Don Joaquin's Pride

Lucy absorbed the surprising detail of his instructions with ever-widening eyes.

Joaquin sent her a slashing sidewise glance and his strong jawline set even harder. ‘I’m thinking of the look of things for my extended family and friends…on film, you understand. We’ll throw a big party and show the film at it when we return to Guatemala to see in the New Year.’

‘So we’ll be spending Christmas here?’ Lucy gathered. ‘May I order a tree?’

For the count of five seconds Joaquin looked as though he had not a clue what she was talking about.

‘A Christmas tree…’ she extended awkwardly.

‘Do as you wish,’ Joaquin said, with all the enthusiasm of Ebenezer Scrooge, his impatience palpable.

And then he was gone.

‘The look of things’? For the sake of appearances alone? Lucy was very pale. She opened the jewellery box and caught her breath at the glittering diamond ring formed in the shape of a flower. It was exquisite and very unusual. An engagement ring, or as he had called it, a betrothal ring. ‘My sister will expect it’. That stabbed her to the heart, and she couldn’t help but think how painfully ironic it was that Joaquin should condemn her for the deception she had practised on him but then make it crystal-clear that he expected her to put on another dishonest charade where their marriage was concerned.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

‘FOR a cheap dress that had to be bought off the peg, it looks really good,’ Yolanda conceded forty-eight hours later as she appraised the wedding gown which Lucy wore from all angles.

‘It was a very expensive buy!’ Lucy protested.

‘Lucy…you have a new scale of expense to learn now that you are about to become a Del Castillo. Anything that hasn’t been specially designed for you is cheap!’

But it was still a dream of a dress. Alone, Lucy would never have entered the couture salon to which Yolanda had taken her only the day before. By that late stage, fretting at her failure to find anything which would be worthy of the tiara which Joaquin had mentioned, Lucy had been getting really desperate. The gown had been a sample, in a tiny size. Without a murmur about the inconvenience, it had been shortened to fit her last night and delivered first thing that morning, a delicate confection of rich fine fabric, its bodice and long slender sleeves overlaid with a very fine tracery of seed pearls.

‘I think it is so cool that Joaquin just can’t wait to marry you,’ Yolanda confided with a grin, helping Lucy to anchor the magnificent diamond tiara to the lace veil. ‘Yet when he followed us to London, whenever I mentioned you he changed the subject! I suppose that means that when a guy is really, really crazy about someone he doesn’t want to talk about it like a woman does.’

‘No,’ Lucy agreed hurriedly, bowing her head.

She had not even seen Joaquin since he’d left for Paris. He had returned very late the previous night. With Yolanda in the house, determined that every tradition should be followed, Lucy had found her efforts to go down to breakfast blocked and had ended up eating off a tray instead, while being lectured on what bad luck it would be for her to see Joaquin before they met at the altar.

Following the ceremony, Yolanda was spending a few days with a schoolfriend. She and her brother had finally reached an agreement on her future. The teenager would board during the week but come home to the townhouse at weekends. After she had sat her exams in June, she would have the option of completing her education in Guatemala.

A limousine ferried Lucy and Yolanda to a little church on the outskirts of London. Lucy couldn’t believe her eyes when she saw the equivalent of a whole camera crew in place, awaiting their arrival.

‘This will make the television news at home,’ Yolanda pointed out to her, surprised at Lucy’s surprise.

In fact the whole ceremony was taped, but Lucy, who would have been very nervous about that idea had she known about it in advance, took account of nothing and nobody but Joaquin from the minute she walked down the aisle. And from the instant she entered the church his attention was on her. Joaquin was sheathed in a superb pale grey suit which threw into prominence his devastating dark good-looks. As his bright eyes met hers Lucy was conscious only of an intense sense of happiness, and every other concern just fell away.

The ceremony complete, the ring on her finger, Lucy floated back into the limousine on Joaquin’s arm.

He gave her a slow smile. ‘You look superb, querida.’

‘Yolanda said it was a cheap dress.’

Joaquin laughed with rich amusement. ‘The term is relative when used by my sister!’

‘Oh, my goodness!’ Lucy suddenly clamped a hand to her mouth in dismay. ‘May I borrow your phone?’

‘What’s wrong?’ he demanded, extending the carphone with a frown etched between his straight ebony brows.

‘I was supposed to start work today and I totally forgot to ring and tell them that I wouldn’t be taking the job after all!’ While Joaquin looked on in apparent astonishment, Lucy called directory enquiries to get the number of the toy store and then rang to offer profuse apologies for not having informed them of her change of heart sooner.

‘Why are you looking at me like that?’ Lucy asked self-consciously when she had replaced the phone, her conscience at peace again.

‘It is your wedding day. I’m amazed that you took the trouble to make that call.’

‘I don’t like letting people down.’

His lean strong features had hardened. ‘Isn’t it a shame that you couldn’t afford me the same consideration?’

‘If you’re talking about me having pretended to be Cindy,’ Lucy responded tautly, ‘that is an entirely different matter.’

‘Por Dios…you have a talent for understatement.’

Lucy breathed in deep. ‘But I might have told the truth sooner had you not made so many unpleasant remarks about my sister’s past and then gone on to suggest that her future husband ought to be warned about what she was like.’

‘So that’s your excuse. I was very angry about what the old man had had to suffer.’

‘Cindy never intended anybody to suffer! She may have written stupid letters asking for money, but she honestly believed he could afford to be generous. That’s not the same thing as being a con-artist.’

Joaquin shot her a darkling glance. ‘Nor is it acceptable behaviour. And you do my image of you no favours in trying to imply otherwise.’

‘I’m sorry. She’s my sister and I love her…flaws included,’ Lucy stated, tilting her chin. ‘People can change, Joaquin. Finding happiness with Roger changed Cindy and I didn’t want to see her lose him.’

‘Infierno!’ Joaquin slashed back at her with a sudden raging incredulity that wholly disconcerted her. It was much as though s

he had thrown a match on a bale of hay: the conflagration was instantaneous. ‘Yet you had little concern for what I might think of you!’

‘That’s not true,’ Lucy began shakily, paralysed to the spot by the blaze of dark fury brightening his extraordinary eyes.

‘You let me call you a whore!’ Joaquin condemned, off-balancing her even further with that outraged reminder. ‘You lied to me. Even the night we made love you were still lying. But the worst, the most unforgivable of acts, was to leave me believing that you were sleeping with another man and that you might not know whose baby you were carrying!’

Lucy sat there like a little stone statue, heart thumping in the region of her dry throat, motionless with sheer shock.

‘I might have gone away…I might never have come back. I might have abandoned you for ever. And did you count the cost? Did you care? No!’ Joaquin thundered in a splintering crescendo of accusation, his lean strong face rigid.

‘I…I would have contacted you.’

‘How? Do you think I would have taken your calls or accepted your letters or even believed anything you said or wrote?’ Joaquin demanded with raw contempt. ‘A woman who let me believe such filth about her for longer than a moment is not a woman I can be proud to have as a wife! I can only hope you have more loving concern for our child when it is born than you had for me!’

With that wrathful conclusion Joaquin sent the privacy panel separating them from his chauffeur buzzing back and rapped out something in Spanish. She soon knew what it was. The big limo came to an almost immediate halt and Joaquin thrust open the door and sprang out.

‘Joaquin!’ Lucy gasped. ‘Where are you going?’

‘I need some fresh air,’ he gritted in a driven undertone, and closed the door on her again.

Fresh as opposed to the air she was polluting with her presence, she translated in a daze as the limousine pulled back into the traffic again. Joaquin vanished into the busy crowds of Christmas shoppers. She looked at her watch. They had been married for forty-five minutes. She blinked and slowly filled her lungs with oxygen again.