Contract Baby

In response, Raul shot her a chilling glance as piercing as an arrow of ice. His lean, strong face was hard. ‘Infierno! I suspected something of the sort last night. Let me tell you now that I do not expect my wife to make furtive assignations with my employees!’

‘It wasn’t an assign—’

‘And from now on you will ensure that you are never in Patrick Gorman’s company without the presence of a third party.’

Thoroughly taken aback, Polly exclaimed, ‘Don’t be ridiculous! ’

His brilliant eyes flashed. ‘As your husband, I have the right to demand a certain standard of behaviour from you.’

Polly was outraged and mortified. ‘But you’re being totally unreasonable. “The presence of a third party”!’ she repeated in a fuming undertone of incredulity.

‘If you disobey me, I’ll dismiss him.’

Raul held her shaken eyes with fierce intensity, and then simply switched channels by telling her that she was sitting on the mare’s back like a seasick sack of potatoes. The riding lesson which followed stretched Polly’s selfdiscipline to the limits. She had to rise above that abrasive exchange and concentrate on his instructions, and Raul had high expectations.

Finally, Raul led her out onto the Ilanos at a walking pace. ‘You’re doing very well for a greenhorn, mi esposa,’ he drawled, surprising her.

Polly focused on his darkly handsome features. As her tummy lurched with reaction, she despised herself. Not an hour ago Raul had been talking like a Middle Eastern potentate who thought no woman could be trusted alone with a man.

A frown line forming between his brows, Raul reined in his mount a few minutes later. A rider was approaching them—an elderly llanero with a bristling silver moustache, clad in an old-fashioned poncho and a wide-brimmed hat.

Raul addressed him in Spanish.

‘My grandfather, Fidelio Navarro,’ he told Polly flatly.

With a sober look of acknowledgement, his posture in the saddle rigid, the older man responded in softly spoken Spanish. He was as unyielding as Raul. Polly glanced between them in frustration. Raul and his grandfather greeted each other like strangers, each as scrupulously formal and rigid with unbending pride as the other.

Polly leant out of the saddle to extend her hand, a warm and determined smile on her face. After some hesitation, Fidelio Navarro moved his mount closer and briefly clasped her hand. ‘It would please me very much if you came to see our son, Luis,’ Polly said quietly.

‘He doesn’t speak English,’ Raul breathed icily.

Not daring to look at him, conscious that he was angrily disconcerted by her intervention, Polly tilted her chin. ‘Then please translate my invitation. And could you also tell him that as I have neither parents nor grandparents living, it would mean a great deal to me if Luis was given the chance to know his great-grandfather?’

Silence followed, a silence screaming with tension and Raul’s outright incredulity.

Then Raul spoke at some length. His grandfather met Polly’s hopeful gaze and sombrely replied.

‘He thanks you for your warmth and generosity,’ Raul interpreted woodenly. ‘He will think the idea over.’

But there had been more than that in Fidelio’s sun-creased dark eyes: a slight defrosting of his discomfiture, an easing of the rigidity round his unsmiling mouth. As they parted to ride off in different directions, she heard Raul release his breath in a stark hiss.

‘Caramba! How can you justify such interference in what is nothing to do with you?’ Raul gritted in a tone of raw disbelief that actually shook with the strength of his emotion. ‘Do you think I have not already invited him to my home without success?’

‘Well, if you glower at him like that when you ask, I’m not surprised. Maybe he thought you were only asking out of politeness, privately recognising the relationship without really wanting to get any closer...’ Daringly, Polly proffered her own suspicions. ‘I think you and Fidelio are both so scared of losing face that you’re afraid to talk frankly to each other.’

‘I am afraid of nothing, and how you can dare—’

‘I did it for Luis,’ Polly lied, because she had spoken up first and foremost for Raul’s benefit—Raul, who definitely wanted closer ties with his grandfather. ‘Neither of us have any other family to offer him.’

‘What do I know about family?’ Raul growled, spurring on El Lobo in the direction of the ranch.

‘What do I know either?’ Polly thought of her own less than perfect childhood, with her controlling, judgemental father. ‘But we are a family now, and we can learn like everybody else!’

‘A family?’ Raul repeated in frowning acknowledgement, and with perceptible disconcertion. ‘I suppose we are.’

Only sparing the time to inform her that they were leaving for his villa on the Caribbean coast that afternoon, Raul took his leave. Polly went for a bath to ease her tired muscles. It was all swings and roundabouts with Raul, she thought heavily. One moment he was alienating her with his tyrannical and utterly unreasonable threat to dismiss Patrick Gorman simply because she had unthinkingly stepped over the formal boundary lines Raul expected her to maintain. And the next?

The next, Raul was filling her with an almost overwhelming desire to close her arms round him in comfort and reassurance. For Raul, she recognised, the years between birth and adulthood had been dogged by traumatic experiences.