Kept at the Argentine's Command

He stopped. Then he ran a hand through his hair and seemed suddenly younger, less the cold stranger he’d been at the reception—the man who had brought another woman to Gigi’s wedding and not told her. He was suddenly Alejandro again, but an Alejandro toting a great deal of baggage she hadn’t known about—like the fame, and the women who apparently pursued him in droves.

‘Dios,’ he said. ‘This is a mess.’

Lulu couldn’t agree more. At least in that they were on the same page.

‘We need to get you onto contraception.’

Or not!

‘Excuse me? That has nothing to do with you.’

‘The hell it doesn’t. You could be pregnant, Lulu. If you have unprotected sex this is what happens.’

‘As I never intend to have sex again in my entire life, it’s no longer a problem,’ said Lulu, her chin trembling, ‘I was perfectly happy keeping myself to myself, and then you wrecked everything.’

He was frowning at her. He seemed to be struggling to follow her words and she wondered for a moment if her English had clotted up, as it had a habit of doing when she was overwrought.

‘What do you mean, keeping yourself to yourself?’

He suddenly seem to loom over her.

‘I don’t want to talk about it.’ Lulu pursed her lips, folded her arms and faced the other direction.

‘Dios,’ he said, almost under his breath. ‘I knew you were a virgin.’

It was the last straw.

‘Did you?’ she snapped. ‘How clever you are. Give the man a medal.’

‘Lulu—’

‘I was not a virgin,’ she stated, staring at an old tapestry on the wall, in which a man in armour appeared to be poking a dragon viciously with a three-pronged weapon. She wished above all things she could be doing that to Alejandro du Crozier right now. ‘I lost my virginity when I was eighteen—how many times do I have to explain this to people? I just never followed up with anyone else.’

She heard him sigh.

‘Not that it’s any business of yours,’ she added. ‘Any more.’

‘Then why the hell did you decide to follow up with me?’ He sounded angry again, but in a different way. He sounded as if he cared.

Lulu discovered she disliked that even more. It was just a trick. She whirled around, wishing he would ignore all her ravings and put his arms around her. But he wasn’t going to do that.

‘And that’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it?’ she shouted—she never shouted, but this was a weekend of firsts. ‘Why don’t you call me if you ever work it out?’

*

He’d handled that well.

Alejandro nursed a whisky as he stood at the window of his guest room. The place was draughty, but that probably went with it being several hundred years old, and yet in shirtsleeves he wasn’t feeling much except the adrenalin his brain was pumping through his body.

He couldn’t put together a coherent picture of her. At every turn Lulu confounded him. She threw up walls, drew lines in the sand for him to step over, made him jump through hoops. She was his worst nightmare.

The kind of woman he’d avoided all his adult life.

A woman who needed drama.

Only she wasn’t quite that either… He was missing a piece in thi

s puzzle, and when he had it everything would fall into place.