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Weirdly, her heart was hammering.
His amber eyes, lushly lashed, met hers with a splintering intensity.
‘Unless you’re interested in walking, chica, I suggest you come with me now.’
He didn’t give her a chance to object. He was walking away. He clearly expected her to follow him.
Lulu stared after him.
He was the rudest man.
She found herself struggling one-handed with her stick-and-stop trolley, her hand luggage banging painfully against her leg.
She most certainly was not travelling with him in a car for three or four hours.
She would find a taxi.
She would entrust her person and her luggage to a man she had paid to do the task—not one who thought he was doing her a big favour.
Money was a woman’s greatest ally and protection. She knew it to be so. Without money her mother had been unable to escape her violent father.
Even now, with her mother blissfully married to another man, Lulu pushed her to keep her own bank account and manage her own money. Money gave you options. Lulu lifted her chin. Right now her own personal bank account gave her the ability to pay her way to Dunlosie Castle.
But when she emerged from the building it was into an overcast Edinburgh day. There was a light rain falling and Lulu stopped to retrieve her umbrella, opening it against the elements and peering about. She spotted the cab rank but there was a queue.
All right, sometimes those options a woman had weren’t optimal, but there was no help for it.
She pushed resolutely in that direction, aware that her pretty harlequin seamed stockings were receiving tiny splashes of dirty water with each step from the washback beneath the wheels of her trolley. The fact that she felt depleted from withstanding her own anxieties in the air for the last couple of hours wasn’t helping. Lulu wanted nothing more than to be warm and comfortable inside a car, with her shoes off, watching this bad weather through a windscreen.
Maybe she’d been a little hasty...
Which was when she saw the lovingly restored red vintage Jaguar.
The passenger side window came rolling down.
‘Get in,’ he instructed.
CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_c7810b53-3e87-5263-8183-666eb5a59a36)
LULU KNEW SHE had a decision to make.
She lifted her umbrella to take another look at the queue. Then she looked at her ‘ride’.
Hot and sexy and far too full of himself—and he had looked at her as if she was a bug.
Her pride pushed to the fore. She was not climbing into a car with a man who didn’t even have the decency to open the door for her. And what about her luggage?
Lulu was tempted in that moment to phone her parents, who would be arriving at the castle tonight. But how would that look? And she couldn’t lean on Gigi this weekend of all weekends.
She gasped as another splash of muddy water, this time from passing pedestrians, hit her shoes and saw the mud now attached to her sadly limp blue ribbons. Her pride wavered.
Dieu, she knew she’d regret this.
She grabbed her trolley and pushed it towards the back end of the car.
It was really completely unfair, but frankly she’d be a fool if she passed this up.
She stood there. In the rain. Waiting.
He took his time.
Lulu narrowed her eyes on his languid stroll around to the boot, all shoulders and confident attitude, looking infinitely rugged and male and capable.
But she knew differently. Knew how a sturdy exterior could mask all kinds of weaknesses and flaws.
She’d bet this man had plenty. For one thing, he didn’t like women. The things he’d said to her on the plane... The way he’d curled his lip at her shoes... She’d seen the way he’d looked at them. He had no idea how secure these shoes made her feel. She stamped one of them, because he was making her wait deliberately.
‘Open the boot, would you?’
He looked her up and down. She wasn’t going to apologise for her rudeness. He needed to know she was onto him.
All the same, she took a shuffling step backwards.
She drew herself up, happily over six feet in her shoes, but still gallingly forced to tip up her chin to look him in the eye.
With a half-smile, as if he knew what she was doing, he unlocked the boot, and Lulu was mollified—and a little relieved—when without a word he began hauling her luggage inside.
He handled the matching powder-blue cases as if they weighed nothing. The problem was he was tossing them into the boot as if he was shifting hay bales.
Lulu made a sound of dismay, but from the look he gave her she was a little afraid he might haul her in there too if she said something.
It was only when he looked about to launch her carpet bag after the cases that she jumped and threw herself bodily in front of him to prevent certain shattering.
‘Doux Jésus, stop!’
He held off, but the look on his face told her he was unimpressed—which was pretty rich, given he was the one destroying her property!
‘It contains the crystal I’ve brought as a wedding gift. For Gigi—and Khaled,’ she added, grudgingly.
‘Crystal?’
‘Goblets...tableware. Crystal.’
He continued to stare at her, as if she’d announced she was giving them a horse and cart.
Lulu inhaled a breath. She held out her arms. ‘Give that to me.’
He complied, but she wasn’t expecting him to step right up to her. She was suddenly more aware of him than ever, and inhaled his aftershave—something woodsy that mingled with the scent of his own skin. It was attractively male in a way she wasn’t used to.
Confused and flustered, Lulu looked up.
She encountered his firm chin and the sensuous line of his mouth, which only made her feel more unsettled.
He had a faint frown on his face and she suspected she mirrored it.
She turned her back on him to lodge the bag carefully between two cases to prevent it being bounced around.
Rude, ignorant, appalling, macho jerk.
He waited until she’d stepped back to lower the boot. She waited patiently by the passenger door with her umbrella. But he abruptly headed for the driver’s side of the car.
‘The “macho jerk” wants you to get in the car,’ he said flatly as he yanked open his door.
Lulu realised two things in that moment. One, she’d spoken her thoughts aloud, and, two, he wasn’t going to open her door.
Given he had all her luggage now locked up inside his car, she didn’t have much choice, but she cursed herself for her weakness. She should have waited for a cab.
As if to remind her why she’d made her choice, the rain began to pelt harder.
Why is this happening to me?
She closed her umbrella and opened the door herself.
‘Try not to drip on the upholstery,’ he shot at her as she lodged her furled umbrella at her feet.
Distinctly queasy with the added tension, Lulu looked around in desperation. Where did he expect her to put it?
‘Here.’ He took it from her hand and laid it on the coat he’d tossed on the back seat.
Alejandro then turned back to discover that instead of buckling herself in she had shoved the door open further, so that the rain had begun to slant in.
His temper snapped. ‘Close that damn door!’
She looked for a moment as if she was going to jump right out of the car.
And then she leaned forward and began to dry retch miserably into the gutter.
He wrenched open his door and cut around the car to find her bent double.
He hunkered down. The face she lifted was bone-white. This she couldn’t fake. She clearly wasn’t well, and he suspected he’d got some things wrong. He produced a handkerchief to blot her mouth and soak up the tears that were sliding down her cheeks.
If she’d been hoping for some sympathy it was effective. The big glistening eyes, the silent tears, how fragile she suddenly looked beneath her showy outfit—as if she was trying to shrink into invisibility within it...
He put his hands around her shoulders to help her back into the car and out of the rain, but her response took him off guard. Her arms shot out and she instantly had them wrapped around his neck as tenaciously as a strangling vine.
He was enveloped in the scent of her, and he wondered for a second if this was her clumsy attempt at a pass. Only the feel of her rapid heartbeat told him she was scared. It was like holding a small nervous bird to his chest—as if what she was feeling was too big for her slight body. And yet what had she to be scared of?
She was overwrought—that was all, he told himself, and possibly a little the worse for wear from her in-flight tippling.
A better question was how had he come to be the only man in Scotland who was saddled with the job of delivering a vodka-wilted bridesmaid to their shared destination?
It had to be vodka, because he couldn’t smell any alcohol on her. All he smelt were those cottage violets—and something warmer and real that was just her.
He tentatively rubbed her back, as he would one of the young kids on the estancia who had taken a fall from a horse and had the wind knocked out of them, and tried to ignore the fact that she was an incredibly appealing full-grown female with her breasts pushed up against his chest.
‘I don’t think I’ll be sick again,’ she confided miserably.
She hadn’t actually done anything other than spit up a little bile, but he didn’t doubt her suffering. She looked more miserable than a human being should.
‘Please don’t tell anybody about this,’ she said in a muffled voice against his neck.
It was a strange request, but she was obviously serious about it.
He cleared his throat. ‘Come on, let’s strap you in. Are you all right to travel?’
She nodded, allowing him to help her.
He went around to the boot to grab a bottle of water from the chiller. He yanked the screw lid off for her and when he offered it to her she took a few grateful sips.
‘Okay now?’ he asked gruffly.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said huskily, swallowing deeply and refusing to meet his eyes. ‘It won’t happen again.’
He drove the keys into the ignition.
‘Do you want to stop for coffee? Get something in your stomach?’
She shuddered. ‘I can’t think of anything worse.’
‘It might sober you up.’
Her eyes flashed his way in confusion. ‘I am sober.’
He gave her an old-fashioned look.
‘I am not drunk. I have not been drinking.’
‘You can deny it if you want, querida. It doesn’t change the fact you were stumbling all over that flight, your words were a little slurry and you’ve just been sick.’
She looked at him in horror, her knuckles white around the bottle. ‘I wasn’t— That’s you— I mean, nobody else thought that—’
Lulu tried to control her shaking because it wasn’t helping her case.
‘Maybe I should just find a taxi,’ she said, deeply humiliated, and distressed as she sloshed some of the water on her skirt. Although getting out of this car was the last thing she felt up to doing. ‘This isn’t working for me and it’s clearly not working for you.’
‘Look,’ he said, keeping the car idling while he took the bottle from her hands, lidded it and tossed it onto the back seat. ‘In my experience nobody likes to be confronted with their behaviour while under the influence. You had a few drinks on the flight...they didn’t agree with you. I’m not judging.’
‘Yes, you are judging,’ she burst out unhappily. ‘And nobody thought I was drunk.’
