The Spaniard's Inconvenient Wife (14 page)

‘Ramón—’ Estrella began, but he couldn’t bear to hear her.

He couldn’t stand to be in the room with her any longer. If he did, he knew that he would do something that he would regret. He would either kiss her or kill her, and right now he didn’t know if the temptation to one was stronger than the other.

And both of them would have an appalling, disastrous effect.

So, not wanting to face the consequences if he stayed, he turned on his heel and marched out of the room, down the stairs and across the hall to the front door. Barely even breaking his stride, he yanked it open so roughly that it slammed against the wall with a heavy thud. A moment later
he was through the doorway and out in the cool of the night air.

He kept on walking, not knowing where he was going, not caring, wanting only to put as much distance between himself and his brand-new wife as he possibly could.

E
STRELLA
couldn’t believe that she had actually fallen asleep.

She hadn’t meant to. She certainly had never wanted to. She had planned to stay wide awake, just listening and waiting for Ramón to come back.

He had to come back, she told herself. However angry he was—and he had been enraged—he couldn’t just walk out of the house, out of her life and disappear. Or could he?

He had been furious enough to do it. So furious that it seemed to have put wings on his feet and although she had flung herself off the bed and after him as soon as she’d been able to think clearly enough—which had taken the space of a few moments—she hadn’t been able to catch him. He had been out of the house before she’d even reached the stairs, the slam of the door behind him echoing round the silent hallway.

So she’d dashed back to the room, pulling on clothes, stuffing her feet into her shoes, as fast as she could, but knowing all the time in the depths of her desolated heart, that she had no hope at all of finding where he’d gone, or being able to follow after him.

Which of course had proved to be the case. There had been no sign of him in the courtyard outside the villa, no sight of his tall, strong figure on the road where the moonlight beat down with cold indifference, making it almost as bright as day so that there had been little room for doubt.

She had trailed back inside the house, feeling so low that she could hardly pick up her feet to move, and had forced
herself upstairs with a struggle. She would sit here and wait for him, she had told herself, settling on the bed and propping herself up on the pillows. He had to come back at some point.

And while she waited she would go back over that appalling row they had had before he had walked out, and try and work out just what had happened. Where it had all gone wrong.

Because something had gone terribly wrong. And it hadn’t been because of what she had believed.

‘But you got so much more than you claimed you wanted,’ Ramón had flung at her and in the heat of the moment, overwrought, overtired, and totally bewildered by the sudden change that had come over him, she had believed that he had found her out. Thinking that he had meant that he knew she had fallen in love with him, she had seen no other way to answer him but to tell him the truth.

She had even laughed. Nervous and uncontrollable, she had felt the giggle rise up inside her and escape as almost a sound of relief. Yes, she had wanted to say, I’ve fallen in love with you. I’m sorry if it’s not what you want, but it’s come as as much of a shock to me as it obviously is to you. But surely this doesn’t have to spoil anything?

But he hadn’t given her a chance, and she had been horrified by the violence of his reaction, the way he had turned on her, the accusations he had thrown at her before he had stormed out.

You and your father got exactly what you planned for.

And I—I got stitched up completely!

She had got what she wanted? And what about that damn TV company?

Too miserable to scream, too strung up to cry, Estrella had only been able to sit there, counting the minutes, jumping at every strange and inexplicable sound, waiting for
Ramón—and praying that he would come back, even if it was only to collect his belongings.

At some point she had fallen asleep without knowing it. All that she did know was that she had closed her eyes for a moment and when she had opened them again something about a change in the light warned her that more of the night had passed since she had last looked at the window. A swift glance at a clock told her that it was four a.m. The lowest, darkest hour of the night.

The darkest hour is just before dawn.
The saying ran inside her head, making her feel more miserable rather than better. An emotional dawn could only come if Ramón had returned so that they could have a chance to talk, to try and sort things out.

But the house was as still and silent as ever before.

And she felt miserable as sin.

Her clothes were crumpled and grubby from having been slept in. The elaborate hairstyle was little more than a bird’s nest—and a badly built bird’s nest at that—she had a pounding stress headache and was parched, desperate for something to drink.

A cup of coffee might help the physical symptoms, she told herself. It was hours since they had left the wedding reception, and the after effects of a little too much champagne, little solid food, and a night of emotional storms had taken its toll on her. After that, she might be able to think straight enough to come up with some plan of action.

But first she had to find the kitchen.

She couldn’t even find the light switches in the unknown rooms, and had to find her way downstairs by groping along the wall in the darkness, going down the steps one at a time and as carefully as possible. The hall and the living room were equally dark, their cases—hers and Ramón’s—stand
ing in a pool of moonlight where they had dumped them hours before.

Now which way would she turn to find the kitchen?

‘There’s a light switch just to your right…’

A voice came out of the darkness, making her start and scream faintly in shock.

‘Don’t panic,’ Ramón said quietly. ‘It’s only me. About shoulder height.’

After a couple of seconds’ clumsy searching, she found it, clicked it on, flooding the room with light so that she blinked hard in the sudden brightness.

Ramón sat in one of the big black armchairs at the far side of the room, beside the wide, empty fireplace. He looked dreadful, Estrella had to admit. His hair was desperately tousled, blown everywhere by the wind that she now realised she could hear outside, there were heavy shadows under the once brilliant eyes, which were now dull and lack-lustre, and the heavy growth of beard that had darkened his cheeks and jaw with stubble made him look like some disreputable tramp.

‘How did you get in?’

Inane as it was, it was all she could manage.

‘I have a key.’ His voice was low and flat, as emotionless as his face.

‘I didn’t hear you.’

‘Probably because I didn’t want to wake you.’

Now how did she interpret that? Had he not wanted to wake her out of consideration for her, or because he just hadn’t wanted to talk to her? After all, he had left her with the impression that if he never saw her again it would be too soon.

‘How long have you been here?’

Shadowed grey eyes glanced at the clock, then back at her face.

‘An hour or so. Perhaps ninety minutes.’

‘And you’ve been sitting all that time in the dark?’

Ramón nodded sombrely.

‘I had a lot of thinking to do.’

‘Oh.’

It was all she could manage. She didn’t dare to ask him what he had been thinking about—she suspected that she already knew. And she wasn’t really sure whether she wanted to know what conclusions he had come to. He would probably tell her soon enough.

So she took refuge in more inanities, and the simple practical reasons why she had come downstairs in the first place.

‘I—I was going to make a drink. Would you like one?’

The words were hardly out of her mouth when he had pushed himself to his feet in one lithe, supple movement, his gaze going towards a door on the far side of the room.

‘I’ll do it. You sit down.’

‘But I—’ Estrella tried to protest, only to break off when he raised a hand to silence her.

‘It’s easier if I do it. I know where everything is. Coffee or something stronger?’

‘Coffee, please.’

Anything alcoholic would just finish her off. She was so worn out, in spite of her catnap, that it would go straight to her head and leave her incapable of talking any sense.

Not that she felt she could string more than three coherent words together, she admitted as he headed for what she presumed was the kitchen. Shock had turned her brain to mush, incapable of functioning.

Ramón had been here for the past hour—perhaps more— and he hadn’t woken her. Had he even come upstairs to see if she was all right? The words so near and yet so far away wouldn’t stop repeating in her head.

‘What—what were you thinking about?’

The question came so quietly, so hesitantly, that she was sure he hadn’t heard her until he paused briefly in the doorway and looked back at her.

‘When I’ve made the coffee,’ he said. ‘We’ll talk then.’

Estrella couldn’t work out his mood from his tone, and those eyes were giving nothing away. But at least he had said that they would talk. For now, she would have to be content with that. To insist on anything more would probably alienate him, drive him away again, and she didn’t want to risk that. And so she made herself sit down in one of the chairs and prepared to wait.

What were you thinking about?
So how did he answer that? Ramón asked himself, his hands, working purely on autopilot, busy filling a kettle, getting coffee, milk, cups.

What had he been thinking of?

Estrella, of course.

Estrella and nothing but Estrella. Estrella and their relationship. Whether they had a relationship. Whether he wanted a relationship. And if he did, just where did they go from here?

Always assuming that she wanted to go anywhere. Which was something he had no idea about.

There was a hell of a lot he had no idea about. And thinking hadn’t done very much to help.

Making the coffee didn’t take long enough. Far too soon the small task was done and he had to take the drinks back into the other room where Estrella was sitting, dwarfed by the oversized black velvet-covered chair.

‘Here…’

He dumped the coffee-cup on a table near her, then took his own to the chair opposite, deciding at the last minute that he felt too restless, too much on pins to sit down, and opting for leaning against the wall instead, watching her.

He already knew she was dressed. When he had come
back to the dark, silent house after several hours of walking and walking in a vain attempt to clear his head, he had crept up to the bedroom to check on her. She had fallen asleep on the bed, having pulled on her going-away outfit—well, the cream-coloured trousers and jacket, at least. The black camisole top had been ripped beyond repair in the heat of their passion. The torn remnants of it still lay on the floor upstairs, at the foot of the bed.

Ramón wished devoutly that it had been fit to wear. At least then she wouldn’t look so sexily enticing as she did now, with the jacket buttoned over her bare skin, the soft curves of the tops of her breasts exposed to view. It was too distracting this way, and he didn’t want to be distracted. He was already far too vulnerable where she was concerned.

The thought made him start uncomfortably, slopping coffee over into his saucer.

Vulnerable. Yes, that was what he had been thinking about all this time, alone in the dark. He had been thinking about the way he felt, and why that made him so damnably vulnerable to everything about this woman.

‘So what did you want to talk about?’

‘I don’t think this marriage has any future,’ he said bluntly. ‘It isn’t going to work out.’

‘But why not? What’s changed?’

‘What’s changed? Well, try the fact that I married you to help you. You said you needed rescuing from your father’s matchmaking schemes. You needed to escape.’

‘And I did.’

Estrella’s fingers were clamped so tight on the handle of her coffee-cup that her knuckles showed white and she looked even paler than ever before.

‘You know I did—you saw…’

‘I saw what you wanted me to see,’ Ramón put in scathingly. ‘And then only part of it. I saw the poor-little-rich-
girl mask you put on—the “I just have to escape—I don’t care how I do it” act.’

‘It wasn’t an act!’

‘No?’

He gave up all pretence at drinking a coffee he’d never wanted in the first place and deposited the cup on the wooden mantelpiece over the fire.

‘No! I swear it! You know what my life was like!’

‘I know what you said it was like. For all I know you could have made half of it up. And your father—’

‘You don’t believe that my father was as bad as I say? That my life wasn’t as miserable as I claim? Have you forgotten so quickly? You were there when the t-toad—when Esteban Ramirez—’

‘Oh, I saw him!’ Ramón cut in. ‘And I believed you then. But what I didn’t know was that you’d already decided who you wanted in your bed. Just as you’d once decided you wanted Perea.’

It came so unexpectedly and with such a stunning force that Estrella’s head actually went back with the shock of it. Numbed, shaking, she stared at him in horror.

‘Is that what my father…? Is that what you really believe? You think I—’

Looking round the room, she spotted where her small patent leather handbag had been discarded on the dresser on their arrival. Snatching it up, she tossed it at Ramón, careless of whether he caught it or not.

‘Look in there. Go on—open it—take a look.’

Totally bemused, he did as she asked. Inside the bag, along with a few feminine bits and pieces, was a folded white envelope, and inside that was an official-looking document. Signed and stamped and dated.

A wedding certificate.

‘What the—’

For a moment Ramón thought it was their marriage certificate, but then he looked again. The print seemed to swim in front of his eyes as he saw the names, the signatures.

Estrella Medrano.

Carlos Perea.

‘Estrella, what is this?’

‘Can’t you see?’ Her tone was terribly bitter. ‘Can’t you read? What do you think it is?’

‘It’s a marriage certificate.’

He still couldn’t believe what he was saying.

‘You and Carlos—but—we…’

‘Oh, don’t worry.’

Estrella too gave up on any pretence that she was drinking her coffee.

‘Don’t panic. It’s not that our marriage is bigamous. It was mine to Carlos that was! Not that he told me, of course. Otherwise, I’d never have been fool enough to marry him.’

‘He— You
married
him.’

‘How do you think he persuaded me to go with him?’

The bitter edge to her words was fraying. Her voice was starting to quaver and there was a suspicious brightness in her eyes. Ramón felt as if he had been thumped hard in the face.