Книга - Naive Bride, Defiant Wife

Naive Bride, Defiant Wife
LYNNE GRAHAM


She had run away…and her husband wanted revenge!Alejandro Navarro Vasquez, the Conde Olivares, has long desired vengeance… His wife betrayed him with an act that by the proud Spaniard’s code was unforgivable. What’s more, the breakdown of their marriage is a bitter truth which undermines Alejandro’s every achievement.Alejandro’s opportunity for justice comes when the private detective he’s hired pinpoints Jemima’s whereabouts…and delivers the news that she has a two-year-old son. Clearly her wanton ways have led to an illegitimate birth… But no matter: Alejandro is determined to settle the score with his runaway wife…SECRETLY PREGNANT… CONVENIENTLY WED With this ring, I claim my baby!







‘I want my son to grow up in Spain—’

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



Alejandro strolled across the floor towards her. ‘I 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.’





Naïve Wife, Defiant Bride


By




Lynne Graham











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




SECRETLY PREGNANT


With this ring, I claim my baby!

The amazing new trilogy by best-selling Modern™ Romance author



Lynne Graham

The charming and pretty English village of

Charlbury St Helens is home to three young women

whose Cinderella lives are about to be turned upside

down…by three of the wealthiest, most handsome and

impossibly arrogant men in Europe!



Jemima, Flora and Jess aren’t looking for love,

but all have babies very much in mind.

Jemima already has a young son,

Flora is hoping to adopt her late half-sister’s

little daughter, and Jess just longs to be a mum.



But whether they have or want a baby,

all the girls must marry ultimate alpha males

to keep their dreams…And Alejandro,

Angelo and Cesario are not about to be tamed!



SECRETLY PREGNANT



NAÏVE BRIDE, DEFIANT WIFE:

Jemima and Alejandro’s story



FLORA’S DEFIANCE:

Flora and Angelo’s story



JESS’S PROMISE:

Jess and Cesario’s story




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.





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