The Secret Wife

He froze in astonishment.

‘Taki, please,’ she pleaded as the dogs got closer.

He gave her a leg-up over the ten-foot wall. By then another alarm was screeching in tune with the siren. Rosie dropped down onto the road and then scudded across it into the cover of some bushes. A police car with a flashing light wheeled to a screeching halt as the electronic gates sprang open. Rosie set off up the road. Eat your heart out, Rambo, she thought smugly. But Constantine really ought to employ Taki elsewhere. Taki was too impressionable for Constantine’s safety.

Why the heck should she care? Well, she might be putting as much distance as she possibly could between herself and Constantine but she didn’t want anything really bad to happen to him. Her father had been very fond of him. As for her, well, Constantine had taken the ring and severed their agreement. He was on his own now, and so was she, and that was just the way Rosie liked it.

CHAPTER SIX

‘WHERE the blazes are you?’ Maurice bawled at deafening volume down the line.

Rosie held the telephone at a distance from her ear. ‘Majorca—’

‘Majorca? What the blinkin’ heck are you doing there? Constantine’s been here... he was frantic! Hell, Rosie, you might have at least left the poor bloke a note! He—’

‘Since when did you start feeling sorry for Constantine?’ Rosie interrupted in an incredulous hiss.

‘Since I saw him demonstrating serious concern for your whereabouts and welfare,’ Maurice informed her with nauseating piety. ‘You’re abroad for the first time in your life, you don’t speak the lingo, you don’t have any money and you disappeared from his home in the middle of the night. I thought you’d grown out of doing moonlit flits.’

‘It wasn’t like that.’ But Rosie flushed furiously.

‘Constantine was hopping mad when he arrived because he was so certain you would be here with me. But when he found out that you weren’t he started panicking.’

‘Constantine is not the panicking type—’

‘Where did you get the money to take yourself to Majorca?’

‘Never mind that, I want to know how—’

‘Where are you staying? I’m coming over.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous—’

‘I’m fed up with you and Constantine raving about the globe like a couple of hot-tempered, irrational lunatics. Last time I saw him he was mobilising the Greek police to look for you! If you don’t tell me where you’re staying, I’ll tell him you’re in Majorca—’

Five seconds later, Rosie slammed out of the phone box without even having found out how the news of the wedding had got into the hands of the Press. It upset her to be at loggerheads with Maurice but it was time that he appreciated that she was no longer the terrified thirteen-year-old he had once saved from sexual assault. She clambered back onto the motorbike she had hired, trying not to think with miserly regret about the secret rainy-day account she had more than half-emptied in the space of three days.

Her sparkling eyes hardened as she rode out of the sleepy little village and back onto the endless mountain road with its perilous bends and truly terrifying drops. Knowing that Constantine had flown over to England in pursuit of her made her feel hunted. It infuriated her too. Little more than a month ago she had not even met the swine and now he was acting as if he owned her! So what if she had fled imprisonment in the middle of the night? She had done what she had agreed to do in marrying him and he had no right, no right whatsoever, to try and demand any further sacrifices from her!

By mid-morning, Rosie was studying a battered iron name-plate hanging by a piece of barbed wire from a set of seriously rusty gates. Son Fontanal appeared to lie up a rutted cart track that climbed a steep hill thickly wooded with pines. Half an hour later, having abandoned the motorbike under the trees, Rosie gazed down at her father’s birthplace in the fertile valley below and caught her breath in enchantment.

The villa had a faded red roof and ageless peach-coloured stone walls, the twin wings of the two-storey building joined by a graceful loggia supported on pillars lushly entwined by a giant jacaranda. Furthermore there appeared to be a more passable paved laneway running to the rear of the building. On the south side, a series of crumbling arches ran round the perimeter of an overgrown garden studded with palm trees. Not crumbling, just old, Rosie adjusted hurriedly, and maybe there were a few roof tiles missing here and there and a few cracks on the walls... but no way was Son Fontanal the ruin which Constantine had called it!

She hurried down the sloping track, her steps only slowing as she approached the courtyard entrance. A plump elderly lady was dozing on a chair in the shade cast by the loggia. As Rosie drew closer, wondering how on earth she was to introduce herself, the old woman woke up and fixed startled eyes on her. Then her creased face slowly blossomed into a beam of positive pleasure.

Rising with surprising vigour, she opened her arms almost as if she was expecting Rosie to rush into them. ‘Señorita Estrada?’ she exclaimed.

Being addressed by her father’s name made Rosie still in astonishment. A torrent of Spanish broke over her as the old lady surged forward to clasp her hands and kiss her warmly on both cheeks. Tears shone in her dark eyes. From the pocket of her pristine white apron, she withdrew a rather crumpled photograph. ‘La hija de Don Antonio...the daughter of Don Antonio,’ she sighed, proudly displaying a snapshot of Anton and Rosie together. ‘I am Carmina...’

Carmina, once her father’s nursemaid. Rosie realised that she needed no further introduction. This old lady actually knew who she was. When Anton had flown in to buy Son Fontanal, he had found Carmina still in residence, and in the emotional grip of that reunion and homecoming he had clearly confessed that he had a daughter. Rosie’s own eyes stung and a tremulous smile of happiness curved her lips. It meant so much to her that her father had confided in someone about her existence.

The old woman went back into her pocket and produced a carefully folded piece of newspaper and slowly shook her grey head. ‘No señorita...señora,’ Carmina stressed with a cheerful smile of self-reproof. ‘Senora Voulos...yes?’

Bloody hell, Rosie thought, limp with incredulity and resentment. Halfway up a mountain in a foreign country, she still couldn’t shake off Constantine and the consequences of that stupid wedding ceremony! Speaking in an excitable mix of Spanish and increasingly confident English now, Carmina went on to enquire anxiously as to the whereabouts of her esposo...Spanish for husband, Rosie gathered, her teeth gritting. And almost simultaneously a distant humming noise in the background broke like a thunderclap over the brow of the steep hill she had climbed. Frowning, she looked heavenward.

A scarlet helicopter hung like a giant brash bird against the cloudless blue sky. Rosie left the courtyard to watch the craft circling in search of a landing place. It came down about fifty yards away on the flat ground to the front of the villa. Even before the rotor blades had stopped twirling, a large male figure sprang out. Rosie’s heart sank and then gave a paradoxically violent lurch of excitement that interfered with her ability to breathe and filled her with appalled and ashamed discomfiture.

Constantine powered towards her on long, lean, muscular legs. Rosie skidded off one foot onto the other, accidentally clashed with blazing, implacable black eyes and froze, caught like a butterfly pinned live to a specimen board. ‘I—’ she began in an odd, squeaky, breathless voice she didn’t recognise as her own.