The Spaniard's Inconvenient Wife (4 page)

But she remembered how she had planned to lead into it. She’d go with that for now and see what happened. If it didn’t work out, or his mood changed, she could still leave with the major part of her idea left unsaid. If she took one step at a time she could test out the water as she went.

The thought restored something of her mental courage and her voice was surprisingly strong when she answered him.

‘I—came to offer you an apology.’

That surprised him. It was clearly the last thing he was expecting. He stilled abruptly with his glass half raised to his mouth and stared at her fixedly across the top of it, cool grey eyes locking with uncertain deep brown ones. Then abruptly he shook his head.

‘I don’t think I heard right,’ he said, his voice sounding rough at the edges. ‘I thought you said—’

‘That I’ve come to apologise—I have!’

Clearly he didn’t believe her. The look he turned on her was frankly sceptical, ice seeming to form in the storm-cloud depths of his eyes.

‘Apologise for what?’ he demanded.

Some of Estrella’s hard-won composure slipped away again and she thought about taking another fortifying sip of wine. But the fear that it would get caught in the knot in her throat, choking her, made her rethink and replace the glass on the coffee-table in front of her.

‘For my—for my father’s behaviour—and mine the other day—when you came to the castle. We should never have— I feel really bad about it.’

Wide, dark eyes went to his face, scrutinising the hard cast of his features in the hope of seeing that he understood. But the strong-boned face was unyielding, his expression still set hard as rock, and she couldn’t see even a flicker of response in the opaque, silvery stare.

‘I—I’m sorry.’

She wished he would speak—say something, anything! But instead he finished what was left in his wineglass and moved to throw himself down on the huge settee that matched the armchair in which she sat, perched uncomfortably on its edge. In contrast, Ramón stretched himself out in totally comfortable abandon, his shining dark head resting on the pale leather, his legs out in front of him, crossed at the ankle above his highly polished handmade boots.

But his eyes remained watchful, sharply assessing. He formed his fingers into a steeple and pressed them against his mouth, studying her over the top of them.

‘Ramón…’ she began, unable to bear the silence any longer, but he cut in on her without apology.

‘Say that again,’ he commanded harshly. ‘What you said just now—say it again.’

What did he want—proof of her honesty? Or did he merely want to humiliate her by making her repeat over and over again the embarrassing reason why she had come?

‘That I want to apologise? I do. I really do. My father was wrong to ask you—’

‘He did more than ask.’

‘I know he made your marrying me the condition for selling you the TV company. He should never have done that. And I…’

Her nerves almost failed her and she had to pause, draw in a deep, calming breath and let it out again before she could find the strength to continue.

‘I should never have reacted in the way I did.’

Still those cool grey eyes watched her, slightly narrowed again, fixed on her face, noting every change of expression, each tiny flicker of emotion that crossed her fine-boned features.

‘I could almost believe you mean that,’ he said at last.

‘I do!’

She wanted him to believe that. She needed him to believe it. If he didn’t, then the rest of her idea was ruined from the start.

‘I do mean it,’ she assured him, leaning forward in her seat, her face towards his, her eyes fixed on his. ‘I hope you can believe that.’

The faint pause, the break in her speech, was because she hoped that he would speak. To give him time to cut in and say: ‘I can—I do believe that.’

But Ramón did nothing of the sort. Instead he simply sat where he was, grey eyes locking with hers, and he watched and he waited. Until his silence began to tug hard on her nerves, making her shift uncomfortably in her seat.

‘My father should never have put those conditions on you—no matter what his reasons. And I should have come right out and told you that I knew—well, that I guessed— he was up to his tricks again. I should have let you know…’

She was burbling, and she knew it, but there was nothing she could do to stop herself. Ramón’s silence had got to her and she had to do something, anything to fill it.

‘I should have said something from the first.’

‘But you didn’t.’

‘No—no, I didn’t.’

‘Care to tell me why?’

Did she want to tell him? Was she ready to tell him? Even more importantly, how much was she ready to tell him? Estrella couldn’t answer the questions in her own thoughts, so she had no idea how to answer his.

‘I—’ she tried, but then nerves struck, her mind shut down and became a total blank. So instead of speaking, she reached for her wineglass and downed what was left in it.

‘I’d prefer it if you didn’t get drunk,’ Ramón commented dryly. ‘I really don’t think it would help my case with your father if I had to take you home half out of your mind on alcohol.’

‘I’m not drunk!’ she protested indignantly, but she could feel the hot colour rushing into her cheeks.

‘Halfway there. So tell me, is what you have to say so terrible that you have to be drunk to admit to it?’

If she was drunk, it would be easier, Estrella acknowledged inwardly. Perhaps some degree of inebriation would make it less difficult to tell this man that she hadn’t been able to get him out of her mind since she had first met him. That he had walked through her dreams every night, and images of him had plagued her thoughts by day. She had tried to push them away, tried to think of anything but him, but that had only seemed to make matters worse. All she
was aware of was the man she was trying not to think of and she might just as well have indulged her imagination and let it run riot.

But that was more than she dared to admit, at least with those cool grey eyes assessing every move she made, every word she uttered.

Hopelessly embarrassed, she set the glass down on the table and stared fixedly at it, unable to meet his eyes.

‘Well, Doña Medrano?’ Ramón questioned and the deliberate provocation of that ‘Doña’ sparked her temper, making her head lift defiantly, and pushing her into unguarded speech.

‘You know perfectly well what started all this! Everyone knows! That’s why my father plays these games—why he tries to bribe people—or coerce them—to marry me. You’ve known that all the time. You were the one who brought Carlos into things last time.’

I’m not so desperate that I would want Carlos Perea’s cast-offs,
he had said, and the words had hurt far more than the angry lash of his tongue. Now, looking into his cold, set face, she saw the same blazing contempt, the same cruel disgust.

‘Ah—so it is Perea that we’re talking about. I wondered when we’d get to the real truth. What is all this about—are you trying to claim that Carlos Perea never happened? That the story about your affair is just fiction?’

Oh, how she wished she could.

‘No,’ she muttered, low and miserable. ‘I’m not going to claim that. I couldn’t—it wouldn’t be true. Carlos—Carlos happened…’

‘So are you going to explain to me why you threw yourself at a married man, how you enticed him so that he left his wife and—was it three children?—for you?’

‘Two,’ Estrella muttered defensively. ‘It was only two.’

‘And I suppose you think that makes a difference?’

‘I don’t think anything makes a difference.’

Nothing eased her conscience, that was for sure. And nothing, it seemed, was going to restore her good name and her reputation ever again.

‘No,’ Ramón agreed cynically, suddenly moving up and out of his seat as if he could no longer stand to be so close to her. ‘I don’t suppose any of it mattered to you—the fact that he had a wife and kids at home, and that he broke all of their hearts by running after you. That just wasn’t important to you, was it? You got what you wanted and you didn’t care how much it cost anyone else.’

She would have thought that it was impossible for her heart to sink any lower or for the bitter memories of her past mistake to haunt her in any more painful ways. But she had never felt so low, so unwanted, so totally cheap and tawdry as she did now. Even when she had found out the truth about Carlos, it hadn’t made her feel quite so sordid, so tainted as the deep, dark scorn in Ramón Dario’s voice did now.

And she couldn’t take any more of it. She pushed herself to her feet, forced herself to keep her head high, her eyes blazing defiance into his.

‘It wasn’t like that, Señor Dario!’

To her delight she actually managed to control her voice, to stop it from shaking, though the effort made it sound painfully cold and shrill. But right now that was the lesser of two evils, she decided miserably.

‘It wasn’t like that at all! But then, I don’t expect you to believe that. I did wonder if you were different, but it seems I was wrong. Of course I was wrong! You’re not any different—you’re just like all the others—like my father…’

‘Hell, no!’

She’d caught him on the raw there. He was furious—
coldly, blazingly angry. The grey eyes were molten, his nostrils flaring, and there were white marks etched around his nose and mouth.

‘Hell, yes!’ she flung at him. ‘You’re so like him it isn’t true! You just see what you want to see; believe what you want to believe. You don’t want to look behind things to see what might actually be the truth!’

‘Are you saying—?’

‘I’m saying nothing—except goodnight.’

Turning swiftly, she snatched up her bag, gripping the handles so tight that her knuckles turned white. She might just make it to the door. If she was quick and she was strong.

‘Goodnight, Señor Dario,’ she managed through gritted teeth. ‘Thank you for the wine. I wish I could say that it’s been nice—but I prefer not to lie.’

She thought he was going to let her go. When he watched in silence as she stalked across the room, she believed that that was it. That she’d blown her chance, burned her bridges, and that any hopes of carrying out her plan would have to be abandoned once and for all. There was no hope at all that he was going to help her now.

But it wasn’t that thought that had the tears pushing at the backs of her eyes, burning them cruelly. It was the knowledge that once again she’d failed to convince someone that she was not how they believed her to be. And, almost complete stranger though he was, she hated the thought that Ramón too had joined the ranks of those who condemned her without hearing her story.

She hadn’t had much hope when she’d arrived at his apartment earlier that evening, but she’d had a tiny ray of optimism. At least there had been a chance that he might listen.

Now there was nothing.

The walk across the room seemed to take for ever. Every
step felt as if she were ploughing through mud, her legs were as feeble as if they were stuffed with cotton wool. And the fight against tears blurred her vision so that she could barely see a thing in front of her.

But she was not going to look back. She was not going to hesitate. Not going to show a sign of weakness.

‘Estrella.’

Ramón’s voice came when she was least expecting it, and at first it was so soft that, concentrating on getting through this haze of misery and out of the door, she wasn’t sure if she had heard it or simply imagined the sound in her head. But then he spoke again, and this time there was no mistaking it.

‘Estrella, don’t go.’

It was the first time that he had used her name, Estrella registered as her footsteps slowed, stilled. The first time he had ever said ‘Estrella’, and the realisation was like the stab of a stiletto as she suddenly thought that she had never heard it sound so right, so perfect. Her heart clenched at the thought that this might be the one, the only time she would hear him say it.

But she still couldn’t bring herself to turn round or face him. She was too afraid of what she might see in his eyes, and what he might be able to read from hers. If she had to go, then she wanted to go now.

If she hesitated, or looked back, then she might never be able to make herself move on again.

I
T WAS
the first time he had ever spoken her name, Ramón realised on a wave of shock. The first time he had ever personalised her so much as to call her by her given name rather than thinking of her as Alfredo Medrano’s daughter, or the more sarcastic Doña Medrano.

Or the woman he had been expected to ask to marry him.

It was a shock. A real slap-in-the-face, punch-in-the-guts shock.

Had he really not ever seen the person in this woman? He had kissed her, dreamed of her, fantasised about her— but had he ever really and truly seen her?

Now she had frozen, still facing the door, turned away from him. All he could see was her tall, slender back, the curving hips and long legs. There was the silken fall of her jet-black hair. But he couldn’t see her face.

Had he really ever seen her face? Had he really ever seen her?

Who was Estrella Medrano? Who was this woman he had practically been ordered to marry—so arrogantly, so autocratically that he had been set against her from the start?

‘Don’t go,’ he repeated, more firmly this time. ‘Don’t walk out like this. Stay.’

Slowly, so slowly, she pivoted on one high heel and turned in a semi-circle until she was facing him. Her eyes looked suspiciously bright, glistening in the deep rays of sunset that flooded through the huge windows, and her face seemed different. Paler and drawn in, more delicate somehow.

Or was that just another thing he had never seen before?

‘Stay?’ she echoed softly, questioningly. ‘Why?’

She looked as wary as a hunted animal, watching him through wide, apprehensive eyes as if she feared he would pounce suddenly and dangerously.

‘Have you eaten?’

This time she simply shook her head, not seeming to trust her voice to answer him.

‘Neither have I—and we both need something to offset the wine.’

Another silent movement of her head, this time a nod, was her only answer.

‘Okay.’

To get to the kitchen he had to walk past her and she watched him mutely, her pale face set into wary, uncertain lines.

He didn’t like the way that made him feel. He’d never had a woman react to him in this way. And there had been plenty of women over the years. Women who had been easy to talk to, easy to charm. But this one was as wary as a feral cat. One moment she was curled up on a chair, smooth and sleek and almost comfortable. The next she was hissing and scratching like a little tiger, brown eyes flashing fire and that proud head up high.

‘I’m not going to hurt you.’

He felt obliged to say it. Anything to make her relax.

‘No,’ she said in a strangely mangled little voice. ‘I don’t suppose you intend to.’

‘And just what is that supposed to mean?’

He was directly opposite her now, facing her head-on, and he could see the cloudiness of those beautiful eyes, the tautness of the muscles of her face.

‘Estrella…’ he prompted harshly when she hesitated to give him an answer.

‘It means—’ she said, meeting his eyes fiercely even though he could see the faint tremor in her slim body as she fought for control. ‘It means that sometimes you’re just like all the others. You only see what’s in front of your face.’

‘All the others? Do you mean the other men your father tried to get to marry you? The other men he wanted to buy?’

It made his stomach curdle to be lumped together with them all like this. To be just one name on a list.

‘Damn you, Estrella—I’m not like that!’

‘No?’ she challenged, folding her arms in front of her, one small, booted foot tapping angrily on the polished wood of the floor. ‘No? Are you sure?’

‘Of course I’m sure! They all knew they could get something from your father. They asked you to marry them.’

‘So what’s different? How are you not like them? Tell me what you were doing in that room—why was I sent to speak to you? What were you going to do?’

‘I sure as hell wasn’t going to do what your father asked.’

‘You—you really weren’t?’

‘Didn’t you listen to a word I said? No, I was not! You want to know the difference between us—between me and those other men your father bought? The point is that he managed to buy them! They asked you to marry them. I didn’t.’

‘Because—’

‘No.’

Ramón lifted a hand and brought it down between them in a hard, slashing movement as if he was physically cutting off the conversation.

‘Not because I didn’t get the chance. Or because you rounded on me like a spitting cat. Or because we fought so hard that I changed my mind and thought the better of it. I didn’t ask you because I didn’t want to!’

He wouldn’t have done anything Alfredo Medrano had
wanted, not with the insults the old man had flung at him still echoing in his thoughts.

‘My company is not for the likes of you,’ Medrano had tossed at him. ‘The land on which the television station is built has been in the Medrano family for years. I’ll not sell it to some jumped-up nobody who from what I hear doesn’t even have the right to the name he bears, and who just happens to have made his first million.’

He had actually turned and had been walking out, Ramón remembered, when the old snake had offered his other suggestion—that he marry Estrella and so gain the television company that way.

‘I was never going to ask you from the start. Not even when he offered me the company for half the asking price if I’d take you along with it.’

If she had looked stunned before, then she looked positively dazed now. Her face had no colour at all in it apart from the deep pools of her eyes, the pink curves of her mouth. He had moved closer as he spoke, so close that he could see the faint indentations in her lips where her sharp white teeth had dug into them, worrying away at them.

Just for a moment he was tempted to lift a finger and smooth it over her mouth, to try to ease away the marks of the damage she had done. But she wasn’t going to tolerate that, he knew. If he tried, she would probably turn and run, out the door before he had time to breathe.

‘But—I know how much you wanted that TV company.’

‘Yes,’ Ramón admitted, nodding his head to emphasise the word. ‘Yes, I wanted it. At the time I thought it was the deal I most wanted in the world.’

Just for a moment he allowed himself to remember how much the deal had meant to him.

‘And is there nothing else that would give you the same satisfaction?’

‘Nothing else that matches it. I hated the thought that I’d lost it—still do.’

‘Why is that?’

Ramón sighed, pushed both hands through the gleaming sleekness of his hair.

‘Ah, well that’s a long story.’

‘I’ve got all night.’

She sounded as if she meant it. And the weird thing was that he felt he could tell her. That he could explain something of the way he’d been feeling, something of his family’s complicated history.

‘Do you really want to hear this? If so, perhaps we’d better sit down again.’

She followed him back to the fireplace, each of them settling in the places they had occupied just a few moments before. Ramón reached for the wine bottle, refilled their glasses then pushed one towards Estrella. Taking a long swallow from the other, he hunted for the words.

‘To understand this, you need to know something about my family.’

‘I know that your mother was English and your father—’

‘If you mean Reuben Dario then he was not my father. Not my biological father.’

Her start of surprise showed that this was news to her.

‘Then who…?’

‘Juan Alcolar.’

‘Of the Alcolar Corporation?’

‘And more. That’s right.’

He stared down into his glass, swirling the rich red wine around in the bottom of it.

‘He and my mother had an affair and I was the result. But she was married to my—to Reuben at the time. So he made her promise never to tell.’

‘So you grew up thinking that Reuben Dario was your father?’

Ramón nodded slowly.

‘I was even registered as his. But I couldn’t have been. Reuben couldn’t have children of his own.’

‘And your mother never told you?’

‘She never got a chance. She died when I was tiny. But she left me a letter to read when I was twenty-one. That was when I found out.’

‘How did you feel?’

Ramón shot her a swift sidelong glance from those silvery eyes.

‘How do you think I felt? How would you feel if you suddenly discovered that your
papá
wasn’t really your father?’

Estrella clearly considered it, then shook her head. She looked totally bemused, Ramón reflected, but she couldn’t feel anything like the way that he’d been left reeling when he’d found out the truth.

‘Lost,’ she managed.

‘Which is exactly how I felt. I didn’t know where I belonged—who I was. Who my family was. Reuben and I had never really got along. We were too unlike each other— miles apart. I wanted to work in the media and he wanted me to do something sensible—become an accountant like him. We fought about it endlessly. That was something I understood better when I knew where I really came from. When I realised that my father was in fact Don Juan Alcolar.’

Once more he slanted one of those glances in her direction.

‘So you see,’ he went on, his tone darkly dry, ‘your father might have been more inclined to hand his precious company over to me if he’d known that I was the son of another
of the great Catalan families. One whose name and title goes back even further than the Medranos. And someone who’s made a fortune in the media.’

‘Is that why you wanted the company—so you could be part of the Alcolar empire?’

Ramón shook his dark head emphatically, rejection of her question in his eyes, his face.

‘No way. I wanted it so that I could have something of my own that would not have come from the Alcolar fortunes but from my hard work. When I went to find my father— my real father—he welcomed me into his family. I think he was thrilled to have a son who was involved in the same business as him. Joaquin has no interest in it. He took himself out into the country and runs his own vineyard and wine-exporting business. And Alex—well, Alex took on another role in the corporation.’

‘Alex?’ Estrella questioned curiously and saw Ramón’s mouth quirk up sharply at one corner.

‘Alex is another brother—half-brother—by another woman. I warned you it was complicated.’

Estrella could only shake her head and reach for her glass. It was complicated and quite frankly it stunned her. Ramón’s father had been unfaithful to his wife with two other women—had fathered children by them—and yet he had emerged from the situation with his reputation unscathed. While she had innocently, stupidly, blindly become involved with a married man, and as a result she had been branded a scarlet woman ever since.

But then, of course, this was Spain. And Spain was a man’s country. Look at the way people spoke of Carlos now. As someone whose behaviour they understood—he was a man, and he had had his head turned by a capricious and irresponsible young girl. But then they had all got to know him again in the time before she had returned from
the convent boarding school, the exclusive finishing college her father had thought would turn her into the lady he wanted as his daughter. And then Carlos had died so tragically.

‘So—the television company would have been yours. Not a part of the Alcolar Corporation.’

‘Exactly. It would have been just about the only thing that I knew was truly mine—not Alcolar, not Dario. Mine. My father would have given me part of the Alcolar Corporation but that wasn’t what I wanted. What I wanted was to match up to him—to my real father—in the world in which he moves. And, of course, being a Medrano business, it would also bring with it something of the “old Spain”, the Catalan heritage that Juan Alcolar values perhaps even more than your father.’

One long finger tapped a restless percussion on the side of his glass, betraying the state of his feelings far more than any words.

‘So now perhaps you’ll see why I wanted it so much.’

If that didn’t give her the perfect opening to tell him just what had been in her mind when she’d come here, then nothing else would, Estrella told herself, drawing in a deep breath and straightening her shoulders as if suddenly facing up to something she had to do.

If she was ever going to do it, then it was now or never.

‘So what if I told you that you didn’t have to lose it?’

There, now she’d said it, Estrella acknowledged, feeling the cold touch of fear zigzagging down her spine so that she couldn’t hold back a shiver in spite of the setting sun burning beyond the windows. As soon as she’d seen his reaction, when he’d admitted just how much he’d wanted the deal with her father, she’d known that she’d never get another chance. There couldn’t be a better opening, any
more of a lead-in to the reason for her being here in the first place.

But she couldn’t believe she’d had the nerve, that she’d actually come out and said the words, and, to judge from the expression on his face, the way his black brows had suddenly snapped together in a sceptical frown, neither could Ramón.

‘What?’ he said, his tone revealing his shock. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘I’m asking what you’d do if you knew that there was a way that you didn’t have to lose out on the deal you wanted. A way that the television company can be yours after all.’

‘And precisely how would I do that?’

‘H-how?’

The word came out as an embarrassing squeak. Estrella’s mouth and throat were painfully dry and she tried to swallow to ease the sensation but with no effect. Her vocal cords seemed to have seized up and she couldn’t find the strength to answer him.

‘Estrella? What the devil are you saying? That just isn’t possible. You know what happened. Your father threw the whole deal back in my face.’

‘But I think you could persuade him to change his mind.’

‘You’d have to be mad to think so!’ Ramón dismissed the idea scornfully. ‘He said he wouldn’t sell.’

‘Except under one condition.’

Surprisingly, now it seemed that her voice had come back, stronger and clearer than ever. It was as if, once she had got over the shock of actually hearing herself say the words that had started her on this crazy course of action, suddenly all the thoughts and the plans, all the arguments she’d given herself in favour of coming here, had buoyed her up, giving her the strength she needed. She actually sounded calm and confident, sure of her direction.