Confessions of a Pregnant Cinderella

His hair was damp. He’d obviously had a shower too. That reminded Skye of watching him emerge from the bathroom at that hotel in Dublin, with nothing but a towel slung around his narrow hips.

She turned away from that view and back to the less provocative one. He came and stood beside her. ‘You have a beautiful property,’ she gabbled. ‘It’s so peaceful. Do you come here often?’

She winced at that. Gauche, much?

‘Not as often as I’d like.’

‘Has it always been in your family?’

Lazaro made a slightly choked sound. ‘Hardly. I bought it about nine years ago.’

Skye realised that she knew next to nothing about his family, and that whenever she touched on his past he made some sarcastic comment. She turned to face him. ‘Where are your family?’

Lazaro placed his hands on the stone wall of the terrace. His jaw tightened. ‘They’re in Madrid.’

‘But they weren’t there the other night—at the hotel.’

‘My father and half-brother were, actually.’

Something cold prickled over Skye’s skin. Lazaro’s face showed no emotion. ‘You said you don’t have a relationship with them.’

‘I don’t.’

‘Why?’

He waited so long to answer that Skye thought he was going to ignore her, but then he said, ‘Because I am the result of an illicit affair between two members of Spain’s oldest and most celebrated families. They abandoned me at birth into the social care system. I was an inconvenience for them—a stain on their whiter-than-white reputation.’

‘Oh.’

He looked at her then, and she was surprised to see a glimmer of humour in his green eyes.

‘Oh. Your favourite word.’

She made a face, but inside her heart was beating hard as she thought of the significance of what he’d said. ‘What happened to you?’

Lazaro turned around and rested his back against the wall. His face was hard. ‘I bounced around foster homes until I realised I’d be safer on the streets. That’s where I got the most invaluable part of my education.’

The fact that she’d judged him for having a privileged life mocked her now.

She thought of something else. ‘That guy...Gabriel...the one who was in the paper...’

He went very still beside her. ‘He’s the half-brother I mentioned—on my father’s side.’

‘Does he know he’s your half-brother?’

Lazaro made a face. ‘He chooses not to acknowledge it.’

Skye was about to say oh again and bit her lip. ‘I’m sorry that that happened to you. It wasn’t fair.’

‘No, it wasn’t fair. But it’s made me who I am today.’

Skye would have preferred not to sink any lower in Lazaro’s estimation, but after what he’d just told her she felt compelled to blurt out, ‘My father was never on the scene either.’

He looked at her.

‘That’s why it was so important to me that I told you about the baby. I don’t want him, or her, growing up fatherless if I can help it.’

Just then Almudena appeared, to tell them dinner was ready, and Skye followed Lazaro to where a table had been set under a trellis of abundant bougainvillea.