Don Joaquin's Pride

The silence seemed to go on and on and on. Her cheeks burned. She was conscious of her body in a way she had never been conscious of it before. Her breasts felt oddly full and heavy, stirring with the increased rapidity of her breathing. He looked, and she…and she? She couldn’t think straight.

Joaquin Del Castillo veiled his gaze.

In bewilderment, Lucy lowered her own gaze, dismayed by the accelerated thump of her own heartbeat, the shortness of her breath, that lingering sense of being dislocated from time. She frowned at the space where she had left her case earlier and muttered unevenly, ‘Where’s my case?’

Without the slightest warning, Joaquin strode forward and dropped a rough wool poncho over her shoulders, engulfing her in yards of scratchy malodorous fabric. ‘What on earth are you doing?’ she cried, pulling at the garment with distaste.

Impervious to her reaction, Joaquin Del Castillo planted a battered straw hat on her head. ‘Treat the sun with respect or you will burn your skin to a withered crisp!’

‘Where’s my case?’ Lucy demanded afresh.

‘I packed for you. Come on. We have no more time to waste.’

‘You went through my personal things?’ Lucy was aghast at the idea of a man rustling through her panties and her bras.

‘Let’s go,’ he grated impatiently.

For some reason there was a general exodus from the bar at the same moment. The cowboy horde poured out through the door to watch Joaquin prod a deeply reluctant Lucy round to the side of the sleek brown mare tethered to the rail.

‘You grasp the rein, place your left foot in the stirrup and then you swing yourself up into the saddle,’ he instructed smoothly.

Lucy’s teeth gritted. She could hear suppressed male laughter behind her. Planting a canvas-shod foot into the stirrup cup, she hauled herself up by dint of sheer determination, but she didn’t raise her other leg quite high enough and simultaneously the mare changed position. Unbalanced, Lucy fell back hard on her bottom and snaked her flailing legs back in fright as the mare’s hooves skittered too close for comfort.

A powerful hand closed over hers and hauled her upright again with stunning ease. ‘Would you like some help, señora?’

Sardonic amusement was audible in that honeyed dark drawl. A tide of unfamiliar rage drew Lucy’s every muscle taut. She snatched her fingers free of his patronising hold. ‘I’d have managed if the blasted horse hadn’t moved!’ she told him with furious resentment. ‘And I’ll do it without your help if it kills me…so stand back and snigger with your friends, because it’s obvious that that’s all that you’re good for!’

A line of dark colour highlighted his amazing cheekbones. Then that expressive mouth set like moulded steel. ‘As you wish…but I would not like to see you injured.’

‘Get out of my way!’ Lucy snarled, a tiny proportion of her brain standing back in disbelief at her own fiery behaviour.

Grasping the rein afresh, Lucy was now powered by so much temper she could have swung up high enough to touch the sun. Seconds later, she found herself surveying the ground from an elevated position. Squaring her slight shoulders, she tried to ease her right foot into the other stirrup. But it was done for her. Long cool fingers clasped her ankle and provided guidance. Lucy was in no way mollified by that belated piece of assistance, but she said thank you in a cold little voice just to show that she had been better brought up than he had been.

‘I will attach a leading rein to the mare. You will not be in any danger,’ Joaquin Del Castillo asserted with a chilling lack of expression.

Briefly her forehead indented. He sounded for all the world like a drawling, icily self-contained aristocrat depressing the rude pretensions of a member of the lower orders. She shook her head at that foolish false impression.

Obviously her outburst had offended him. Good, she told herself. He had been asking for it. Boy, had he been asking for a metaphoric slap in the face in front of their now silent audience! Nobody was smirking or sniggering now; she might feel somewhat shaken by the experience of having shouted at someone for the first time in her life, but in the aftermath she was proud of herself. And then the living, breathing animal beneath her rigid hips shifted with alarming effect.

‘Joaquin…?’ Lucy whispered with sick but definite emphasis. ‘The horse is m-moving again.’

‘Try not to stiffen up. It will make Chica nervous,’ he responded in a curiously constrained tone as he bent his head.

‘Do you think I’m not nervous, stuck up here ten feet off the ground?’ Lucy gasped before she could snatch the words back.

He spread fluid hands very slowly and stepped back. ‘I assure you that you will come to no harm.’

In strained silence, she watched him attach what he had called a leading rein to the huge black stallion twitching its hooves like a threatening volcano several feet away. ‘I hope you can control that monster…I hope it’s not going to run away with you—’

‘No horse has ever run away with me, señora,’ Joaquin Del Castillo gritted, half under his breath.

And if any had he certainly wouldn’t admit it, Lucy decided. Joaquin Del Castillo was of a breed of male utterly unknown to her. All sizzling, musclebound temperament and just bursting with pride over the fact. Any form of weakness, she sensed, would be anathema to him. And he despised her…well, he despised Cindy, and, as she was pretending to be Cindy, she was stuck with being despised.

But why was Joaquin Del Castillo being so hostile and rude? After all, she had dutifully come to visit Fidelio, as he had demanded. And, whether he knew it or not, he could thank his lucky stars that she wasn’t Cindy. Her twin would have been halfway back to the airport by now! Cindy had a very quick temper, not to mention a love and expectation of comfort. Furthermore, accustomed as she was to male admiration, Cindy would never have withstood the attacks and indignities meted out to the sister eleven minutes her junior.

Ironically, Cindy had forecast that Lucy would be treated like a princess from the moment she arrived in Guatemala. Apparently Fidelio Paez’s letters had shown him to be an old-fashioned gentleman with an instinctive need to be protective towards any member of the female sex. But Fidelio was generations older than his neighbour, Joaquin Del Castillo, Lucy conceded wryly. There was no intrinsic old-world Latin gallantry to be had from her companion. Why? Evidently he saw Cindy as a scarlet woman just because she had slept with Mario on their first date. What did he think a whirlwind romance entailed? So Cindy had got carried away by love and passion. How dared he sneer?

‘How is Fidelio?’ Lucy suddenly asked.

Joaquin shot her a grim glance. ‘You finally remembered him?’

Lucy flushed.

‘He is as well as can be expected in the circumstances.’ With that scathing and uninformative assurance, he leapt up into the saddle and made further enquiry impossible.

As the horses plodded at a snail’s pace out of the tiny settlement, Lucy focused on his wide-shouldered back view. Joaquin Del Castillo moved as if he was part of the stallion. Lucy endeavoured to unknot her own tense muscles, but she was so terrified of falling off that no sooner did she contrive to loosen one muscle than two others tightened in compensation.

‘Slow down!’ she called frantically within minutes, when the pace speeded up and her hips started to rise and fall bruisingly on the hard saddle beneath her.

He reined in and swung round. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘If I fall off and break a leg, I won’t be much use to Fidelio!’ Lucy warned, with a strained attempt at an apologetic smile.

‘Soon it will be dark—’

‘So you keep on promising,’ Lucy muttered limply, convinced she was boiling alive beneath her poncho. ‘I can hardly wait for that sun to sink.’

‘I am so sorry that this means of travel is not to your taste, señora.’

‘Oh, call me Lucy, for goodness’ sake. That formal address is a nonsense when you match it with your appalling manners!’

Before her eyes Joaquin Del Castillo froze, hard jawline squaring, nostrils flaring.

‘I do realise that you neither like nor approve of me, and I can’t stand hypocrisy,’ Lucy admitted uncomfortably, her voice dying away in the stillness of his complete silence.

‘Your name is Cindy. Why would I call you Lucy?’

In horror at her accidental slip, Lucy bent her head, suddenly belatedly grateful that her late parents had seen fit to name their twin daughters Lucinda and Lucille. ‘Most people call me Lucy now. Cindy was for the teen years,’ she lied breathlessly.

‘Lucinda,’ he sounded out with syllabic thoroughness, and pressed his knees into the stallion’s flanks.

Lucy struggled to stay on board the mare as they wended their way out across the bleached grass plain. The emptiness was eerie. Sky and grass, and all around the heat, like a hard physical entity beating down on her without remorse. There were no buildings, no people, not even the cattle she had dimly expected to see. The eventual sight of a gnarled set of palm trees on a very slight incline should have been enough for her to throw her hat high in celebration. But she didn’t have enough energy left. Indeed, by that stage she had already lost all track of time. Even to shrug back the poncho, lift one wrist and glance at her watch felt like too much effort.

‘I need a drink,’ she finally croaked, her mouth dry as a bone.

‘There is a water bottle attached to your saddle,’ Joaquin informed her drily over his shoulder. ‘But don’t drink too much. You’ll make yourself sick.’

‘You’ll have to get the bottle,’ Lucy told him in a small voice, because really she was beginning to feel like the biggest whiniest drag in the whole of Guatemala. ‘I don’t like looking down. It makes me feel dizzy.’

Joaquin Del Castillo rode the stallion round in a circle, leant out across the divide between their respective mounts with acrobatic confidence and detached the water bottle, the fluid movement simplistic in its highly deceptive air of effortless ease. Indeed, the whole operation took Lucy’s breath away.

‘I saw a Cossack rider do something like that at a circus once,’ Lucy confided shyly.

‘I did not learn to ride in a circus, señora,’ Joaquin Del Castillo responded with icy hauteur.

‘It was meant to be a compliment, actually.’ Turning her discomfited face away, Lucy let the water drift down into her parched mouth.

‘That’s enough,’ Joaquin Del Castillo told her within seconds.

Lucy handed the bottle back, wiped her mouth with an unsteady hand and drooped like a dying swan over Chica’s silky mane. With a groaned imprecation in Spanish, Joaquin Del Castillo sprang out of the saddle and planted his hands on her waist. ‘Let go of the reins.’

In surprise, Lucy unclenched her stiff fingers and found herself swept down from the mare into a pair of frighteningly powerful arms. ‘What on earth—?’

‘You will ride with me on El Lobo,’ Joaquin announced as he swung her up on to the huge stallion’s back, following her up so fast into the saddle she didn’t even have the chance to argue.

As Lucy curved uneasily away from the hard heat of his lean, muscular thighs, a strong arm settled round her abdomen and forced her inexorably back. ‘Stay still…I will not allow you to fall,’ he said impatiently.

Shaken by the sudden intimate contact of their bodies, Lucy dragged in a deep, shivering breath. The disturbingly insidious scent of warm male assailed her. Her dry mouth ran even dryer. He smelt of hot skin and horse. Something twisted low in her tummy, increasing her nervous unease, but at least she felt safe in his hold. As her tension ebbed, slow, pervasive warmth blossomed in its stead, making her feel strangely limp and yielding. The soft peaks of her breasts tightened into hard little points, filling her with a heat that had nothing to do with the relentless sun above. She jerked taut on the shattering acknowledgement that her body was responding without her volition to the sexually charged sizzle of Joaquin Del Castillo’s raw masculinity.

‘Relax,’ he murmured softly, long brown fingers splaying across her midriff to ease her back into position again.

When he talked, soft and low, he had the most beautiful dark honeyed accent, she thought abstractedly, and never had she been as outrageously aware of anything as she was of that lean hand pressing just below her breasts. Her heart was pounding like a hammer inside her ribcage.

‘You’re holding me too tightly,’ she complained uneasily, horrified and embarrassed by the effect he was having on her.

‘You are not in any danger,’ Joaquin Del Castillo drawled silkily above her head. ‘I am not attracted by stunted women with bleached hair and streaky fake tans.’

A lump ballooned in Lucy’s convulsed throat. Mortified pink chased away her strained pallor. ‘You really are the most loathsome man,’ she gasped. ‘And I can’t wait to see the back of you! When will we reach Fidelio’s ranch?’

‘Tomorrow—’

‘Tomorrow?’ Lucy croaked in stunned disbelief.

‘In an hour, we will make camp for the night.’

Camp…camp? Aghast at the prospect of spending the night outdoors, Lucy swallowed back a self-pitying moan with the greatest of difficulty. ‘I thought we would be arriving soon—’

‘We have not made good time, señora.’

‘I had no idea that the ranch was so far away,’ she confided miserably.

They rode on in silence, and slowly the sun became a fiery orb in its sliding path towards the horizon. Lucy was by then dazed with exhaustion and half asleep. She was plucked from the stallion’s back and set down on solid earth again, but her legs had all the strength of bending twigs. She staggered, aching in bone and muscle from neck to toe. Dimly she focused on a trio of gnarled palm trees silhouetted against the darkening night sky and experienced a vague sense of déjà vu. But they couldn’t possibly be the same trees she had noticed hours back! No doubt one set of palm trees looked much like another, Lucy conceded wearily, and she definitely couldn’t recall the slender ribbon of river she could now see running nearby.

With every step she cursed her own bodily weakness. She had lost a lot of weight while her mother had been ill, and only the previous month had come down with a nasty bout of flu. After two solid days of travelling she had no energy left, and was indeed feeling far from well. It had not occurred to either her or Cindy that Fidelio’s ranch might lie in such a remote and inaccessible location.

The Guatemalan lowlands had looked infinitely less vast and daunting on the map than they were in reality, and, torn from the familiarity of city life and her own careful routine, Lucy felt horrendously vulnerable. Her twin might have travelled the globe but this was Lucy’s first trip abroad. Freedom had been the one thing her adoring but possessive mother had refused to give her.

Joaquin was seeing to the horses by the river when Lucy returned. She saw him through a haze of utter exhaustion. Her legs were trembling beneath her. She sank down on the grass. He dropped a blanket beside her.

‘You must be hungry,’ he murmured.

Lucy shook her head, too sick with fatigue to feel hunger. Slowly, like a toy running out of battery power, she slumped down full length. ‘Sleepy,’ she mumbled thickly.

Surprising her once again, he spread the blanket for her. Then, bending down, he shook her even more by sweeping her up in one easy motion and laying her down on the blanket. ‘Rest, then,’ he drawled flatly.

Joaquin Del Castillo was a male of innate and fascinating contradictions, Lucy acknowledged sleepily. Fiercely proud and icily self-contained in his hostility towards her, yet too honourable, it seemed, to make her suffer unnecessary discomfort.

Against the backdrop of the flaming sunset, he stood over her like a huge black intimidating shadow. ‘You look like the devil,’ she whispered, with a drowsy attempt at humour.

‘I will not take your soul, señora…but I have every intention of stripping you of everything else you possess.’

Stray words fluttered in the blankness of Lucy’s brain. They did not connect. They did not make sense. With a soundless sigh of relief, Lucy sank into the deep, dreamless sleep of exhaustion.

CHAPTER TWO

LUCY opened her eyes slowly.

A small fire was crackling, sending out shooting sparks. No wonder she had awakened, she thought in astonishment. The night was warm and humid, yet Joaquin Del Castillo was subjecting her to the heat of a fire. She scrambled back from it, her eyes adjusting only gradually to his big dark silhouette on the other side of the leaping flames.

Pushing a self-conscious hand through her tangled curls, Lucy sat up just as a hair-raising cry sounded from somewhere out in the darkness. Lucy flinched, her head jerking as she glanced fearfully over her shoulder.

‘What was that?’

‘Jaguar…they hunt at night.’

Lucy inched back closer to the fire and her companion and shivered. He extended a tin cup of coffee and she curved her unsteady hands round the cup and sipped gratefully, even though the pungent bitter brew contained neither sugar nor milk. ‘How soon tomorrow will we get to Fidelio’s ranch?’ she pressed.

In the flickering light his strikingly handsome features clenched, the lush crescent of his ebony lashes casting fan-like shadows on his hard cheekbones. ‘Early.’

‘I suppose we would have got there tonight if I’d been able to ride,’ Lucy conceded, striving to proffer an olive branch for the sake of peace. He might despise her, but she was remembering the plane tickets he had sent at his own expense. He didn’t look as if he was terribly well off, yet he had made a very generous gesture. Without doubt Fidelio had a caring and concerned neighbour, willing to go to a lot of trouble on his behalf. She might loathe Joaquin Del Castillo, and every bone in her body might feel battered by that almost unendurable ride, but she could still respect the motives which had prompted him to demand that Cindy visit her father-in-law.

Joaquin shrugged a sleek, muscular broad shoulder and passed her a plate.

Lucy surveyed the roughly sliced bread and cheese, and a fruit she didn’t even recognise, and then tucked in with an appetite that surprised her.

Having cleared the plate, and drained the coffee in a final appreciative gulp, she felt the continuing silence weigh heavily on her. ‘Perhaps you’ll tell me now how Fidelio really is,’ she prompted, with a small uncertain smile of encouragement.

‘You will see the situation soon enough.’

His cool steady gaze and his sonorous accented drawl had a curiously chilling quality. A faint spasm of alarm crawled up Lucy’s spine and raised gooseflesh on her arms. But as quickly as she found herself reacting in fear, she told herself off. Being brought up by a mother who hated and distrusted all men had made her over-sensitive.

Lucy had been seven when her father met another woman and demanded a divorce. Cindy, always his favourite, had become a real handful after he’d moved out. Infuriated by her daughter’s increasingly difficult behaviour, their mother had complained that it wasn’t fair that she should be left to raise both children alone. In the end Peter and Jean Fabian had divided their twin daughters between them in much the same way that they had divided their possessions.

Her father and Cindy had moved to Scotland, where her father had set up a new business. He had promised that his daughters would be able to exchange visits but it had never happened. And, embittered by her husband’s desertion for the younger, prettier woman he had replaced her with, Jean Fabian had clung to the daughter who remained with feverish protectiveness. A rebound romance in which she had once again been betrayed and humiliated had set the seal on her mother’s prejudices. Lucy’s teenage years had been poisoned by her mother’s hatred for the male sex. The endless restrictions she had endured had made it impossible for her to hang on to her friends.

By the time she had been ready to make a stand and demand a social life of her own Jean Fabian’s health had been failing, and Lucy’s imprisonment outside working hours had become complete. When she had tried to go out even occasionally she had been treated to sobbing hysterical accusations of selfish neglect and threats of suicide.

However, her poor sister had suffered infinitely more in their father’s care, Lucy reminded herself, ashamed of her momentary pang of self-pity. Her mother had loved and looked after her. But when her father’s new business had failed and his girlfriend had walked out on him, Peter Fabian had apparently degenerated into a surly drunk, forever in debt and unable to hold down a job. Cindy had been frank on the subject of her childhood experiences at least. Her sister had had a rough time. Indeed, listening to her talk, Lucy had felt horribly guilty about the security which she herself had taken for granted.

Tugging the blanket back round her again, Lucy lay down and stared up into a night sky studded with stars. She could cope with Joaquin Del Castillo’s icy antagonism for another few hours. He didn’t matter, she told herself. She was here for Fidelio’s sake, and instead of feeling threatened by what was strange and different in Guatemala she should be seizing the opportunity to enjoy what she could of the experience.

Lucy was in agony when she tried to move the next morning. Her mistreated muscles had seized up and a night on the hard ground hadn’t helped to ease her aching limbs. Sore all over, she accepted the small amount of water and the toilet bag which Joaquin silently offered her and removed herself to the comparative shelter of the palms to freshen up as best she could.

She could hardly walk. If anything, she felt worse than she had the night before, and the air was surprisingly cool. Shivering violently, she returned to the low-burning fire and donned the old poncho without being asked, grateful for its shielding warmth.

Joaquin passed her a cup of black coffee and more bread and cheese. He ate standing up, with the quick economical movements of an energetic male in a hurry.

As he helped her mount Chica Lucy gritted her teeth when her every muscle screeched in complaint. Another couple of hours at most, she told herself bracingly, but in no time at all the ride became yet another endurance test.

When the mare finally drifted to an unannounced halt, Lucy muttered, ‘Why have we stopped?’ sooner than go to the trouble of raising her aching head.

Joaquin lifted her down from the mare. For a split second she was in close contact with his lithe, superbly masculine body. The sun-warmed virile scent of him engulfed her. As he lowered her to the ground her breasts rubbed against the muscular wall of his chest. Her nipples pinched taut and throbbed and Lucy sucked in a dismayed breath, her face colouring with embarrassment.

A pair of lean hands curved over her stiff shoulders and carefully turned her round. Her already shaken eyes opened even wider in surprise. A dingy little house with stucco walls lay only a few yards away. Tumbledown out-housing and a broken line of ancient fencing accentuated its forlorn air of desertion and neglect.

‘Where are we?’ she whispered in bewilderment.

‘This is Fidelio’s ranch, señora.’ Joaquin Del Castillo raked her stunned face with hard, glittering eyes. ‘I do hope that you will enjoy your stay here.’

‘This…this is Fidelio’s ranch?’ Lucy queried unevenly, staring with glazed fixity at the hovel before her.

‘No doubt you were expecting a more luxurious dwelling…’

Inwardly, Lucy winced at his perception. Swift shame engulfed her. The old man was ill and alone and he had evidently come down in the world over the past five years. He had fallen on hard times, very hard times. Her compassionate heart bled for Fidelio, and now she understood exactly why Joaquin Del Castillo had thought it necessary to send those plane tickets. Clearly Cindy’s father-in-law couldn’t possibly have afforded such a gesture on his own behalf.