Naive Bride , Defiant Wife

re.’

Jemima tore her stricken eyes from his, shame sitting inside her like a heavy rock because she was tempted. ‘I’ll see you on Saturday,’ she said tightly.

All the way home on the train she was picturing his lean, strong features inside her head and tearing herself apart over what she had agreed to do. He might as well have hypnotised her! Sandy picked her up in the shop van and dropped her at Flora’s cottage.

Twenty minutes later, Jemima was sitting at the island in her friend’s kitchen with Alfie cradled half asleep on her lap from his afternoon exertions. Flora was studying her with wide and incredulous green eyes. ‘Tell me you’re not serious…I thought you hated your ex.’

Jemima shifted her hands in an effort to explain a decision that felt almost inexplicable even to her. ‘What Alejandro said about giving our marriage another go for Alfie’s sake made sense to me,’ she confided ruefully. ‘When I walked out on him I didn’t know I was still pregnant and I’m not sure I would’ve gone if I’d known.’

Her friend’s face was troubled. ‘You were a bag of nerves when I first met you and you had no self-esteem. It’s not my place to criticise your husband but if that’s what being married to him did to you, something was badly wrong.’

‘Several things were badly wrong then, but not everything was his fault.’ Alfie snuggled into his mother’s shoulder with a little snuffle of contentment and she rearranged his solid little body for greater comfort. ‘Marco’s living in New York now and another…er…problem I had, well, it’s gone too,’ she continued, her expressive eyes veiled as she thought back reluctantly to those last stressful months in Spain, which had been, without a doubt, the most distressing and nerve-racking period of her life.

‘You want to give your marriage another chance,’ Flora registered in a tone of quiet comprehension. ‘If that’s what you really do want, I hope it works out the way you hope. But if it doesn’t, I’ll still be here to offer support…’

Chapter Five

FROM her stance on the edge of the small adventure playground, Jemima watched Alejandro park his sumptuous vehicle. Halston Manor estate lay a few miles outside the village and its grounds were open to the public the year round and much used by locals. Jemima had arranged their meeting with care, choosing an outdoor location where Alfie could let off steam and where all interaction between his parents would have to be circumspect.

Alejandro was dressed with unusual informality in a heavy dark jacket, sweater and jeans. Black hair ruffled by the breeze and blowing back from his classic bronzed features, he looked totally amazing and every woman in the vicinity awarded his tall, well-built figure a lingering look. Jemima tried very hard not to stare and, shivering a little in the cool spring air, she dug her hands into the pockets of her red coat and focused on Alfie, who was climbing the steps to the slide, his big dark eyes sparkling with enjoyment.

‘The family resemblance is obvious,’ Alejandro remarked with husky satisfaction. ‘He is very much a Vasquez, though he has your curls and there is a look of you about his eyes and mouth.’

‘I’ve told him about you,’ Jemima informed him.

‘How did he take it?’

‘He’s quite excited about the idea of having a father,’ she confided. ‘But he doesn’t really understand what a father is or what one does.’

In receipt of that news, Alejandro gave both Jemima and Alfie an immediate demonstration, striding forward to intervene when a bigger boy pushed his way past Alfie on the slide steps and the toddler nearly fell. Jemima watched as Alejandro grabbed her son and steadied him. Alfie laughed and smiled up at Alejandro, who spoke to him before stepping back to applaud Alfie’s energetic descent of the slide.

Her attention glued to man and child, Jemima hovered. Father and son did look almost ludicrously alike from their black hair and olive-tinted skin to their dark eyes and the brilliance of their smiles. Alfie shouted at her to join them at the swings and she went over, her small face taut, her eyes wary. She could barely speak to Alejandro, yet they’d had a child together: it was an unsettling thought. She pushed Alfie on the swing and watched him show off for his father’s benefit. Then her son jumped off the swing before it came to a halt and fell, bursting into tears of over-excitement.

Alejandro scooped him up and took him straight over to another piece of equipment to distract him and Alfie quickly stopped crying. Jemima hadn’t expected Alejandro to be as assured at handling a young child as he so obviously was. She watched him crouch down to wipe Alfie’s tear-wet face, and tensed as Alfie suddenly flung his arms round Alejandro and hugged him with the easy affection that was so much a part of him. She saw Alejandro’s expression as well: the sudden blossoming warmth in his dark eyes, the tightening of his fabulous bone structure that suggested that he was struggling to hold back his emotions and the manner in which he vaulted upright to unashamedly hug Alfie back.

Set down again and in high spirits, Alfie scampered over to his mother and grabbed her hand. ‘Ducks…ducks,’ he urged and, turning his head, he called, ‘Papa…Papa!’ in Spanish as if he had been calling Alejandro that all his life.

‘Now we go and feed the ducks,’ Jemima explained to Alejandro.

Alfie tearing ahead of them, they walked along the wide path by the lake.

‘He’s a wonderful little boy,’ Alejandro commented abruptly, his dark, deep accented drawl low pitched and husky. ‘You’ve done well with him.’

Jemima shot him a surprised glance and met gleaming dark golden eyes with an inner quiver. ‘Thanks.’

‘Only a happy, confident child could accept a stranger so easily.’

Warmed by that approval, Jemima felt less defensive and she leant back against a tree and relaxed while Alfie fed the ducks and talked to Alejandro about them. A lot of what the little boy said was nonsense-talk because he only had a small vocabulary, but Alejandro played along. Alfie stretched out a trusting hand to hold his father’s and Alejandro began to tell his son about the lake at the Castillo del Halcón and the ducks that lived there.

‘The recruitment agency got in touch yesterday and have promised to send me a couple of CVs by midweek,’ she told him.

‘Estupendo! Marvellous,’ Alejandro pronounced, studying her from below the dense black fringe of his lashes, eyes a glinting gold provocation that sent colour winging into her cheeks.

He looked at her and she could barely catch her breath. Her nipples were taut, distended buds beneath her clothing and her thighs pressed together as though to contain the rise of the hot, sensitised heat there. She swallowed hard, struggling to shut out the fierce sexual awareness that was racing through her veins like an adrenalin rush.

‘Tell me,’ Alejandro murmured in a lazy undertone as he towered over her, one lean brown hand braced against the tree, and there was absolutely no forewarning of what he was about to say. ‘What did you get from Marco that you couldn’t get from me?’

Jemima recoiled from him as though he had stuck a knife in her and moved away several steps, her face flushing, her eyes evasive and full of discomfiture.

‘Naturally I want to know,’ Alejandro added curtly. So beautiful and so treacherous, he reflected darkly. It was a fact he could not afford to forget.

Jemima threw her head up, her eyes purple with strong emotion. ‘He talked to me, he took me places, he introduced me to his friends…He wanted my opinions and my company, which is more than you ever did!’

In receipt of that recitation of his brother’s deceptive talents, Alejandro dealt her a forbidding appraisal. ‘Primarily, Marco used you to get at me. He’s a player and you found that out for yourself, didn’t you? Did you or did you not tell me that you hadn’t heard from my brother since you left Spain?’

At that retaliatory crack, furious mortification gripped Jemima for, of course, he was correct in that assumption. Put under pressure, Marco’s friendship had lacked strength, permanence and true affection. Refusing to respond in kind, however, she set her teeth together and for wha

t remained of Alejandro’s visit she spoke mainly to Alfie and only when forced to his father.

A month later, a four-wheel-drive driven by an estate worker collected Jemima and Alfie from their flight to Spain. Jemima had hoped that Alejandro might pick them up personally but she was not surprised when he failed to appear. As she had learned when they were first married, Alejandro was always very much in demand and, as his wife, she was usually at the foot of his priorities list.

It was a recollection that could only annoy Jemima on the day that she had had to leave behind both the home and the business that she cherished. An excellent manager had taken over the shop. Jemima had put most of her possessions in storage so that the older woman could also rent her house. But all the work she had put into training as a florist, growing her client base for the shop and decorating her home now seemed pointless. On the other hand, she had only agreed to a three-month sojourn in Spain, Jemima reminded herself bracingly. Surrendering to Alejandro’s blackmail had cost her dear but retaining custody of the little boy securely strapped in the car seat beside her was much, much more important to her.

The Castle of the Hawk sat on rocky heights above a lush wooded valley in the remote Las Alpujarras mountains, the last outpost of the Moors in Spain. Little villages with white flat-roofed houses and steep roads adorned the mountainsides while olive, orange and almond groves, grapevines and crops grown for biofuels flourished in the fertile soil. The Vasquez family had ruled their hidden valley like feudal lords for centuries and anyone seeing Alejandro, the current Conde Olivares, being greeted by deferential locals soon appreciated just how much weight that heritage still carried.