Kept at the Argentine's Command

Lulu got up the next morning and ventured across the echoing parquet floors from sumptuous room to room, trying not to hear the silence or look out at the immense flatness around them, rising to low blue hills in the distance.

She felt almost unmoored in large open spaces. They were worse than being locked up in the cabin of a plane. But as long as she could establish a routine here for the next few days and have her touchstones—her room, Alejandro, knowing the people around her—she would do fine.

Only then she discovered Alejandro was gone. She stood in the kitchen with Maria Sanchez, who acted as his housekeeper, and learned that he wasn’t expected back until Thursday.

Two whole days!

‘He works hard,’ said Maria in English, when Lulu asked if he’d said where he was going. ‘I tell him his grandfather had his two brothers to help—and he didn’t have the pressures of a polo team. But he does not listen. He is like his grandfather that way. He sets his mind on something and nothing will deter him.’

‘You’ve worked for the du Croziers a long time?’

‘Over thirty years.’ Maria looked proud. ‘I came here when Alejandro’s grandfather was El Patron. It is a shame he never knew what a success his grandson has made of the estancia—especially after that son of his.’

‘Alejandro’s father?’

Maria made a face. ‘Fernandez never cared for the land…never cared for the people here. His grandfather took Alejandro under his wing and sent his parents away. Good riddance, I say. Now we have the best pure-bred Criollos in the country.’

Lulu frowned. ‘He sent his parents away?’

Maria drew herself up, clearly relishing an audience for her views. ‘El Patron could see how it was tearing Alejandro and his sisters Isabella and Luciana apart, watching them fight. Fernandez was never here, but Marguerite aired their dirty laundry to anyone who would listen. People felt sorry for her, because of Fernandez and his women, but she manipulated everyone with her weakness. A real woman works. Instead she liked

the easy money.’

Lulu thought of her own mother, married at eighteen with no job skills. Married to a man who had only shown his true colours when she’d had a small child and another one on the way and had been trapped.

Félicienne had remarried now, and she worked. She had her own flourishing import business. She’d never be trapped again.

‘Are you his sweetheart?’

‘P-pardon?’ Lulu stammered.

‘Alejandro doesn’t bring his women here. Yet you are here.’

‘I’m not his sweetheart…um…girlfriend.’ Lulu knew she was babbling, but what did Maria mean by his women? ‘I’m not anything.’ Which was a sobering thought.

Lulu discovered that she felt even more unmoored.

‘You are something,’ said Maria wryly, and turned towards the oven.

Lulu moved faster, slid on oven mitts and opened the oven.

‘Gracias.’

Lulu stayed in the kitchen, helping Maria prepare the food. It was easier than explaining why she didn’t want to go outside.

She told herself she would venture out tomorrow. She just needed to get her bearings.

She also needed a routine for her meals—something Maria was agreeable to after all her help in her kitchen.

The three weeks stretched out interminably. There was no way she could hide her problem for that long. There would be an incident, and Alejandro would witness it, or somebody else here in the house, and they would tell him, and she would be humiliated, and—baby or no baby—he wouldn’t want her.

Nobody would want to be around her. Whatever happened, he wouldn’t want her when he found out.

*

There was a problem with his champion stallion, Chariot. According to the phone call Alejandro had got that afternoon the old boy was still limping, and he wanted to have a look at that injured fetlock himself. It was the only reason he’d walked out of a reception for the team in one of Buenos Aires’s better hotels tonight and torn up the highway to home.

At least he told himself that.