of retaliation, he reflected broodingly.

* * *

WHILE JEMIMA WRAPPED the bouquet in clear, decorative cellophane, Alfie peered round the corner of the shop counter, his big brown eyes dancing with mischief. ‘’Ello,’ he said chirpily to the waiting customer, shyness not being one of Alfie’s personality traits.

‘Hello. He’s a beautiful child,’ the woman remarked, smiling down at Alfie as the toddler looked up at her with his irrepressible grin.

It was a compliment that often came Alfie’s way, his mother conceded as she slotted the payment in the till, while wondering what age her son would reach before that particular description embarrassed him. But like father like son, she thought ruefully, and in looks Alfie was very much a product of his Spanish father’s genes, with gorgeous dark brown eyes, olive-tinted skin and a shock of black silky hair. All he had inherited from his less exotic mother was her rampant curls. On the inside, however, Alfie had all the easy warmth of his mother’s essentially optimistic nature and revealed only the occasional hint of his father’s infinitely darker and more passionate temperament.

With a slight shiver, Jemima pushed that daunting thought back out of her mind again. With Alfie playing with his toy cars at her feet, she returned to fashioning a flower arrangement requested by a client who had photographed a similar piece of floral art at a horticultural show. Pure accident had brought Jemima to the village of Charlbury St Helens at a crisis point in her life and she had never regretted staying on and laying the foundations for her new future there.

The only work she’d been able to find locally while she’d been pregnant was as an assistant at a flower shop. She had needed to earn back her self-respect by keeping busy and positive. Discovering that she had a very real interest in floristry, she had found more than a job to focus on and had since studied part-time for formal qualifications. By the time her employer decided to retire, owing to ill health, Jemima had had the courage and vision to take over the business and expand it by taking on occasional private projects that encompassed small weddings and other functions.

She was so proud of running her own business that sometimes she had to pinch herself to believe that she could have come so far from her humble beginnings. Not bad for the daughter of a violent, criminal father who had never worked if he could help it, and a downtrodden, alcoholic mother, who had died when her husband crashed a stolen car. Jemima had never dared to develop any aspirations as a teenager. Nobody in her family tree had ever tried to climb the career or social ladders.

‘Those kinds of ideas aren’t for the likes of us. Jem needs to get a job to help out at home,’ her mother had told the teacher who’d tried to persuade the older woman that her daughter should stay on at school to study for her A-level exams.

‘You’re like your mother—dumb as a rock and just about as useful!’ her father had condemned often enough for that label to have troubled Jemima for many year afterwards.

With lunch eaten, she walked Alfie down to his session at the playgroup in the village hall, wincing when her son bounded boisterously through the door calling his friends’ names at the top of his voice. Alfie, named for his great-grandfather on Jemima’s mother’s side of the family, was very sociable and full of energy after spending the morning cooped up at the shop with his mother. Although Jemima had created a play corner in the backstore room for her child, there really wasn’t enough space to house a lively little boy for long. With the help of a childminder, she had often contrived to keep Alfie with her during working hours, but now that he was of an age to join the playgroup in the afternoons and she no longer attended floristry classes she needed a lot less childcare. Considering that her close friend and former childminder, Flora, was now often too busy with her bed-and-breakfast operation to help out as much, Jemima was grateful for that fact.

It was a pleasant surprise therefore when Flora came into the shop an hour later and asked Jemima if she had time for a coffee. Brewing up in the small kitchen, Jemima eyed her red-headed friend and read the other woman’s uneasiness with a frown. ‘What’s up?’

‘It’s probably nothing. I meant to come over and tell you at the weekend, but a whole family booked in with me on Saturday and I was run off my feet,’ Flora groaned. ‘Apparently some guy in a hire car was hanging around the village last Thursday and someone saw him taking a picture of your shop. He was asking questions about you in the post office as well.’

Jemima stilled, dark blue eyes widening while her heart-shaped face paled below her cloud of wildly curling strawberry-blonde hair and the stance of her tiny slender figure screamed tension. Just an inch over five feet in height, she had reminded the more solidly built Flora of a delicate blown-glass angel ornament when they’d first met, but she had later appreciated that nobody as down-to-earth and quirky as Jemima could be seen for long in that improbable light. However, her friend was unquestionably beautiful in an ethereal way and if men could be equated to starving dogs, Jemima was the equivalent of a very juicy bone, for the male sex seemed to find her irresistible. Locals joked that the church choir had been on the brink of folding before Jemima had joined and a swell of young men had soon followed in her wake, not that any of them had since got anywhere with her, Flora reflected wryly. Badly burned by her failed marriage, Jemima preferred men as friends and concentrated her energies on her son and her business.

‘What sort of questions?’ Jemima prompted sickly, the cold chill of apprehension hollowing out her stomach.

‘Whether or not you lived around here, and what age Alfie was. The guy asking the questions was young and good-looking. Maurice in the post office thought he was playing cupid…’

‘Was the man Spanish?’

Flora shook her head and took over from her anxious friend at the kettle to speed up the arrival of the coffee. ‘No, a Londoner according to Maurice. He probably just fancied trying his chances with you—’

‘I don’t remember any young good-looking men coming in here last week,’ Jemima pointed out, her concern patent.

‘Maybe he lost interest once he realised you were a mother.’ Flora shrugged. ‘I wouldn’t have told you about him if I had known you would get wound up about it. Why don’t you just get on the phone and tell…er…what’s his name, your husband?’

‘Alejandro,’ Jemima supplied tautly. ‘Tell him what?’

‘That you want a clean break and a divorce.’

‘Nobody gets away with telling Alejandro what to do. He’s the one who does the telling. It wouldn’t be that simple once he found out about Alfie.’

‘So you go to a solicitor and say what a lousy husband he was.’

‘He didn’t drink or beat me up.’

Flora grimaced. ‘Why should such extremes be your only yardstick? There are other grounds for divorce, like mental abuse and neglect—and what about the way he left you at the mercy of his horrible family?’

‘It was his mother who was horrible, not his brother or his sister,’ Jemima pointed out, wanting as always to be fair. ‘And I don’t think it’s right to say I was mentally abused.’

Flora, whose temper was as hot as her hair, regarded the younger woman with unimpressed eyes. ‘Alejandro criticised everything you did, left you alone all the time and got you pregnant before you were ready to have a kid.’

Jemima reddened to the roots of her light-coloured hair and marvelled that she could have been so frank with Flora in the early weeks of their friendship, sharing secrets that she sometimes wished she had kept to herself, although not, mercifully, the worst secrets of all. Of course, back then, she had been as steamed up as a pressure cooker of emotions and in dire need of someone to talk to. ‘I just wasn’t good enough for him…’ She spoke the truth as she saw it, as lightly as she could.

Growing up, Jemima had never been good enough for either of her parents and the ability to search out and focus on her own flaws was second nature to her. Her mother had entered her in juvenile beauty contests as a young child but Jemima, too shy to smile for the photos and too quiet to chatter when interviewed, had not shone. Bored out of her mind as she was as a daydreaming teenager, she had done equally poorly at the office-skills course her mother had sent her on, shattering her mother’s second dream of her becoming a high-powered personal assistant to some millionaire who would some day fall madly in love with her daughter. Her mother had pretty much lived in a fantasy world, which, along with the alcohol, had provided her with her only escape from the drudgery and abuse of a bad marriage.

Jemima’s father, whose only dreams related to making pots of money without ever getting up off the sofa, had wanted Jemima to become a model, but she failed to grow tall enough for fashion work and lacked the bountiful curves necessary for the other kind. After her mother’s death, her father had urged her to become a dancer at a club run by his mate and had hit her and thrown her out of the family home when she’d refused to dress up in a skimpy outfit and attend an audition. It was years before she saw her father again and then in circumstances she preferred to forget. Yes, Jemima had learned at an early age that people always expected more from her than she ever seemed able to deliver and, sadly, her marriage had proved no different. It was for that reason that making her own way in life to set up and run her business had added greatly to her confidence; for once she had surpassed her own expectations.

Yet when she had first met Alejandro and he had swept her off her feet, he had seemed to be her every dream come true, which in retrospect seemed laughable to her. But love had snatched her up like a tornado and made her believe in the impossible before it flung her down again. Somehow, and she had no idea how, she had truly believed that she could marry a rich, educated foreigner with a pedigree as long as her arm and make a go of it. But in practice the challenges and the disparities had proved insurmountable. Her background had come back to seriously haunt her, but her biggest single mistake had been getting too friendly with her brother-in-law, Marco. Although, she reasoned defensively, had Alejandro been around more and made more effort to help her come to terms with her new life in Spain she wouldn’t have been so lonely and wouldn’t have jumped at the offer of Marco’s company. And she had adored Marco, she acknowledged abstractedly, recalling how wounded she had felt when even after her marriage broke down he had made no attempt to get in touch with her again.

‘You were too good for that husband of yours,’ Flora told Jemima with strong emphasis. ‘But you really should tell Alejandro about Alfie instead of staying in hiding as if you have something to be ashamed of.’

Jemima turned her head away, her cheeks colouring as she thought, If only you knew… Telling the whole unvarnished truth would probably turn her closest friend off her as well, she reckoned painfully.

‘I honestly believe that if Alejandro found out about Alfie, he would go to any lengths to get custody of him and take him back to Spain to live,’ she replied heavily. ‘Alejandro takes his responsibilities towards the family very seriously.’

‘Well, if you think there’s a risk of Alfie being snatched by his father, you’re wise keeping quiet about him,’ Flora said, although there was an uncertain look on her face when she voiced that opinion. ‘But you can’t keep him quiet for ever.’

‘Only, for now, it’s the best option,’ Jemima declared, setting down her coffee to attend to a customer as the shop bell on the door sounded.

Soon afterwards, she went out to deliver a floral arrangement for a dinner party to one of the big houses outside the village. On the way home she collected Alfie, his high energy dissipated by a couple of hours of horseplay. The tiny terraced cottage she rented on the outskirts of the village enjoyed a garden, which she had equipped with a swing and a sandpit. She was proud of her small living space. Although the little house was inexpertly painted and furnished cheaply with flat-pack furniture, it was the first place she had ever been able to make feel like her home since childhood.

Sometimes it seemed like a dim and unbelievable fairy tale to recall that after she had married Alejandro she had lived in a castle. Castillo del Halcón, the Castle of the Hawk, built by his warrior ancestors in a mix of Islamic and European styles and filled with history, luxury and priceless artefacts. Moving the furniture or the pictures around had been forbidden and redecorating equally frowned on because the dowager countess, Doña Hortencia, could not bear any woman to interfere in what she still essentially saw as her home. Living there, Jemima had often felt like a lodger who had outstayed her welcome, and the formal lifestyle of changing into evening clothes for dinner, dealing with servants and entertaining important guests had suited her even less.

Had there been any redeeming features to her miserable marriage? she asked herself, and instantly a picture of Alejandro popped up unbidden inside her head. Her spectacularly gorgeous husband had initially felt like a prize beyond any other she had ever received, yet she had never quite been able to stifle the feeling that she didn’t deserve him and he deserved better than her. It crossed Jemima’s mind that most of the best things that had happened to her in life had occurred seemingly because of blessed accidents of fate. That description best covered Alfie’s unplanned conception, her car choosing to break down in Charlbury St Helens after she had run away from Spain, her marriage, and ironically it even covered her first meeting with Alejandro…

He had knocked her off her bike in a car park or, rather, his driver’s overly assertive driving style had done so. She had been on her day off from the hotel where she was working as a receptionist and riding a bicycle was a necessity when she was employed in a rural business and buses were scarcer than hens’ teeth. The opulent Mercedes had ground to a halt and Alejandro and his chauffeur had emerged to check out the damage done while she was struggling to blink back tears from the pain of her skinned knees and bruised hip. Before she had known what was happening to her, her damaged bike was stacked in the local repair shop and she was ensconced in the luxury Mercedes, being swept off to the nearest hospital A and E department by the most gorgeous-looking guy she had ever met in her life. It was a shame that she really hadn’t noticed that day just how domineering and deaf to all argument Alejandro could be, for he had refused to listen when she declared that she did not require any medical attention. No, she had been X-rayed, cleaned up, bandaged and bullied within an inch of her life all because Alejandro’s dazzling smile had cast a spell over her.

Love at first sight, Jemima labelled with an instinctive frown of antipathy while she shifted about restlessly in her bed that night. She had never believed in love at first sight, indeed had grown up promising herself that she would never allow any man to wield the kind of power over her that her father had always exercised over her mother. But despite the hard lessons she had believed she had learned at her mother’s knee, Jemima had taken one look at Alejandro Navarro Vasquez and fallen as hard and as destructively for him as a brick thrown from a major height. And the real lessons she had learned she had picked up from Alejandro himself, only she had failed to put what she learned to sensible use.

Long before Alejandro had shocked her with his proposal of marriage, he had put her through months of dating hell by not phoning when he said he would, by cancelling meetings last minute and by seeing other women and getting photographed with them. Even before she’d married him he had battered her heart and trodden her pride deep in the dirt. But she had understood even then why he was giving her the runaround. He was, after all, a Spanish count, while she worked for peanuts at a little hotel that he considered to be a dump. He had known she was not his equal on any level and the disparity had bothered him deeply from the outset of their acquaintance. Six months after that first encounter, however, Alejandro had seemed to shed that attitude…

‘Sol y sombre…sun and shade, querida mia,’ Alejandro had murmured then as he compared the pale skin of her slender arm to the bronzed vibrancy of his darker colouring. ‘You cannot have one without the other—we belong together.’

But they had mingled as badly as oil and water, Jemima conceded with the dulled pain of acceptance that she had learned she had to live with, and she finally dropped off to sleep around two in the morning by dint of trying to forget the delivery she had to get up for the next morning.

There was hardly any floor space left in the shop once she had loaded the fresh blooms into the waiting containers. Her fingers numbed by the brisk spring morning temperature and too much contact with wet stems and water, Jemima rubbed her hands over her slim jeans-clad hips and tried not to shiver, because she knew that one shiver would only lead to another half-dozen and that in the end she would only feel colder. After all, winter or summer, the shop was always cool. It was an old building with poor insulation and she was always quick to remind herself that too much heat would only damage her stock. She went into the back room and dragged a black fleece jacket off the hook in the wall and put it on. Alfie was out in the little backyard playing on his trike while making loud motoring noises and she smiled at the sight of his innocent enjoyment, which took no account of the early hour he had been dug out of his cosy bed or the chilly air.

‘Jemima…’

It was a voice she had hoped never to hear again: rich, melodic, dark and deep, and so full of accented earthy male sexiness it sent little quivers down her sensitive spine. She shut her eyes tight, refusing to turn round, telling herself wildly that her mind had somehow slipped dangerously back into the past and that she was imagining things…

Imagining waking up in bed with Alejandro, all tousled black hair, stubble and raw male sensual appeal…Alejandro, who could ignite her hunger with one indolent glance from his stunning black-fringed dark-as-the-night-sky eyes and seal it by simply saying her name…But even as a steamy burst of imagery momentarily clouded her brain and interfered with her breathing, she was instead recalling the emptiness of her bed once she had fallen pregnant and the wounding anguish of that physical lack of interest in her rapidly swelling body. As a chill slid through her slender length she spun round.

And there he was, Alejandro Navarro Vasquez, her husband, who had taught her to love him, taught her to need him and who had then proceeded to torture her with deprivation for her weakness. She was shocked, deeply, horribly shocked, her dazed violet-blue eyes widening to roam slowly over him as if she could not credit what she was seeing. Thick blue-black hair swept back from his brow, a fitting overture to the splendour of high patrician cheekbones bisected by a strong arrogant nose and punctuated by a sensually shaped and perfect masculine mouth. He was a staggeringly handsome man and fabulously well turned out in a dark business suit of faultless cut and polished handmade shoes. He always looked immaculate…except in bed, she recalled dully, when her hands had disarranged his hair and her nails had inflicted scratch marks down the long golden expanse of his flawless back. And she wanted to scream against the recollections that would not leave her alone, that were uniting with her sense of panic to destabilise her even more.

‘What are you doing here?’ she exclaimed breathlessly…




CHAPTER TWO


‘WE HAVE UNFINISHED business,’ Alejandro intoned softly, his keen gaze wandering slowly over her small figure.

And Jemima went from cold to hot as if he had turned a blowtorch on her. She flushed because she knew she looked less than her best with her hair loose round her to keep her ears warm and only a touch of mascara and lip gloss on her face, not to mention the worn jeans, fleece jacket and shabby low-heeled boots that completed her practical outfit. And even though it was bloody-minded—for she wanted nothing between them to be as it had once been, when she’d had no control over her responses—she deeply resented his cool stare and businesslike tone: it was the ultimate rejection. She leant against the door frame, her slender spine taking on an arch that enhanced the small firm curves below the neat fit of wool and denim, her head lifting so that the pale foaming ringlets of her eye-catching strawberry-blonde hair rippled back across her shoulders.

An almost infinitesimal tightening hardened Alejandro’s darkly handsome features, his sculpted jaw line clenching, his brilliant gaze narrowing and brightening. Then Jemima knew he had felt the challenge from her as stridently and clearly as though she had used a loud hailer. Suddenly the atmosphere was seething with tension. At that point, she suffered a dismaying reduction in courage and veiled her gaze, drawing back a step while being terrifyingly aware of the swelling tightness of her nipples inside her bra and the twisting slide of sexual awareness low in her pelvis. It shocked her that a man she now hated as much as she had once loved him could still have such a powerful effect on her body.

‘Always the temptress,’ Alejandro drawled with a roughened edge to his dark deep voice that vibrated through her like a jamming wireless signal and made her rigidity give way to a trembling vulnerability. ‘Do I really look that desperate?’

The fierce chill of his rejection might have cut her like a knife had she not been more aware of the way his strikingly beautiful eyes lingered on her. As she tore her attention from the lean, strong face that haunted her dreams and her gaze dropped she could not help noticing the distinctive masculine bulge that had disturbed the perfect fit of his trousers. Her cheeks flamed as hot as a kettle on the boil as she was both mollified by that reaction and burned by it at the same time.

‘What are you doing here?’ she demanded for the second time.

‘I want a divorce. I need an address for you to obtain it,’ Alejandro spelt out in a driven undertone. ‘Or didn’t that occur to you? Your staging a vanishing act was selfish and immature.’

That fast Jemima wanted to lift one of the buckets of flowers and upend it over him. ‘You forced me to behave like that,’ she told him heatedly.

‘How?’ Alejandro growled, striding forward to brace his lean, well-shaped hands on the counter, clearly more than ready for an argument.

‘You wouldn’t listen to a word I said. We had reached stalemate and there was nothing more I could do.’

‘I told you that we would work it out,’ Alejandro reminded her in a tone of galling condescension.

‘But in the whole of our marriage you never did work anything out with me. How could you when you wouldn’t talk to me? When I told you how unhappy I was what did you ever do to make anything better?’ Jemima demanded, her violet eyes shimmering with pain and condemnation as she remembered the lavish gifts he had given her instead of more concrete and meaningful things like his time and his attention.

Straight away, anger flared in Alejandro, his stunning eyes flaming bright gold with heat just as the bell on the shop door rang to herald the arrival of Jemima’s assistant, Sandy. The silence inside the shop was so deep and so tense it could have filled a bank vault and as she came in the dark-haired, neatly dressed older woman shot Jemima a look of dismay. ‘Am I late? Were you expecting me to start early today?’

‘No, no,’ Jemima hastened to reassure her employee. ‘But I’m afraid I have to go back home for an hour, so you’ll be in charge.’

Without even looking in Alejandro’s direction, Jemima went out to the backyard to retrieve Alfie, hoisting him into her arms and hurrying back indoors to say in a frazzled aside to Alejandro, ‘I live a hundred yards down the road at number forty-two.’

But before she could reach the door a broad-shouldered young man with cropped fair hair strolled through it brandishing a bag. ‘Fresh out of the bakery oven, Jemima!’ he exclaimed with satisfaction. ‘Cherry scones for our elevenses…’

‘Oh, Charlie, I totally forgot you were coming today!’ Jemima gasped in dismay. She had made the arrangement the previous week when she’d last seen Charlie at choir practice. ‘Look, I have to go out for a little while, but first I’d better show you that electrical socket that’s not working.’

Anchoring Alfie more firmly to her hip, Jemima dived back behind the counter with Charlie close behind her and pointed out the socket that had failed the previous week.

Full of cheerful chatter, Charlie rested appreciative eyes on her delicate profile. ‘If it would suit you better I can come back tomorrow when you’re here.’

‘No, that’s fine, Charlie. Today is perfect,’ Jemima insisted, turning back to head for the door where Alejandro waited in silence, his shrewd gaze pinned to the hovering electrician, who was making no attempt to hide his disappointment that she was leaving. ‘Sandy will look after you.’

Jemima stepped out into the fresh air, hugely conscious of Alejandro’s presence by her side but also perplexed, because if he had even looked at Alfie for ten seconds he had contrived to hide the fact from her. ‘I’ll see you at the house,’ she said flatly, setting Alfie down and grasping his hand because he was too heavy for her to carry any further.

‘I’ll give you a lift,’ Alejandro drawled.

‘No, thanks.’ Without any further ado, Jemima crossed the road and began to walk away fast with Alfie tottering along beside her. Outside working hours she used the van to get around, but when the shop was open it was needed to deliver orders.

She had only gone twenty yards before a neat, dark saloon car pulled in beside her and the driver’s door opened. Then a tall man in a business suit climbed out. ‘Going home?’ Jeremy prompted. ‘Get in. I’ll drop you off.’

‘Thank you, Jeremy, but I’m so close it’s easier just to walk,’ she declared breezily, though all her thoughts were miles away, lodged back on Alejandro and his assurance that he wanted a divorce.

Had he already met someone else? Some well born beauty from a moneyed background, much more suitable than she had been? She wondered how many other women he had been with since she had left him and it made a tiny shudder of agonising emotional pain arrow through her tender heart. She didn’t want Alejandro back, no, she definitely didn’t, but she didn’t want any other woman to have him either. Where he was concerned, she was a real dog in the manger. But it would be foolish to imagine that he might have been celibate since her departure, for that high-voltage libido of his required frequent gratification…or at least it had until he was faced with her enlarged breasts and thickening waistline and it had become painfully, hurtfully obvious that he’d found his pregnant wife’s body about as attractive as a mud bath. So how could she possibly care what he had done and with whom since then?

Jeremy yanked open the passenger door of his car. ‘Get in,’ he urged. ‘You’re both getting soaked.’

Belatedly appreciating that it had started raining while she’d stood there, Jemima scooped up her son and clambered in. Jeremy pulled in just ahead of the sleek sports car already waiting outside her home. He vented a low whistle of appreciation as he studied the opulent model. ‘Who on earth does that beauty belong to?’

‘An old friend of mine,’ she replied as she stepped out of his car. ‘Thanks.’

As she attempted to turn away Jeremy strode round the bonnet to rest a staying hand on her arm. ‘Eat out with me tonight,’ he urged, his blue eyes pinned hopefully to her face. ‘No strings, no big deal, just a couple of friends getting together for a meal.’

Turning pink, Jemima stepped back from his proximity, awesomely conscious that just feet away from them Alejandro was listening to the exchange. ‘I’m sorry, I can’t,’ she answered awkwardly.

‘I’ll keep on asking,’ Jeremy warned her.

Jemima almost winced at that unnecessary assurance, as she had already discovered that Jeremy, the local estate agent and a divorcee in his early thirties, had the hide of a rhinoceros when it came to taking a polite hint that a woman wasn’t interested. Since the day she had signed the rental agreement on her cottage, he must have asked her out at least a dozen times.

Aware of the glacial cool of Alejandro’s scrutiny, Jemima hastened to slot her key into the lock on the front door.

‘Why didn’t you just tell him that you were married?’

‘He already knows that. Everybody knows that,’ Jemima fielded irritably, making a point of flexing the finger that bore her wedding ring as she pushed open the door. ‘But he also knows that I’m separated from my husband.’

‘There’s nothing official about our separation,’ Alejandro countered, crowding her with his presence in the tiny hall before he moved on into the small living room. ‘But I am surprised that you’re still wearing the ring.’

Jemima shrugged a slight shoulder and made no reply as she unbuttoned Alfie’s jacket and hung it up beside her fleece.

‘Juice.’ Alfie tugged at her sleeve.

‘Please,’ Jemima reminded him.

‘Peese,’ Alfie said obediently.

‘Do you want coffee?’ Jemima asked Alejandro grudgingly. He had taken up a stance by the window and his height and wide shoulders were blocking out a good deal of the light.

‘Sí,’ Alejandro confirmed.

‘Peese,’ Alfie told him helpfully. ‘Say peese.’

‘Gracias,’ Alejandro pronounced in his own tongue, stubborn to the last and barely sparing the attentive toddler a glance.

Once again Jemima was taken aback by that pronounced lack of interest in her child. She had expected Alejandro to be stunned by Alfie’s existence and, at the very least, extremely curious. ‘Haven’t you got any questions to ask me about him?’ she enquired, her attention resting pointedly on Alfie’s dark curly head as he crouched down to take his beloved cars out of the toy box and line them up in a row.

Alfie liked things organised and tidy, everything in its place. She had a sudden disconcerting recollection of Alejandro’s immaculately neat desktop at the castle and wondered if there were other similarities that she had simply refused to see.

‘When the family lawyer engages a solicitor here to represent my interests, they can ask the questions,’ Alejandro responded very drily.

‘So, you’re already convinced he’s not yours,’ Jemima breathed in a very quiet tone, her lips sealing over her gritted teeth like a steel trap.

Luxuriant black lashes swept up on Alejandro’s gorgeous dark golden eyes, his handsome mouth taking on a sardonic cast. ‘How could he be?’

Seething frustration filled Jemima. For a crazy instant, she wanted to jump on him and kick him and punch him, batter him into a state where he would be forced to listen to her. But she wasn’t a violent woman and if he didn’t listen to her, or believe in her, or even trust her, and he never had, at this stage of their relationship he probably never would. Wasn’t that another good reason as to why she had walked out on their marriage? The conviction that she was beating her stupid head up against a brick wall? Not to mention the sheer impossibility of staying married to a man who was utterly convinced that she had had an affair with his brother?

While she waited on the kettle in the galley kitchen, she reached a sudden decision and lifted the wall phone to call Flora, asking her friend if it would be possible for her to look after Alfie for an hour. ‘Alejandro is here,’ she explained stiffly.

‘Give me five minutes—I’ll come down and pick Alfie up,’ Flora promised.

Jemima set a china mug of coffee down near Alejandro. She knew what she had to do next but she just didn’t want to. Been there, done that, got the T-shirt and the scars. Flora arrived very quickly, bridging the awkward silence with her chatter while Jemima fed Alfie into his coat again.

‘Alejandro…Flora,’ Jemima performed the introduction stiffly.

‘I’ve heard so much about you,’ Flora said brightly to Jemima’s husband. ‘None of it good.’

Alejandro sent Jemima a censorious look of hauteur and she reddened, wishing that the other woman had kept quiet rather than revealing how much she knew about her friend’s marital problems.

The silence left after Flora’s departure spread like a sheet of black ice waiting to entrap the unwary. Jemima straightened her slight shoulders, her blue eyes so dark with strain they had the glimmer of purple against her skin. ‘I hate that I have to say this again, but you don’t give me much choice—I did not sleep with your brother.’

Alejandro shot her a grim dark-eyed appraisal. ‘At least he had the courage not to deny the charge—’

‘Oh…right,’ Jemima sliced in, rage bubbling and pounding through her like a waterfall that had been dammed up inside her. ‘Marco didn’t deny it, so therefore I have to be lying!’

‘My brother has never lied to me but you have,’ Alejandro pointed out levelly.

Jemima’s hands clenched into fists. ‘What lies? What are you talking about?’

‘You went through thousands and thousands of pounds while we were still living together, yet you had nothing to show for your extravagance and could not even cover your own expenses in spite of the generous allowance I gave you. Somewhere in that financial mess, when I asked you for an explanation, there must have been lies,’ he concluded.

Jemima had turned white as milk, for those were charges she could not deny. She had got through a terrifying amount of money, although she hadn’t spent it on herself. Sadly, she had had nothing to show for it, however, and she had found herself in the embarrassing position of not being able to pay bills during the last weeks of their marriage. All her sins had come home to roost by then, all because of the one seemingly harmless and seemingly even sensible little lie that she had told him when they’d first met.

‘Did you give all that money to Marco?’ Alejandro asked her abruptly, his voice harsh. ‘He often overspent and I was afraid that he might have approached you for a loan.’

For a split second, Jemima was tempted to tell another lie to cover herself and then shame pierced her and she bent her head, refusing to look at him. Although, while on one level she was still angry with Alejandro’s brother for dropping her in the mire by refusing to deny the allegations of an affair, she still retained enough fondness for the younger man not to seek revenge and to tell the truth. ‘No, Marco never once asked me for money.’

Alejandro’s lean, powerful body had tautened. He flicked her a narrowed glance so sharp that she was vaguely surprised it didn’t actually cut her. ‘I assume that you are still in contact with my brother?’

That comment startled her. ‘No, I’m not. I haven’t talked to Marco since I left Spain.’

Alejandro made no attempt to hide his surprise at that news. ‘I’m amazed, when you were so intimate.’

Her teeth clenched at that crack. Not for the first time she was tempted to give way and simply tell him the truth. Unfortunately the repercussions threatened to be too great. Furthermore she had once faithfully promised Marco that she would never betray him. After all, she had seen for herself and on more than one occasion why the younger man was quite so determined to keep that particular secret from his family. Unfortunately, Marco’s selfishness did not release her from her pledge of silence. In any case, she reminded herself ruefully, it was not solely Marco’s fault that her marriage to his brother had broken down.

‘Marco has been working in New York at our art gallery for the past couple of years. You haven’t had any contact with him at all?’ Alejandro persisted in a silky smooth tone, his accent growling along the edges of every syllable.

‘But presumably he is supporting his child?’

‘Alfie is not his bloody child!’ Jemima raked at him furiously.

‘There is no need to swear,’ Alejandro murmured smooth as glass.

Jemima trembled and struggled to master a temper that was threatening to overwhelm her. Two years ago when she walked out on her marriage she had been exhausted and worn down to the bone by the weight of her secrets, but since then she had made a strong recovery. ‘Alfie is not Marco’s son,’ she pronounced flatly.

‘Your child is only the smallest bone of contention between us,’ Alejandro intoned in a driven undertone, his stunning eyes full of condemnation bright as sunlight in his lean, saturnine face.

‘Is that so?’ Jemima asked tightly, ridiculously annoyed that he could so easily dismiss Alfie’s existence as an unimportant element.

Alejandro bit out an unamused laugh. ‘You know surprisingly little about men,’ he breathed roughly. ‘I’m much more interested in what you did in my bed with my brother and why you felt the need to do it.’

In one comprehensive sentence, he tore down the deceptive veil of civility and confronted her with the reality of his convictions and she was shocked into silence by that direct attack. The experience also reminded her that she had never found Alejandro’s moods or actions easy to predict and had often failed to identify the whys and wherefores that drove that hot-blooded temperament of his.

‘Did you have him in our bed?’ Alejandro gritted, lean brown hands clenched so hard by his side that she could see the white of bone over his knuckles. Intimidated, she stepped away, which wasn’t easy to do in that small room and her calves pressed back against the door of the pale modern cupboard unit behind her.

In the inflammable mood he was in she didn’t want to engage in another round of vehement denials, which he had already heard and summarily dismissed two years earlier. ‘Alejandro…’ she murmured as quietly as she could, trying to ratchet down the tension in the explosive atmosphere.

He flung his dark head back, his brilliant gaze splintering over her so hard that she would not have been surprised to see a shower of sparks light up the air. For a timeless moment and without the smallest warning she was entrapped by his powerfully sexual charisma and it was like looking into the sun. She remembered the hum of arousal and anticipation that had once started on the rare nights he was home on time for dinner, when she knew he would join her in their bedroom and take her to a world of such joyous physical excitement that she would briefly forget her loneliness and unhappiness.

‘Is my need to know such sordid details too raw for you? Did you ever once stop to think of what it might be like for me to be forced to picture my wife in my brother’s arms?’ Alejandro ground out wrathfully.

‘No,’ she admitted, and it was the truth because she had never been intimate with Marco in that way and had wasted little time wondering how Alejandro’s offensive and unfounded suspicions might be making him feel. Angry with her? Disillusioned? She had already been much too familiar with the knowledge that he had to be experiencing such responses while she failed to live up to the steep challenge of behaving like a Spanish countess.

‘No, why should you have?’ Alejandro growled, his accent thick as treacle on that rhetorical question. ‘Marco was simply a sacrifice to your vanity and boredom, a destructive, trashy way of hitting back at me and my family—’

‘That’s absolute nonsense!’ Jemima flailed back at him furiously.

‘Then why did you ever let him touch you? Do you think I haven’t wondered how it was between you?’ Alejandro slung back bitterly. ‘Do you think it didn’t hurt to imagine you naked with him? Sobbing with gratification as he pleasured you? Crying out as you came?’

‘Stop it!’ Jemima launched at him pleadingly, her face hot with mortification at the pungent sexual images he was summoning up. ‘Stop talking like that right now!’

‘Does it strike too closely for you?’ Alejandro hissed fiercely. ‘You got off lightly for being a faithless, lying slut, so stop staring at me with those big shocked eyes. I won’t fall for the little-fragile-girl act this time around—I know you for what you are.’

Disturbed by the implicit threat in those hard words, Jemima spun away and walked past him to the window, fighting to get a grip on the turmoil of her emotions. He had shocked her, he had shocked her very deeply, for it had not until that moment struck her that his belief in her infidelity could have inflicted that much damage. Two years back when he had confronted her about Marco, he had been cold, controlled, behaving almost as though he were indifferent to her. By then she had believed that Alejandro felt very little for her and might even be grateful for a good excuse to end their unhappy alliance. Only now did she recognise that she had been naïve to accept that surface show from a male as deep and emotional as he could be.

‘I’m not a slut because I didn’t have an affair with your brother,’ Jemima muttered heavily, slowly turning back round to face him. ‘And you should know now that my son, Alfie, is your son.’

‘Is that supposed to be a joke?’ Alejandro demanded with a look of angry bewilderment. ‘I’m well aware that you suffered a miscarriage before you left Spain.’

‘We assumed I had had a miscarriage,’ Jemima corrected with curt emphasis. ‘But when I finally went to see a doctor here in the UK, I discovered that I was still pregnant. He suggested that I might have initially been carrying twins and lost one of them, or that the bleeding I experienced was merely the threat of a miscarriage rather than an actual one. Whatever,’ she continued doggedly, her slender hands clenching tightly in on themselves beneath his incredulous appraisal, ‘I was still very much pregnant when I arrived in England and Alfie was born just five months later.’

Alejandro dealt her a seething appraisal, his disbelief palpable. ‘That is not possible.’

Jemima yanked open a drawer in the sideboard and leafed through several documents to find Alfie’s birth certificate. In one sense she could not credit what she was doing and yet in another she could not see how she could possibly do anything else. Her son was her husband’s child and that was not something she could lie about or leave in doubt because she had to take into account how Alfie would feel about his parentage in the future. It was a question of telling the truth whether she liked it or not. Emerging with the certificate, she extended it to Alejandro.

‘This has to be nonsense,’ Alejandro asserted, snatching the piece of paper from her fingers with something less than his usual engrained good manners.

‘Well, if you can find some other way of explaining how I managed to give birth to a living child by that date and it not be yours, I’d like to hear it,’ Jemima challenged without hesitation.

Alejandro stared down at the certificate with fulminating force and then glanced up, golden eyes bright as blades and as dangerous. ‘All this proves is that you must still have been pregnant when you walked out on our marriage. It does not automatically follow that the child is mine.’

Jemima shook her fair head and expelled her breath in a slow hiss. ‘I know it doesn’t suit you to hear this news now and I really didn’t want to tell you. Too much water has gone under the bridge since we split up and now we lead separate lives. But the point is, I can’t lie to you about it. Some day Alfie may want to look you up and get acquainted.’

Alejandro studied her with brooding dark ferocity. ‘If what you have just told me is the truth, if that little boy does prove to be mine, it was vindictive and extremely selfish of you to leave me in ignorance!’

Jemima had paled. ‘When I left you I had no idea that I was still pregnant,’ she protested.

‘Two years is a long period of time, yet you made no attempt to inform me that I might be a father,’ he fielded harshly. ‘I will want DNA tests to confirm your claim before I make any decision about what I want to do.’

Jemima compressed her lips hard at the reference to the testing. Once again Alejandro was insulting her with the assumption that she had been an unfaithful wife and that, for that reason, there could be doubt over who had fathered her child. ‘Do as you like,’ she told him curtly. ‘I know who Alfie’s father is and there has never been any doubt of his identity.’

‘I will make arrangements for the tests to be carried out and I will see you again when the result is available,’ Alejandro drawled, with lashings of dark Spanish masculine reserve emanating from his forbidding demeanour and cool taut intonation.

‘I’ll contact a solicitor and start the divorce,’ Jemima proffered in turn, determined not to leave him with the impression that he was the only one of them who could act and make decisions.

Alejandro frowned, dark eyes unlit by gold narrowing in a piercing scrutiny that made her uncomfortable. ‘It would be foolish to do anything before we have that DNA result.’

‘I disagree,’ Jemima flashed back at him angrily. ‘I should have applied for a divorce the minute I left you!’

Cool as ice water, Alejandro quirked an ebony brow. ‘And why didn’t you?’

Jemima dealt him a fulminating glance but said nothing, merely moving past him to yank open her front door in a blunt invitation for him to leave. She was shaken to register that she was trembling with temper. She had forgotten just how angry and frustrated Alejandro could make her feel with his arrogant need to take charge and do exactly what he wanted, regardless of other opinions.

‘I’ll be in touch,’ he delivered on the doorstep.

‘I’d appreciate some warning the next time.’ Jemima lifted a business card off the table and gave it to him. ‘Phone and tell me when you’re coming.’

Anger shimmering through her, she slammed the door in his wake and peered out from behind the shelter of the curtains to watch him swing into his fancy car and drive off.

Nothing had changed, she reflected unhappily. Even being in the same room again as Alejandro revived all the doubts, insecurities and regrets she had left behind her when she gave up on being his wife…




CHAPTER THREE


JEMIMA LEFT HER teenaged babysitter in charge of the house and closed the front door as quietly as she could behind her. Thursday nights she and Flora went to choir practice and enjoyed a convivial evening in the company of friends. As a rule she looked forward to getting out. But, recently, Jemima had been in a thoroughly bad mood and indeed was still stiff with the angry resentment that she had been struggling to suppress for two long weeks.

‘Cheer up,’ Flora urged as the two women walked in the direction of the quaint little medieval stone church and village green that made Charlbury St Helens so pretty a village. ‘You’re letting this whole DNA-testing business eat you alive and it’s not healthy for you.’

Jemima flung her friend an apologetic glance. ‘I can’t help feeling as though I’ve been publicly humiliated by it,’ she confessed ruefully.

‘Both the notary and the GP are bound by rules of confidentiality,’ Flora reminded her with a reassuring glance. ‘I seriously doubt that either will discuss your private business with anyone, particularly if it may end up in a civil courtroom.’

Unconvinced, but recognising her friend’s generous attempt to offer comfort, Jemima compressed her lips, not wanting to be a bore on the subject, even though the DNA tests had proved to be an exercise in mortification in which she felt that her anonymity and privacy had been destroyed. When such tests were required for a case that might end up in a court they had to be done in a legal and formal manner. A snooty London solicitor acting on Alejandro’s behalf had phoned her to spell out the requirements. Jemima had had to make an affidavit witnessed by a public notary as well as have photos taken to prove her identity before she could have the tests for her and Alfie done by her own GP. The actual tests had been swabs taken from the mouth and completed in seconds, but Jemima had writhed in mortification over the simple fact that both the notary and the doctor were being made aware of the fact that her husband doubted that Alfie was his child. She knew that she would never, ever forgive Alejandro for forcing her to undergo that demeaning process, all because he was convinced that she had broken her marriage vows.

Yet how could she have refused the tests when refusal would have been viewed as a virtual admission of wrongdoing? she asked herself as she moved into the comparative warmth of the church and greeted familiar faces with a wave and a determined smile. Common sense told her that it was essential that Alfie’s father should know the truth; for Alfie’s sake there should be absolutely no doubt on that score in anyone’s mind. Those were the only reasons why she had agreed to the tests being carried out.

The effort of raising her voice in several rousing choruses and then singing a verse solo in her clear sweet soprano took Jemima’s mind off her combative feelings. She was definitely feeling more relaxed by the time she helped to stack the chairs away. Fabian Burrows, one of the local doctors and a very attractive male in his mid-thirties, reached for her jacket before she did and extended it for her to put on.

‘You have a really beautiful voice,’ he told her.

‘Thanks,’ she said, her cheeks warming a little beneath his keen appraisal.

He fell into step beside her and Flora. ‘Are you going for a drink?’ he asked, a supportive hand settling to her spine as she stumbled on the way down the church steps.

‘Yes.’

‘Fancy trying The Red Lion for a change?’ he suggested, coming to a halt by the church gate while other members of the choir crossed the road to the usual hostelry.

‘Thanks, but I’m with Flora,’ Jemima told him lightly.

‘You’re both very welcome to keep me company,’ he imparted while Jemima tried frantically to interpret the frowning meaningful expression on her friend’s face. Did that look mean that Flora wanted to take up the invitation or that she didn’t?

‘I’m afraid this isn’t a good night,’ Flora remarked awkwardly, turning pointedly to look out onto the road.

Jemima saw the sports car parked there a split second before she saw the tall dark male sheathed in a cashmere overcoat leaning up against the bonnet and apparently waiting for her. Dismay gripped her and then temper ripped through her tiny frame like a storm warning. After all, she had specifically asked Alejandro to give her notice of his next intended visit. How dared he just turn up again without giving her proper notice of his plans?

But somehow the instant her attention settled on Alejandro an uninvited surge of heat shimmied over her entire skin surface and sexual awareness taunted her in tender places. His dangerous sensuality threatened her like the piercing tip of a knife. Scorching dark golden eyes set in a lean dark-angel face assailed her and suddenly it was very hard to breathe because, no matter how angry she was with him, Alejandro was still drop-dead gorgeous and sinfully sexy. Even the lean, well-balanced flow of his powerful body against his luxurious car was elegant, stylish and fluid with grace. She wanted to walk past him and act as if he were invisible while the compelling pull of his attraction angered her almost as much as his unexpected appearance.

‘How did you know where I was?’

‘The babysitter,’ Alejandro told her softly. ‘My apologies if I’m intruding on your evening.’

‘Who is this?’ Fabian demanded loftily.

‘Oh, I’m just her husband,’ Alejandro drawled in a long-suffering tone that made Jemima’s teeth grind together in disbelief.

The other man stiffened in discomfiture and muttered something about seeing Jemima the following week at practice. Turning to address Flora, who was also hovering, Fabian escorted her away.

‘How dare you say that and embarrass him?’ Jemima hissed like a spitting cat at Alejandro.

Alejandro, very much in arrogant Conde Olivares mode, gazed broodingly down at his diminutive wife. ‘It is the truth. Every time I come here you’re knee-deep in drooling men and flirting like mad.’

‘You don’t have the right to tell me how to behave any more.’ Jemima threw those angry words back at him in defiance of the manner in which he was looking down at her.

Alejandro closed lean, strong hands over her shoulders and, dark eyes glittering like polished jet in the moonlight, he hauled her close and his wide sensual mouth plunged down on hers in an explosion of passion that blew her defences to hell and back. She hadn’t been prepared, hadn’t even dreamt that he might touch her again, and she was so taken aback that she was totally vulnerable. Her legs wobbled below her as the fiery demand of his mouth sent a message that hurtled through her slight body like a shriek alarm and awakened the desire she had shut out and denied since Alfie’s birth.

In an equally abrupt movement, Alejandro straightened, spun her round and pinned her between his hard muscular length and the car. A gasp of relief escaped her as he pressed against her for, at that moment, pressure was exactly what her body craved; indeed, in the grip of that craving she had no shame. Her breathing was as ragged as the crazy pulse pounding in her throat while he ground his hips into her pelvis and heat and moisture burned between her thighs.

‘Dios mio! Vamonos…let’s go,’ Alejandro urged raggedly, pulling back from her to yank open the car door. He almost lifted her nerveless body into the leather passenger seat and with a sure hand he protected the crown of her head from a painful bump courtesy of the roof.

‘Let’s go,’ he said. Let’s go where? she almost shouted back in response. But she hid from that revealing question to which she already knew her own answer while being fully, painfully aware of what her body longed for. She shrank into the seat as he clasped the seat belt round her and then bent her buzzing head, her hands closing over her knees to prevent them from visibly shaking in his presence.

She had trained herself to forget what that desperate, yearning, wanting for him could feel like and she did not want to remember. But the taste of him was still on her lips, just as the phantom recall of his hands on her still felt current while the slow burn pain of his withdrawal of contact continued to shock-wave through her and leave her cold.

‘We really shouldn’t touch in public places,’ Alejandro intoned soft and low.

Jemima clenched her teeth together, hating herself for not having pushed him away. How dared he just grab her like that? How dared he prove that he could still make her respond to him? Of course, had she known what he was about to do she would have rejected him as he deserved, yes, she definitely would have, she reasoned stormily. But back when she had still been living with him, she had always wanted him. Need had been like a clawing ache inside her whenever she looked at him and the only time she had felt secure was when she was in his arms and she could forget everything else. Hugging that daunting memory to her, she hauled a stony shell of composure round her disturbed emotions, determined not to let him see how much he had shaken her up.

‘You still haven’t told me what you’re doing here,’ Jemima complained as he followed her to her front door.

‘We’ll talk inside.’

Jemima had to swallow back a sharp-tongued comment. In every situation Alejandro assumed command and that he rarely got it wrong only annoyed her more. She went in to her babysitter and paid her. Audra lived only two doors down from her and the arrangement suited both of them.

‘Do you make a habit of leaving a child in charge of a child?’ Alejandro enquired.

‘No, I don’t,’ Jemima countered curtly. ‘And though Audra may look immature, she’s eighteen years old and training to be a nurse.’

Alejandro did not apologise for his misapprehension. Jemima hung up her jacket and hovered, her face burning as she remembered the heat of that extravagant kiss.

‘It’s a little late for a social call,’ she remarked flatly, avoiding any visual contact with him, refusing to knuckle down and play hostess.

‘I wanted to see my son,’ Alejandro confided in a roughened undertone.

The import of that admission engulfed her like a tidal wave. So the DNA testing had delivered its expected result and backed up her claims, and thanks to that he now had to accept that she had not been lying to him yet he had not opened the subject with the fervent apology that he owed her. Her chin came up at a truculent angle. ‘Alfie’s asleep.’

‘I don’t mind looking at him while he sleeps,’ Alejandro confessed in a not quite steady rush, his excitement at even that prospect unconcealed.

For a split second that look on his face softened something inside her but she fought it. ‘But you didn’t believe me when I told you he was yours—’

‘Let’s not get into that. I know the truth now. I know he is my child. I only got the news this morning. This is the soonest I could get here.’

His eagerness to see Alfie dismayed her, even while she tried to tell herself that his reaction was only to be expected. He had just found out that he was a father. Naturally he was much more interested in Alfie than he had been when he had assumed that her son was some other man’s. ‘I’ll take you upstairs,’ she offered, striving to take control of the situation.

Alejandro moved quietly into the bedroom in Jemima’s wake and studied the sleeping child in the wooden cot. Black curls tousled, with his little sleep-flushed face, Alfie looked peaceful and utterly adorable to his besotted mother’s eyes. Alejandro closed a strong hand over the cot rail and stared down, spiky black lashes screening his gaze from her.

Without warning Alejandro looked across the cot at her, brilliant dark eyes brandishing a fierce challenge. ‘I want to take him home to Spain.’

That announcement hit her like a bucket of icy water, shocking her and filling her with fear for the future. She backed away to the door and watched Alejandro award his son an undeniably tender last glance. Yes, he could be tender when he wanted to be but it wasn’t a notion that took him very often, she conceded painfully. He had looked at her the same way the day they learned that she had conceived and his initial unconcealed pleasure in the discovery that she was pregnant had made her swallow back and conceal her own very different feelings on the same score. Yet how could she recall those confusing reactions now when Alfie had since become the very centre of her world? Given the chance she would never have turned the clock back to emerge childless from her failed marriage, but it was already beginning to occur to her that a childfree marriage would have been easier to dissolve.

I want to take him home to Spain. That frank declaration raced back and forth inside her head as she led the way back downstairs. It was only natural that Alejandro would want to show Alfie off to his family while ensuring that Alfie learnt about the magnificent heritage and ancestry that he had been born into on his father’s side, she reasoned, eager not to overreact to his announcement.

‘What did you mean when you said you wanted to take him back to Spain?’ Jemima heard herself ask abruptly.

Alejandro took off his heavy cashmere overcoat and draped it on a dining chair by the table that filled the small bay window in the living room. His elegant charcoal-grey business suit accentuated his height. His classic profile was cool and uninformative when he turned back to her but his stunning dark eyes were bright gold chips of challenge.

‘I cannot allow you to have full custody of my son,’ Alejandro spelt out without apology. ‘I don’t believe that you can offer him what he needs to thrive in this environment. I wish I could say otherwise. I have no desire to fight you for custody of our child but I do not see how I can do anything else without betraying my duty to him.’

‘How…dare…you?’ Jemima threw back at him in a fiery temper of disbelief, her heart racing as if she were running a marathon. ‘I gave birth to your precious son alone and unsupported and I’ve been on my own ever since. Alfie is a very happy and well-adjusted little boy and you know nothing about him, yet the minute you find out he exists you assume that I am an unfit parent!’

‘Does he even know he has a father or a family in Spain? Is he learning to speak Spanish? What kind of stability can you give him? You are not a responsible person.’

‘What gives you the right to say that to me?’ Jemima interrupted thinly, her hands clenching into defensive fists by her side.

His lean, darkly handsome face tautened into censorious lines. ‘Look at the way you dealt with our marriage, your debts, your affair with my brother—’

‘For the last time, I did not have an affair with your brother!’

‘You don’t deal with problems, you run away,’ Alejandro condemned without hesitation. ‘How could you possibly raise our child properly and teach him what he needs to know?’

‘I don’t have to stand here putting up with being criticised by you any more. We’re separated,’ Jemima rattled out, her voice brittle. ‘I want you to leave.’

Alejandro grabbed up his coat. ‘It’s impossible to talk to you,’ he vented in a driven undertone of frustration.

‘You call threatening to take my child away from me talking?’ Jemima exclaimed with incredulous force. ‘How did you expect me to respond to a threat?’

‘A threat is something that may not happen, but I will most assuredly fight you for custody of my son,’ Alejandro extended grittily, refusing to back down.

Jemima breathed in deep and slow to calm her jangling emotions and studied him with angry, anxious eyes. ‘What can I do or say to convince you that I am a good mother?’

Having donned his coat, Alejandro shrugged a broad shoulder as if she was asking him the unanswerable.

Jemima’s thoughts were already ploughing ahead to reach several fear-inducing conclusions. If a custody battle went to court, Alejandro had the wealth to hire the very best lawyers and nobody representing her interests would be able to compete. The very fact that she had kept quiet about Alfie’s existence for the first two years of his life would weigh against her. And how much importance might a judge lay on the truth that Alfie would one day be an influential member of the Spanish aristocracy in charge of a massive country estate and a very successful string of international family businesses? Such a background and his father’s ability to prepare his son for those responsibilities could not be easily ignored.

‘You can’t do this to me,’ Jemima protested. ‘I love Alfie and he loves and needs me.’

‘Perhaps it is my turn to be a parent for a change,’ Alejandro said drily, tugging open the front door to facilitate his departure with an alacrity that was ironically no longer welcome to her. ‘When it comes to sharing one little boy a divorce will leave few, if any, equitable solutions possible. We will both have to compromise.’

Jemima reached out in an ill-considered movement to thrust the door he had opened closed again before sliding between it and him like an eel. Violet eyes dark with strain in her pale heart-shaped face, she stared up at him and muttered tightly, ‘We need to discuss this now!’

Alejandro sent her a sardonic glance. ‘Madre mia, you change direction with the wind. You told me to leave…’

Jemima gritted her teeth. ‘Possibly I was a little hasty. I wasn’t expecting you to already be making plans for Alfie. You annoyed me earlier. Why did you kiss me?’

Alejandro took a small step forward that trapped her between the wooden door and his lean, powerful body. ‘Because I wanted to, mi dulzura.’

He called her ‘sweetness’ and she ran out of breath and rationality in the same instant. Awareness ran like a river of red-hot lava through her trembling length, her nipples swelling and blossoming like fire flowers while the tender flesh at the very heart of her burned and ached. The atmosphere was explosive and she couldn’t fight the hunger stabbing at her. She studied the full curve of his sensual lower lip, reliving the taste of him, and slowly tipped her head back to meet hot golden eyes.

‘Ask me to stay the night,’ Alejandro urged thickly, pushing her back against the door, letting her feel the hard, promising power of his erection through his well-cut trousers. Air scissored through her lungs in a breathless surge, sexual heat uniting with dismay to hold her there.

‘You want to stay?’ Jemima whispered, already visualising closing a hand into the expensive fabric of his overcoat to haul him down to her, already imagining the taste and passion of him that drew her like a fire on a winter day. Desire had her in the fiercest of holds.

A long brown finger skimmed along the quivering line of her white throat, pausing to flick the tiny pulse flickering wildly above her collarbone. ‘It’s what you want too—’

‘No,’ Jemima gasped strickenly, feeling her self-discipline shatter like glass in the ambience and below it the roar of need she had resisted for so long.

‘Liar,’ Alejandro countered without hesitation, his confidence in his own powers of seduction absolute.

Her slender body vibrating with awareness, she still managed to tear free of him and step back. It hurt like hell. She couldn’t think; she could only fight the craving that she recognised as a dangerous weakness. ‘Leave,’ she urged again, wanting to hug herself in consolation for the rush of cold and disappointment enveloping her.

‘Call me when you come to your senses,’ Alejandro drawled, hooded dark golden eyes undimmed by rejection as he tossed a business card down on the little shelf in the hallway.

And in a moment he was gone and she was left in a disturbing mess of conflicting emotions and regrets. She was furious with herself because she hadn’t sorted out anything. Sex had got in the way and had only exacerbated the tensions between them. But she should have risen above the challenge to concentrate on Alfie and on Alejandro’s threats. He had wanted to stay the night with her. He had wanted to share a bed with her again. The blood ran hot below her fair skin. For just a moment he had been as vulnerable as she to the powerful attraction that could still flare between them. She adjusted that thought the instant she thought it. No, Alejandro had not been vulnerable. If she had let him he would have slept with her again but it wouldn’t have meant anything to him or led anywhere. He believed she had slept with Marco and he hated her for it. She lifted his business card and threw it down on the dining table in a fever of self-loathing. Alejandro was calling the shots again and she didn’t like that at all.

Yet over three years earlier when they were dating she had liked the way Alejandro had automatically taken charge and looked after her and had revelled in his masculine protective instincts. Looking back with hindsight, she marvelled at the way he had made her feel and how much maturity had changed her. Of course, she had been a virgin when they’d first met. As a result she had been far too quick to idealise Alejandro and believe that they had something special together. She had not even recognised him for the womaniser he was until one of the hotel maids had slid an old newspaper beneath her nose, pointed to a photo and said, ‘Isn’t that that Spanish guy you’re seeing?’

And there Alejandro had been, pictured at some snobby London party with a beautiful blonde in an evening dress. The accompanying prose had made it clear that he enjoyed the reputation of a heartbreaker who always had more than one woman in tow. She hadn’t wanted to believe the evidence even though Alejandro had already proved to be anything but a devoted boyfriend, cancelling dates as he did at the last minute and rarely phoning when he said he would. When she’d questioned him, however, Alejandro had been commendably frank.

‘I’m not looking for a serious relationship,’ he had told her without apology. ‘I’m not interested in being tied down.’

Feeling stupid and hurt over the assumptions she had made and grateful that she had, at that stage, stayed out of his bed, Jemima had put the brakes on her feelings for him and had begun going out socialising again with her friends. Before very long she too was dating someone else, a local accountant who was flatteringly keen to offer her an exclusive relationship. But when Alejandro had realised that she was seeing another man, he had had a furious row with her, which had made it perfectly clear that, while he expected her to share him, he was not prepared to share her. For a few weeks they had split up and, although she was heartbroken at losing him at the time, she had thought it was the only option left.

Barely a month later, though, Alejandro had come back to her and had said that he would stop seeing other women. Jemima had been overjoyed and their relationship had entered a far more intense second phase. Head over heels in love with him as she had been, she had plunged straight into a passionate affair. He had rented a house not far from the hotel where she worked and they had spent every spare minute there together. In her entire life she had never known such happiness as she had known then, during the romantic weekends he’d shared with her. The demands of business and family, not to mention the fact that he lived in Spain, had often kept them apart when they wanted to be together, and on her twentieth birthday Alejandro had asked her to marry him. He had not said he loved her; he had never told her he loved her. He had merely said that he could not continue spending so much time in England with her. He had made marriage sound like a natural progression.

But he had not invited her to meet his family before they took that crucial final step. No doubt he had known how much his relatives would disapprove of his ordinary English bride, who had so little to offer on their terms. Within weeks of his proposal they had married in a London church with only a couple of witnesses present. She had had no idea at all of what his life in Spain would be like. In fact she had been a lamb to the slaughter in her ignorance.

Dragging herself free of wounding memories that still rankled, Jemima lifted her head high. That silly infatuated and insecure girl was dead and gone. This time around she was in control of her own destiny and, with that in mind, she snatched up her phone and rang Alejandro.

‘We have to meet to talk about Alfie,’ she told him urgently.

‘Couldn’t you have decided that while I was still with you?’ Alejandro enquired drily.

‘I’m not like you. I don’t plan everything,’ she reasoned defensively.

He suggested that she and Alfie meet him the following afternoon at his London apartment.

‘I know you want to see Alfie again, but he would be better left out of it tomorrow—we’ll probably argue.’

Having agreed a time and won his agreement on the score of Alfie, Jemima put down the phone again and wondered anxiously what rabbit she could possibly pull out of the hat that might persuade him that their son was better off living with his mother in England…




CHAPTER FOUR


THE LONDON APARTMENT was not the same one that Jemima remembered. The new one was bigger, more centrally located and sleek and contemporary in style, while the previous accommodation had been knee deep in opulent antiques and heavy drapes, a home-from-home backdrop for a family accustomed to life in a medieval castle.

A manservant showed her into a huge elegant reception room with the stark lines and striking impact of a modern artwork, again a very appropriate look for a family that owned a famous chain of art galleries.

She caught her reflection in the glass of an interior window and decided that, even though she was wearing the smartest outfit in her wardrobe, she looked juvenile in her knee-length black boots, short black skirt and red sweater. But her lifestyle no longer required dressy clothing and she preferred to plough her profits either back into the shop or into her savings. Having survived a childhood in which cash was often in very short supply, Jemima only felt truly safe now when she had a healthy balance in her rainy day account.

In the act of putting away a mobile phone, Alejandro emerged from an adjacent room to join her. His elegant black pinstripe suit and blue shirt fitted him with the expensive fidelity of the very best tailoring and the finest cloth, outlining broad shoulders, narrow masculine hips and long, long, powerful legs. Her attention locked to his lean dark features, noting the blue-black shadow round his handsome jaw line, and for a split second she was lost in the memory of the rasp of stubble against her skin in the mornings. She could feel a guilty blush envelop her from her brow to her toes. His black hair still damp and spiky from the shower, Alejandro was the most absolutely beautiful man she had ever seen and her heart was jumping inside her as if the ground had suddenly fallen away beneath her feet.

‘Is your friend looking after Alfie?’ he enquired.

‘Yes, but he attends a playgroup in the afternoons,’ she explained.

She turned down an offer of refreshments and hovered while Alejandro helped himself to strong black coffee that scented the air with its unmistakeable aroma. Memories she didn’t want were bombarding her again. He had taught her to grind coffee beans and make what he called ‘proper’ coffee. There had been so many things she didn’t know about that he took for granted. He had even been a better cook than she was and right from the start she had been captivated by his knowledge and sophistication. But before their marriage—when things had gone wrong between them—he had scooped her up into his arms and swept her off to bed and she had been so ecstatic that she wouldn’t have cared if the roof had fallen in afterwards. But once their sex life had ground to a halt, they’d had no means of communication at all and it had seemed natural to her that their marriage had then fallen apart. He had just lost interest in her, a development she had seen as being only a matter of time from the outset of their acquaintance.

‘I couldn’t sleep last night,’ Jemima admitted in a sudden nervous rush, her eyes violet as pansies in the sunlit room. ‘I was worrying about what you said about Alfie.’

‘You named him Alfonso after my father. That was a pleasant surprise,’ Alejandro remarked.

‘He was named in memory of my grandfather, Alfred, as well,’ Jemima advanced, not choosing to admit that the kindly vegetable-growing maternal grandfather she recalled had probably been the only presentable member of her former family circle, in that he had worked for a living and had stayed on the right side of the law. ‘That’s why I call him Alfie, because that was how my grandpa was known.’

Alejandro studied her with stunning dark golden eyes ringed and enhanced by black inky lashes. His charismatic appeal was so powerful that she couldn’t take her attention off him and her mouth ran dry.

‘We can’t reasonably hope to share a child when we’re living in different countries,’ he told her.

Jemima tensed and smoothed her skirt down over her slight hips with moist palms. ‘Other people manage it—’

‘I want my son to grow up in Spain—’

‘Well, you can’t always have what you want,’ Jemima pointed out flatly.

Alejandro set down his empty cup and strolled across the floor towards her. ‘I too gave this matter serious thought last night. I can give you a choice…’

Her spine went rigid, her eyes flying wide with uncertainty. ‘What sort of a choice?’

‘Option one: you return to Spain and give our marriage another chance. Or, option two: I take you to court over Alfie and we fight for him.’ As Jemima lost colour and a look of disbelief tautened her delicate pointed features Alejandro surveyed her with unblemished cool. ‘From my point of view it’s a very fair offer and more than you deserve.’

As an incendiary response leapt onto Jemima’s tongue she swallowed it back and welded her lips closed, determined not to say anything before she had thought it through. But sheer shock was ricocheting through her in wave after wave. Alejandro was asking her to go back to him and live with him as his wife again? She was totally stunned by that proposition and had never dreamt that he would consider making it. ‘That’s a crazy idea,’ she said weakly.

‘If you take into account our son’s needs, it’s a very practical idea,’ Alejandro contradicted levelly.

Jemima breathed in slowly and tried to concentrate her mind solely on her son’s best interests, even though her brain was in a total fog at what he had just suggested. Many children might be more contented with two parents rather than one but that wasn’t the end of the story. ‘If we’re not happy together, how could Alfie possibly be happy? I don’t understand why you’re even discussing the idea of us living together again.’

‘Are you really that naïve?’ His intent gaze was semi-screened by lush sooty lashes to a hot glitter of gold while the muscles in his strong jaw line clenched hard. ‘I still want you. If I didn’t I wouldn’t be offering you this alternative.’

The heat of that look welded Jemima to where she stood and colour ran in scarlet ribbons into her cheeks. Once again he had taken her by surprise. ‘Are you saying that you’re able to forgive me for the past?’

Alejandro loosed a harsh laugh of disagreement. ‘No, I couldn’t go that far. I’m saying that if I get you back into my bed, I will make the effort to overlook your past transgressions.’

Her bosom swelled with wounded pride and resentment as she drew in a very deep and steadying breath. ‘Fortunately for me, I haven’t the slightest desire to be married to you again. You may have considered it an honour the first time around, but for me it was more like living in purgatory.’

Alejandro dealt her a stony look that chilled her to freezing point and she knew that she had angered him. She recognised that he believed that he was making an enormously generous concession in offering her—an unfaithful wife—the opportunity to live with him again. She even recognised that lots of women would bite off his hand in their eagerness to accept such an offer. After all, he was drop-dead gorgeous, amazing in bed and open-handed with money…as long as you could tell him what you’d done with it, she completed inwardly and suppressed a shiver, flinching from her bad memories. But at heart Alejandro was as flint-hard and unyielding as his centuries-old castle. He believed she had betrayed him and he was not the forgiving type and would never come round to seeing or understanding her side of the story. He thought she was a slut and even if she lived with him for another twenty years he would die thinking that she was a slut.

‘I’ve made a life for myself now in the village and I enjoy my life there,’ Jemima responded in a stiff tone of restraint that did not come naturally to her. ‘I was miserable in Spain and you didn’t seem any happier with me as a wife. Why would you want to revisit the past?’

‘Only because we have a son.’ Alejandro gave her a sardonic appraisal. ‘And this time around life could be much more straightforward.’

‘How?’ Jemima prompted baldly, wanting every detail of his thoughts even though she had no intention of accepting his offer.

‘I know you for who you are now. I would have no false expectations, no sentimental ideas. Our marriage would merely be a convenient agreement for Alfie’s benefit. All I would require from you would be the superficial show—’

‘And sex,’ Jemima added in a tight-mouthed undertone, because she felt demeaned that he had dared to include that aspect.

‘Be grateful that you still have that much appeal, mi-dulzura. Without the pull of that angle, I wouldn’t even have considered taking you back.’

Clashing unwarily with hot golden eyes, Jemima experienced a deeply mortifying sliding sensation low in her pelvis. It infuriated her that she could still react to him that way when so much else was wrong between them. Her body took not the smallest account of her brain or even of common sense, for being attracted to Alejandro was destructive and stupid and likely to get her into serious trouble. It occurred to her that maybe he felt the same way about her and that was such a novel suspicion that she stared at him, wondering if he too could be fighting the same rearguard action against his own natural inclinations.

‘You don’t like the fact that you still find me attractive,’ Jemima commented, daringly taking a stab in the dark.

‘But I can handle it. Familiarity breeds contempt—isn’t that what they say?’ His brilliant eyes were lit by a sensual golden glimmer that as his gaze wandered over her seemed to burn over her skin like a tiny point of flame. ‘I believe that this arrangement will give me a healthy chance of working you right out of my system.’

Jemima could not resist the sensual temptation of imagining what it would be like to be put to that kind of work in the marital bedroom. The more responsive parts of her treacherous body hummed with enthusiasm until shame and pride combined to suppress her facetious thoughts. She had never been able to escape the fear that wanting and loving any man as much as she had once loved and wanted Alejandro was weak and pathetic. It had inspired her into making numerous attempts to play it cool with him, most of which had blown up in her silly face as she had lacked both subtlety and good timing. She had acted all cool, for instance, once he’d stopped sleeping with her while she was pregnant; rather a case of closing the barn door after the horse had already bolted, she recalled impatiently. Those final weeks of their marriage he hadn’t seemed to notice her at all and his increasing indifference and long working days had made her feel invisible and insignificant.

‘I couldn’t just go back to Spain,’ she told him again. ‘I’ve worked hard to build up my business. I don’t want to lose it—’

‘I’m willing to cover the cost of a manager for several months. That would give you the time and space to come up with a more permanent solution.’

Cut off at the knees by that unexpectedly practical proposal, Jemima muttered, ‘I couldn’t live with you again.’

‘That decision is yours to make.’ Alejandro shifted a broad shoulder in a fluid and fatalistic shrug, his lean, strong face full of brooding dark Spanish reserve and pride. ‘But I’ve already missed out on two years of my son’s life and I don’t want to waste any more time. My English lawyer is waiting to hear whether or not I wish to proceed with a custody claim.’

That assurance hit Jemima like a bucket of snow thrown across unprotected skin. Every anxious cell in her body plunged into overload. ‘Are you simply expecting me to make up my mind about this here and now?’ she gasped.

Alejandro quirked an ebony brow. ‘Why not? I’m not in the mood to be patient or understanding. I doubt that you suffered many sleepless nights while you were denying me the chance to get to know my son.’

In receipt of that shrewd comment on her attitude, Jemima turned almost as red as her sweater. It was true. She had pretty much celebrated her escape from Spain. She had regretted her failed marriage and cried herself to sleep many nights but she had blamed him entirely for that failure. Now sufficient time had passed for her to be willing to acknowledge that she, too, had made serious mistakes that had undoubtedly contributed to their break-up. She had certainly kept far too many secrets from him, had spent a lot of money, but that did not mean that she was prepared to have another go at their marriage. But she did, however, love her son very much and she did appreciate how much she had denied Alejandro when she chose not to inform him that he was a father.

‘I could come and stay in Spain for a few weeks,’ she suggested limply as an alternative.

‘A temporary fix of that nature would be pointless.’

‘I couldn’t possibly sign up to return to our marriage for the rest of my life. That’s an appalling idea. Even convicts get time lopped off their sentences for good behaviour!’ Jemima pointed out helplessly. ‘Maybe I could consider coming out to Spain for a trial period, like, say…three months.’

Alejandro frowned. ‘And what would that achieve?’ he derided.

‘Well, by then we would know if such an extraordinary arrangement was sustainable and I would still have a life to return to in the village if it wasn’t working,’ she argued vehemently. ‘I’m not saying I will do it, but you would also have to give me a legal undertaking that you would not try to claim custody of Alfie while he was still in Spain because that would give you an unfair advantage.’

‘The exact same advantage that you would have as an Englishwoman applying for custody in an English court,’ Alejandro traded drily.

Her eyes fell before his at that response. ‘But we just couldn’t do it…live together again,’ she protested in an enervated rush, folding her arms and walking round the room in a restive circle.

‘There has never been a divorce in my family!’

‘That’s nothing to boast about. We’re not living in the Dark Ages any more. People don’t have to live with a mistake for ever.’

‘But you think it’s all right for our son to suffer all the disadvantages of coming from a broken home?’

Jemima groaned out loud in frustration, all shaken up at the very idea of reliving any part of their brief marriage. ‘We can’t make everything perfect for Alfie.’

‘No, but it is our responsibility to give him the best of ourselves, even if that means making personal sacrifices. I respect that,’ Alejandro intoned with insistent bite.

‘You’re always so superior. I want the best for Alfie too.’

‘Yet you didn’t see a problem bringing him up without a father,’ Alejandro lashed back soft and low.

Her face flamed.

‘If you truly do want the best for our son, come back to Spain.’

It was blackmail whichever way she looked at it: emotional blackmail, moral blackmail. He knew which buttons to push. He knew how to make her conscience writhe. He was too clever for her, she thought worriedly. If her best hadn’t been good enough two years back, how much worse would she fare now with him? But had she ever really given him her best? a little voice asked her doggedly and the abstracted look in her gaze deepened. She was older and wiser and more confident, she reminded herself fiercely. Would it do her so much harm to give their marriage another shot? Of course it went without saying that it wouldn’t work out and that both the trial and the subsequent break-up would hurt her again, but wouldn’t agreeing give her the satisfaction of knowing that she had tried every option and made the best effort she could?

In the heat of that last inspiring thought, Jemima turned back to focus on her tall, darkly handsome husband. ‘All right. I’ll come back to Spain but initially I’m only agreeing to stay for three months,’ she extended, nervous tension rippling through her in a quivering wave as she realised what she was giving her consent to.

Alejandro stared back at her with brooding dark eyes, revealing neither satisfaction nor surprise at her surrender. ‘I will accept that.’

Jemima gazed back at him, suddenly horrified at what she had allowed herself to be persuaded into. He had the silver tongue of the devil, she decided wildly. He had made her feel that any decent mother would have another go at being married for her child’s sake. He had studied her with those smouldering dark golden eyes and told her that he still wanted her. Not only had she liked that news very much but her body had burned and her brain had shrivelled while she’d thought that truth through to its natural conclusion.

‘Have you had lunch?’ Alejandro asked.

Jemima backed away a step like a drug addict being offered a banned substance. ‘No, but I’m not hungry. I think I should get back to the shop.’

‘Of course, you’ll have a lot of arrangements to put in place. I’ll instruct a recruitment agency to find you a manager,’ Alejandro imparted smooth as ice, gleaming dark golden eyes raking over her with a subdued heat that she felt as deep as the marrow of her bones. ‘I don’t want this to take too long. I also want to see Alfie.’

‘Will you still be here over the weekend?’ At his nod of assent, Jemima added breathlessly, ‘Then come down and see him tomorrow.’

‘How soon will you come to Spain?’ he prompted.

‘Just as soon as I can get it organised.’

‘I should take you home,’ Alejandro murmured before she got as far as the hall.

‘No. I’m used to getting the train…’

‘I’ll take you to the station, mi dulzura.’

The immediate change in his attitude to her made a big impression on Jemima. All of a sudden he believed it was his job to look after her again and it felt seriously strange to have someone expressing concern on her behalf. She accompanied him down to the basement car park and climbed into his shiny car. As she clasped the seat belt Alejandro reached for her, a lean hand tugging up her chin so that his beautiful mouth could crash down on hers without anything getting in the way. It was like plugging her fingers into an electric socket or walking out unprepared into a hurricane. As he plundered her readily parted lips her hand rose and her fingers speared into his luxuriant black hair, holding him to her. The passionate pressure of his mouth on hers was a glorious invitation to feel things she hadn’t felt in too long and the plunge of his tongue stoked a hunger she had never managed to forget.

‘Dios mio! Te deseo.’ He told her he wanted her in a voice hoarse with desire and it sparked a flame at the heart of her and made her shiver with shock. That fast, he had contrived to turn the clock back.

As Jemima drew back from him, breathless with longing and self-loathing, his brilliant gaze scanned her flushed face. ‘If you stayed, I would give you so much pleasure.’

Jemima tore her stricken eyes from his, shame sitting inside her like a heavy rock because she was tempted. ‘I’ll see you on Saturday,’ she said tightly.

All the way home on the train she was picturing his lean, strong features inside her head and tearing herself apart over what she had agreed to do. He might as well have hypnotised her! Sandy picked her up in the shop van and dropped her at Flora’s cottage.

Twenty minutes later, Jemima was sitting at the island in her friend’s kitchen with Alfie cradled half asleep on her lap from his afternoon exertions. Flora was studying her with wide and incredulous green eyes. ‘Tell me you’re not serious…I thought you hated your ex.’

Jemima shifted her hands in an effort to explain a decision that felt almost inexplicable even to her. ‘What Alejandro said about giving our marriage another go for Alfie’s sake made sense to me,’ she confided ruefully. ‘When I walked out on him I didn’t know I was still pregnant and I’m not sure I would’ve gone if I’d known.’

Her friend’s face was troubled. ‘You were a bag of nerves when I first met you and you had no self-esteem. It’s not my place to criticise your husband but if that’s what being married to him did to you, something was badly wrong.’

‘Several things were badly wrong then, but not everything was his fault.’ Alfie snuggled into his mother’s shoulder with a little snuffle of contentment and she rearranged his solid little body for greater comfort. ‘Marco’s living in New York now and another…er…problem I had, well, it’s gone too,’ she continued, her expressive eyes veiled as she thought back reluctantly to those last stressful months in Spain, which had been, without a doubt, the most distressing and nerve-racking period of her life.

‘You want to give your marriage another chance,’ Flora registered in a tone of quiet comprehension. ‘If that’s what you really do want, I hope it works out the way you hope. But if it doesn’t, I’ll still be here to offer support…’




CHAPTER FIVE


FROM HER STANCE on the edge of the small adventure playground, Jemima watched Alejandro park his sumptuous vehicle. Halston Manor estate lay a few miles outside the village and its grounds were open to the public the year round and much used by locals. Jemima had arranged their meeting with care, choosing an outdoor location where Alfie could let off steam and where all interaction between his parents would have to be circumspect.

Alejandro was dressed with unusual informality in a heavy dark jacket, sweater and jeans. Black hair ruffled by the breeze and blowing back from his classic bronzed features, he looked totally amazing and every woman in the vicinity awarded his tall, well-built figure a lingering look. Jemima tried very hard not to stare and, shivering a little in the cool spring air, she dug her hands into the pockets of her red coat and focused on Alfie, who was climbing the steps to the slide, his big dark eyes sparkling with enjoyment.

‘The family resemblance is obvious,’ Alejandro remarked with husky satisfaction. ‘He is very much a Vasquez, though he has your curls and there is a look of you about his eyes and mouth.’

‘I’ve told him about you,’ Jemima informed him.

‘How did he take it?’

‘He’s quite excited about the idea of having a father,’ she confided. ‘But he doesn’t really understand what a father is or what one does.’

In receipt of that news, Alejandro gave both Jemima and Alfie an immediate demonstration, striding forward to intervene when a bigger boy pushed his way past Alfie on the slide steps and the toddler nearly fell. Jemima watched as Alejandro grabbed her son and steadied him. Alfie laughed and smiled up at Alejandro, who spoke to him before stepping back to applaud Alfie’s energetic descent of the slide.

Her attention glued to man and child, Jemima hovered. Father and son did look almost ludicrously alike from their black hair and olive-tinted skin to their dark eyes and the brilliance of their smiles. Alfie shouted at her to join them at the swings and she went over, her small face taut, her eyes wary. She could barely speak to Alejandro, yet they’d had a child together: it was an unsettling thought. She pushed Alfie on the swing and watched him show off for his father’s benefit. Then her son jumped off the swing before it came to a halt and fell, bursting into tears of over-excitement.

Alejandro scooped him up and took him straight over to another piece of equipment to distract him and Alfie quickly stopped crying. Jemima hadn’t expected Alejandro to be as assured at handling a young child as he so obviously was. She watched him crouch down to wipe Alfie’s tear-wet face, and tensed as Alfie suddenly flung his arms round Alejandro and hugged him with the easy affection that was so much a part of him. She saw Alejandro’s expression as well: the sudden blossoming warmth in his dark eyes, the tightening of his fabulous bone structure that suggested that he was struggling to hold back his emotions and the manner in which he vaulted upright to unashamedly hug Alfie back.

Set down again and in high spirits, Alfie scampered over to his mother and grabbed her hand. ‘Ducks…ducks,’ he urged and, turning his head, he called, ‘Papa…Papa!’ in Spanish as if he had been calling Alejandro that all his life.

‘Now we go and feed the ducks,’ Jemima explained to Alejandro.

Alfie tearing ahead of them, they walked along the wide path by the lake.

‘He’s a wonderful little boy,’ Alejandro commented abruptly, his dark, deep accented drawl low pitched and husky. ‘You’ve done well with him.’

Jemima shot him a surprised glance and met gleaming dark golden eyes with an inner quiver. ‘Thanks.’

‘Only a happy, confident child could accept a stranger so easily.’

Warmed by that approval, Jemima felt less defensive and she leant back against a tree and relaxed while Alfie fed the ducks and talked to Alejandro about them. A lot of what the little boy said was nonsense-talk because he only had a small vocabulary, but Alejandro played along. Alfie stretched out a trusting hand to hold his father’s and Alejandro began to tell his son about the lake at the Castillo del Halcón and the ducks that lived there.

‘The recruitment agency got in touch yesterday and have promised to send me a couple of CVs by midweek,’ she told him.

‘Estupendo! Marvellous,’ Alejandro pronounced, studying her from below the dense black fringe of his lashes, eyes a glinting gold provocation that sent colour winging into her cheeks.

He looked at her and she could barely catch her breath. Her nipples were taut, distended buds beneath her clothing and her thighs pressed together as though to contain the rise of the hot, sensitised heat there. She swallowed hard, struggling to shut out the fierce sexual awareness that was racing through her veins like an adrenalin rush.

‘Tell me,’ Alejandro murmured in a lazy undertone as he towered over her, one lean brown hand braced against the tree, and there was absolutely no forewarning of what he was about to say. ‘What did you get from Marco that you couldn’t get from me?’

Jemima recoiled from him as though he had stuck a knife in her and moved away several steps, her face flushing, her eyes evasive and full of discomfiture.

‘Naturally I want to know,’ Alejandro added curtly. So beautiful and so treacherous, he reflected darkly. It was a fact he could not afford to forget.

Jemima threw her head up, her eyes purple with strong emotion. ‘He talked to me, he took me places, he introduced me to his friends…He wanted my opinions and my company, which is more than you ever did!’

In receipt of that recitation of his brother’s deceptive talents, Alejandro dealt her a forbidding appraisal. ‘Primarily, Marco used you to get at me. He’s a player and you found that out for yourself, didn’t you? Did you or did you not tell me that you hadn’t heard from my brother since you left Spain?’

At that retaliatory crack, furious mortification gripped Jemima for, of course, he was correct in that assumption. Put under pressure, Marco’s friendship had lacked strength, permanence and true affection. Refusing to respond in kind, however, she set her teeth together and for what remained of Alejandro’s visit she spoke mainly to Alfie and only when forced to his father.

* * *

A MONTH LATER, a four-wheel-drive driven by an estate worker collected Jemima and Alfie from their flight to Spain. Jemima had hoped that Alejandro might pick them up personally but she was not surprised when he failed to appear. As she had learned when they were first married, Alejandro was always very much in demand and, as his wife, she was usually at the foot of his priorities list.

It was a recollection that could only annoy Jemima on the day that she had had to leave behind both the home and the business that she cherished. An excellent manager had taken over the shop. Jemima had put most of her possessions in storage so that the older woman could also rent her house. But all the work she had put into training as a florist, growing her client base for the shop and decorating her home now seemed pointless. On the other hand, she had only agreed to a three-month sojourn in Spain, Jemima reminded herself bracingly. Surrendering to Alejandro’s blackmail had cost her dear but retaining custody of the little boy securely strapped in the car seat beside her was much, much more important to her.

The Castle of the Hawk sat on rocky heights above a lush wooded valley in the remote Las Alpujarras mountains, the last outpost of the Moors in Spain. Little villages with white flat-roofed houses and steep roads adorned the mountainsides while olive, orange and almond groves, grapevines and crops grown for biofuels flourished in the fertile soil. The Vasquez family had ruled their hidden valley like feudal lords for centuries and anyone seeing Alejandro, the current Conde Olivares, being greeted by deferential locals soon appreciated just how much weight that heritage still carried.

Agriculture alone, however, had proved insufficient to keep Alejandro’s family in the style to which they had long been accustomed. His father had opened an art gallery in Madrid, but it had taken Alejandro—an astute businessman with the guts to take risks and an infinitely more ruthless edge—to turn that initial purchase into a hugely profitable and influential chain of international galleries. A hotel group and several financial enterprises had also been acquired by Alejandro and between the demands of his business empire and the running of the family estate Alejandro had very little time to spare.

He had always tried to maintain a low profile with the media at home and abroad. However, not only was he very photogenic and the bearer of an ancient title, but he had also, prior to his marriage, enjoyed a love life that was very newsworthy. Those facts, allied with his growing visibility in the business world, had ensured that he could no longer pass undetected and both their wedding and their break-up had, to Alejandro’s intense annoyance, attracted newspaper coverage. For that reason, Jemima felt she should have been better prepared when she’d found cameras waiting at the airport earlier that day to record their departure for Spain, but she had been out of the limelight for so long that the appearance of the paparazzi had taken her completely by surprise.

Jemima would also have liked to have known how on earth word of her apparent reconciliation with her Spanish Count and the fact that they now had a child had reached the public domain. She did have very good reason to dread renewed media exposure. Indeed, just thinking about how those photos might cause trouble for her again made Jemima feel sick with apprehension. She was praying that the bad luck that had overtaken her some years earlier and trapped her between a rock and a hard place would not reappear to cause her and those connected with her even more damage and distress.

Endeavouring to bury her worries and control her nerves, Jemima drank in the beauty of the picturesque landscape while the heavy vehicle climbed a familiar road girded by a forest of oaks and chestnuts. The car finally pulled into a courtyard ringed by ornamental trees in giant pots that bore the family coat of arms. Alfie stared out with rounded eyes at the towering thirteenth century stone fortress that now surrounded them on three sides. Her youthful figure slender in casual jeans and a tangerine T-shirt, Jemima left Alfie in the car and rattled the knocker on the giant studded front door.

The door was opened by the middle-aged housekeeper, Maria, but she stepped back to give precedence to a stout older woman with greying hair who carried herself with a ramrod straight spine, her hard black eyes glinting with outrage.

‘How dare you come back to my home?’ Doña Hortencia erupted, barring the doorway.

Her daughter, Beatriz, hurried into view and twisted her hands together in an ineffectual protest. ‘Jemima, how lovely to see you again…Mamá, please, please…we must respect Alejandro’s wishes.’

Her sister-in-law’s anxious, embarrassed face was painful to behold. That her loyalties were tearing her in two was obvious.

The driver carted over two suitcases while Beatriz stared out at the child she could see peering through the window of the estate vehicle. ‘Oh, is that Alfie, Jemima? May I go and see him?’

For once impervious to her mother’s mood, Beatriz hurried out to the car. The driver hefted up the luggage and stepped past Doña Hortencia with a subservient dip of his head.

‘Good afternoon, Doña Hortencia,’ Jemima said stoically, following the driver indoors with her flight bag on her shoulder. She was determined not to react in any way to the dirty looks she was receiving and believed that she was a good deal less likely to be bullied than she had been two years earlier. The older woman would certainly make the attempt but Jemima had learned to care less about the impression she made.

Aglow with satisfaction, Beatriz returned holding Alfie’s little hand in hers. ‘Mamá, look at him,’ she urged with enthusiasm.

Doña Hortencia gazed down at her first grandchild and her forbidding stare softened for an instant before she shot a grim glance at her daughter-in-law. ‘This little boy, Alejandro’s son and heir, is the one and only thing you have got right.’

Swallowing back the urge to retaliate in kind, Jemima said nothing. What was there to say? Alejandro’s mother would never like her or accept her as an equal. Her son had married an ordinary working woman and a foreigner, rather than the wealthy Spanish aristocrat whom the older woman had thought his due, and Doña Hortencia was too stubborn, arrogant and prejudiced to revise her attitude. When Jemima had first come to the castillo, the Spanish woman had done everything possible to ensure that her daughter-in-law’s daily life was as miserable as she could make it. This time around, however, Jemima had no plans to accept victimhood.

Beatriz accompanied Jemima up the carved staircase and made small talk as if her life depended on it. Dark gloomy oil portraits of Alejandro’s ancestors lined the hall and landing walls. Serious though Alejandro so often was, Jemima reflected helplessly, he was a positive barrel of laughs when she compared him to his predecessors.

‘Alejandro has engaged a nanny to help you with Alfie,’ Beatriz announced.

‘How very thoughtful of your brother,’ Jemima remarked after a noticeable pause.

‘Placida is the daughter of one of our tenants and a very able girl,’ her companion extended anxiously.

Jemima did not want to make Beatriz feel uncomfortable. ‘I’m sure she’s perfect for the job.’

‘This is the room I chose for Alfie,’ Beatriz announced with pride, throwing wide the door on a fully furnished nursery complete with a cot, a junior bed and piles of toys. ‘Of course, you may prefer to choose another.’

‘This is lovely. Did you organise all the toys?’

Beatriz laughed. ‘No, that was my brother. Can you believe that Alejandro went shopping for his son?’

‘I wouldn’t have believed it if you hadn’t told me,’ Jemima admitted, as Alejandro’s dislike of shopping was well known. Bitter as she was about finding herself back in Spain, she could only be touched by the effort he had made on Alfie’s behalf. Equally quickly, however, her thoughts travelled in the opposite direction. Of course, wouldn’t Alejandro’s actual presence mean more than the purchase of expensive toys? In fact wasn’t Alfie receiving his first dose of the same benign neglect that Jemima had once endured as Alejandro’s wife?

Undisturbed by such deep and troubled mental ruminations, Alfie pelted across the room to grab a toy car with an eager hand. His aunt watched him, entranced. ‘You must be so proud,’ Beatriz remarked.

Not for the first time, Jemima felt sorry for Beatriz, who was only thirty-five years old but very much on the shelf of her mother’s making, for no young man capable of winning Doña Hortencia’s approval had ever come along. A dutiful daughter to the last, Alejandro’s older sister lived the sedate life of a much older woman.

Placida, the small dark-haired nanny, came to be introduced. After chatting for a while, Jemima left Alfie with Placida and Beatriz and crossed the corridor. The elaborate suite of tower rooms in which she had lived with Alejandro before her pregnancy had brought all sharing to an end was unrecognisable to Jemima at first glance. All the furniture had been changed and a pale yellow colour scheme had banished the dark ornate wallpaper that she had once hated, but that Doña Hortencia had informed her was hand-painted, exceedingly rare and there for eternity. A maid was already busily unpacking her cases and putting her clothes away in the dressing room.

A weird and worrying sense of déjà vu was now settling over Jemima. Alejandro’s non-appearance at the airport had first ignited the suspicion that she was about to discover that nothing had changed in the marriage she had left behind. He had also just demonstrated his engrained habit of taking authoritarian charge of anything and everything that came within his radius. In hiring Placida over her head, Alejandro had shown that only his opinion mattered and Jemima did not appreciate being made to feel superfluous in her child’s life.

Once the maid had gone, Jemima went for a shower and padded through to the dressing room to extract fresh clothes. It was a shock to open the closets and find that they were already stuffed full of brand-new garments and the drawers packed with equally new lingerie, all of it in her size. Her own small collection of clothes looked shabby in comparison. Evidently, Alejandro, the guy who hated to shop even for himself, had ordered her a new wardrobe. Such generosity was very much his trademark but it made Jemima feel uncomfortable. Perhaps he didn’t trust her to dress smartly enough. Perhaps her lack of formal fashion sense had once embarrassed him. Maybe that was why he had gone shopping for her…

Yet the prospect of dining with her haughty mother-in-law garbed like a poor relation in more humble clothing had surprisingly little appeal and Jemima succumbed to the temptation of the new clothes. She selected an elegant sapphire blue dress and slid her feet into delicate sandals before hurriedly going to check on Alfie. He was playing happily in the bath while Placida watched over him. Using her slightly rusty Spanish, Jemima established that Alfie had already eaten his evening meal and she returned to the bedroom.

While she was combing her rebellious hair into a less tumbled style the door opened and she froze. Alejandro, already in the act of removing his tie, appeared. His immaculate grooming was, for once, absent. Indeed, in the bright light of the sunset flooding into the room through the windows, his tailored suit looked crumpled and almost dusty, his black hair tousled, while a dark shadow of stubble heavily accentuated his angular jaw line. But, even with all those flaws taken into consideration, he still looked spectacular, awesomely masculine and awesomely sexy. As she studied him, her body reacting with treacherous enthusiasm even as her pride rejected those earthy responses, hot, heady anger threatened to consume her.

‘I told Maria we would dine alone next door tonight. Give me ten minutes for a shower,’ Alejandro urged her carelessly, but the scorching golden eyes that raked over the mane of strawberry-blonde curls framing her heart-shaped face, before roaming down to the pouting curves defined by the fine fabric of her dress, were in no way casual. That appraisal was so hot she was vaguely surprised that her body didn’t start smoking and if anything that bold, sensually appreciative appraisal only increased her resentment.

‘Where do you get the nerve to look at me like that?’ Jemima launched at him in furious condemnation of that familiarity and the evident plan for a romantic meal for two. It would take a great deal more than that one tiny effort to turn her into the compliant wife he so obviously wanted and expected.

His well-shaped ebony brows drew together as he shed his jacket and embarked on the buttons of his shirt. ‘You’re too eye-catching to ignore,’ he told her teasingly

Jemima was fighting to hang onto her temper. She didn’t need a crystal ball to tell her that it was never cool to rail at a man for keeping his distance and even less cool to complain of a lack of attention. So she spun away and glowered at her own frustrated reflection in a tall cheval mirror. Why should she give him the satisfaction of knowing that she had been disappointed when he failed to show up at the airport? Or when he didn’t even take the trouble to phone to make a polite excuse for his absence from home? Yet that lack of consideration for her feelings was so familiar from the past that she couldn’t help wanting to scream and shout in complaint.

‘I’m such an idiot!’ she suddenly exclaimed, unable to hold back her seething emotions and keep her tongue glued to the roof of her mouth any longer. ‘Somehow I thought it would be different…that you’d make more of an effort to make this work this time—’

‘What are you talking about?’ Alejandro demanded in the act of shedding the shirt to reveal a superb bronzed muscular chest sprinkled with dark curling hair and a hard, flat stomach that easily met the attributes of the proverbial six-pack.

Jemima spun back to face him. A pulse was beating so fast at the foot of her throat that it was a challenge to find her voice. With every fibre in her body she was blocking out and refusing to respond to his mesmeric physical appeal. ‘I arrived here a couple of hours ago. What did you think it would be like for me to be confronted with your mother before I even saw you again? Obviously it didn’t occur to you that for once in your life you should have been here for me!’

‘I left a message with my mother for you. Are you saying that you didn’t receive it?’ Alejandro prompted in a tone of hauteur that only set her teeth on edge more.

‘Your mother hates me like poison. Are you still so naïve that you think she would take the trouble to pass on a message to me?’ Jemima fired back at him.

‘If you didn’t get the message, I can only apologise for the oversight,’ Alejandro drawled smooth as glass, casting off the remainder of his clothes with incredible cool and strolling into the bathroom as lithe and strikingly naked as a sleek bronzed god.

That non-committal and reserved response made Jemima so mad, she was vaguely surprised that the top of her head didn’t blow off. ‘Don’t pull that aristocratic indifference act on me to try and embarrass me into silence!’ she hissed, stalking after him into the bathroom.

‘Since when has it been possible to embarrass you into silence?’ And with that cutting comeback Alejandro switched on the shower and forced her to swallow back her ire as she assumed that he could no longer hear her above the noise of the water beating down on the tiles.

But Jemima was so irate she still couldn’t shut up. The suave assurance with which Alejandro had stripped off in front of her and calmly entered the shower had acted like an electric shock on an already raw temper. ‘I hate you when you treat me like this!’ she yelled.

While Alejandro showered, Jemima paced in the doorway, all recollection of her past unhappiness as his wife returning then and there to haunt her. Not for anyone would she go through that experience again! And yet hadn’t she just signed up again for a rerun on Alfie’s behalf? How could it benefit Alfie that she wanted to kill his father in cold blood?

The water switched off and the fleecy white towel on the tiled wall was snatched off the rail. Jemima was trembling and she wrapped her arms round herself. Alejandro reappeared with the towel knotted round his narrow hips, his damp black hair slicked back from his brow and his big powerful body still beaded with drops of moisture. He surveyed her with infuriating, deeply offensive assurance.

‘You don’t hate me. Of course you don’t,’ he told her drily.

‘And how do you make that out? By the time that I walked out on our marriage, I couldn’t stand you!’

Alejandro moved towards her and she backed into the bedroom. ‘But why?’ he queried in the most reasonable of voices. ‘Because I had realised what you were up to with Marco? Because I asked you to explain what happened to all that money? Any man would have demanded answers from you.’

‘First and foremost I left you because you wouldn’t believe a word I said, but I did have lots of other good reasons,’ Jemima flung, her eyes bright as violet stars below her fine brows as she challenged him.

Alejandro frowned darkly. ‘I’m hungry. I want to get dressed and eat. I don’t want to get into a big scene right now.’

Such a surge of rage shot through Jemima’s tiny frame that she genuinely felt as though she had grown physically taller. ‘Alejandro…there’s never a right time with you. But I suggest that for once you look at what you did to contribute to the breakdown of our marriage and stop blaming me for everything that went wrong—’

‘Leave the past behind us.’

‘Don’t you dare say that to me when you continually throw everything I did back at me!’ Jemima hissed.

Alejandro groaned out loud. ‘So, say what you have to say in as few words as you can manage.’

‘You forced me to live under the same roof as your mother—’

‘The castle is very large. Such living arrangements are common in Spain—’

‘It was never that simple. Doña Hortencia loathes me and she made my life a misery the last time I was here. What did you ever do to stop her?’ she condemned fiercely.

‘You always exaggerate. How was your life made a misery?’ Alejandro countered in a discouraging tone of disbelief.

‘If I asked any of the staff to do anything they had to run it by your mother first because she insisted that she was still the mistress of this household. Usually, whatever I wanted I didn’t get and I found that humiliating. She criticised everything I did, refused to speak to me at mealtimes when you weren’t there and insulted me to my face in front of visitors. Ask your sister. Beatriz avoids trouble like the plague but she won’t tell you any lies if you ask the right questions.’

Alejandro had screened his brilliant gaze and his wide sensual mouth was compressed by the time she had finished speaking. ‘I’ll check it out.’

Jemima knotted her hands into fists. ‘So, you can’t take my word on that either?’

‘Since it looks as though I am destined to go hungry tonight, what else do I stand accused of?’ Alejandro enquired with sardonic bite.

His derisive intonation made Jemima’s teeth grind together. She was shivering with temper and her gaze locked accusingly to his. ‘It’s your fault that I fell pregnant with Alfie!’

Alejandro studied her in obvious bewilderment. ‘You love our son. You can scarcely hold his conception against me.’

‘I did when I first discovered that I was pregnant. You chose to be careless with contraception but I paid the price for it,’ she challenged, flushing as she recalled the passionate bout of lovemaking in the shower that had led to her unplanned pregnancy. ‘We had only been married a few months and I was still quite young for motherhood. I didn’t feel ready for a baby and being so sick while I was carrying him didn’t help. It made me feel more trapped than ever here but you didn’t understand how I felt, did you?’

‘No, I didn’t, but then you didn’t tell me at the time,’ Alejandro countered levelly. ‘Naturally I realised that you were unhappy but I assumed that was because you were unwell. I would’ve thought that by now you would have put any bitterness behind you on that score.’

Jemima regarded him with seething resentment. ‘So you get a clean slate while I get reminded of my every mistake?’

‘Alfie is not a mistake, Jemima. He is most probably the best thing that ever happened to either of us,’ Alejandro proclaimed in an undertone of driven emotion that was rare for him, his stunning golden eyes unusually eloquent.

Her eyes suddenly stung with prickling tears. ‘I didn’t mean that he was a mistake…’

‘Then what did you mean?’

‘You see, there you go again…thinking the very worst of me!’ Jemima launched accusingly, the swimming moisture in her eyes overflowing.




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