A Spanish Affair: Naive Bride, Defiant Wife / Flora's Defiance
‘Does he even know he has a father or a family in Spain? Is he learning to speak Spanish? What kind of stability can you give him? You are not a responsible person.’
‘What gives you the right to say that to me?’ Jemima interrupted thinly, her hands clenching into defensive fists by her side.
His lean, darkly handsome face tautened into censorious lines. ‘Look at the way you dealt with our marriage, your debts, your affair with my brother—’
‘For the last time, I did not have an affair with your brother!’
‘You don’t deal with problems, you run away,’ Alejandro condemned without hesitation. ‘How could you possibly raise our child properly and teach him what he needs to know?’
‘I don’t have to stand here putting up with being criticised by you any more. We’re separated,’ Jemima rattled out, her voice brittle. ‘I want you to leave.’
Alejandro grabbed up his coat. ‘It’s impossible to talk to you,’ he vented in a driven undertone of frustration.
‘You call threatening to take my child away from me talking?’ Jemima exclaimed with incredulous force. ‘How did you expect me to respond to a threat?’
‘A threat is something that may not happen, but I will most assuredly fight you for custody of my son,’ Alejandro extended grittily, refusing to back down.
Jemima breathed in deep and slow to calm her jangling emotions and studied him with angry, anxious eyes. ‘What can I do or say to convince you that I am a good mother?’
Having donned his coat, Alejandro shrugged a broad shoulder as if she was asking him the unanswerable.
Jemima’s thoughts were already ploughing ahead to reach several fear-inducing conclusions. If a custody battle went to court, Alejandro had the wealth to hire the very best lawyers and nobody representing her interests would be able to compete. The very fact that she had kept quiet about Alfie’s existence for the first two years of his life would weigh against her. And how much importance might a judge lay on the truth that Alfie would one day be an influential member of the Spanish aristocracy in charge of a massive country estate and a very successful string of international family businesses? Such a background and his father’s ability to prepare his son for those responsibilities could not be easily ignored.
‘You can’t do this to me,’ Jemima protested. ‘I love Alfie and he loves and needs me.’
‘Perhaps it is my turn to be a parent for a change,’ Alejandro said drily, tugging open the front door to facilitate his departure with an alacrity that was ironically no longer welcome to her. ‘When it comes to sharing one little boy a divorce will leave few, if any, equitable solutions possible. We will both have to compromise.’
Jemima reached out in an ill-considered movement to thrust the door he had opened closed again before sliding between it and him like an eel. Violet eyes dark with strain in her pale heart-shaped face, she stared up at him and muttered tightly, ‘We need to discuss this now!’
Alejandro sent her a sardonic glance. ‘Madre mia, you change direction with the wind. You told me to leave…’
Jemima gritted her teeth. ‘Possibly I was a little hasty. I wasn’t expecting you to already be making plans for Alfie. You annoyed me earlier. Why did you kiss me?’
Alejandro took a small step forward that trapped her between the wooden door and his lean, powerful body. ‘Because I wanted to, mi dulzura.’
He called her ‘sweetness’ and she ran out of breath and rationality in the same instant. Awareness ran like a river of red-hot lava through her trembling length, her nipples swelling and blossoming like fire flowers while the tender flesh at the very heart of her burned and ached. The atmosphere was explosive and she couldn’t fight the hunger stabbing at her. She studied the full curve of his sensual lower lip, reliving the taste of him, and slowly tipped her head back to meet hot golden eyes.
‘Ask me to stay the night,’ Alejandro urged thickly, pushing her back against the door, letting her feel the hard, promising power of his erection through his well-cut trousers. Air scissored through her lungs in a breathless surge, sexual heat uniting with dismay to hold her there.
‘You want to stay?’ Jemima whispered, already visualising closing a hand into the expensive fabric of his overcoat to haul him down to her, already imagining the taste and passion of him that drew her like a fire on a winter day. Desire had her in the fiercest of holds.
A long brown finger skimmed along the quivering line of her white throat, pausing to flick the tiny pulse flickering wildly above her collarbone. ‘It’s what you want too—’
‘No,’ Jemima gasped strickenly, feeling her self-discipline shatter like glass in the ambience and below it the roar of need she had resisted for so long.
‘Liar,’ Alejandro countered without hesitation, his confidence in his own powers of seduction absolute.
Her slender body vibrating with awareness, she still managed to tear free of him and step back. It hurt like hell. She couldn’t think; she could only fight the craving that she recognised as a dangerous weakness. ‘Leave,’ she urged again, wanting to hug herself in consolation for the rush of cold and disappointment enveloping her.
‘Call me when you come to your senses,’ Alejandro drawled, hooded dark golden eyes undimmed by rejection as he tossed a business card down on the little shelf in the hallway.
And in a moment he was gone and she was left in a disturbing mess of conflicting emotions and regrets. She was furious with herself because she hadn’t sorted out anything. Sex had got in the way and had only exacerbated the tensions between them. But she should have risen above the challenge to concentrate on Alfie and on Alejandro’s threats. He had wanted to stay the night with her. He had wanted to share a bed with her again. The blood ran hot below her fair skin. For just a moment he had been as vulnerable as she to the powerful attraction that could still flare between them. She adjusted that thought the instant she thought it. No, Alejandro had not been vulnerable. If she had let him he would have slept with her again but it wouldn’t have meant anything to him or led anywhere. He believed she had slept with Marco and he hated her for it. She lifted his business card and threw it down on the dining table in a fever of self-loathing. Alejandro was calling the shots again and she didn’t like that at all.
Yet over three years earlier when they were dating she had liked the way Alejandro had automatically taken charge and looked after her and had revelled in his masculine protective instincts. Looking back with hindsight, she marvelled at the way he had made her feel and how much maturity had changed her. Of course, she had been a virgin when they’d first met. As a result she had been far too quick to idealise Alejandro and believe that they had something special together. She had not even recognised him for the womaniser he was until one of the hotel maids had slid an old newspaper beneath her nose, pointed to a photo and said, ‘Isn’t that that Spanish guy you’re seeing?’
And there Alejandro had been, pictured at some snobby London party with a beautiful blonde in an evening dress. The accompanying prose had made it clear that he enjoyed the reputation of a heartbreaker who always had more than one woman in tow. She hadn’t wanted to believe the evidence even though Alejandro had already proved to be anything but a devoted boyfriend, cancelling dates as he did at the last minute and rarely phoning when he said he would. When she’d questioned him, however, Alejandro had been commendably frank.
‘I’m not looking for a serious relationship,’ he had told her without apology. ‘I’m not interested in being tied down.’
Feeling stupid and hurt over the assumptions she had made and grateful that she had, at that stage, stayed out of his bed, Jemima had put the brakes on her feelings for him and had begun going out socialising again with her friends. Before very long she too was dating someone else, a local accountant who was flatteringly keen to offer her an exclusive relationship. But when Alejandro had realised that she was seeing another man, he had had a furious row with her, which had made it perfectly clear that, while he expected her to share him, he was not prepared to share her. For a few weeks they had split up and, although she was heartbroken at losing him at the time, she had thought it was the only option left.
Barely a month later, though, Alejandro had come back to her and had said that he would stop seeing other women. Jemima had been overjoyed and their relationship had entered a far more intense second phase. Head over heels in love with him as she had been, she had plunged straight into a passionate affair. He had rented a house not far from the hotel where she worked and they had spent every spare minute there together. In her entire life she had never known such happiness as she had known then, during the romantic weekends he’d shared with her. The demands of business and family, not to mention the fact that he lived in Spain, had often kept them apart when they wanted to be together, and on her twentieth birthday Alejandro had asked her to marry him. He had not said he loved her; he had never told her he loved her. He had merely said that he could not continue spending so much time in England with her. He had made marriage sound like a natural progression.
But he had not invited her to meet his family before they took that crucial final step. No doubt he had known how much his relatives would disapprove of his ordinary English bride, who had so little to offer on their terms. Within weeks of his proposal they had married in a London church with only a couple of witnesses present. She had had no idea at all of what his life in Spain would be like. In fact she had been a lamb to the slaughter in her ignorance.
Dragging herself free of wounding memories that still rankled, Jemima lifted her head high. That silly infatuated and insecure girl was dead and gone. This time around she was in control of her own destiny and, with that in mind, she snatched up her phone and rang Alejandro.
‘We have to meet to talk about Alfie,’ she told him urgently.
‘Couldn’t you have decided that while I was still with you?’ Alejandro enquired drily.
‘I’m not like you. I don’t plan everything,’ she reasoned defensively.
He suggested that she and Alfie meet him the following afternoon at his London apartment.
‘I know you want to see Alfie again, but he would be better left out of it tomorrow—we’ll probably argue.’
Having agreed a time and won his agreement on the score of Alfie, Jemima put down the phone again and wondered anxiously what rabbit she could possibly pull out of the hat that might persuade him that their son was better off living with his mother in England…
CHAPTER FOUR
THE LONDON APARTMENT was not the same one that Jemima remembered. The new one was bigger, more centrally located and sleek and contemporary in style, while the previous accommodation had been knee deep in opulent antiques and heavy drapes, a home-from-home backdrop for a family accustomed to life in a medieval castle.
A manservant showed her into a huge elegant reception room with the stark lines and striking impact of a modern artwork, again a very appropriate look for a family that owned a famous chain of art galleries.
She caught her reflection in the glass of an interior window and decided that, even though she was wearing the smartest outfit in her wardrobe, she looked juvenile in her knee-length black boots, short black skirt and red sweater. But her lifestyle no longer required dressy clothing and she preferred to plough her profits either back into the shop or into her savings. Having survived a childhood in which cash was often in very short supply, Jemima only felt truly safe now when she had a healthy balance in her rainy day account.
In the act of putting away a mobile phone, Alejandro emerged from an adjacent room to join her. His elegant black pinstripe suit and blue shirt fitted him with the expensive fidelity of the very best tailoring and the finest cloth, outlining broad shoulders, narrow masculine hips and long, long, powerful legs. Her attention locked to his lean dark features, noting the blue-black shadow round his handsome jaw line, and for a split second she was lost in the memory of the rasp of stubble against her skin in the mornings. She could feel a guilty blush envelop her from her brow to her toes. His black hair still damp and spiky from the shower, Alejandro was the most absolutely beautiful man she had ever seen and her heart was jumping inside her as if the ground had suddenly fallen away beneath her feet.
‘Is your friend looking after Alfie?’ he enquired.
‘Yes, but he attends a playgroup in the afternoons,’ she explained.
She turned down an offer of refreshments and hovered while Alejandro helped himself to strong black coffee that scented the air with its unmistakeable aroma. Memories she didn’t want were bombarding her again. He had taught her to grind coffee beans and make what he called ‘proper’ coffee. There had been so many things she didn’t know about that he took for granted. He had even been a better cook than she was and right from the start she had been captivated by his knowledge and sophistication. But before their marriage—when things had gone wrong between them—he had scooped her up into his arms and swept her off to bed and she had been so ecstatic that she wouldn’t have cared if the roof had fallen in afterwards. But once their sex life had ground to a halt, they’d had no means of communication at all and it had seemed natural to her that their marriage had then fallen apart. He had just lost interest in her, a development she had seen as being only a matter of time from the outset of their acquaintance.
‘I couldn’t sleep last night,’ Jemima admitted in a sudden nervous rush, her eyes violet as pansies in the sunlit room. ‘I was worrying about what you said about Alfie.’
‘You named him Alfonso after my father. That was a pleasant surprise,’ Alejandro remarked.
‘He was named in memory of my grandfather, Alfred, as well,’ Jemima advanced, not choosing to admit that the kindly vegetable-growing maternal grandfather she recalled had probably been the only presentable member of her former family circle, in that he had worked for a living and had stayed on the right side of the law. ‘That’s why I call him Alfie, because that was how my grandpa was known.’
Alejandro studied her with stunning dark golden eyes ringed and enhanced by black inky lashes. His charismatic appeal was so powerful that she couldn’t take her attention off him and her mouth ran dry.
‘We can’t reasonably hope to share a child when we’re living in different countries,’ he told her.
Jemima tensed and smoothed her skirt down over her slight hips with moist palms. ‘Other people manage it—’
‘I want my son to grow up in Spain—’
‘Well, you can’t always have what you want,’ Jemima pointed out flatly.
Alejandro set down his empty cup and strolled across the floor towards her. ‘I too gave this matter serious thought last night. I can give you a choice…’
Her spine went rigid, her eyes flying wide with uncertainty. ‘What sort of a choice?’
‘Option one: you return to Spain and give our marriage another chance. Or, option two: I take you to court over Alfie and we fight for him.’ As Jemima lost colour and a look of disbelief tautened her delicate pointed features Alejandro surveyed her with unblemished cool. ‘From my point of view it’s a very fair offer and more than you deserve.’
As an incendiary response leapt onto Jemima’s tongue she swallowed it back and welded her lips closed, determined not to say anything before she had thought it through. But sheer shock was ricocheting through her in wave after wave. Alejandro was asking her to go back to him and live with him as his wife again? She was totally stunned by that proposition and had never dreamt that he would consider making it. ‘That’s a crazy idea,’ she said weakly.
‘If you take into account our son’s needs, it’s a very practical idea,’ Alejandro contradicted levelly.
Jemima breathed in slowly and tried to concentrate her mind solely on her son’s best interests, even though her brain was in a total fog at what he had just suggested. Many children might be more contented with two parents rather than one but that wasn’t the end of the story. ‘If we’re not happy together, how could Alfie possibly be happy? I don’t understand why you’re even discussing the idea of us living together again.’
‘Are you really that naïve?’ His intent gaze was semi-screened by lush sooty lashes to a hot glitter of gold while the muscles in his strong jaw line clenched hard. ‘I still want you. If I didn’t I wouldn’t be offering you this alternative.’
The heat of that look welded Jemima to where she stood and colour ran in scarlet ribbons into her cheeks. Once again he had taken her by surprise. ‘Are you saying that you’re able to forgive me for the past?’
Alejandro loosed a harsh laugh of disagreement. ‘No, I couldn’t go that far. I’m saying that if I get you back into my bed, I will make the effort to overlook your past transgressions.’
Her bosom swelled with wounded pride and resentment as she drew in a very deep and steadying breath. ‘Fortunately for me, I haven’t the slightest desire to be married to you again. You may have considered it an honour the first time around, but for me it was more like living in purgatory.’
Alejandro dealt her a stony look that chilled her to freezing point and she knew that she had angered him. She recognised that he believed that he was making an enormously generous concession in offering her—an unfaithful wife—the opportunity to live with him again. She even recognised that lots of women would bite off his hand in their eagerness to accept such an offer. After all, he was drop-dead gorgeous, amazing in bed and open-handed with money…as long as you could tell him what you’d done with it, she completed inwardly and suppressed a shiver, flinching from her bad memories. But at heart Alejandro was as flint-hard and unyielding as his centuries-old castle. He believed she had betrayed him and he was not the forgiving type and would never come round to seeing or understanding her side of the story. He thought she was a slut and even if she lived with him for another twenty years he would die thinking that she was a slut.
‘I’ve made a life for myself now in the village and I enjoy my life there,’ Jemima responded in a stiff tone of restraint that did not come naturally to her. ‘I was miserable in Spain and you didn’t seem any happier with me as a wife. Why would you want to revisit the past?’
‘Only because we have a son.’ Alejandro gave her a sardonic appraisal. ‘And this time around life could be much more straightforward.’
‘How?’ Jemima prompted baldly, wanting every detail of his thoughts even though she had no intention of accepting his offer.
‘I know you for who you are now. I would have no false expectations, no sentimental ideas. Our marriage would merely be a convenient agreement for Alfie’s benefit. All I would require from you would be the superficial show—’
‘And sex,’ Jemima added in a tight-mouthed undertone, because she felt demeaned that he had dared to include that aspect.
‘Be grateful that you still have that much appeal, mi-dulzura. Without the pull of that angle, I wouldn’t even have considered taking you back.’
Clashing unwarily with hot golden eyes, Jemima experienced a deeply mortifying sliding sensation low in her pelvis. It infuriated her that she could still react to him that way when so much else was wrong between them. Her body took not the smallest account of her brain or even of common sense, for being attracted to Alejandro was destructive and stupid and likely to get her into serious trouble. It occurred to her that maybe he felt the same way about her and that was such a novel suspicion that she stared at him, wondering if he too could be fighting the same rearguard action against his own natural inclinations.
‘You don’t like the fact that you still find me attractive,’ Jemima commented, daringly taking a stab in the dark.
‘But I can handle it. Familiarity breeds contempt—isn’t that what they say?’ His brilliant eyes were lit by a sensual golden glimmer that as his gaze wandered over her seemed to burn over her skin like a tiny point of flame. ‘I believe that this arrangement will give me a healthy chance of working you right out of my system.’
Jemima could not resist the sensual temptation of imagining what it would be like to be put to that kind of work in the marital bedroom. The more responsive parts of her treacherous body hummed with enthusiasm until shame and pride combined to suppress her facetious thoughts. She had never been able to escape the fear that wanting and loving any man as much as she had once loved and wanted Alejandro was weak and pathetic. It had inspired her into making numerous attempts to play it cool with him, most of which had blown up in her silly face as she had lacked both subtlety and good timing. She had acted all cool, for instance, once he’d stopped sleeping with her while she was pregnant; rather a case of closing the barn door after the horse had already bolted, she recalled impatiently. Those final weeks of their marriage he hadn’t seemed to notice her at all and his increasing indifference and long working days had made her feel invisible and insignificant.
‘I couldn’t just go back to Spain,’ she told him again. ‘I’ve worked hard to build up my business. I don’t want to lose it—’
‘I’m willing to cover the cost of a manager for several months. That would give you the time and space to come up with a more permanent solution.’
Cut off at the knees by that unexpectedly practical proposal, Jemima muttered, ‘I couldn’t live with you again.’
‘That decision is yours to make.’ Alejandro shifted a broad shoulder in a fluid and fatalistic shrug, his lean, strong face full of brooding dark Spanish reserve and pride. ‘But I’ve already missed out on two years of my son’s life and I don’t want to waste any more time. My English lawyer is waiting to hear whether or not I wish to proceed with a custody claim.’
That assurance hit Jemima like a bucket of snow thrown across unprotected skin. Every anxious cell in her body plunged into overload. ‘Are you simply expecting me to make up my mind about this here and now?’ she gasped.
Alejandro quirked an ebony brow. ‘Why not? I’m not in the mood to be patient or understanding. I doubt that you suffered many sleepless nights while you were denying me the chance to get to know my son.’
In receipt of that shrewd comment on her attitude, Jemima turned almost as red as her sweater. It was true. She had pretty much celebrated her escape from Spain. She had regretted her failed marriage and cried herself to sleep many nights but she had blamed him entirely for that failure. Now sufficient time had passed for her to be willing to acknowledge that she, too, had made serious mistakes that had undoubtedly contributed to their break-up. She had certainly kept far too many secrets from him, had spent a lot of money, but that did not mean that she was prepared to have another go at their marriage. But she did, however, love her son very much and she did appreciate how much she had denied Alejandro when she chose not to inform him that he was a father.
‘I could come and stay in Spain for a few weeks,’ she suggested limply as an alternative.
‘A temporary fix of that nature would be pointless.’
‘I couldn’t possibly sign up to return to our marriage for the rest of my life. That’s an appalling idea. Even convicts get time lopped off their sentences for good behaviour!’ Jemima pointed out helplessly. ‘Maybe I could consider coming out to Spain for a trial period, like, say…three months.’
Alejandro frowned. ‘And what would that achieve?’ he derided.
‘Well, by then we would know if such an extraordinary arrangement was sustainable and I would still have a life to return to in the village if it wasn’t working,’ she argued vehemently. ‘I’m not saying I will do it, but you would also have to give me a legal undertaking that you would not try to claim custody of Alfie while he was still in Spain because that would give you an unfair advantage.’