Susan Stephens - The Spaniard's Revenge

Silently, he returned to the business of lighting the cooker, signalling the end of the exchange.

They had to get to know each other all over again, Sophie realised, as she watched him. The impetuous teenager she had once been was as far removed from her present incarnation as Xavier was from the life-loving young aristocrat who used to rip up the roads with his high performance cars.

Over supper they discussed nothing more controversial than the various treatments for asthma, a condition Sophie had suffered from since infancy. Then, after helping him to clear up the dishes, she made an excuse to escape to her own bed. Away from Xavier’s distracting presence, Sophie hoped it might be possible to get her thoughts in order and have a decent night’s sleep before their early start the next morning.

Snuggling deep into her sleeping bag, half-clothed, she meant to spend an hour or so quietly mulling over everything that had happened. But the moment her head touched the pillow her eyes drifted shut, and she knew nothing more until an insistent tapping on the window brought her fully awake the next morning.

Gathering her thoughts, Sophie clambered out of the low-slung bed and stared out of the window. A Peruvian couple stood waiting outside, a broad smile on the woman’s round face, with just a little more tension showing on the face of her male companion.

‘Just a minute,’ Sophie called to them as a cluster of impressions struck her all at once: Xavier’s bed hadn’t been slept in, the floor felt chilly under her bare feet, even though the sun was beaming promisingly outside, she was in Peru! Excitement ripped through her as she pulled on her jeans and made for the door. Whoever the couple were, they looked friendly, and Xavier had to be somewhere around…didn’t he?

She was here to do a job, Sophie warned herself as she went to open the outer door to the clinic. Even if an unashamedly primitive part of her insisted on responding to the fact that Xavier was masculinity incarnate—a fact that excited and worried her in equal measure—it was high time she got on with it.

But where were the keys? And, more importantly, where was Xavier?

She was fully awake now, her senses on full alert, and she had the unmistakable impression that she was alone. Swinging around, she scanned the sparsely furnished room, and there, on top of the table where they had eaten supper the previous evening, she saw a large bunch of keys resting on top of a sheet of paper. Snatching up both the keys and the paper, she made for the door, reading as she went.

Juan and Lola will take good care of you—

The hand holding the sheet of A4 clenched automatically, scrunching the rest of Xavier’s message into indecipherable gibberish.

He’d gone without her!

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