Kept at the Argentine's Command

‘What sort of a man are you anyway?’ She didn’t give him a chance to respond. ‘Well, I know now, don’t I? You just go from one woman to the next, like a bee to a flower, only you don’t extract anything—’ except for her heart ‘—you just leave deposits.’

‘What are you talking about?’

Her heart? Really?

Lulu stared at him, horrified. Her heart wasn’t involved. It was her feelings he’d trashed. The bastard did not have her heart!

‘You’re just like your father. You’re a…a philanderer.’

Like his father? Where had that come from? What had she heard? Read?

Alejandro’s first reaction as a young man had been to punch in the face any journalist who had come at him with prurient accusations about like father, like son. The intervening years had seasoned his reaction down to a cool, half-amused ‘no comment’ response.

Hearing the accusation come out of Lulu’s sweet mouth made it raw all over again.

‘You know nothing about me, Lulu, and even less about my father.’

‘I know that—and now you’re telling me I could be pregnant by a man I’m not married to. How am I expected to react?’

‘Try not screeching out the news to all the inhabitants of the castle.’

‘I do not screech! she shouted, then looked around as if people might come pouring in to see what the fuss was about. ‘What are you going to do about it?’ she hissed.

Later, when he analysed the situation, Alejandro would recognise that this was the line he should never have uttered. ‘I think I’ve done my bit.’

Lulu looked ready to haul off and punch him, but for some reason he relaxed. Alejandro discovered that with Lulu the hostility was starting to feel like foreplay.

He made the mistake of smiling at the idea.

‘You think this is funny?’

She was almost dancing on her toes with fury—a little French tornado of outraged sensibilities.

And he felt…surprisingly calm. For the first time all day he felt good—because now they were talking everything felt a lot less fraught. He was beginning to think that if he’d forced her to talk yesterday they wouldn’t be facing this problem now. Sex between them was incendiary, and it just burned the reason out of both of them.

His gaze dropped to her pelvis, where she had settled her hands, as if trying to repel any imaginary seeding in her womb.

He frowned. It wasn’t as if he’d been trying to impregnate her. But she was glaring at him as if he’d wilfully and wantonly planted a baby inside her. And now he was seeing other things: Lulu’s slender curvy shape distended, a little person growing inside her until she was a soft, round, fecund woman, with his baby…somewhere in Paris.

This sudden and to his mind bizarre detour of his imagination had him doing a double-take.

He focused on the more important question. Paris was a big city. He didn’t even have her address.

Dios.

How the hell had he missed all this?

Logically, he knew he could get it from Khaled. But right now this was about the two of them. He had no intention of involving other people who would by necessity come between them.

She spun away from him.

‘Where the hell are you going?’ he growled.

She didn’t even look around as she flung over her shoulder, ‘Away from you.’

‘Oh, no, you don’t, querida.’

He seized her by the wrist and Lulu jerked her head round, and for a moment all he saw was the true panic in her eyes. He was so puzzled by it that when she rounded on him with a raised elbow he wasn’t quick enough to deflect the blow and it connected with his jaw. His head jerked back and he let her go.