Mistress: Pregnant By The Spanish Billionaire

CHAPTER THREE

THE dull pain drumming in her temples intensified as Nell watched him stroll back to the castillo not pausing even once to look back. He was so damned sure that she’d follow him the way women had no doubt been following him all his adult life—not that she would be following him in the same sense.

She would have loved to have the luxury of calling his bluff, but that gesture would have been pretty self-defeating. If he was speaking the truth and he knew who Lucy was with she had no choice but to follow him. And his point about the heat was valid; the protective factor of the moisturiser she had used that morning had to have worn off hours ago.

The cool inside the stone-walled castle was sheer bliss after the oppressive heat of the Valencian sun. She hurried, her feet echoing on the stone floors, to catch up with him.

‘So who is the man?’ Nell asked, trotting to pass him.

She turned and came to an abrupt halt. He had to follow suit or fall over her. He didn’t do that, but he did get awfully close—close enough for her to receive a pretty hefty jolt as she got too close to the raw sexual aura he projected.

It passed through her body like an electrical current and was the weirdest and most disturbing thing that had ever happened to her. She pressed a hand to her heaving chest and hoped that he attributed her breathless condition to a lack of fitness combined with the altitude.

He glanced down, his dark eyes skimming her face. ‘My cousin.’

Nell opened her mouth to demand more information when he placed a hand on the wall above her head. Nell closed her eyes and edged closer to panic as he leaned into her, his big body curling over her. She held her breath, then released it a moment later as she found herself pushed through a door behind her and into a big, light, airy room.

‘Sit down. I’ll order some refreshments.’

Nell ignored the offer—a pretty pointless defiance considering her knees were literally shaking. ‘Your cousin?’ Was he just trying to wriggle out of it? Send her off on a false trail?

‘It fits. He had a holiday job at the hotel you spoke of. I arranged it for him myself.’

She still wasn’t convinced. ‘What about the name?’

‘We were both christened Luiz Felipe. This is not the first time confusion has arisen, but it is the most…amusing.’

‘You’re both called Luiz Felipe.’

‘I know—an appalling lack of imagination. We were both named after our grandfather, but in the family we call him Felipe usually.’

‘So how old is this cousin of yours?’ Nell’s feelings were mixed. While she was obviously relieved that Lucy hadn’t got mixed up with this man—hopefully his cousin was not the similar type of predatory male—it did mean that she still had no idea where Lucy was.

‘I’m not sure.’ He arched a brow. ‘Eighteen, nineteen?’

Nell stared. ‘You’re asking me? Just how many cousins do you have?’

Luiz leaned his elbow on the mantel of the carved stone fireplace and moved a heavy candlestick with his forefinger. His air of preoccupation incensed Nell.

‘I’m sorry if I’m boring you.’

The acid observation swung Luiz’s attention back to the figure standing there with her hands planted on her slim hips. ‘Sorry.’ He produced a grin that had no hint of apology in it and answered her question. ‘Just the one.’

‘And you don’t know how old he is?’

‘We are not what you would call close.’

‘But he’s your cousin.’ She searched his dark face for any sign he was being facetious and found none. ‘Your family.’

‘Families are all different and I think you will find that my attitude to family is one that more people could readily identify with than your own.’

Nell looked at him, appalled. ‘Don’t you care if your cousin ruins his life?’

‘A person learns by their mistakes. Perhaps your niece will learn from hers?’

The odd inflection in his deep voice that made Nell wonder what his mistakes had been was absent as he added flippantly, ‘And who am I to stand in the way of true love?’

Nell, her eyes narrowed, did not bother to disguise her utter disgust as she glared at him. ‘Ha. The truth is you don’t give a damn about anyone else. You’re utterly and totally selfish—you’ve no intention of lifting a finger to stop your cousin making the biggest mistake of his life because you’re utterly self-centred.’

She was midway through accusing him of possessing no family feeling when Ramon’s joke came back to Luiz. The future Mrs Santoro! His lips curled into a wry smile that faded as he recognised the element of truth in Ramon’s joke—a bride would be his grandmother’s most precious birthday present.

Luiz was inclined initially to reject the crazy, though intriguing, idea forming in his head, because it was so obviously, well…crazy. He could not pinpoint the exact moment that it stopped being crazy but actually almost logical, but suddenly he found himself asking—Why not?

He would never be able to give his grandmother the wife and heir she longed for him to provide, so wasn’t this an alternative where nobody got hurt? Why shouldn’t he be studying the flushed and angry face of the future Mrs Santoro? It could work.

Why wait for her birthday?

There were always two ways of looking at a situation. Some people would think his idea a moment of inspiration while others would think it a moment of madness.

Luiz didn’t care about the label, he just cared about the result.

‘I have a proposition to put to you.’

Nell regarded him with an expression of baffled frustration. He had not even attempted to defend himself. She wasn’t even sure if he had heard a word she had said.

‘I know where they are.’

Her eyes widened. ‘Lucy and your cousin?’

He nodded.

‘So where…?’

He pushed aside the poignant image of the cottage by the sea where he and Rosa had lived and held up a hand to stop her. Fulfilling his side of the bargain he was proposing would mean him going there for the first time in many years. The first time since Rosa died.

‘First you need to do something for me.’

He saw the alarm flare in her eyes and sketched a cynical grin. ‘Relax, not that something. You’re really not my type.’

As if to challenge his careless contention the image that formed in his head of one perfect breast fitting perfectly into his hand momentarily vaporised every other thought.

‘Imagine my devastation,’ she snarled, irrationally deflated. ‘Forget the dramatic pause and get to the point—what do I have to do?’

‘Come and meet my grandmother.’

Nell’s face fell. ‘That’s it?’ Obviously there was a catch.

‘And go along with whatever I say.’

‘But I don’t understand why—?’

He cut across her with an autocratic shake of his dark head. There was no time for a question and answer session. If he paused long enough to think about this he strongly suspected that he’d bail.

‘I do not require you to understand. As I said, I simply require you to go along with anything I say—no matter what it is.’

‘But why?’

‘Do you want to find the lovers?’

Nell’s expression reflected her dilemma. ‘Oh, all right, then.’ What choice did she have? ‘And afterwards you’ll tell me where they are.’

‘Querida,’ he promised with a grin, ‘I’ll take you to them. Shake on it.’

Nell dragged her eyes away from the magnetic pull of his deep-set dark eyes and regarded the hand he held towards her for a long moment before finally extending her own.

As his cool fingers closed around hers Nell tried to ignore the warning voice in her head that told her she was making a big mistake.

It was a lot more difficult to ignore the prickle under her skin that had nothing to do with sunburn and a lot to do with their brief physical contact.

CHAPTER FOUR

THE castle was a maze. Nell followed Luiz for what felt like miles along stone-floored corridors before he finally halted.

‘This is my grandmother’s room.’ Luiz reached for the door and stopped. ‘Wait here. I will be back presently.’

Left with little choice but to obey his terse instruction, Nell began to study the large tapestry of brilliant colours on the wall opposite.

The battle scene it portrayed was nothing compared to the one being waged in her head. Just what are you doing, Nell? This is crazy, totally crazy. You don’t know this man—you don’t even know what you’ve agreed to and who’s to say he will keep his word?

Before she could totally lose her nerve Luiz Santoro returned. Without a word he took her left hand and slid a ring onto her finger.

‘What are you doing? What…w-what is that?’ she stammered, staring at her finger. The gold band felt heavy, a rose-coloured diamond surrounded by what she assumed were rubies in an antique setting.

She was no expert but it didn’t look like the sort of thing you found in a Christmas cracker.

He lifted his brows. ‘A ring.’

‘I can see that,’ she retorted crankily. ‘What is it doing on my finger?’

‘Window dressing.’

‘For what?’

‘That is not relevant.’

Nell shook her head and dug in her heels literally. ‘I’m not taking another step until you explain this thing.’ She waved the offending jewellery him.

Luiz studied her mutinous face for a moment, then gave a philosophical shake of his head. ‘My grandmother—’

‘The one who owns this house?’

His dark brows twitched into a straight line of disapproval at the interruption. ‘The one who own this house and the estancia it stands upon. She is ill…maybe…’

He paused, unwilling to voice the possibility, as if saying the thing made it more likely to happen. He was impatient with the lack of logic in his thought processes, but then when you cared for a person it was hard to always be logical.

He glanced down at the young woman who was staring up at him, suspicion and wariness reflected in her clear eyes, and thought, Logic does not feature in that glossy head at any level…just neat emotion.

It made her a frustrating person to negotiate with.

‘Maybe?’ Nell prompted.

‘Maybe even dying.’

Nell’s face dropped. ‘I’m sorry.’ It was hard to tell from his stony expression if her sympathy was either required or desired.

Not that the lack of emotion in his features meant he didn’t have any, she reminded herself. Give the man the benefit of the doubt—she had not cried at her father’s funeral or, for that matter, since. Pushing aside the thought, Nell focused on his dark face—too much focus because she immediately started to feel dizzy.

‘We all die, and my grandmother is eighty-five.’

Nell found the clinical pronouncement chilling, but not as chilling as the total lack of feeling in his voice or manner. She suspected he didn’t deserve the benefit of any doubt—the man was just plain cold.

‘I’m sorry your grandmother is ill, but that still doesn’t explain the ring—’ she waved her hand in an expansive gesture ‘—or any of this.’

‘It is her wish that I marry and provide an heir.’

Nell, her eyes wide—she was clearly dealing with someone who was delusional and possibly dangerous—started to shake her head and back away.

‘I care about Lucy, but if you think I’m going to…m-m…’ She shook her head again. ‘Some sacrifices I’m not willing to make. Let her leave the place to this other Luiz Felipe—he seems more than willing to marry.’ And for all she knew provide heirs! ‘God, I really need to find Lucy.’

For a split second he looked perplexed by her response. ‘Sacrifice? You think…?’ He threw back his dark head and laughed, a deep attractive sound. ‘I am not asking you to marry me, and Felipe would not make a suitable custodian for the estancia.’

Nell pursed her lips, perversely irritated that he appeared to find the idea so hilarious. ‘So you don’t want a wife.’

His expression sobered and she glimpsed something that wasn’t cold calculation flicker at the back of his eyes. It was stark, shocking pain.

‘I had a wife. I require no one to fill her place in my life or heart.’

Did that mean the ex-wife had walked…? The image of him as broken-hearted, discarded husband was one Nell’s imagination just wouldn’t expand to accommodate. Actually she felt a lot more comfortable believing he didn’t have a heart at all, let alone a bruised one, so she changed the subject.

‘So you think you’d be a…suitable custodian? Is that shorthand for you fancy yourself as king of the castle?’ He certainly had the regal manner. ‘So you don’t mind if your cousin gets the girl but not the money.’

‘There is no money.’

Nell rolled her eyes. ‘Sure there isn’t.’ She folded her arms across her chest and challenged, ‘So, if you don’t have an avaricious bone in your body—’ gorgeous body ‘—why this silliness?’ she finished, thinking she might well ask herself the same question. Stop drooling, Nell!

‘My grandmother raised me, she has taught me everything I know, I owe her everything and I wish her to die a happy woman.’

‘But…’

His eyes flashed as he frowned in exasperation and mimed a zipping motion across his mouth. ‘Will you be silent and let me finish?’

Nell’s chin went up as she viewed him, eyes narrowed in dislike. ‘If you get to the point.’

‘My grandmother is a redoubtable woman. She has carried the burden of running the estancia alone for many years. She was a young woman when her husband died. She does not want that for me. She wants me to be happy and she believes that for that I need a…’ he paused, his lips twisting into a cynical smile before he completed ‘…soul mate, a wife.’

‘Me? No way!’

‘My thought exactly.’

‘And I’m not lying for you.’

‘I’m not asking you to. I’m hoping that the ring will do the trick.’

‘But what if she doesn’t…?’ Nell gave an awkward grimace.

‘Die,’ he inserted, turning his head so that Nell could not see the muscle he could feel clenching in his cheek. ‘It is possible,’ he conceded. ‘She is tough and she has been ill before. If that happens…’ nothing in Luiz’s demeanour suggested how desperately he clung to that hope as he calmly outlined his hastily formed fall-back strategy ‘…I will simply explain that you have been forced to return to England. Long-distance love affairs are notoriously difficult and ours will die a natural death, possibly due, I think, to your infidelity.’

Nell stared. She almost believed it herself! ‘You seem to have thought of everything.’

He took her comment as a compliment and bowed his head in acknowledgement. ‘I have that reputation.’ And whether it was deserved or not it made him feared by his competitors.

That was not entirely a bad thing in the cutthroat world he operated in. A man used every advantage he had, and one advantage Luiz no longer had was the element of surprise that had enabled him as an unknown twenty-year-old to make his first million before the competition had become aware of his existence.

Now they knew he was there, but he enjoyed a challenge.

‘Maybe you’ve actually convinced yourself that you’re doing this to make her happy because you’re ashamed to admit how far you’d go to make sure you inherit this place?’

Luiz Santoro looked almost as shocked as Nell felt to hear her private speculation voiced out loud.

She took an involuntary step back as eyes that housed sheer molten rage connected with her own. Before she had a chance to be defensive or even sensibly scared it was gone, leaving her wondering if it had ever been there at all.

Luiz, on the point of ramming his financial success down her superior, self-righteous little throat, stopped himself. Why justify his actions to this girl, when he never justified himself to anyone?

Her opinion of him was of no consequence but defending himself would force him to question this.

‘You need not trouble yourself with my motivation or my self-delusion, just look sweet and in love,’ he mocked, placing a finger under her chin.

Nell, her pulse racing and no longer just from fear, held herself rigid while he studied her upturned features. ‘You don’t look in love.’ He sounded irritated by the discovery.

She pushed his hand away and directed her darting glance at some point behind him. Don’t panic, Nell—you can leave at any time you like. He can’t stop you.

All you have to do is walk away.

‘That’s because I’m not.’ She ran her tongue nervously across her dry lips and said, ‘This is all too weird. I need time. I’ve changed my mind. I think—’

‘Not an option.’

Without any warning at all he bent his head and pressed his mouth to hers.

The hot, hungry kiss did not start slow and build; it was hard, demanding, and began at a mind-blowing level of intimacy that nothing could have prepared her for. As his mouth moved with innate sensuality across her own the heat flared inside her and her senses were flooded with the texture and taste of him.

At the first erotic stabbing incursion of his tongue her insides dissolved and something inside her snapped. Suddenly she was kissing him back, her fingers spread out across his hard chest as she groaned into his mouth and pressed her body into his, responding to a frantic need to be closer.

When Luiz lifted his head he looked as dazed as she felt, but maybe she had imagined it because a second later he was removing her hands from his chest and pushing her through the door ahead of him.

‘And don’t think,’ he said in her ear.

Nell, her mind still numb with shock, thought, Walk away! But her will seemed to have deserted her, her body was nailed to the spot with shock.

Struggling to prove she still had a mind of her own…God, I kissed him back…she flashed him a killer look. ‘If you do that again I will make you regret it!’ she snapped.

Luiz, who was already regretting the impulsive action, did not respond. He looked at her lush lips and thought about the way she had tasted. Then he pushed the thought away. For a man who prided himself on his iron control it should have been a simple matter.

It wasn’t.

A man could not excel at everything and it was clear that he was not good at spontaneity…especially spontaneity that involved this woman.

Resentment and humiliation swirled through Nell’s veins. Calculatingly, he’d done that to shut her up and get her through the door and the worst part was it had worked!

And while she was reduced to a shell-shocked wreck by a simple kiss—just a kiss, what was wrong with her?—he was acting, it seemed to a mortified Nell, as if nothing had happened! I kissed him back!

Nell stumbled a little and his hand shot out to steady her and stayed at her elbow. She did not mistake the gesture for concern. He’s probably getting ready to rugby tackle me to the ground if I try and run, she thought.

A rugby tackle would have been infinitely preferable to a kiss…although rolling on the ground with him did present some worrying opportunities for making a fool of herself.

The room they entered was in shadow. Nell could make out the general outline of furniture and a frail figure propped up in a big carved bed. She spoke in Spanish but Luiz replied in English.

‘Surprise? I doubt it. Don’t tell me the jungle drums have not already told you I had arrived.’

Nell tried to slow her laboured breathing as she watched Luiz walk towards the bed and bend over it.

Seeing the walking frame beside the bed brought back a rush of memories and to her horror Nell felt her eyelids prickle with tears. Eight weeks and I cry now. Please, no, not now. Inch by inch she fought her way back to control, dabbing angrily at the moisture at the corners of her eyes.

‘I’ve brought you a visitor and she doesn’t speak Spanish.’

The contrast between his callous attitude to her moments earlier and the tenderness in his manner as he kissed the sunken cheek of the tiny figure lying in the bed increased the emotional ache in her throat. She remained stubbornly reluctant to endow him with finer feelings or motives, but if he didn’t love this old lady he was a very good actor.

‘This is Nell.’

How could anyone put so much expression into one word—one name?

It was astonishing, and her reaction to the warm husky intonation in his deep voice suggesting unspoken intimacies was no less shocking.

Luiz reached a hand towards her and she responded without thinking to the compelling message in his eyes and stepped forward, taking his hand. An embarrassing rush of heat passed through Nell’s body as he tugged her towards him and slipped his arm around her waist before pulling her into his body.

She suddenly felt a spasm of sympathy for Lucy. If his cousin had half this man’s seductive powers, then it was hardly surprising that her inexperienced niece had fallen so hard.

‘Turn that light on, Luiz.’

Nell blinked as the light from an angle lamp fell across her face.

‘Good bones…’ came the verdict. The sharp eyes slid thoughtfully back to her grandson’s face, before she returned her attention to Nell. ‘Not your usual type, Luiz.’

Tell me something I don’t know, thought Nell as to her relief Luiz aimed the light away from her eyes. Then prompted by the expression in his eyes, she held out her hand. Like some sort of puppet, observed the disgusted voice in her head.

‘Well, now I won’t have to change my will, Luiz,’ Doña Elena joked.

It took a couple of seconds for Nell to register the comment, and when she did she was gripped by a wave of disillusionment. She had wanted to know and now there was no doubt. It was quite irrational to feel so let down. People did unpleasant, low, nasty things when large sums of money were involved, so why should he be any different?

‘Were you going to leave it to Felipe?’

The standing joke between them raised a weak smile from the old lady and a horrified look from Nell. Elena Santoro, who was perfectly aware that her younger grandson had no fondness for the estancia that was, to quote him, ‘an anachronism in the modern world’, teased back.

‘Possibly.’ Felipe had even less enthusiasm for the responsibilities that came with it and he remained mystified by their grandmother’s stubborn determination to hang onto what he referred to as a damned money pit. He had been almost comically relieved when she had explained to him that it was her intention his cousin would inherit, but he would have her house in Seville and the art collection it contained.

Turning her head towards Nell, she asked, ‘You have met Felipe?’

Nell shook her head. ‘Not yet.’ She could almost feel sorry for him.

‘He is a good boy, artistic, but I expect he will grow out of that. You notice I do not speak of my sons. IfI left the estancia to them, Nell, they would split it up and sell it off to speculators before I was cold in my grave.’ She broke off as her slight frame was racked by hacking coughs. ‘I’m fine, don’t fuss, Luiz,’ she gasped breathlessly as she patted away his solicitous hand. ‘So when, Nell, are you going to marry my grandson?’

Luiz spoke for her. ‘We have not set a date yet.’

Despite her physical frailty there was nothing weak about the glare that was directed at Luiz. ‘Does the girl not have a voice, Luiz? Let her speak,’ she quavered imperiously.

Nell lifted her chin. If Luiz was scared about what she might say, he ought to be. ‘I can speak.’ She flashed Luiz a look of distaste and thought, Let him sweat.

‘Tell me about yourself.’

It was a request, not an order, but Nell was starting to realise this was not a lady who did requests.