One Night in Madrid: Spanish Billionaire, Innocent Wife / The Spaniard's Defiant Virgin / The Spanish Duke's Virgin Bride

The sudden sharp reminder by her conscience of just why Raul was here now, why he had had to drop everything and come to England had her choking off her words and swallowing them down in a rush. She was supposed to have told him the truth about what had happened. That was why she had been waiting for him at the hospital. She had been there to tell him; to make sure that he knew before he found out in any other way. She had to be the one who explained things to him.

But instead she had messed everything up. When she had tried to talk about Chris she had just broken down, gone to pieces, and everything that needed to be said had been left unspoken.

And she could hardly tell him now. Not here, in the darkness of the car, with his chauffeur in the driving seat and the glass panel between him and his passengers in the back partly open so that he would hear every word she said.

‘So he is at work, this new man of yours?’

She couldn’t answer that, not without lying, and so she hedged her bets, sticking instead to a round-about answer that she prayed would satisfy him without actually coming out with the truth.

‘New? It’s been two years.’

‘So long … and yet you wear no ring.’

It was dropped softly, almost lightly into the silence and Alannah was surprised to find that her instinctive response was to clamp her right hand down on top of her left, pushing the ringless finger out of sight. She didn’t know why she reacted in that way, only that some note in Raul’s voice had suddenly made a sensation like the slither of something cold and nasty slide down her spine, so that she shifted uncomfortably in her seat.

‘There’s no need for that.’

Again she dodged round a real answer. There was no need for a ring—but because there was no other man, new or not, in her life.

‘Oh, I see—so was that my mistake?’

‘Mistake?’ Alannah blinked in confusion. Raul Marcín never admitted to mistakes.

‘My approach was too conventional? You should have said that you weren’t interested in marriage.’

‘I wasn’t interested in marriage to you!’

How she wished it was as convincing as she made it sound. The bitter truth was that she had thought that her heart would burst with joy when he had proposed. It had simply never occurred to her innocent, naïve twenty-one-year-old self that this devastating, sexy man could actually want to marry her for any reason other than that he had been as head-over-heels in love with her as she was with him.

It had truly never occurred to her that a sophisticated man of the world like Raul might have other, more pragmatic reasons for wanting to marry her. Reasons for which her innocence, sexually at least, and her family background were much more important than any feelings she might have.

‘It really was just as well we split up when we did,’ she said hastily, as much to distract herself from her own foolish thoughts as to fill the awkward silence that had fallen between them. ‘After all, what is it they say about repenting at leisure?’

‘But that saying is usually preceded by the line “Marry in haste",’ Raul drawled mockingly. ‘We never actually got that far.’

‘And for that we ought to be thankful. If we had got married, it would have been a disaster.’

‘You think so?’ A sceptical note on the question caught on a raw edge on her nerves.

‘Very definitely,’ she stated emphatically. ‘Don’t you agree?’

His sudden silence, his total stillness was unnerving.

Turning to him in confusion, she caught a look she couldn’t begin to interpret in his eyes, flashing on and off, on and off as the streetlights caught them and then moved on.

In spite of herself, her heart gave a sudden rough kick inside her chest, making her blood throb in her veins.

He would only have to move a couple of inches, she told herself hazily. He would only have to turn in his seat, just so, and he would be facing her, his head directly above hers. And with her face turned up towards him as it was, then he would just have to lower that proud dark head in order to crush her lips in the kiss he so obviously wanted to take from her. The kiss that the gleam in his eyes, the softening of the beautiful, hard mouth promised.

And the kiss she so wanted from him.

The realisation was like a blow landing on her ribcage, making her catch her breath in shock and confusion.

She wanted Raul to kiss her. Wanted it so much that it was like a scream in her head. But a scream of need that warred in the same instant with an equally desperate scream of denial and warning. This didn’t make any sort of sense. It was not only stupid, but it was also dangerous as hell. She should be running miles away from Raul, as far and as fast as she could. Not sitting here, imagining, waiting—yearning …

‘Raul …’ she said, trying desperately to make it sound like a warning, as offputting as possible. But she had so little control over her tongue that instead it came out on a sensual husk, enticing and provocative when she was trying for exactly the opposite.

‘Alannah …’ Raul murmured and his tone echoed hers almost exactly, the gravelly purr seeming to coil around her head like perfumed smoke until she felt as if her senses were swimming from just breathing in. And what breath she managed seemed to catch in her throat so that her lips parted on a small, faintly gasping sigh as she fought for control.

Those gleaming eyes were fixed on her and she saw the faint twitch of his mouth into a tiny smile before he sobered again. Staring intently at her partly open mouth. And she could only watch, frozen as his dark head tilted slightly to one side, lowered …

And stopped dead as the car drew in to the side of the road and pulled up, coming to a smooth halt right outside the main door to the building where her flat was. A comment from the driver—something on the lines of ‘We’re here’ in Spanish, Alannah presumed—broke into the taut, heated silence that gripped the two of them as the engine slowed, stilled.

And still Raul didn’t move. Still he kept his hooded gaze fixed on her lips, so fiercely intent that she could almost feel its burn along the delicate skin of her mouth, drying them, drying her throat until the sensation became totally unbearable and she had to slick her tongue over her lips to ease the parched discomfort there.

And almost groaned aloud—but whether in relief or disappointment she was unable to say—when she saw how the tiny, brief movement shattered the mesmeric mood. Raul’s head came up again, his eyes clashed with hers just for a moment, then glanced away again, looking out into the rain-swept street.

‘My stop, I think,’ Alannah managed, her voice coming and going on the words like a badly tuned radio. ‘This is where I get out.’

If she expected any response, she didn’t get one. Instead Raul leaned across her and pushed open the door, letting in a waft of cold, wet air as he did so, then sat back, obviously expecting her to take herself off, out of the car, and as speedily as possible if his closed, withdrawn expression was anything to go by.

‘Thank you for the lift.’

‘You’re welcome.’ He made it sound the exact opposite.

The abrupt change from fiercely intent sensuality to cold distance was so disconcerting that Alannah actually felt herself shaking, unable to quite get a grip on herself. She had been so sure … and yet now his mood was so totally different that she was forced to wonder if she had been imagining things, deluding herself completely.

She couldn’t get out fast enough, pushing awkwardly and inelegantly out of the car. It was only as she set foot on the pavement, buffeted uncomfortably by the force of the wind and the rain, her short jacket no protection against the inclement weather, that she suddenly remembered in a devastating rush just why she had met up with Raul at all. Why she had been at the hospital in the first place.

She had been there to tell him everything—the whole truth about the terrible accident that had claimed Chris’s life—and she hadn’t even begun to say anything. She had let the time in the car slide away from her, caught in her memories of the past, in anything and everything other than what she should have been thinking of.

What she should have told him.

What she still had to tell him.

She couldn’t let someone else break the truth to him; couldn’t let him find out in any other way. There was only one person who could tell him everything that had happened—and it was her duty to make sure he got the right story. It was the last thing she could do for her brother—the only way to preserve Chris’s memory.

But there was no way she could turn round now and tell him. What was she to do? Get back in the car and say—‘Hang on, I’ve got something to tell you’? Or say it baldly and bluntly standing here like this, leaning in at the door, where the driver and possibly anyone passing by might also be able to hear.

She couldn’t do that to him. Not even to Señor Heartless Raul Marcín. In these circumstances she owed him a bit more than that.

And so she drew on all her strength, took a deep, calming breath, and bent down to lean in at the car door again.

‘We don’t have to leave it like this, do we? Would you like to come inside—for coffee?’

She knew the form of her words was a mistake even as they left her tongue but she only knew how bad an error she had made when she heard them fall into the silence of the night, sounding horribly light considering the impetus behind them. She felt even worse when she saw the way that Raul’s face changed, his eyes narrowing in his shadowed face, his mouth thinning out to just a hard, cold line.

‘Coffee?’ he said, making the word sound like a curse, as if the drink was a totally alien substance to him.