Contract Baby

‘A broken heart...it may well be mine,’ Raul breathed with stark impatience, releasing her to stride back indoors.

Did he care about Melina? Really care? Might he only have realised that after their marriage? Stranger things had happened, and she could not say that Raul was a male noticeably in touch with his own feelings except where Luis was concerned. So why had he told her that he thought he loved her?

As a reward? Those words were so easy to say. Out of guilt? Knowing that he was about to betray her, had he tossed that declaration at her like a consolation prize? Or to take the edge off any suspicions she might develop about his fidelity? And yet, strangely, that was the second time Raul had invited her to talk to him about what she had on her mind. Raul knew something was wrong. He had freely admitted that Melina didn’t like her own sex, almost as if he didn’t trust the beautiful blonde...

Any more than you trust him? That accidental comparison shocked Polly. For trust had been there until she’d overheard that phone call. And before that call, whenever she’d thought of telling Raul all the horrible things which Melina had slung at her, she had remembered that nasty little scene on the jet, and then the way he had walked out on her that same day after calling her obsessively jealous. Furthermore, she had no evidence of anything that Melina had said. Was she now trying to work herself up to running and telling tales like an immature little girl? Or was she seriously waiting for Raul to make some sort of move on Melina, who already seemed so unbearably smug tonight? Like a temporarily forsaken mistress aware that her star was now in the ascendant again?

Patrick wandered over to speak to her. ‘I thought I’d avoid you while Raul was around,’ he shared in an undertone, glancing rather anxiously around himself, like a man watching out for trouble.

‘Why’s that?’

‘Raul is a Latin American male to his fingertips. I used to think he wasn’t, except when he was being a killer on the polo field. Then he married you, and all of a sudden that cool front is cracking. I honestly don’t think he can stand another man within twenty feet of you.’

‘Really?’ Polly lifted her head, a fledgling smile curving her lips because she was ready at that moment to snatch at any straw.

‘So, if you don’t mind, I won’t ask you to dance.’

‘No problem. I want to dance with Raul.’ Polly drifted off, her mind made up. Time to stop avoiding the issue and allowing Me

lina to make her miserable and call all the shots. It was time to fight back and do the sensible thing, which was to talk to Raul.

So, in the mood she was in, it wasn’t pleasant to find Raul, standing in a corner with a brooding look of darkness on his starkly handsome features, and Melina, chattering in that covert, intimate way she always embraced around him, her exquisite face soft with a cloying smile.

But Polly walked right over. ‘Would you like to dance, Raul?’ she asked in a rather high-pitched voice, and with a sudden spooky horror that he might say no and humiliate her.

Melina raised a brow and averted her eyes, a selfsatisfied little smile playing about her lips. Raul strode forward, eyes blazing hot gold as they whipped over his wife’s flushed and unhappy expression.

He closed an arm around her, and instead of taking her onto the floor to dance, he guided her out into the softly lit greater privacy of the gardens.

‘I didn’t really want to dance,’ Polly admitted unevenly, wondering why on earth he should look so scorchingly angry. ‘I needed to talk to you in private. And if you’re annoyed now, you’re probably going to be even more annoyed when I’ve finished talking...so possibly we should take a raincheck on this until later...’

Polly got two steps away, and then was unceremoniously pulled back by the lean hand that closed round hers.

‘No raincheck. You were saying?’

Polly breathed in deep to steady herself. She could not say that harsh tone was the most inviting she had ever heard. ‘I heard you talking to Melina on the phone at the villa—’

‘Did you indeed?’ Raul threw that query like a gauntlet.

It wasn’t quite the response she had expected.

Polly became even more flustered. ‘I want you to know that up until that point I trusted you...and you may wonder why I should say that, but, you see, Melina told me she was your mistress the first day I came here, and she said that you’d go back to her...and that night you did go over there, and even though you said it was to see Fidelio—’

‘One point at a time,’ Raul intervened levelly. ‘Melina called me at the villa to inform me that, after wrestling with her non-existent conscience, she had decided that it was her duty to tell me that you were meeting up with Patrick Gorman in secret.’

In shock at that news, Polly felt her mouth simply drop open.

Raul dealt her a grim look of amusement. ‘I thought that would take the wind out of your sails.’

It did. Polly was poleaxed to realise that Melina had been working on both her and Raul.

‘Divide and conquer. Not very original or clever, at least not clever enough to fool me,’ Raul delineated grittily, shooting Polly a forbidding glance of reproach. ‘I didn’t believe a word of it, but I strung her along to see how far she was prepared to go in her determination to cause trouble between us. It also confirmed my suspicion that she had been working on you as well.’

He hailed a passing maid with a snap of his fingers and spoke to her in Spanish.

‘I want to know everything that Melina told you,’ he said next, his lean, strong face hard and unyielding.

‘Maybe you should pull up a chair. She said a lot,’ Polly muttered uncertainly, suddenly not knowing whether she was on her head or her heels, and getting the horrendous feeling that every time she parted her lips she was digging another foot of her own grave. There was no doubt that the more Raul heard, the angrier he became.