Naive Bride , Defiant Wife

‘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.

‘You still haven’t told me what you’re doing here,’ Jemima complained as he followed her to her front door.

‘We’ll talk inside.’

Jemima had to swallow back a sharp-tongued comment. In every situation Alejandro assumed command and that he rarely got it wrong only annoyed her more. She went in to her babysitter and paid her. Audra lived only two doors down from her and the arrangement suited both of them.

‘Do you make a habit of leaving a child in charge of a child?’ Alejandro enquired.

‘No, I don’t,’ Jemima countered curtly. ‘And though Audra may look immature, she’s eighteen years old and training to be a nurse.’

Alejandro did not apologise for his misapprehension. Jemima hung up her jacket and hovered, her face burning as she remembered the heat of that extravagant kiss.

‘It’s a little late for a social call,’ she remarked flatly, avoiding any visual contact with him, refusing to knuckle down and play hostess.

‘I wanted to see my son,’ Alejandro confided in a roughened undertone.

The import of that admission engulfed her like a tidal wave. So the DNA testing had delivered its expected result and backed up her claims, and thanks to that he now had to accept that she had not been lying to him yet he had not opened the subject with the fervent apology that he owed her. Her chin came up at a truculent angle. ‘Alfie’s asleep.’

‘I don’t mind looking at him while he sleeps,’ Alejandro confessed in a not quite steady rush, his excitement at even that prospect unconcealed.

For a split second that look on his face softened something inside her but she fought it. ‘But you didn’t believe me when I told you he was yours—’

‘Let’s not get into that. I know the truth now. I know he is my child. I only got the news this morning. This is the soonest I could get here.’

His eagerness to see Alfie dismayed her, even while she tried to tell herself that his reaction was only to be expected. He had just found out that he was a father. Naturally he was much more interested in Alfie than he had been when he had assumed that her son was some other man’s. ‘I’ll take you upstairs,’ she offered, striving to take control of the situation.

Alejandro moved quietly into the bedroom in Jemima’s wake and studied the sleeping child in the wooden cot. Black curls tousled, with his little sleep-flushed face, Alfie looked peaceful and utterly adorable to his besotted mother’s eyes. Alejandro closed a strong hand over the cot rail and stared down, spiky black lashes screening his gaze from her.

Without warning Alejandro looked across the cot at her, brilliant dark eyes brandishing a fierce challenge. ‘I want to take him home to Spain.’

That announcement hit her like a bucket of icy water, shocking her and filling her with fear for the future. She backed away to the door and watched Alejandro award his son an undeniably tender last glance. Yes, he could be tender when he wanted to be but it wasn’t a notion that took him very often, she conceded painfully. He had looked at her the same way the day they learned that she had conceived and his initial unconcealed pleasure in the discovery that she was pregnant had made her swallow back and conceal her own very different feelings on the same score. Yet how could she recall those confusing reactions now when Alfie had since become the very centre of her world? Given the chance she would never have turned the clock back to emerge childless from her failed marriage, but it was already beginning to occur to her that a childfree marriage would have been easier to dissolve.

I want to take him home to Spain. That frank declaration raced back and forth inside her head as she led the way back downstairs. It was only natural that Alejandro would want to show Alfie off to his family while ensuring that Alfie learnt about the magnificent heritage and ancestry that he had been born into on his father’s side, she reasoned, eager not to overreact to his announcement.

‘What did you mean when you said you wanted to take him back to Spain?’ Jemima heard herself ask abruptly.

Alejandro took off his heavy cashmere overcoat and draped it on a dining chair by the table that filled the small bay window in the living room. His elegant charcoal-grey business suit accentuated his height. His classic profile was cool and uninformative when he turned back to her but his stunning dark eyes were bright gold chips of challenge.

‘I cannot allow you to have full custody of my son,’ Alejandro spelt out without apology. ‘I don’t believe that you can offer him what he needs to thrive in this environment. I wish I could say otherwise. I have no desire to fight you for custody of our child but I do not see how I can do anything else without betraying my duty to him.’

‘How…dare…you?’ Jemima threw back at him in a fiery temper of disbelief, her heart racing as if she were running a marathon. ‘I gave birth to your precious son alone and unsupported and I’ve been on my own ever since. Alfie is a very happy and well-adjusted little boy and you know nothing about him, yet the minute you find out he exists you assume that I am an unfit parent!’

‘Does he even know he has a father or a family in Spain? Is he learning to speak Spanish? What kind of stability can you give him? You are not a responsible person.’

‘What gives you the right to say that to me?’ Jemima interrupted thinly, her hands clenching into defensive fists by her side.

His lean, darkly handsome face tautened into censorious lines. ‘Look at the way you dealt with our marriage, your debts, your affair with my brother—’

&n

bsp; ‘For the last time, I did not have an affair with your brother!’

‘You don’t deal with problems, you run away,’ Alejandro condemned without hesitation. ‘How could you possibly raise our child properly and teach him what he needs to know?’

‘I don’t have to stand here putting up with being criticised by you any more. We’re separated,’ Jemima rattled out, her voice brittle. ‘I want you to leave.’

Alejandro grabbed up his coat. ‘It’s impossible to talk to you,’ he vented in a driven undertone of frustration.

‘You call threatening to take my child away from me talking?’ Jemima exclaimed with incredulous force. ‘How did you expect me to respond to a threat?’

‘A threat is something that may not happen, but I will most assuredly fight you for custody of my son,’ Alejandro extended grittily, refusing to back down.

Jemima breathed in deep and slow to calm her jangling emotions and studied him with angry, anxious eyes. ‘What can I do or say to convince you that I am a good mother?’

Having donned his coat, Alejandro shrugged a broad shoulder as if she was asking him the unanswerable.

Jemima’s thoughts were already ploughing ahead to reach several fear-inducing conclusions. If a custody battle went to court, Alejandro had the wealth to hire the very best lawyers and nobody representing her interests would be able to compete. The very fact that she had kept quiet about Alfie’s existence for the first two years of his life would weigh against her. And how much importance might a judge lay on the truth that Alfie would one day be an influential member of the Spanish aristocracy in charge of a massive country estate and a very successful string of international family businesses? Such a background and his father’s ability to prepare his son for those responsibilities could not be easily ignored.