скачать книгу бесплатно
‘I left them at the stable.’ She tried to scramble to her feet and then gave a yelp of pain as her ankle gave way. ‘Ouch!’
Tears pricked her eyes and she blinked them away, determined not to cry in front of him.
He frowned sharply. ‘Let me look at that.’
Without waiting for her permission he slid a strong hand down her leg and examined her ankle. She held her breath and stared in fascination at his long, strong fingers as they moved over the bone, pressing and testing her reaction. Finally he straightened. ‘It’s not broken. You must have sprained it when you fell. You’re lucky you didn’t fracture your skull.’
Strands of her blonde hair trailed onto his forearm and she marvelled at the contrast between them. He was so dark and strong and everything about him was so different to her. Hypnotised by his masculinity, her eyes fixed on the dark hairs on his forearms, travelled slowly upwards over the swell of muscle and then lifted to the stubble shadowing his hard jaw. He was breathtakingly gorgeous and so sexy that her imagination took flight.
She felt a flutter in the pit of her stomach and her eyes dropped to his firm mouth, wondering, wishing …
He met her rapt expression with a lazy amusement that was totally male. ‘Stop looking at me like that, princess, or I just might do what you want me to do.’
She blushed and sank her teeth into her lower lip. Miles from anywhere, frustrated beyond belief with her life, she felt suddenly bold. ‘I want you to kiss me.’
She stood totally still, shocked by her own impulsive declaration, but his expression didn’t flicker.
‘I know you do.’
His wicked dark eyes slid down to her mouth and suddenly her breathing was choppy. ‘So will you?’ His gaze lifted. ‘No.’
Her fragile bubble of confidence exploded and she stumbled to her feet, wincing at the pain in her ankle. ‘Because you’re scared of my father?’
He threw back his head and laughed. A rich, masculine sound that made her toes curl.
‘What do you think?’ He was still smiling and she swallowed.
‘I don’t think you’re scared of anything.’ She stared down at her feet, mortified by his rejection. ‘So it’s because I’m not pretty enough.’
There was a long, electric silence and then he slid strong fingers under her chin and forced her to look at him.
‘You’re beautiful, princess, and you know it.’ His voice was soft and he moved his hand and ran his fingers through her blonde hair with the same easy confidence that he applied to everything. ‘So beautiful that it hurts to look at you.’
‘So why won’t you kiss me?’
‘Because I’m too old to sneak around kissing children.’
‘I’m not a child!’
One dark eyebrow lifted. ‘So why were you running away? Grown-ups don’t run away from problems, Katy. They face them. When you’ve got the courage to kiss me in full view of your father, come back and we’ll talk.’
Grown-ups don’t run away from problems.
And here she was, running again …
She stared at Jago, thinking that he hadn’t changed much. He might be a doctor but it certainly hadn’t softened him. He looked tough and uncompromising and totally self-assured. But, then, Jago Rodriguez had always had confidence by the bucketload.
Ironic really, she reflected as she tightened her fists on the sheet. For all her privileged upbringing she’d never managed to achieve much in the way of confidence.
‘I’m still waiting for you to tell me what you were running from.’
There was a tap on the door and the nurse opened it warily.
‘Miss Westerling’s fiancé is here.’
Jago’s eyes lifted to Katy’s.
There was a long, aching silence and then he stood up, his eyes shuttered. ‘Show him in.’
Freddie came striding in, hidden behind a bouquet of flowers the size of Africa. Despite the pain in her head, Katy gave a weak smile. Unlike Jago, Freddie never veered from protocol. He couldn’t possibly visit someone in hospital and not take flowers.
Freddie presented the flowers and leaned over to kiss her awkwardly on the cheek. ‘Katherine! What the devil happened?’
Katy was hopelessly aware of Jago’s dark scrutiny. ‘I—I crashed my car.’
Freddie looked perplexed. ‘None of us even knew you’d left the party.’
‘Nothing changes,’ Jago murmured in an undertone, but only Katy understood the implications of his softly spoken words.
‘Are you the doctor who sorted her out?’ Freddie extended a hand, his cultured drawl the product of an exclusive public school education. ‘Can’t thank you enough. Will she be all right?’
‘She was lucky. The damage was superficial,’ Jago said, his eyes drifting to the dressing on Katy’s forehead. ‘Stitches out in seven days and the scar will be under the hairline. She’ll be modelling again in a few weeks without a mark to show for it.’
Freddie frowned and Katy realised that Jago didn’t even know she was a doctor. Especially not a doctor who was going to be working for him in this department in two weeks’ time.
Or would she?
Could she really take a job alongside the one man who had the ability to dishevel her otherwise ordered life?
She couldn’t believe that fate would do this to her.
On the other hand, working in A and E was what she really wanted, and if she gave up her father would think he’d won and she’d lose the career she loved.
She looked at Jago. For eleven years he’d been haunting her life. In the shadows of everything she did.
Maybe the only way she was going to move on was to face up to the past.
He was just a man after all.
A man who obviously hadn’t loved her. A man who wasn’t capable of loving anyone.
She had more sense than to fall for Jago again. And she was marrying Freddie.
Conservative, British Freddie who respected convention, could trace his family back six hundred years, spoke with the right accent and always tried to do the right thing.
‘How long does she need to stay in?’ Freddie glanced discreetly at his watch and Katy almost laughed. He was so transparent. He obviously had a meeting that he was desperate to get to. It was like her father all over again. Only Freddie was much, much nicer than her father.
‘You don’t need to stay, Freddie,’ she said gently, and Freddie gave an awkward smile.
‘It’s just that I’ve got dinner with one of the managing directors from Fixed Income and—’
‘It’s OK.’ Her head was throbbing too much to hear about banks. ‘I’ll be fine. I’ll be going home tomorrow. Libby can fetch me. I’ll call you.’
‘Well, don’t worry about the car.’ His mind clearly on other things, Freddie leaned forward and gave her another awkward kiss on the cheek. ‘I’ll buy you a new one as a wedding present.’
Katy’s eyes slid to Jago but his face gave nothing away, his thick, dark lashes concealing the expression in his eyes. She remembered her father saying that it had been his inscrutability and cool head that had made him such a fearsome reputation at such a young age.
‘I’ll be in touch, then.’ Freddie slid out of the door, leaving the two of them alone once more.
‘So he’s the reason you were running.’ Jago’s voice was even and suddenly Katy felt exhausted.
She just wanted to close her eyes and sleep for ever. She wished her head would stop throbbing.
‘Go away, Jago.’ Before she made a total fool of herself in front of him.
‘Your father’s choice, I presume. I can’t believe you’re marrying him,’ he drawled softly. ‘He’s totally wrong for you.’
Weakened by her injury and the shock of seeing him again, Katy roused herself sufficiently to defend herself.
‘He’s totally right for me. I want to marry Freddie.’
‘Do you? So, tell me, Katy …’ He leaned forward, his voice suddenly soft. ‘If it’s what you want, why did you just drive your car into a ditch?’
CHAPTER THREE
JAGO strode back to his office, tense and on edge, shaken out of his customary cool by his encounter with Katy.
Why the hell had he gone and seen her personally?
He could have arranged for a more junior doctor to check on her and discharge her, but instead he hadn’t been able to resist seeing her one more time.
Some self-satisfied, macho corner of his make-up had wanted to see her awake, to test her reaction to him.
He’d walked away eleven years before, too angry to risk seeing her face to face. Confronted by her after all this time, he’d suddenly wanted to see if there was even the slightest hint of guilt or discomfort in that beautiful face.
There hadn’t been.
Oh, she’d been shocked to see him, but she’d met his gaze steadily, without the slightest hint of remorse. A man with less experience than him might have thought she was as innocent as the day she was born, but he knew better.
Katy’s innocence was only on the surface.
He opened the door to his office, anger erupting inside him at the memories her presence had reawakened. Until he’d met Katy, he’d always prided himself in his lack of vulnerability when it had come to the female sex. He’d been streetwise and sharp and able to recognise every one of their tricks.
He shouldered the door shut behind him and swore softly in Spanish. Katy was the only woman in his life who’d managed to sneak under his defences. Her fragile innocence and femininity had appealed to everything male in him and he had been totally unprepared for the strength of his reaction to her. She had been so far removed from the type of woman he’d usually spent time with that to begin with he’d avoided her, but her blatant fascination in him had proved impossible to resist.
He tried to ignore her lush curves and told himself that his taste didn’t run to innocent schoolgirls, however beautiful. And Katy was astonishingly beautiful. An incredible heart-shaped face surrounded by a cloud of silken blonde hair that could make a man lose his mind. At eighteen she possessed a sweetness that had stifled his usually measured reaction to the opposite sex.
There was something about those huge blue eyes, about the way she watched him with a mixture of excitement and longing, that gradually eroded his already severely tested self-control. Given the temptation, maybe it wasn’t so surprising that he behaved like a hormonal teenager, allowing the power of sexual attraction to overwhelm common sense.
It amused him to take her out and watch the havoc that her presence caused. She was so dazzling that wherever they went she attracted the maximum amount of male attention, attention that went completely unnoticed by Katy herself because she was never able to drag her eyes away from him.
And her blatant and naïve adoration of him was both a source of amusement and smug male satisfaction.
She was his and only his.
Knowing her to be sexually inexperienced, for the first time in his life he was forced to curb his own physical needs until he judged that she was ready. And when that moment came, he derived an astonishing measure of gratification from peeling away the layers of shyness and reserve to reveal the hot, sexual nature that he’d detected from the first time he’d seen her.
He gritted his teeth as he remembered just how passionate a nature his patience had revealed.
Too passionate.
When her father took him to one side and told him the truth about her, he was stunned by the depth of his own disappointment and distaste.
Stunned by the emptiness he felt, he walked away in a state of shock and never contacted her again, grimly aware that he’d let her touch him in ways that weren’t exclusively physical.
I love you, Jago.
He tensed, reminding himself of the truth. That her declarations had proved as shallow and fragile as her promises of commitment.
And now she was engaged to be married.
Freddie was so obviously the suitable man.
And Katy would make an excellent businessman’s wife.
Jago stared fixedly out of the window, wondering why he wanted to put a fist through it.
‘Did you slap his face?’ Libby curled up on Katy’s bed in the flat that they shared and broke a piece off a bar of chocolate. Her blonde hair showed only the merest hint of strawberry after several washes and was now held in a ponytail with a brightly coloured ribbon covered in cartoon characters. Libby worked on the paediatric ward and instead of uniform they wore practical, colourful tracksuits.
‘Hardly.’ Katy pulled a face, still hating herself for being so completely tongue-tied when she’d found herself confronted by Jago. ‘Lying injured in a hospital bed in a nightie which only has a front to it hardly gives you the confidence to confront your past.’
‘Mmm. I see your point.’ Libby shook her head. ‘I can’t believe he’s a doctor. I bet none of the female staff get any work done. Is he still fabulous-looking?’
Katy remembered the nurse who’d dropped the chart when he’d walked into the room.
‘Spectacular.’
Libby grinned and sucked chocolate from her fingers. ‘Oh, boy. What are you going to do?’
Katy lifted a hand and touched the dressing pad on her head. She’d asked herself the same question repeatedly.
‘I’m going to start my job and try and ignore the fact that he works there,’ she said finally. ‘It’s a big department and very busy. He’s not going to have time to worry about me. It’s time I put that episode of my life behind me.’
No more dreams.
‘You think you can do that?’ Libby chewed slowly, her expression doubtful. ‘You were crazy about him, Katy.’
‘But he wasn’t crazy about me. I was just a conquest. When it came to it, Jago walked away without a backward glance.’
