The Spaniard's Inconvenient Wife (10 page)

‘That’s just as well—because I don’t want you thinking that you can renege on our bargain.’

‘And why would I want to do that, my beautiful star?’

Leaning forward, Ramón pressed his lips to her forehead, along the fine dark line of her brows, on the delicate vein that pulsed at her temple.

‘Well, now you have what you want, you could—’

‘You think I would go back on my promise—that I would break my word to you?’

His tone sharpened dangerously, his eyes flashing angry fire as they burned down into her wide, darkly shadowed ones.

‘Don’t you know that I would rather die than do that?’

Rather die…

The words made her head spin, her foolish, naïve heart
leaping at the sound of them; at the thought that she might actually mean more to him than just the wife acquired as a necessary part of a business deal. But even as the wild fantasy formed in her head Ramón’s next words dashed it away again with a dousing of cold reason, as effective as the splash of icy water right in her face.

‘If I give my word, it is a point of honour never to go back on it,’ he declared tersely, each word snapped off in a harsh slash of sound. ‘And besides, your father is no fool. His signature will not go on that vital piece of paper until mine is on our wedding certificate. So you need have no fear that I will run out on you before our wedding day,
querida.
I know too well what I want in life to do that.’

‘Because you see the whole thing as a business arrangement.’

That brought her another swift, reproving glare from those steel-grey eyes, all the mockery leaching from them, leaving them cold and bleak as ice.

‘I don’t sleep with my business partners, Doña Medrano. I never have, and I don’t intend to start now.’

‘Then why—?’

But their private time was up. Mercedes spotted them in their corner and the next moment she and Cassie came over, Ramón’s sister-in-law pulling him onto the dance floor, and the chance to talk was gone.

They didn’t get it back either. There was more dancing, a meal, toasts and speeches followed and Estrella seemed to spend all her time forcing herself to thank well-wishers, accepting their congratulations with as much enthusiasm as she could manage, praying that her smile looked genuine and not as forced and as stiff as it felt to her.

By the end of the evening her jaw and cheek muscles ached and she had a pounding headache from trying to play the part of the happy, excited bride-to-be when inside she
was feeling so tangled and messed up that she felt she would never be able to think straight again. She had danced with Ramón, spending long minutes in his arms, pressed hard against the taut muscles of his lean frame. And those minutes had stirred all her senses, making her long for the end of the evening when the prospect of being alone with him offered so much more than just a chance to talk.

But Ramón was suddenly a very different man. To the guests at the party he might seem exactly the same, smiling easily, talking even more so. He laughed, he told jokes, he played the role of the proud, happy fiancé to perfection. But to someone as sensitive to his every mood, to every nuance of his voice, his look, as Estrella had become, it was so obvious that he wasn’t really there.

His eyes were strangely opaque, reflecting none of the warmth that was threaded through his voice, that curled his mouth in a wide, brilliant smile. When he touched her it was like being held by a stranger. Worse, it was like being in the arms of some brilliantly designed, almost human, but totally unfeeling animatronic creation that functioned in every way that a real person should but was somehow totally lacking in soul.

He held her, danced with her, but he didn’t really touch her. He made polite, trivial conversation, listened to her responses, answered them, but didn’t truly seem to hear her. Although he rarely left her side through what was left of the night, she never, ever felt that she had the real Ramón there, rather than some pale shadow of the man who was her fiancé, her lover, her prospective husband and yet whom she didn’t truly know in any way at all.

The longed-for private time didn’t come either. They had hardly said goodbye to the last, lingering guests when a gesture from Ramón’s hand brought a maid hurrying up with Estrella’s coat. Another summoned the chauffeur, who
had obviously been waiting for just this command, and had a large, luxurious car purring at the main door in the blink of an eyelid, it seemed.

‘But I…’ Estrella tried to protest, but Ramón paid no heed to her stumbling attempt to dissuade him.

‘I promised your father I would make sure you got home safely,’ was all he would say. ‘And as I have drunk too much champagne to drive you myself, then Paco will take care of you.’

‘I thought—I’m not ready to leave yet!’

‘Estrella…’ Ramón’s voice sounded appallingly reasonable, even gentle, though his cold eyes and the hard set of his jaw delivered exactly the opposite message. ‘It’s been a long night, and we have a busy week coming up, preparing for the wedding.’

Softly he touched her face, trailing his fingers down the line of her cheek, and it was only looking into those hooded eyes that kept her from turning her head and pressing her lips into the centre of his hard palm.

‘I’m not tired.’

‘And I want to make sure you stay that way. I want a glowing bride on our wedding day, not someone pale and worn out from lack of sleep.’

‘But…’

‘Estrella—you are going home.’

He didn’t raise his voice, it remained cold and flat, but somehow so brutally emphatic that she knew she didn’t dare to argue. She certainly didn’t want to risk saying that she had hoped to stay with him tonight. That she needed his arms around her, his kiss on her lips.

‘Oh, all right. If you insist.’

The kiss, she tried for, standing on tiptoe and pressing her mouth against the lean, stubble-shadowed plane of his cheek, his lips. But there was no response. If it hadn’t been
for the warmth of his skin, the yielding softness of his flesh, she would have thought that he was surrounded by a sheet of plate glass, cold and hard and totally unwelcoming. He didn’t even kiss her back, but reached for the long, black velvet evening coat the maid held and wrapped it round Estrella’s shoulders, pulling it close at her neck.

‘Goodnight,
querida.
Sleep well.’

Taking her arm, he almost hustled her down the steps and into the waiting car, barely giving her time to settle on the soft leather of the wide back seat before he slammed shut the door and straightened up again.

Still she tried to wave—to blow him a kiss—but he just rapped on the driver’s window to order him to start, then stepped back, his stunning face carefully blanked off as he watched the car pull away. A second later he had turned on his heel, marched up the steps, and was gone.

Although she had seen him on several occasions since, he had never once taken her to bed again since that night. He had always been perfectly polite, sociable even, but he had made sure that they were rarely on their own together, and if they were it was in some place where they couldn’t do more than kiss, and certainly not make love.

So tonight—their wedding night—was something that Estrella was looking forward to with a strong sense of apprehension, almost as much as if she had been a virgin anticipating her husband’s lovemaking for the very first time.

Looking down at the beautiful diamond star engagement ring that shone on her finger, she touched it softly, her eyes blurring faintly, her expression thoughtful.

Which Ramón would she be with tonight? The ardent, passionate lover who couldn’t keep his hands off her, or the strangely subdued, distant and withdrawn man he had become since the night of their engagement party? She didn’t know, and not knowing was twisting her nerves into tight,
painful knots, making her heart lurch into an uncomfortable, urgent beat, pounding unevenly in double-quick time.

Restlessly she twisted the ring round and round on her finger, betraying the unease and discomfort of her thoughts.

‘Estrella!’

It was Mercedes’ voice, dragging her back from the uncomfortable place that her reflections had taken her to, making her head come up with a start, her dark eyes widen in stunned shock.

‘I—I’m sorry,’ she managed awkwardly, struggling for control again. ‘I was miles away.’

‘And I know where!’ Mercedes grinned. ‘You’ve really got it bad! I wonder if that brother of mine knows just how madly in love with him you are.’

‘Wha…?’

Estrella’s head jerked in shock and she tried to speak, but the word died in the middle, her throat drying, her tongue seizing up as the impact of what Mercedes had said really hit home.

Love.

Had Mercedes said love?

Her mind reeled as if the words had been a violent blow struck right in her face, and she couldn’t gather her scattered thoughts together to focus on the word and the problems it brought with it.

Problems that would change the whole of the rest of her life.

She could only be thankful that Mercedes had chosen that moment to turn away, looking for her handbag, and so never saw the way that all colour leached from Estrella’s face, leaving her eyes looking like two huge, dark bruises above her pale, wan cheeks.

I wonder if that brother of mine knows just how madly in love with him you are.

Oh, heaven help her, what did she do now?

‘S
HE’LL
be here soon.’

Joaquin grinned widely at his brother as they stood to one side of the altar in the small village church.

‘You’d better enjoy your last moments of freedom.’

‘Says the man who’s only been married a month or so himself,’ laughed Alex, the youngest of Juan Alcolar’s three sons. ‘As an old married man, myself, I can heartily recommend it.’

He meant it too, Ramón reflected, seeing the way that Alex’s dark grey eyes sought out the tall, slender, brown-haired figure of his English wife Louise, who sat just a few metres away in one of the family pews, her baby daughter on her lap. Ever since Alex had returned from a visit to England with Louise and some story of her claiming to be his wife, the two of them had been inseparable. Now the birth of Maria Elena had put the crown on their love.

Joaquin too had found happiness, though it had been a close-run thing. before his older half-brother had finally seen sense and realised that he was madly in love with Cassie. Now they were married, with their first child on the way. Joaquin had mellowed too, his once prickly relationship with both his father and Ramón himself becoming easier, more relaxed, as he settled into his new way of life. Knowing he loved and was loved had turned him from the man some had called
El Lobo
—the Lone Wolf—into a very different personality.

Privately Ramón admitted to being jealous as hell. His brothers were both living out the happy ever after that he
had once believed was an impossibility. The happy ever after that, if he was honest, he had once wanted for himself.

His own home life, growing up with his mother dead and the man he believed was his father a harsh, aggressive, unloving figure, had made him long for the sort of family his friends had had. He’d vowed that one day, when he was a man, he would find that life, create the sort of home he had never known, with a wife he loved and centred his life around.

So why was he marrying Estrella? Why was he standing here, today, with his brothers, wearing the traditional tucked and hand-finished shirt that, to his total astonishment, Estrella had insisted on making for him?

‘I have to admit I’m stunned,’ Alex was saying now. ‘If anyone got you down the aisle, I always thought it would be the lovely Benita. One minute you only had eyes for her. The next, you announced that you were marrying some woman we’d never heard of. What the devil happened?’

‘Estrella happened,’ Ramón returned, knowing he spoke nothing less than the truth.

He’d asked himself that same question heaven knew how many times, and never come up with any other more coherent answer.

Estrella had happened. She had burst into his life like a blazing comet rather than the star that gave her her name and he hadn’t been able to think straight ever since. Benita, who had seemed the most desirable female he knew up until that moment, now never crossed his mind. He couldn’t even bring her features to mind if he tried—not that he ever did try. His thoughts were fully occupied with images of the woman he was going to marry today.

‘Mercedes always said that if you ever fell in love, you’d fall hard,’ Joaquin put in. ‘But she was sure that you were
going to be a long time finding someone you wanted to be with.’

‘Mercedes thinks she knows too much,’ Ramón scoffed, hoping that he sounded convincing.

He’d fallen hard, all right—but not in love. He was head over heels in lust and he couldn’t break free from the sensual chains that Estrella had fastened around him. He wasn’t at all sure he wanted to either.

But that wasn’t being in love. It was something else entirely.

He was no longer sure he believed in love, not for himself. Oh, he had done once, when he was younger. It was only later, when he had discovered that he was not his father’s child, that his mother had been unfaithful early on in her marriage, and he had been the result, that disillusionment had set in.

‘Our little sister needs to know what love is all about before she starts propounding on how it will affect other people’s lives.’

‘Well, that might not be too long coming,’ was his elder brother’s response. ‘She’s been hopelessly distracted these past few days. Maybe she has someone on her mind.’

‘Well, if she does, heaven help us,’ Alex put in devoutly. ‘Mercedes feels passionately enough about the most ordinary things. Remember how she once thought she was in love with me when I first turned up—before she realised I was actually her brother? If she ever fell in love for real then she would be in deep right from the start.’

‘That seems to be something of a family trait,’ Joaquin murmured dryly. ‘It’s just that some of us take a while to discover the truth.’

And some of us settle for other things instead, Ramón reflected, though he didn’t actually voice the words. He didn’t feel that his brothers, so sure of their own feelings
and those of their wives, would understand the way he was acting—the reasons that had brought him here today.

But one thing was true. He had been in deep from the start—and he was getting in deeper with every day that passed. And that was why he was here. Not for any damn business deal, or because Estrella had asked him, or because of the aristocratic inheritance that might be in the future for any children he might have.

He was here because he couldn’t stay away. Because of all the things he had wanted out of this arrangement, all that he would acquire as a result of it, Estrella was what he wanted most of all.

‘She’s here.’

He wasn’t sure which brother actually said the words, only knew that the subdued flurry of excitement and interest at the far end of the church meant that Estrella, his bride— soon to be his wife—had arrived. The time for second thoughts, if he was to have any, was now.

Surprisingly, perhaps, there were none. Nothing at all but a calm, deep conviction that this was what he wanted. This was what was right for him. For now—and he’d let the future take care of itself.

‘Here we go.’

It was Joaquin this time. His elder half-brother checked Ramón’s appearance, tweaked his cravat into place, slapped him on the shoulder.

‘Showtime,
hermano.
’

And it was that
hermano
—that ‘brother’—that rocked him. After all the tensions there had been in their relationship until now, tensions that were inevitable in the unconventional set-up of their family, the unexpected term of affection, and the grin that accompanied it, left him with his mind reeling for a moment. Relief, delight, gratitude flooded
his thoughts so that at first he missed the beginnings of a minor sensation at the bride’s appearance.

‘Oh, Lord…’

Alex’s muttered comment under his breath was what penetrated his hearing first. That and the note of stunned disbelief, blending with a wicked, amused delight, brought him back to reality in a rush.

‘Ramón?’

What?

The murmurs and the whispers behind him grew, the sound swelling, rising towards him as if on a wave, getting louder, becoming impossible to ignore.

Ramón couldn’t stand at the altar with his back to the rest of the church any longer. He had to turn, had to look.

Oh, dear God, but she was beautiful!

That was his first thought; the only thought that registered for a moment. Just the sight of her took his breath away, making his head spin dangerously.

She was so, so beautiful. As soon as he saw her his body responded, hard and fast, in a definitely carnal, definitely non-spiritual way. A way that was totally inappropriate to his place here, at the foot of the altar steps.

She was alone, having refused the idea of her father giving her away. She wasn’t wearing any veil or headdress, but she had piled her gleaming jet hair up on the top of her head, and it was scattered all over with tiny white flowers. Her face was slightly pale, but resolute, and her deep ebony eyes looked huge and darker than ever in contrast. As soon as he turned those wide eyes fastened on his face, watching him intently, a little hint of more colour creeping into her porcelain cheeks.

The way she had pulled her hair up exposed the long, elegant line of her neck, broken only by the finest of gold chains with a star-shaped diamond pendant hanging from it.
A diamond pendant that exactly matched her engagement ring and that he had sent to her only the night before, as his wedding gift to his bride. It sat perfectly at the base of her throat, revealed by the square-cut neckline of her dress. The square-cut neckline that had been the only thing she had told him about what she was going to wear.

The square-cut neckline of the long, fitted, silken…

His eyes dropped lower, taking in what she was wearing, and then swung back up to her face, his dark head going back in shock.

‘Oh, Estrella!’ Ramón breathed, her name breaking on a note of stunned laughter, of pride, of amazement. ‘Oh,
mi Estrella!
’

My father’s just grateful that he’s getting rid of his shameful daughter.
Estrella’s words, spoken on the night of their engagement party, sounded loud and clear inside his head.
And he thinks you’re wonderful because you’re taking me off his hands in spite of my reputation as a scarlet woman.

He knew that there had been talk. That interfering gossips from the village, her father, an elderly, scandalised aunt, had made comments about what she might wear to her wedding. That they had said that the traditional white might not be appropriate. They had suggested cream, or perhaps blue…

And Estrella had listened, and kept her own counsel, and never given a clue as to what she’d been planning. So that now she had hit them right between the eyes.

The dress was long, sweeping down to the floor as most traditional wedding dresses did. It was made of the finest, most supple silk available, and it was as beautifully cut, as supremely elegant, as he would have expected from anything that Estrella chose. The tight-fitting bodice, with the square neckline she had described, contrasted with the swathe of silk, the long train that fell from her slender waist.
It was the perfect traditional wedding dress in design—in all but one thing.

No traditional wedding dress had ever been made in such a bold, brilliant colour. No traditional dress would ever have been in such a stunning, undeniable, hit-you-right-between-the-eyes scarlet.

My scarlet woman.

My bold, my brilliant, my brave Estrella.

Ramón didn’t know if he actually spoke the words or if they only sounded inside his head. He just knew that he couldn’t stand here, waiting, seeing the way she had hesitated, the sudden uncertainty in her eyes.

Before he was even aware that he was moving, he had left his place at the altar and was striding down the aisle towards her, his hand coming out, reaching for hers.

Immediately all the uncertainty, the apprehension fled from her face. Her smile was wide, stunning, dazzling, and she took her bouquet in one hand, holding the other out to him, that amazing smile growing as he folded his fingers around it.

‘My scarlet woman! My beautiful scarlet woman.’

This time he did say the words, but in a whisper that only the two of them could hear, and he lifted her hand to his lips, pressing a warm, ardent kiss on the backs of her fingers before moving to her side, tucking the hand he had kissed under his arm and smiling down at her in his turn. He saw the faint glisten of tears in the huge dark eyes she turned on him and knew that, for all the bravado that had stiffened her back, lifted her head high, made her walk tall and proud down that aisle, the focus of all eyes, she had not been as confident as she had looked. She had been brave and determined, but quailing just a little inside.

So he squeezed her hand, pressing his own bigger, broader one on top of the slender, delicate fingers that lay
on his arm, pale against the darkness of the cloth of his morning coat. And he smiled at her again, seeing her confidence grow in response as she swallowed down the betraying moisture.

‘Ready?’ he murmured and she nodded. Firm, sure, positively resolved this time, there was no hesitation, not a flicker of doubt in her face.

‘Ready,’ she echoed, and moved forward with him, perfectly in step towards the waiting priest.

Estrella felt as if she were floating on air. Her feet barely seemed to touch the ground as she walked the last steps to the altar, Ramón’s tall, powerful form at her side, the strength of his arm supporting her, his hand on hers.

She had arrived at the church in a state that had been almost sick with nerves. Mercedes’ words had hit home like a bolt of lightning, illuminating everything she hadn’t seen or understood before.

You’ve really got it bad! I wonder if that brother of mine knows just how madly in love with him you are.

Once she had let the words into her thoughts, she couldn’t drive them away again. No matter how hard she tried to distract herself, to think of other things, she still kept coming back to that one forceful word. The one that had the power to rock her world and turn everything she had believed upside down.

Love.

She had tried to deny it. Had tried to find arguments to refute it, reasons why it was wrong, wrong, wrong. But it wasn’t.

Instead it was right, right, right. Though she had no idea how it had happened.

But in the moment that she had begun the long, nerve-shattering walk down the aisle she had known that it was nothing less than the truth. Each step that she took nearer
and nearer to where Ramón stood, strong, straight-backed, dark head held proudly high, broad shoulders set square under the perfect tailoring of his morning coat, also took her closer and closer to the need to face her destiny.

She had fallen blindly, crazily, headlong and irrevocably in love with Ramón Dario, the bridegroom her father had bought for her.

It was nothing like what she had felt for Carlos. In fact it was so unlike those feelings that she knew she had to admit to the truth. What she had felt for Carlos had in fact not been love at all. It had been nothing more than a blind infatuation, a loss of all sense, a falling in love with the idea of being in love. She had thought she had cared for him, but, compared with the huge, swamping tidal wave that was her feelings for Ramón, her passion for Carlos had been nothing more than a brief, ineffectual cloudburst, over and gone again in the space of a few brief moments.