‘Try not to stiffen up. It will make Chica nervous,’ he responded in a curiously constrained tone as he bent his head.
‘Do you think I’m not nervous, stuck up here ten feet off the ground?’ Lucy gasped before she could snatch the words back.
He spread fluid hands very slowly and stepped back. ‘I assure you that you will come to no harm.’
In strained silence, she watched him attach what he had called a leading rein to the huge black stallion twitching its hooves like a threatening volcano several feet away. ‘I hope you can control that monster…I hope it’s not going to run away with you—’
‘No horse has ever run away with me, señora,’ Joaquin Del Castillo gritted, half under his breath.
And if any had he certainly wouldn’t admit it, Lucy decided. Joaquin Del Castillo was of a breed of male utterly unknown to her. All sizzling, musclebound temperament and just bursting with pride over the fact. Any form of weakness, she sensed, would be anathema to him. And he despised her…well, he despised Cindy, and, as she was pretending to be Cindy, she was stuck with being despised.
But why was Joaquin Del Castillo being so hostile and rude? After all, she had dutifully come to visit Fidelio, as he had demanded. And, whether he knew it or not, he could thank his lucky stars that she wasn’t Cindy. Her twin would have been halfway back to the airport by now! Cindy had a very quick temper, not to mention a love and expectation of comfort. Furthermore, accustomed as she was to male admiration, Cindy would never have withstood the attacks and indignities meted out to the sister eleven minutes her junior.
Ironically, Cindy had forecast that Lucy would be treated like a princess from the moment she arrived in Guatemala. Apparently Fidelio Paez’s letters had shown him to be an old-fashioned gentleman with an instinctive need to be protective towards any member of the female sex. But Fidelio was generations older than his neighbour, Joaquin Del Castillo, Lucy conceded wryly. There was no intrinsic old-world Latin gallantry to be had from her companion. Why? Evidently he saw Cindy as a scarlet woman just because she had slept with Mario on their first date. What did he think a whirlwind romance entailed? So Cindy had got carried away by love and passion. How dared he sneer?
‘How is Fidelio?’ Lucy suddenly asked.
Joaquin shot her a grim glance. ‘You finally remembered him?’
Lucy flushed.
‘He is as well as can be expected in the circumstances.’ With that scathing and uninformative assurance, he leapt up into the saddle and made further enquiry impossible.
As the horses plodded at a snail’s pace out of the tiny settlement, Lucy focused on his wide-shouldered back view. Joaquin Del Castillo moved as if he was part of the stallion. Lucy endeavoured to unknot her own tense muscles, but she was so terrified of falling off that no sooner did she contrive to loosen one muscle than two others tightened in compensation.
‘Slow down!’ she called frantically within minutes, when the pace speeded up and her hips started to rise and fall bruisingly on the hard saddle beneath her.
He reined in and swung round. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘If I fall off and break a leg, I won’t be much use to Fidelio!’ Lucy warned, with a strained attempt at an apologetic smile.
‘Soon it will be dark—’
‘So you keep on promising,’ Lucy muttered limply, convinced she was boiling alive beneath her poncho. ‘I can hardly wait for that sun to sink.’
‘I am so sorry that this means of travel is not to your taste, señora.’
‘Oh, call me Lucy, for goodness’ sake. That formal address is a nonsense when you match it with your appalling manners!’
Before her eyes Joaquin Del Castillo froze, hard jawline squaring, nostrils flaring.
‘I do realise that you neither like nor approve of me, and I can’t stand hypocrisy,’ Lucy admitted uncomfortably, her voice dying away in the stillness of his complete silence.
‘Your name is Cindy. Why would I call you Lucy?’
In horror at her accidental slip, Lucy bent her head, suddenly belatedly grateful that her late parents had seen fit to name their twin daughters Lucinda and Lucille. ‘Most people call me Lucy now. Cindy was for the teen years,’ she lied breathlessly.
‘Lucinda,’ he sounded out with syllabic thoroughness, and pressed his knees into the stallion’s flanks.
Lucy struggled to stay on board the mare as they wended their way out across the bleached grass plain. The emptiness was eerie. Sky and grass, and all around the heat, like a hard physical entity beating down on her without remorse. There were no buildings, no people, not even the cattle she had dimly expected to see. The eventual sight of a gnarled set of palm trees on a very slight incline should have been enough for her to throw her hat high in celebration. But she didn’t have enough energy left. Indeed, by that stage she had already lost all track of time. Even to shrug back the poncho, lift one wrist and glance at her watch felt like too much effort.
‘I need a drink,’ she finally croaked, her mouth dry as a bone.
‘There is a water bottle attached to your saddle,’ Joaquin informed her drily over his shoulder. ‘But don’t drink too much. You’ll make yourself sick.’
‘You’ll have to get the bottle,’ Lucy told him in a small voice, because really she was beginning to feel like the biggest whiniest drag in the whole of Guatemala. ‘I don’t like looking down. It makes me feel dizzy.’
Joaquin Del Castillo rode the stallion round in a circle, leant out across the divide between their respective mounts with acrobatic confidence and detached the water bottle, the fluid movement simplistic in its highly deceptive air of effortless ease. Indeed, the whole operation took Lucy’s breath away.
‘I saw a Cossack rider do something like that at a circus once,’ Lucy confided shyly.
‘I did not learn to ride in a circus, señ
ora,’ Joaquin Del Castillo responded with icy hauteur.
‘It was meant to be a compliment, actually.’ Turning her discomfited face away, Lucy let the water drift down into her parched mouth.
‘That’s enough,’ Joaquin Del Castillo told her within seconds.
Lucy handed the bottle back, wiped her mouth with an unsteady hand and drooped like a dying swan over Chica’s silky mane. With a groaned imprecation in Spanish, Joaquin Del Castillo sprang out of the saddle and planted his hands on her waist. ‘Let go of the reins.’
In surprise, Lucy unclenched her stiff fingers and found herself swept down from the mare into a pair of frighteningly powerful arms. ‘What on earth—?’
‘You will ride with me on El Lobo,’ Joaquin announced as he swung her up on to the huge stallion’s back, following her up so fast into the saddle she didn’t even have the chance to argue.
As Lucy curved uneasily away from the hard heat of his lean, muscular thighs, a strong arm settled round her abdomen and forced her inexorably back. ‘Stay still…I will not allow you to fall,’ he said impatiently.
Shaken by the sudden intimate contact of their bodies, Lucy dragged in a deep, shivering breath. The disturbingly insidious scent of warm male assailed her. Her dry mouth ran even dryer. He smelt of hot skin and horse. Something twisted low in her tummy, increasing her nervous unease, but at least she felt safe in his hold. As her tension ebbed, slow, pervasive warmth blossomed in its stead, making her feel strangely limp and yielding. The soft peaks of her breasts tightened into hard little points, filling her with a heat that had nothing to do with the relentless sun above. She jerked taut on the shattering acknowledgement that her body was responding without her volition to the sexually charged sizzle of Joaquin Del Castillo’s raw masculinity.
‘Relax,’ he murmured softly, long brown fingers splaying across her midriff to ease her back into position again.
When he talked, soft and low, he had the most beautiful dark honeyed accent, she thought abstractedly, and never had she been as outrageously aware of anything as she was of that lean hand pressing just below her breasts. Her heart was pounding like a hammer inside her ribcage.