Don Joaquin's Pride

‘Are you normally this slow on the uptake in the morning, querida?’ Joaquin teased with husky amusement as he thrust the door shut behind him.

She was discovering that she could not meet those extraordinary green eyes without being intimately aware that she had conceived his baby. It was bad enough that she was terrified that at any moment Roger might appear to find out who was visiting, but to be burdened with yet another big guilty secret where Joaquin was concerned was all of a sudden just too much for Lucy to handle. Sheer nervous tension made her tummy lurch with nausea.

‘Are you ill?’ Joaquin began to question with a frowning look of concern.

With a stifled moan of chagrin, Lucy raced for the bathroom, but she had the presence of mind to close and lock the door behind her. She was sick. In the aftermath, the loud thumping on the door demanded her attention.

‘Lucy…don’t be stupid, open this door!’ Joaquin urged with considerable impatience.

Hurriedly freshening up, capable of considering nothing but the reality that she felt absolutely awful, Lucy went dizzily back out to the hall.

‘Suppose you’d collapsed in there?’ Joaquin curved a supportive arm round her slim shoulders and then with a muttered curse in Spanish lifted her into his powerful arms to carry her into the lounge opposite and lay her down on the sofa. ‘I’ll get a doctor. You’re just not a very healthy person, querida. I think you need a really thorough medical examination—’

‘No, I—’

‘Lie there and keep quiet,’ Joaquin instructed, standing over her clutching his mobile phone with an air of serious purpose. ‘How could I have taunted you with the amount of time you have spent out of work in recent years? It is obvious to me now that you suffer from a great deal of ill-health.’

‘I really don’t need a doctor,’ Lucy began, trying to sound forceful enough to stop him in his bossy tracks.

‘Allow me to tell you what you need.’

‘But you don’t know—’

‘I know it’s not normal to look green,’ Joaquin slotted in crushingly.

‘I’m pregnant…’ The confession just escaped her in a weary burst of resentful frustration at his refusal to listen to a word she was saying.

But this time Joaquin had listened, and the phone dropped clean out of his hand as he involuntarily loosened his grip on it. His lush ebony lashes lifted, revealing stunned green eyes. But then the oddest thing happened. He screened his gaze again, threw back his wide shoulders as if he was squaring up to a challenge, and said only the slightest bit unsteadily, ‘Sí…so you still need a doctor.’

‘Talk about interrupting at the optimum wrong moment…’ another male voice groaned from across the room.

In all the excitement, Lucy had totally forgotten about Roger. She was still caught up in the drama of having told Joaquin she was pregnant without actually having intended to tell him. But the sound of Roger’s apologetic intrusion was an even greater shock, and she reared up off the sofa just in time to see her sister’s large bulky fiancé backing speedily into the hall again, looking almost comically embarrassed by what he had overheard.

‘Por Dios…no wonder you acted so weird when you saw me at your door!’ Joaquin framed thickly, his accent growling along every carefully enunciated syllable. His bronzed skin had an ashen quality as he studied her with seething contempt.

‘I think…I think it’s time that I explained something to you,’ Lucy muttered tautly, thinking frantically fast and seeing that full confession was the only option left. ‘But could we go somewhere else to talk about it because it’s kind of private?’

‘Roger Harkness…what need is there of privacy to explain his presence here in your apartment?’ Joaquin demanded with volcanic force, spreading both arms wide with the sort of volatile expressive body language that was extremely intimidating. ‘You got back into bed with your ex-fiancé after sleeping with me. I neglected to offer you an option sufficient to keep you out of other men’s beds! You came back here to him last night…you slut!’

Lucy turned pale as death. ‘It’s not like that, Joaquin, because—’

Joaquin focused on her with a dark blistering fury that only seemed to heighten with every second which had passed since Roger’s hasty exist. ‘And now you’re pregnant and you can’t possibly know which of us is the father…I’ll get DNA tests done when the baby’s born. In the meantime, he’s welcome to you, if he still wants you, but only after I’ve beaten the living daylights out of him!’

For a staggered instant, Lucy was paralysed to the spot by that unashamed threat of violence. Joaquin strode out of the room like a man on a mission. Lucy regained the use of her limbs and surged in his wake. ‘Joaquin…for goodness’ sake!’

But Joaquin was throwing wide every door he came to in search of a fight, indifferent, it seemed, to Lucy’s efforts to prevent him. Nobody was more surprised than Lucy when Roger failed to appear. She reckoned that her future brother-in-law must have walked straight out of the apartment to give her and Joaquin peace to talk.

‘Infierno!’ Baulked of his prey, and incredulous that Roger had evidently just gone out and left them alone together, Joaquin grated in wrathful frustration, ‘What sort of coward is he that he runs away from a fight?’

‘Please just calm down for a moment and listen to me,’ Lucy urged feverishly.

Joaquin turned ferociously bright green eyes full of condemnation on her. ‘Listen? Listen so that you can whisper lying explanations into my ears and try to convince me that the child you carry is mine?’ he countered with savage derision. ‘It will snow in hell before I listen to you again!’

And with that highly emotive smouldering condemnation, Joaquin strode out of the apartment.

Lucy was in a sobbing heap on the sofa when Roger reappeared. ‘So that was Joaquin Del Castillo,’ he remarked as Lucy crammed a tissue to her mouth and sat up, struggling to pull herself together again. ‘I feel really sorry for that guy.’

Stunned by that most telling admission from her sister’s fiancé, Lucy gaped at him.

‘Yes, I know the whole story. Cindy kept me up until dawn talking about it,’ Roger revealed. ‘I’m more or less beyond being shocked now, but she didn’t mention that other matter…the one I really would rather not have overheard.’

‘Cindy doesn’t know and I’m not going to mention it just yet,’ Lucy muttered tightly on the subject of her pregnancy. She realised that she was kind of beyond shock as well, after the distressing encounter she had just had with Joaquin. The guy she loved, the father of her baby, had just walked away, thinking all sorts of crazy horrible things about her.

‘I want to thank you for looking out for Cindy while I was away,’ Roger said flatly. ‘I owe you…we both owe you on that score.’

Lucy gave him a blank look.

‘Come on, Lucy. Your common sense prevented her from making a bad situation ten times worse. If she’d lost her head and dug her heels in, she most probably would have ended up in court accused of fraud,’ Roger stated tautly, his frank open face stiff. ‘Quite frankly, it’s fortunate it was you in Guatemala!’

Lucy was embarrassed. She could see that he was still angry with her sister.

‘With my help, Cindy will pay back every penny with interest to that old man,’ Roger told her squarely.

‘But she didn’t mean to hurt anybody,’ Lucy pointed out hurriedly, before he left the room, still looking really grim.

Her thoughts turning to her own situation then, Lucy accepted that she had got herself into an awful mess. No matter which way she broke the news, Joaquin would be outraged by the manner in which she and her sister had deceived him, and Lucy knew with a sinking heart that she would have to wait until the wedding was over before she risked telling Joaquin the truth of her identity.

Roger’s faith in Cindy had been shaken. The very last thing Roger needed now was to see her twin confronted by Joaquin in a righteous rage. That might just be the straw that would break the camel’s

back. Lucy already suspected that Roger had used this report for his firm as an excuse to put some distance between himself and her twin while he came to terms with what he had been told. What if Roger decided to call off the wedding? Lucy saw for herself that the situation could still go either way. Right now, marooned with Roger’s parents, forced to go on pretending that she was a happy bride-to-be and entertain visitors, poor Cindy had to be really suffering.

So, although every instinct Lucy possessed was urging her to track Joaquin down without further loss of time and tell him that she was not Cindy Paez, she didn’t feel that she could dare take that risk in case it rebounded on her twin. But, at the same time, it really hurt Lucy to leave Joaquin believing that she had already turned to another man and that she couldn’t be sure of who had fathered their child. Right now, Joaquin truly believed that she was a slut. Hadn’t she been in his arms yesterday? However, in about forty-eight hours she could get in touch with him and sort it all out, she promised herself wretchedly.

In the afternoon, Lucy went out and walked round the shops, with their wonderful festive displays. Roger had been pacing restively round the apartment, looking increasingly uncomfortable at her presence. That had worried Lucy even more. Naturally he would start feeling awkward if he was toying with the idea of dumping her sister two days before their wedding.

Yolanda called her on the mobile phone she had given her. ‘Have you still got Joaquin with you?’ she asked brightly.

‘No, he’s long gone…I mean, he didn’t stay long,’ Lucy rephrased hurriedly.

‘Did he offer you the job?’

‘What job?’

Yolanda proceeded to tell her that she was prepared to go back to school but only as a day girl, not as a boarder. Joaquin had pointed out that, although he could spend more time in London, he was often abroad and she couldn’t stay alone in the townhouse with just the staff for company.

‘So I suggested that he could give you the job of being my companion,’ Yolanda completed with satisfaction.