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‘Threw her out? Ten.’
Old enough to feel angry and betrayed. An image flashed into his head and he felt nothing as he watched his ten-year-old self begging his mother to take him with her and shouting when she tearfully sobbed she couldn’t.
‘It was a tragedy she died so young.’
Before he ever had a chance to retract the things he had yelled at her as she left.
Not insensible to the sensitivity of the subject, Fernando slid a glance at Rafael’s stony profile before observing, ‘There are worse things in life than being considered a sex god.’
‘A hard reputation to live up to.’
The comment drew a laugh from the older man. ‘Modesty,’ he mocked. ‘That’s not like you, Rafael.’
‘You think I need a lesson in humility?’ Meekness was to his mind an overrated virtue, he had never turned the other cheek in his life and he wasn’t about to start any time soon. In his world displaying any weakness was fatal.
‘You care what I think?’ Fernando stopped dead, his attention straying across the road. ‘Now that is what I call a remarkably good-looking woman…she reminds me of someone… Rafael…?’
It was not hard to identify the object of his relative’s admiration. She stood poised uncertainly on the edge of the pavement watching for a gap in the heavy traffic that moved through the congested street.
A little above medium height, she had a natural poise and elegance that made her stand out from the crowd even wearing standard-issue faded denims and a loose cotton tee shirt that hinted at the lush curves of her breasts, the natural attribute he suspected had first drawn his reprobate great uncle’s attention.
As his glance moved upwards to her face she stepped backwards as a scooter mounted the pavement. As she lifted a hand to throw the ponytail that had flopped forward over her shoulder her head turned and he saw her face for the first time.
The breath left his body as Rafael froze, feeling as if someone had just landed a punch in his solar plexus.
‘Over there… I think she’s trying to cross the road. You see her?’
‘I see her.’
‘Now that is what this party lacked—a few pretty faces to look at.’
‘Not pretty,’ Rafael contradicted.
His elderly relative looked outraged. ‘Not pretty? What is wrong with you? Don’t tell me you like your women like sticks. A woman should be soft and—’
‘Beautiful,’ Rafael corrected, cutting across his great-uncle’s list of womanly attributes.
As his brain emerged from its temporary paralysis his eyes remained trained on the slim figure, but it was not the brunette’s face or her indisputably womanly figure that held his stunned gaze.
He glanced briefly at his great-uncle, who played the forgetful old man card when it suited him but was anything but; the last thing Rafael needed at this moment was Fernando to realise why the girl looked familiar to him.
He was surprised he hadn’t already.
The sooner he got him safely away from this potentially explosive scene, the better.
Rafael dragged his eyes off the brunette. Still aware of her in the periphery of his vision, and aware he was not the only one aware of her—this was a woman accustomed to male attention—he offered his great-uncle a supportive arm, nodding to the driver who held the door open as Fernando took his place in the car.
The car moved off and Rafael was able to focus all his attention on the brunette.
She was obviously heading for the hotel. If she walked in now he could imagine the reaction and there were photographers to record the moment for posterity and every tabloid on the planet!
An illegitimate love child reunited with her mother while the unsuspecting husband and social elite looked on. My God, the girl had to have engineered the moment for maximum embarrassment—not that her motivation or her feelings were what he needed to concentrate on now, he told himself, blocking out this line of speculation.
This was about damage limitation. Let Angelina have this day at least before disaster in the shape of this girl arrived.
He couldn’t let her go into the hotel.
So how did he stop her?
He found himself wistfully contemplating a less civilised and much simpler age when he could have simply slung her over his shoulder.
This not being an option, he had to repress his natural instincts and opt for more subtle methods. As he sifted through the possibilities he was very aware that no matter what action he chose, he could not give this situation a happy outcome.
The story had everything: sex, money and a beautiful woman—or in this case two!
If she walked through those doors now he could imagine the reaction to that face and tomorrow’s headlines. He couldn’t allow it to happen.
Rafael tried to narrow his focus to the here and now. It was a struggle: he had a mind wired to asking why…where; a question mark was a challenge to him.
As he walked towards the road his mind was working fast as he sifted through the possibilities. What was she doing here?
Coincidence did not even make it to the list.
Rafael did not believe in coincidence any more than he believed in the Easter bunny or the general decency of his fellow man…or in this case woman. He did believe in protecting the people he cared about.
His silver grey eyes narrowed. The brunette, her hair and other things bouncing gently, had begun crossing the road towards the hotel entrance, confirming all his worst suspicions.
He felt something kick low in his stomach—anger, he told himself—as he watched the gentle sway of her hips in the tight jeans she wore.
Of course there were decent and genuinely good people—people like Angelina. He liked to think he was not without the odd scruple, but this woman was not one of life’s innocents.
It always amazed Rafael how that vulnerable minority managed to get through life with their ideals and their lives intact while most people were out for what they could get regardless of the people they trampled over in their pursuit of whatever ambition drove them.
What was driving Angelina’s daughter?
Greed, revenge…possibly a combination?
A child genuinely wishing to discover a parent would hardly choose a public occasion to do so.
Then as he watched she stepped off the pavement. Dios, he might not have to worry about scandal—the girl was a traffic statistic waiting to happen!
It was pure luck that she reached his side of the road before disaster struck—or almost. He watched as she jumped in response to the blast of a scooter horn as it whizzed past her, lost her footing and began to fall back into the moving traffic.
CHAPTER FOUR
MAGGIE lifted her head, a smile of gratitude ready to thank the person who had leant a steadying hand and pulled her onto the safety of the pavement.
‘Thank you…’ The words and the smile died a death as she found herself looking into the lean face of her saviour.
The sound of the traffic retreated somewhere into the recesses of her shell-shocked brain. She was looking into the dark face of the most beautiful man she had ever seen or even imagined.
She was too startled to disguise her reaction. Maggie’s gaze travelled in wide-eyed appreciation over his strongly sculpted features.
This was not a face anyone would forget in a hurry.
As a child Maggie remembered wondering what her mum had meant when she spoke of someone’s ‘beautiful bones.’
He was what she meant.
The genetic gene pool had been very generous to this tall Spaniard, who had been gifted cheekbones sharp enough to cut yourself on, a strong aquiline nose and a firm, angular jaw.
His unlined brow was broad and intelligent and he possessed the most striking eyes she had ever seen—pale icy grey, almost silver, the striking colour intensified by the dark ring around the iris, they were fringed by incredibly long spiky lashes that were as dark as his strongly delineated ebony brows.
But it was his mouth that Maggie couldn’t take her eyes off. Was it the hint of cruelty she saw in the sensual curve of his sculpted lips that tugged so strongly at her senses and made the aura he projected so overtly sensual and masculine?
Close your mouth, Maggie, you’re drooling.
In an effort to respond to the ironic voice in her head, she gave herself a mental shake.
It didn’t help. Her head remained a swirl of impressions and her nerve endings continued to thrum, sending shivers across the surface of her overheated skin.
She’d had too much sun, Maggie decided, shading her eyes as she struggled to find an explanation for being struck dumb and foolish at the same moment—an explanation that did not involve being in the presence of a six-feet-four black-haired Mediterranean male who looked like a fallen angel who worked out!
The fine lines around his marvellous eyes deepened as he looked down with concern into her face.
‘Are you all right? There is someone you’d like me to call, perhaps?’
Oh, my God, even his voice was sexy! Deep and slightly gravelly, his cultured voice contained a faint and attractive foreign inflection.
‘I… I…’ She gulped, then he smiled and she thought, Wow!
Get a grip, girl. So you were smiled at by a good-looking man—there is no need to act as though you’ve just been released from a convent.
‘You’ve had a shock. You’re shaking…’ Rafael pushed aside an intrusive flicker of genuine concern. Save it, he told himself, for Angelina and her marriage.
Besides, in his expert opinion this was about sex, not the sun or a blow to the head. He was not the only one to feel the sexual charge in the air. This was not a thing he could have anticipated, but Rafael knew that such things were easier to work with than fight against—not, obviously, to the extent that he followed the advice of the loud voice telling him that what he really wanted was to know what she would taste like when he kissed her!
Though had the circumstances been different, who knew…?
The comment drew Maggie’s gaze to the fingers still curved around her upper arm. She made no attempt to break the contact; in fact she was conscious of a strange reluctance to do so.
She could feel the warmth in his long brown fingers through the thin fabric of her cotton top and sense the strength in them…in the man himself.
Her eyes lifted and the impression of strength she picked up from the light contact intensified. He was a big man, broad-shouldered and athletically built—he was both lean and hard.
He projected an undiluted force-field of raw masculinity. It was utterly overwhelming and…seductive?
The latter question made Maggie’s eyes widen with shock. Curbing the imaginative dialogue in her head, she began to pull her arm away, then stopped as she encountered the flash of concern in his silver grey eyes.
She swallowed past the sudden emotional thickness in her throat and blinked as her eyelids prickled. She looked away, embarrassed by her emotional response to this cursory show of concern.
‘I’m fine…oh!’ Maggie grunted as a passerby bumped into her. ‘Sorry…’
‘You are sorry?’ Her rescuer mumbled something under his breath and directed a glare of such autocratic outrage at the retreating back of the clumsy culprit that Maggie would not have been surprised to see the burly figure disintegrate into a pile of dust.
‘You’re very kind.’
Her low-pitched voice with the husky timbre came as a surprise—not an unpleasant one. ‘You’re English?’
Had he needed confirmation, this would have been it. He knew that Angelina had been shipped to England to have her baby.
She had not gone into details, but he could only imagine that the experience of being sent away from family and friends at such a time must have been a terrifying ordeal for a sixteen-year-old.
Maggie saw the flicker of expression move at the back of his incredible eyes and interpreted it as surprise. She had seen a lot of that when people realised she was not Spanish. There had been several occasions on this trip when unable to respond when, someone spoke to her in Spanish, she had had to explain that she was English.
It was difficult not to think about her genetic heritage when for the first time in her life her colouring made her blend in, not stand out.
She lifted a hand to smooth her tousled hair, a frown settling on her brow as she blinked to clear the unbidden image of Simon’s excited expression when he had revealed that the firm he had employed to investigate her background without telling her had discovered her real mother did not have, as his own mother had suspected, Romany blood, but was in fact a member of one of Spain’s oldest families.
‘Like Mother said, it explains your temperament and your colouring, doesn’t it, sweetheart? The way I see it,’ he had mused, ‘if this family are willing to acknowledge you it would do us no harm at all. Obviously we have to approach them sensitively…’
Sensitive—he actually said sensitive and with no trace of irony. ‘You told your mother about this?’
Simon had remained oblivious to the danger in her voice and stilted manner. ‘It was her idea.’
He had not appeared to notice her flinch as he’d smiled indulgently before announcing confidently, ‘I know what you’re thinking.’
Maggie had been pretty sure Simon hadn’t or he wouldn’t have been standing that close to her clenched fists.
She could remember clearly staring up at his handsome face, and thinking, I’ve never actually seen you before.
She was engaged to a man who didn’t know her at all, a man who under the caring exterior he liked to cultivate, was utterly and totally self-centred.
‘You’re thinking how did the daughter of a Spanish aristocrat come to be adopted by an ordinary English couple.’
Maggie had recovered her voice in time to silence any further revelations and assure Simon that she had no interest in her birth mother or a family who were strangers to her, and neither did she have an interest in marrying him.
It had taken some time to convince Simon that she wasn’t joking, but when he had realised he had been furious, revealing a side to his nature that she had never glimpsed previously.
Maggie flicked her ponytail firmly over her shoulder and equally firmly pushed away the memories.
She had moved on and in a rather unpredictable way, she thought, directing a bold direct stare at the face of the dark, devastatingly handsome Spaniard. Communication was not a problem; he spoke perfect English.
The problem was her inability to stop staring at him or speculate on how good his non-verbal communication skills were.
‘You are here with your family?’ He arched an ebony brow, his eyes travelling up from her toes to her glossy head.
She shook her head, feeling ridiculously tongue-tied and unable to shake the crazy conviction he could read her thoughts.
