‘Long before we were married. That time you decided that if I was seeing other women you would see another man,’ he specified.
Undaunted by the reminder, Jemima tilted her chin. ‘That was fair enough,’ she commented.
‘You were in the street, smiling at him the same way you smiled at me and he was holding your hand,’ Alejandro recalled, his dark eyes brooding with remembered hostility and recoil. ‘I couldn’t stand it. There is nothing I wouldn’t have done to get him out of your life! But that predilection for jealousy stayed with me. It’s in my nature.’
She remembered how fast their relationship had become exclusive once Alejandro had realised that the agreement had to cut both ways. But it was news to her that his demon jealousy had continued to dog him.
In the simmering silence, Alejandro clenched his hands into powerful fists. He sent her a burning look of condemnation from below the fringe of his lush black lashes. ‘If you want honesty, I’ll give it to you. I hated you spending so much time with my brother three years ago. I tried very hard to be reasonable about it. I knew I was working too many hours. I knew you were bored and unhappy, but you and Marco got on too well. You seemed so close. Of course it bothered me at a time when our marriage was under strain. I thought I was losing you. Naturally I began to believe that you had more than a platonic friendship going with my brother.’
‘Even though I was pregnant with Alfie and was as sick as a dog for weeks on end?’ Jemima pressed, keen to bring him to an awareness of how far-fetched his fears had been in the circumstances.
‘Your friendship with Marco started months before that. He was always seeking you out, phoning you, sharing secret jokes with you…’
‘I suppose we were too close for comfort. He told me his big secret that he was gay and it made me feel privileged,’ she muttered ruefully. ‘I just didn’t realise that you could be jealous of me because you never let me see it.’
‘I was too proud to show you my Achilles’ heel. But the jealousy tortured me and twisted the way I saw everything,’ he revealed in a roughened admission. ‘I thought you were taunting me with your preference for Marco’s company.’
Jemima swallowed and then spoke up even though she didn’t want to speak up on that angle. ‘There was an element of that in my attitude. I so wanted your attention. I thought that if you saw how much Marco liked being with me it might make you want to spend more time with me,’ she confessed unhappily. T didn’t know that you were working so hard because you were trying to keep your businesses afloat. I thought you were bored with me.’
‘I felt many things when we were first married but boredom never featured for even five minutes,’ Alejandro revealed with a look of sardonic amusement marking his lean, darkly handsome features.
In the moonlight, which silvered his bronzed skin and accentuated the angles and hollows of his sculptured face, his sheer masculine beauty took her breath away. It crossed her mind that she now loved him much more deeply than she had when she first married him. She saw the man and his flaws. He wasn’t perfect but it didn’t matter because neither was she. But all that truly mattered to her just then was that he had never stopped wanting her before or after their marriage. Jealousy, assuming he could keep it within bounds, well, she could live with it by understanding that all that deep dark emotion of his had to occasionally find the wrong outlet.
‘Why were you drinking?’ she asked him worriedly.
Alejandro released a bleak laugh that was like a cold hand trailing down her spine. He settled haunted dark eyes on her, his tension unrelieved by their discussion. ‘I let you down. I let you down in every way that mattered. You were my wife and, instead of supporting you and caring for you, I accused you of sleeping with my brother. Then I drove you away.’
‘But now you know the truth.’
‘And like many truths, it’s not one I will enjoy living with.’ Lean, powerful face grim, he yanked off his shirt in a physical move that startled her and strode past her, his steps even, his head high as though the very act of having had to talk to her had sobered him up. ‘I need a shower.’
And Jemima went back to bed and lay awake waiting for him, but wherever he went to wash it wasn’t in the en suite bathroom that adjoined the master bedroom. And wherever he slept it was not with her.
The next morning, however, it was business as usual for Alejandro. There was not a hint of the night’s excesses visible in his crackling vitality and immaculately dressed appearance or, indeed, in his light and courteous conversation over breakfast. He’d made arrangements for the car she had driven to Seville to be returned to the estate and they left for the airfield and the short flight home. Alfie came running out into the garden to greet his parents and Alejandro snatched his son off his feet and hugged him close with an unashamed affection that touched Jemima’s heart while making her crave the same treatment. Why were pride and perfection so important to Alejandro? Why could she accept his faults and live with them so much more easily than he could hers? She hadn’t expected a perfect man and she hadn’t got one. A more enlightened husband willing to accept that there was a learning curve in their marriage was the very best she could reasonably hope for. The difference between them was that she was already happy with the balance they had achieved now that he knew the truth about her supposed ‘affair’.
It was the very next day that she received her second phone call from her father. She was with Alejandro when the call arrived and she excused herself to take it.
‘It’s normal for a man to expect his daughter to help him out,’ Stephen Grey told her in a self-pitying whine. ‘I’m not long out of prison, times are tough…’
‘Have you tried to find work?’ Jemima enquired flatly.
‘It’s not that easy.’
‘You’ve never worked, never tried to keep yourself honestly. I’m not giving you any money this time.’
‘How can you be so selfish? You’re married to a very rich man. I’ve done my homework on him. You can afford to be generous—’
‘I don’t intend to spend the rest of my life being blackmailed by you. I’ve said no. You’re out of luck. I’m not giving you a single euro of my husband’s hard-earned cash. For a start, it’s not mine to give,’ Jemima asserted with cold clarity, and she replaced the phone receiver the instant she heard the warning rumble of her father’s abusive response beginning.
She felt hot with shame when she recalled how she had first given way to her father’s threats almost three years earlier, recklessly and fearfully handing over cash that she now knew Alejandro had not been able to afford just to keep the older man silent. Now she was calling Stephen Grey’s bluff while dreading the prospect that he might go to the newspapers to reveal their relationship. The sleazy tale of her father’s criminality and her unsavoury background and upbringing could only embarrass Alejandro and his family.
‘Who was that on the phone?’ Alejandro asked when she joined him and her son in the swimming pool, her slender body fetchingly clad in a ruffled apricot bikini.
‘Oh, just someone from home.’ Jemima struggled to telegraph casualness and lifted and dropped a thin shoulder while feeling the stiff discomfiture of virtually lying to him handicapping her pretence. ‘Nobody important.’
It seemed to her that Alejandro’s dark golden eyes rested on her a little longer than they need have done but, mercifully, he said nothing and went back to the task of teaching Alfie to swim. Very much a water baby, her son paddled over to her and giggled as he splashed her. The movement of the water was like cool silk lapping against Jemima’s overheated skin. She rested back against the side and took in the sweeping view of the lush valley encircled by the snow-capped peaks. Her marriage had a horizon and a future again. She was not about to let go of that without a fight.
In the week that followed, Alejandro went out of his way to spend time with her and Alfie but, even though he returned to the marital bed, he didn’t make love to her again. They dined out twice and on the second occ
asion he gave her a fabulous diamond ring just before they went out.
‘What is this for?’ she asked helplessly over dinner, watching the light flash blindingly on the glittering jewel and knowing that such magnificence must have cost at least two arms and a leg.
His ebony brows drew together, his dark golden eyes level. ‘You’re my wife. It’s natural for me to want to give you gifts.’
‘As long as it’s not your guilty conscience talking,’ Jemima cut in uncomfortably. ‘You don’t need to buy me, Alejandro. You already have me.’
‘Do I? That’s not something I would like to take for granted. You like pretty things,’ he drawled softly. And I like giving them to you. I always did.’
Jemima turned a guilty pink. ‘I had a fairly dismal childhood and I suppose I’m still making up for what I didn’t get then.’
‘You never talk about your childhood.’