The Spaniard's Love-Child (15 page)

He shook his head. ‘Roxie saw you coming out a supermarket nearby earlier.'

‘Oh, Roxie.' She gave a wooden smile. ‘Is she well?' she asked, determined to be civilised about this.

She had been a passing fancy; Roxie was the woman he actually loved. The fact Raul had spent one night with her didn't give her any special rights—in fact it didn't give her any rights full stop.

Raul flashed her an impatient look. ‘Yes, she's well.' And also, he suspected, not very happy with him. They had been about to sit down for lunch with a group of friends when she had mentioned that she had seen Nell earlier. She had not liked him dragging every last detail from her. She had liked even less him walking out just as the friends in question had been arriving—it was not cool to be sitting alone!

‘I asked around the immediate area, but although several
people recognised your description nobody knew where you lived. So I waited.'

Her eyes widened. ‘You
waited
?' This seemed an extraordinary thing for him to do.

He nodded. ‘It appears it is just as well I did. Falling like that could have had very serious consequences.'

Raul appeared to have forgotten that she wouldn't have fallen at all if he hadn't been there, but he looked so obviously shaken by the evening's revelations that she didn't have the heart to point this out.

‘How pregnant are you?' She saw his eyes drop to her lap as though he expected to see physical evidence of her condition.

‘Can't you figure that out for yourself?' She couldn't totally eliminate the bitterness from her voice. The date that was etched in her memory obviously did not stand out as anything significant in his social calendar.

‘Twelve weeks.'

Her startled eyes lifted to his face and were held tight by his compelling silver-flecked gaze. ‘It's hardly likely I would have forgotten something I have regretted every day since.'

His harsh admission was like a slap in the face. Nell's lashes came down to hide her hurt. She had hoped that time might have softened his attitude.
He must regret it even more now with a baby he doesn't want on the way,
she thought dully. She had to make sure he knew that as far as she was concerned he didn't owe her anything.

‘Why did you leave that way? Without a word to anyone.'

The driven intensity in his deep voice brought her frowning attention back to his face. ‘Because, like you said,' she began, choosing her words with great care, ‘it was a mistake, and one I didn't want to repeat either.'

Raul, desperately pale beneath his natural olive colouring, sucked in his breath through his flared nostrils. ‘You think I would have forced myself upon you?' he demanded, outrage quivering in every power-packed inch of his lean body.

As her eyes slid greedily down his spare frame, despite the fact the circumstances were hardly conducive to such things she experienced an almost paralysing stab of lustful longing.

‘No, of course not!' Nell rebutted as she dragged her eyes clear. She released a tiny self-derisory sigh. ‘But I thought I might ask you to,' she admitted.

Nell squirmed in the heavy silence that followed her rash revelation.

So much for keeping things on a need-to-know basis—as in him not needing to know that I love him. Well, if I carry on coming out with gems like that there's not much chance of that.

‘We both needed time out for things to cool down.' A century wouldn't cool her feelings. ‘I thought it was for the best.'

‘And what I thought was of no matter?' The dangerous edge in his silky enquiry was unmistakable.

‘I knew what you thought,' she said flatly.

‘Oh, I doubt that.' He released a sudden deep groan and Nell, who automatically looked up, found her face framed between a big pair of strong brown hands. His eyes scanned her face with a hungry ferocity. He swallowed hard before launching into a low, impassioned speech.

‘You have to put the past behind you, Nell. Now more than ever with this baby coming.' She opened her mouth and he gave a low laugh. ‘Oh, I
know
you think what you felt for Javier was love, but it wasn't. It was just a childish infatuation for a man far too old to be what you wanted. It
is understandable, you had lost your parents, you were looking for a father-figure more than a lover.'

She blinked at this erroneous reading of her relationship with Javier. ‘That's not—'

He cut off her protest with an imperative shake of his head. ‘I know it is hard for you to accept this, but you must. You've got to stop thinking it is betraying his memory to have physical feelings for another man…for me,' he added thickly. ‘Because I know you do…Javier might have been your dream lover but you are a woman; dreams are not enough. You need a man of flesh and blood. A man who can hold you in his arms.
You need me!
' Dark eyes dared her to deny it.

Nell stared dumbly up at him, unable to understand what she was hearing in his voice, what she was seeing in his face.

‘I had assumed you were lovers, and I was jealous as hell. It made me ashamed to be jealous of my own brother and irrationally I turned my anger on you. I blamed you.
Dios!
' he groaned, releasing her and sitting down on the edge of the bed, his face buried in his hands.

He still thought she had been in love with Javier. How could anyone so clever get it so wrong?

For a moment Nell just sat there watching the faint vibrations that intermittently attacked his lean body. She was totally stunned by the storm of white-hot emotion that had spilled from him. She felt utterly and totally out of her depth; her brain had gone blank trying to sift and make sense of so much information.

One thing she did know was that Raul was hurting and that she couldn't bear. The instinct to offer him comfort overrode everything else. She got to her knees and, pressing her slim body to his back, curled her arms around him. His hard body was warm through the thin hospital gown she
had donned before her examination. She felt him tense, then as she laid her face against his shoulder heard a sigh whisper through his body.

After that neither of them spoke for some time.

It was Nell who finally broke the silence.

‘Jealous…?'

Raul twisted and Nell found herself drawn onto his lap. She examined his well-loved features minutely. Raul's face was still drawn, but she thought he seemed calmer and more in control; or she did until their eyes locked. There was nothing calm about the fiery expression in his blazing eyes.

‘Was it not obvious?' he demanded.

‘Not to me,' she whispered. Could this entire situation ironically be the result of sibling rivalry? One brother wanted what the other had.

‘You must marry me, of course.' There was something of his old autocratic manner in this decree.

Nell smiled sadly. ‘I can't do that.' She might not be able to marry him, but she couldn't resist stroking his cheek.

‘You are thinking that I might drop dead any moment?'

Nell gasped and her hand fell away. Eyes sparkling with anger, she pressed a hand to his lips. ‘Don't talk about it.'

He removed her fingers and kissed each one in turn. By the time he had completed his task Nell's breath was coming fast and uneven, the room was spinning.

‘I have had the tests. I got the results last week and I was given the all-clear. I have a future.'

But not with me.

Tears squeezed from underneath her tightly closed eyelids as she wrapped her arms tight about his neck and wept into his shoulder, unable to repress her relief.

‘So, you see, there is no reason we should not marry.'

Nell lifted her tear-stained face. ‘You don't want to get married; you said so.'

‘I have changed my mind. Would you condemn a man because of a few foolish things he said in the past?' His compelling eyes raked her face angrily.

‘It wasn't very long in the past,' she pointed out. ‘People don't get married these days just because a baby is coming.'

‘I am not interested in what
people
do,' he announced scornfully. ‘I intend to be a full-time father to my child.'

If he had expressed such commitment to the idea of being her full-time lover she would have been over the moon. ‘I'm sure we can arrange for you to be fully involved and I'm glad, of course I am,' she added huskily, ‘that you have been given a clean bill of health.'

She gave a loud sniff. ‘Not that that would make any difference. If you love a man it really doesn't matter if he is going to live fifty years or a week,' she explained wistfully.

He gazed at her with an expression of angry frustration. ‘I am the father of your child; you will marry me if I have to drag you to the altar.'

‘What about Roxie?'

His brows drew together in a puzzled line. ‘What has she to do with us?'

‘Everything, Raul.' Raul wanted her now, but he was a highly sexed man with strong appetites and no feelings of love to bind him to her. It was a need to compete with his elder brother that had driven him into her bed—that wouldn't keep him there.

‘I'm afraid I don't share your attitude to sex, and I never will. When I get married I'm not going to develop a selective blindness about who my husband is sleeping with. Marriage has to be based on mutual love and respect to stand a cat's chance in hell of working!'

Raul's expression acquired a rock-like quality as he heard her out in silence.

‘I think we have established that you do not love or respect me, and after the way I took advantage of you and didn't even have the sense to protect you I am not surprised. But the fact remains that I am the father of your child…and if you are able to let go of the past—'

‘I don't want to let go of the past!' she interrupted fiercely. ‘It holds memories that I will cherish for ever. And I do respect you, Raul, I do…love you. So much it hurts.'

‘Incidentally, if you had picked up a newspaper in the last month you would know that Roxie and Tristram are to remarry next month.' He suddenly froze and rose jerkily to his feet, sending Nell sliding off his knee in a tangle of limbs.

‘Oh, Raul, I'm so sorry about Roxie!' Nell said, finding her feet.

‘You love me…?'
Though barely audible, his incredulous words seemed to echo around the room.

Nell looked into his stunned face and blushed vividly. ‘I didn't mean that precisely.'

‘Well, you said that.
Precisely
that,' he added, a touch of complacence entering his deep voice.

‘All right, then,' Nell conceded crossly. ‘But I didn't know what I was saying.'

‘Because you find it difficult to think straight when I am around…?' he suggested smoothly.

‘I could hit you!' she declared, appalled by this display of callous self-satisfaction.

‘Come here and kiss me instead.'

His bold eyes invited her, and Nell felt the familiar prickle of heat under her skin. She backed away, not trusting herself. ‘Roxie,' she said, using the actress's name like a talisman to stop herself doing something really silly.

‘I have had lovers in the past, but Roxie isn't one of them.'

Nell's jaw dropped. ‘But you said…I thought…'

‘I could see what you thought; it is hard not to when you walk around with your feelings written in neon across your forehead.' This recognition of her transparent vulnerability seemed to make him inordinately angry. ‘It was not an assumption I did anything to dispel, admittedly. I was suffering agonies of jealousy so I didn't see why you shouldn't suffer just a little too.'

‘You slept with me because of some sort of sibling rivalry. You didn't have to, you know; I never loved Javier…Well, I did, but I was never
in love
with him. He was almost like a father-figure to me.'

A hoarse laugh was wrenched from him. ‘And you have the cheek to call
me
stupid! I slept with you,
querida
, because I couldn't
not
.'

Eyes as big as saucers blinked up at him.

‘I was obsessed with you from the first moment I saw you,' he confided thickly. ‘I convinced myself for a little while that I had brought you to live with us for the sake of the children, but in reality I brought you there because I couldn't bear to have you out of my sight. I still can't,' he revealed shakily.

‘The last few weeks have been a nightmare. I couldn't even come after you at first, not knowing if I had a life to ask you to share with me, and when I knew I had you seemed to have vanished off the face of the earth. When Roxie said she'd seen you I could have kissed her.'

‘But you didn't…?'

A smile glimmered in his deep-set eyes as he shook his head. ‘I was in too much of a hurry.'

‘Good. I don't think I like it when you kiss other women.
Kissing me is all right,' she added pointedly when he didn't move.

He moved fast enough then to satisfy even her impatience. His mouth closed over hers with a hunger that drove the breath from her body and the thoughts from her head. Nell responded with eagerness to the unashamed hunger of the hard male body she was pressed against. For several minutes they kissed with feverish passion as if they could wipe out the memory of the past few weeks' unhappiness from their minds.

‘You will never leave me again,' Raul rasped huskily when they broke apart panting.

Nell gave a rapturous smile. ‘I didn't want to leave you this time, only I didn't think you wanted me and I was so embarrassed at what I'd done.'

‘You were so beautiful…so generous…so
wild
…' He broke off, laughing, and ducked the swing she took at him.

‘Well, you didn't seem to mind too much at the time,' she recalled, flushing prettily at the memory.