The Spanish Consultant (Westerling)

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.