Spaniard's Seduction / Cole's Red-Hot Pursuit
Good, the man was afraid. Phillip Saxon had sensed that he, Rafaelo, could destroy his privileged world, everything he held dear.
Then a movement forced his attention to Caitlyn. Her hand was outstretched. “If you’re going to get to know the Saxons well, then we’d better introduce ourselves, too. I’m—”
He ignored the proffered hand, and her introduction trailed away into silence. Placing his hands on her shoulders, he leaned forward. She smelled of wildflowers, soft and subtle.
“Encantado de conocerte.” Very happy to meet you. His lips brushed one cheek, he heard her gasp. His head lifted. Deliberately he kissed her other cheek, no social brush, but a careful placing of his mouth against the pale, silken milk-and-honey skin. He paused for a moment before whispering in her ear, “The pleasure is all mine, Miss Ross.”
She pulled back, a startled expression on her face, a touch of fear in her eyes. “You know my name?”
She was too modest. Of course he knew her name. Rising star. Winner, two years ago, of a silver medal at the World Wine Challenge. And last year she and Saxon had secured a coveted gold medal. His mouth curved. “You’d be surprised by how much I know.”
He heard Phillip’s indrawn breath.
The fear subsided and her eyes sparkled with anger. “Perhaps you don’t know as much as you think, Mr. Carreras. It’s Ms. Ross.”
“Ah,” he said softly, eyes narrowing at her attempt to hold him at a distance with icy formality. “I should’ve known.” And he watched the fresh annoyance flare in those pale, clear eyes.
He preferred her anger to her fear. For a split second he wondered what she was afraid of—because she couldn’t know why he was here. Then Saxon shifted and he moved his attention back to the man he’d come across the world to find.
“Caitlyn, Kay, perhaps it is better that I speak to Mr. Carreras alone.” Saxon sounded anxious.
A frown pleated Kay’s forehead. “But why should that be necessary?”
“There may be things that your husband hasn’t told you, Mrs. Saxon.” The address held a certain irony that only Rafaelo was aware of.
She waved a dismissive hand. “My husband tells me everything.”
“Perhaps not.” Rafaelo’s mouth slashed upward.
“You’re impertinent.”
It was not Kay Saxon who spoke. Rafaelo turned his attention on the blonde. If anyone was impertinent, it was her. He was the Marques de Las Carreras. All his life the family name had commanded respect. Until now…
“Be careful,” he murmured.
“Or what?” Caitlyn challenged. “What are you threatening to do? This is Saxon property, there is security—” She gestured toward a burly man in a dark uniform.
“Caitlyn.” Phillip put a hand on her arm.
But with her protective instincts roused, she would not be stopped. “Call Pita. He can’t just walk into Saxon’s Folly and threaten you, Phillip.”
Rafaelo stared at her. “I am not threatening anyone. I will not be evicted. But I am certain that that he—” Rafaelo couldn’t bring himself to address the man directly “—would prefer to talk alone.”
Phillip released her. “Caitlyn, perhaps he is right.”
“I would like to hear what this man has to say, what he thinks you might not have told me.” Kay Saxon dug her Ferragamo-clad heels into the ground. “Caitlyn is right—he is impertinent.”
Anger ignited deep in Rafaelo’s heart. All the inconveniences of the past two days flamed high, and the pain and rage he’d been keeping under tight control for the past months burst into a blinding conflagration.
He raised an arched, black eyebrow. “It is impertinent to travel all the way to New Zealand to meet my father?”
Phillip dropped his head forward into his hands and uttered a hoarse groan.
“Your father?” Caitlyn looked bewildered. “What does that have to do with—”
Rafaelo glared at her. “It has nothing to do with you—it is a family matter. But trust me, Phillip Saxon is my father.”
Two
Trust him?
Never! Caitlyn drew a shaking breath but kept quiet. Lashing out at the arrogant Spaniard wouldn’t help the fact that she’d exposed Kay to a dreadful revelation.
If she hadn’t pushed him, challenged him, the outcome might have been very different…
“What did you say your name was?” Kay was asking Rafaelo, her face suddenly pale.
“Rafaelo Carreras.”
Slowly Kay started to shake her head. “I don’t know anyone by that name.”
“He’s lying,” Caitlyn said fiercely, determined not to let Kay be upset. She had enough to contend with already.
“Kay—”
“Wait.” Kay warded off Phillip’s attempt to talk to her. “Carreras, it’s Spanish, isn’t it?”
Caitlyn didn’t like the sudden gleam in Kay’s eyes. Nor, it appeared, did Phillip.
“Kay, love, let’s go. There are people waiting to pay their respects.” Phillip curled an arm around his wife’s shoulders, the skin stretched thin across his cheekbones.
But Kay didn’t budge.
Rafaelo placed his hands on his hips, and thrust his shoulders forward. He looked ready for battle. “Madam, my full name is Rafaelo Lopez y Carreras.”
“Lopez? There was a girl…a young woman…” Kay’s brow pleated as her voice trailed away. “I think her name was Maria Lopez. In fact, I’m sure of it. She was researching her family…I seem to remember that her father, or perhaps an uncle, had died in the Napier earthquake. Yes, that’s right. It’s coming back to me. Her name was Maria.”
“My mother’s name is Maria,” Rafaelo said in a flat voice, his eyes shooting daggers at Phillip.
Eyes widening, Kay put her hand over her mouth and, shrugging out from under his arm, turned to her husband. “Tell me this isn’t true.”
Caitlyn’s stomach dropped like a stone at the expression in Kay’s eyes. She clenched her hands into fists. Surely, Kay couldn’t believe what Rafaelo claimed was true?
Phillip took a large white handkerchief from his pocket and, without unfolding it, rubbed it across his brow.
“You are not going to deny it, are you?” Kay’s face had drawn into tight lines. She turned her attention back to Rafaelo, studying him with critical eyes. “How old are you?”
“Thirty-five.”
Kay was not telling Rafaelo to get lost.
“That’s the same age as Roland.” Kay paused and sucked in an audible breath. “When were you born?”
Rafaelo told her.
Hurt flickered across Kay’s face. “That makes you Phillip’s eldest son…even if Roland our—my—first child hadn’t died.”
There was a world of reproach in the look that Kay gave Phillip.
Hurriedly he reached for her. “Kay, I’m sorry. I never—” He broke off, shamefaced.
“Never wanted me to know?”
Phillip didn’t answer and Kay tugged her hand free and walked away. After a horrible silence, Phillip took off after her.
Finding that her hands were shaking, Caitlyn balled them against her mouth. God. It had all happened so fast…
And it appeared that Rafaelo wasn’t lying.
A sideways glance revealed that Rafaelo’s face held no expression. No glee. No gloating. So why had he done it? Why had he come all the way across the world and dropped this devastating bombshell on the Saxons?
He met her questioning gaze with a decided lack of expression and said, “So I am not a liar.”
Then Rafaelo was walking away from her, too, his back ramrod-straight, his black head held at a proud, arrogant tilt. Caitlyn stared after him, her mouth hanging open. Finally she came to her senses.
“What were you hoping to achieve by staging that little scene?” She hurled the words like pebbles at the space between his shoulders.
He stopped, then turned.
Caitlyn glanced around. A little way off a couple stared curiously in their direction. Farther away groups stood around talking. “It’s too public here for the conversation I have in mind. Come with me.”
He didn’t look like the kind of man who followed orders. She half expected him not to follow as she crossed the lane that led past the winery to the house and wound her way along the shoulder of the hill, down the northern slope planted with Cabernet Franc vines. For once Caitlyn didn’t notice the pale green of the leaves, or how the land opened up to meadows where wildflowers had started to bloom in deep drifts along the fence line. She was too mad.
His fault.
Normally, she was even-tempered, easy to get along with—she never lost her temper and rarely even told off any of her cellar hands. But Rafaelo Carreras had managed to get under her skin with his intransigence, with his hard-ass, unbending attitude. She glanced back, he was following. Good.
She quickened her pace.
Caitlyn took him to the stable block. As they entered the yard in front of the L-shaped block, several horses stuck their heads over the half doors, ears pricked with interest. The familiar warm smell of horses and hay calmed her a little. At the end of the row, one stall was closed top and bottom and Caitlyn could hear the animal inside battering the door with his hooves as he demanded to be let out.
That would be Lady Killer. Apart from him, there should be no interruptions. Certainly, there would be no danger of being overheard by guests who’d come to attend Roland’s memorial service.
She swung around and glared at Rafaelo. “Do you have any idea what you interrupted?”
“I called the winery. I made an appointment.”
Caitlyn raised her eyebrows. “I don’t think so. Not for today. Not when Kay and Phillip are unveiling a memorial plaque for their son.”
“No, no. The appointment was for yesterday.” His hands raked his hair. “But I experienced some delays.”
She scanned his appearance. Not even the wrinkles and specks of dust could hide the fact that the suit was unlike anything she’d seen before. It fitted like it had been handmade—even if it was looking a little shabby right now. “The security scare in London?” She nodded at his startled look. “I heard about it on the news. I’m sorry, but Phillip and Kay haven’t been taking appointments for the last few days.”
He looked a little abashed. “The woman who answered the phone said something but I wasn’t listening.”
So he wasn’t lying. The frustration in his eyes was too real.
“You must’ve spoken to Amy, the winery’s PA. Roland was her fiancé.” Poor, poor Amy. She would almost certainly not have remembered to tell Phillip about any appointment. She was perilously close to a breakdown. “So I’m sorry, but Phillip probably didn’t get the message.” But that still didn’t excuse Rafaelo’s harsh behaviour. “Once you realised that a memorial ceremony was taking place, couldn’t you have left?”
“So the memorial service is for Roland? The eldest son?”
His face wore a strange expression. Caitlyn gave up trying to decipher what it meant. “Yes, Roland died in a car accident, several weeks ago.” The night of the annual Saxon’s Folly masked ball. “A terrible tragedy.”
“My condolences.” He bowed his head. Briefly. Politely. Then, like a dog with a bone, continued, “I have travelled many miles, I came with a purpose—I’d made an appointment. I wasn’t to know Saxon knew nothing of it. Nor do I have any intention of turning tail and leaving without fulfilling that purpose.”
“That’s it? That’s all you can say?” Caitlyn stared at him in disbelief. “After that confrontation you just forced?”
“I had no intention of forcing a confrontation—it was you who provoked that.”
He gave her a frown filled with dislike. Caitlyn opened her mouth, then shut it again. Oh, why hadn’t she stayed out of it?
Yet she knew that would’ve been impossible. She’d taken one look at the tall, dark foreigner, heard the sardonic edge to his voice as he harangued Phillip and she’d leapt into the fray to protect her employer. Hell, Phillip was more than an employer. He was her sounding board…her mentor…a dear friend.
“You must understand that the Saxons are like family to me.” It was true. “I could no more leave you to bully Phillip than I could walk away from a delinquent drowning a kitten.”
“I am not a bully,” he growled, blood rushing under his olive skin. “I am not a delinquent. I do not drown kittens. I am a man of honour, something that your employer is not. I would never leave a young woman pregnant and alone.”
Suddenly aware of his height and the strength of him as he loomed over her, Caitlyn felt a whisper of fear and took a step back.
He followed, relentlessly closing the space she’d claimed. “I wanted to face my cowardly father with the fact that he has a son he has never cared to acknowledge—and a woman who he had abandoned without giving her any emotional or financial support.”
Another step and the whitewashed wall of the stables pressed against her back; Caitlyn could feel the roughness of the plaster through the linen jacket. She swallowed nervously. “Maybe he didn’t know—”
“He knew!” Rafaelo loomed over her, dark and menacing, and planted a balled fist on either side of her head. “My mother wrote to him when she first learned she was pregnant.”
“Perhaps—” Her voice cracked as he bent forward. Up close the snapping eyes were full of anger, his mouth drawn into a hard line that highlighted the small white scar below his bottom lip. No sign showed of the good humour that the laugh lines around his eyes suggested.
She didn’t know this man at all.
He was a stranger.
What had possessed her to seek out privacy far from everyone else? Caitlyn swallowed again, horribly conscious of how isolated they were here in the empty stable yard.
Bravely she found her voice. “Perhaps the letter went astray.”
“My mother wrote to him again, she was desperate. Is it likely that two letters went astray? New Zealand is, after all, hardly Mars.”
The turmoil in his eyes twisted Caitlyn’s insides into a knot and her anxiety about her own safety subsided. She fell silent. It did sound bad. But she couldn’t believe Phillip would act so callously. Despite Rafaelo’s accusations, she knew Phillip was a man of honour, a decent man, respected throughout the region for his business acumen and the fund-raising he did for charity.
She had to make Rafaelo understand that.
But before she could try to convince him, he pushed his hands away from the wall. The suffocating space between them widened, and Caitlyn sucked in a breath of relief.
“My mother even contacted him by telephone. Phillip Saxon made it clear that he wasn’t interested in the child he had fathered, told my mother that he wouldn’t be leaving his wife.” There was a corrosive bitterness beneath that exotic accent.
Caitlyn glimpsed pain and suppressed rage in his expressive eyes. Unbidden, her hand came up, driven by an urge to rest it on his shoulder, to comfort him. Then the memory of his head bending over hers—of the suffocating closeness of a moment ago—returned and a sharp sliver of the poisonous fear pierced her. Hastily she dropped her hand to her side.
“There must have been some mistake,” she whispered at last, thinking the response that he roused in her was definitely a mistake. She didn’t want, or need, this.
“It was no mistake. Phillip Saxon abandoned her.”
The edge in his voice took her mind off her body’s incomprehensible reaction and made her think about what it must have been like for his mother to find herself alone and pregnant. Three decades ago it would have been worse; society had been much less accepting.
Yet Caitlyn couldn’t help the wave of sympathy for Kay that flooded her. Poor Kay! How humiliating this must be. How horrible to discover her husband’s betrayal of their marriage vows at a time when she was struggling to come to terms with grief over the loss of her son.
In front of her Rafaelo shifted, his eyes unseeing, focused on an inner hell.
The last lingering vestige of apprehension left her. Caitlyn stepped away from the wall. “You’re not the only one who has suffered.” Surely Rafaelo would see that he had more in common with his father than he believed? “Phillip lost a son recently. Can’t you find it in yourself to show him pity?”
“I’m well aware that I am not the only person to suffer bereavement.” From this close her eyes were level with his mouth. His mouth…
Quickly she glanced up, only to find Rafaelo looking down his haughty nose at her. At once Caitlyn realised that he’d misunderstood her.
“I meant both of you are grieving. Perhaps you can offer comfort—”
“I have no intention of offering him anything,” Rafaelo growled. “I owe him nothing. Nada.”
Caitlyn’s cheeks grew hot at his stubborn intransigence. “He’s your father, and he’s just lost a son. Why don’t y—”
The black eyebrows jerked together. Something violent flashed in the depths of his stormy eyes. “Phillip Saxon is not my real father. My father is dead. My father taught me to ride, to fish, to swim—and about wine. And that man is not Saxon.”
“I’m sorry,” she muttered in a subdued tone, not knowing what else to say.
He sighed then, a harsh, grating sound. “On his deathbed, the man who all my life I’d believed to be my father, informed me that he and my mother had lied to me, that I was not his son.”
He’d felt betrayed. The sympathy Caitlyn felt for him grew. It had been wrong of his mother to keep the truth from him. But what choice would Maria have had? She’d probably wanted to forget Phillip existed. Now Rafaelo had arrived at Saxon’s Folly, betrayed, grieving…angry at the world.
It was an explosive situation. “Kay doesn’t deserve—”
“I concede that my timing is unfortunate.” The dark eyes lost a little of their angry fire. “But it was not my intention to deliberately set out to cause Kay Saxon pain.”
“Only Phillip,” she retorted, and watched his head jerk back. “You want to hurt him. Why? Because he rejected you when you were a child? Or because you’re scared that he won’t accept you now?”
A range of emotions flickered across his face, receding one by one, until only irritation remained. “I am not a child. I am a realist. I don’t even know this man who fathered me—”
“But you want to get to know him?”
“No! I don’t need to know him. I dislike him. I have no respect for hi—”
“So you want to wound him, don’t you?” Caitlyn could feel herself getting hot and bothered as annoyance spread through her. “What do you plan to do to make up for the hurt he caused you?”
“It’s not about me. I want the bastard to pay for what he did to my mother.” The words burst from him in a torrent.
The silence that fell between them was deafening, broken only by the scrape of an iron shoe as a horse shifted.
Rafaelo looked astonished.
There was another emotion, too. Bewilderment? Confusion? Irritation? It passed too quickly for Caitlyn to read. Either way, it showed there was a chink in that impenetrable armour.
Before she could respond, her cell phone rang. “Where are you?” Megan demanded. “We need you.”
Oh, damn. She was supposed to be helping with the reception.
“Be there shortly.” Caitlyn hit the button to end the call. Meeting his gaze, she said, “I have to go—and so should you. I think you’ve caused enough disruption today.”
His eyes flashed. “I have every right—”
“Not today,” Caitlyn said with certainty. “You need to calm down before you speak to your father.” She tensed, waiting for him to rail at her for calling Phillip that. But to her surprise he didn’t interrupt, so she continued, “Give the Saxons a chance to mourn, to remember Roland with dignity.”
His eyes narrowed until all she could see were slits of onyx. “Tomorrow.”
Caitlyn started to thank him. The compromise could not have been easy, but he steamrolled over her. “In the evening I am flying back to Spain. I do not have time to—how do you say?—twiddle my fingers.”
“Twiddle your thumbs.” She started to smile, refusing to let his disgruntlement spoil her pleasure in his concession. “It will be for only one night.”
Rafaelo stared at her. Caitlyn shifted uncomfortably.
“You will have dinner with me tonight? At my hotel?”
Suddenly his eyes held a lazy warmth that turned Caitlyn’s knees to liquid. The sensation was disturbing…and extremely unwelcome.
“No, I will not have dinner with you.” She couldn’t. Dared not. Not even to try and talk him out of the hatred he held toward the Saxons. “But may I suggest—”
“You are about to order me around again, no?”
She drew a deep breath. “No. Not order. Make a suggestion that will benefit both you and Phillip—and your relationship in the future.”
“I have told you, I have no relationship with him.” He was all disdain again, looking down that arrogant nose, the glimmer of interest that had warmed his eyes a moment ago well and truly doused.
The Spanish grandee, Caitlyn thought with a brief pang of regret at the loss of his more approachable manner. Then she said, “I think you do want a relationship with your father, otherwise why else did you come all this way?”
“Because—” He checked himself. “This is none of your concern.”
Caitlyn suppressed the urge to roll her eyes skyward. “Oh, yes, because I’m not family, right?”
He stared at her unblinkingly, until an uncomfortable prickle started beneath the loose hair at her nape and shivered down her spine.
Hastily Caitlyn said, “I suggest that you spend the evening planning how best to cement the relationship with your father. I also think you should call tomorrow and let Phillip know that you’re coming and give him some idea what you wish to see him about.”
The edge of his lips curled up. The smile—if it could be called that—was full of male superiority and mockery. And it set her teeth on edge. It was a smile that made it clear that he would not take advice. Not from her. Not from anyone. Rafaelo Carreras was his own man and he would do what the hell he wanted.
Finally his lips moved. “It is not my way to let the opposition prepare.”
Damn, but he was annoying with his formal diction, his immaculately tailored suit, and his give-not-one-inch manner…and that beautiful mouth that said such hateful, intransigent things.
“He’s your father…not the opposition.” Caitlyn heard her voice rising.
His face darkened and his lips parted.
She struggled for calm. “Okay, okay. You don’t need to say it.”
“Say what?”
“That he’s not your father.”
Rafaelo’s mouth snapped shut, but his expression remained black as thunder. As she watched that very same mouth compressed into the hard line she was starting to recognise. Then he said, “Phillip Saxon has done nothing to earn the title of father. Right now he is my enemy.”
Caitlyn tore her gaze from that riveting mouth and met the pair of black, smouldering eyes, where she read his implacable hatred for his father. And unexpectedly her heart ached for Rafaelo—and the Saxons.
After the disturbance he’d caused, Caitlyn was determined to escort Rafaelo politely off the estate herself even if the delay meant that she’d have to contend with Megan’s wrath. She wanted no further chance encounters between Rafaelo and the Saxons. At least, not until this day was over.
But as she marched him back along the lane that led to the winery complex, Heath’s voice broke in from behind them, “Caitlyn, do you know what happened to Mother? She’s crying.”
“Uh…” Caitlyn’s heart sank and she suppressed the urge to utter a short, sharp curse. Making her way to the verge of the lane to get out of the path of an approaching car, she said, “Kay’s crying?”
Kay hadn’t cried since Roland had died. Her unnatural stoicism had caused the entire family much concern. But given today’s emotionally charged occasion, it was hardly surprising that she’d broken down. Beside her Rafaelo paused, too. Caitlyn was aware of his body quivering with tension as he slowly turned to face Heath Saxon.