Lynne Graham - A Spanish Affair

I want to take him home to Spain. That frank declaration raced back and forth inside her head as she led the way back downstairs. It was only natural that Alejandro would want to show Alfie off to his family while ensuring that Alfie learnt about the magnificent heritage and ancestry that he had been born into on his father’s side, she reasoned, eager not to overreact to his announcement.

‘What did you mean when you said you wanted to take him back to Spain?’ Jemima heard herself ask abruptly.

Alejandro took off his heavy cashmere overcoat and draped it on a dining chair by the table that filled the small bay window in the living room. His elegant charcoal-grey business suit accentuated his height. His classic profile was cool and uninformative when he turned back to her but his stunning dark eyes were bright gold chips of challenge.

‘I cannot allow you to have full custody of my son,’ Alejandro spelt out without apology. ‘I don’t believe that you can offer him what he needs to thrive in this environment. I wish I could say otherwise. I have no desire to fight you for custody of our child but I do not see how I can do anything else without betraying my duty to him.’

‘How… dare …you?’ Jemima threw back at him in a fiery temper of disbelief, her heart racing as if she were running a marathon. ‘I gave birth to your precious son alone and unsupported and I’ve been on my own ever since. Alfie is a very happy and well-adjusted little boy and you know nothing about him, yet the minute you find out he exists you assume that I am an unfit parent!’

‘Does he even know he has a father or a family in Spain? Is he learning to speak Spanish? What kind of stability can you give him? You are not a responsible person.’

‘What gives you the right to say that to me?’ Jemima interrupted thinly, her hands clenching into defensive fists by her side.

His lean, darkly handsome face tautened into censorious lines. ‘Look at the way you dealt with our marriage, your debts, your affair with my brother—’

‘For the last time, I did not have an affair with your brother!’

‘You don’t deal with problems, you run away,’ Alejandro condemned without hesitation. ‘How could you possibly raise our child properly and teach him what he needs to know?’

‘I don’t have to stand here putting up with being criticised by you any more. We’re separated,’ Jemima rattled out, her voice brittle. ‘I want you to leave.’

Alejandro grabbed up his coat. ‘It’s impossible to talk to you,’ he vented in a driven undertone of frustration.

‘You call threatening to take my child away from me talking ?’ Jemima exclaimed with incredulous force. ‘How did you expect me to respond to a threat?’

‘A threat is something that may not happen, but I will most assuredly fight you for custody of my son,’ Alejandro extended grittily, refusing to back down.

Jemima breathed in deep and slow to calm her jangling emotions and studied him with angry, anxious eyes. ‘What can I do or say to convince you that I am a good mother?’

Having donned his coat, Alejandro shrugged a broad shoulder as if she was asking him the unanswerable.

Jemima’s thoughts were already ploughing ahead to reach several fear-inducing conclusions. If a custody battle went to court, Alejandro had the wealth to hire the very best lawyers and nobody representing her interests would be able to compete. The very fact that she had kept quiet about Alfie’s existence for the first two years of his life would weigh against her. And how much importance might a judge lay on the truth that Alfie would one day be an influential member of the Spanish aristocracy in charge of a massive country estate and a very successful string of international family businesses? Such a background and his father’s ability to prepare his son for those responsibilities could not be easily ignored.

‘You can’t do this to me,’ Jemima protested. ‘I love Alfie and he loves and needs me.’

‘Perhaps it is my turn to be a parent for a change,’ Alejandro said drily, tugging open the front door to facilitate his departure with an alacrity that was ironically no longer welcome to her. ‘When it comes to sharing one little boy a divorce will leave few, if any, equitable solutions possible. We will both have to compromise.’

Jemima reached out in an ill-considered movement to thrust the door he had opened closed again before sliding between it and him like an eel. Violet eyes dark with strain in her pale heart-shaped face, she stared up at him and muttered tightly, ‘We need to discuss this now !’

Alejandro sent her a sardonic glance. ‘ Madre mia , you change direction with the wind. You told me to leave…’

Jemima gritted her teeth. ‘Possibly I was a little hasty. I wasn’t expecting you to already be making plans for Alfie. You annoyed me earlier. Why did you kiss me?’

Alejandro took a small step forward that trapped her between the wooden door and his lean, powerful body. ‘Because I wanted to, mi dulzura .’

He called her ‘sweetness’ and she ran out of breath and rationality in the same instant. Awareness ran like a river of red-hot lava through her trembling length, her nipples swelling and blossoming like fire flowers while the tender flesh at the very heart of her burned and ached. The atmosphere was explosive and she couldn’t fight the hunger stabbing at her. She studied the full curve of his sensual lower lip, reliving the taste of him, and slowly tipped her head back to meet hot golden eyes.

‘Ask me to stay the night,’ Alejandro urged thickly, pushing her back against the door, letting her feel the hard, promising power of his erection through his well-cut trousers. Air scissored through her lungs in a breathless surge, sexual heat uniting with dismay to hold her there.

‘You want to stay?’ Jemima whispered, already visualising closing a hand into the expensive fabric of his overcoat to haul him down to her, already imagining the taste and passion of him that drew her like a fire on a winter day. Desire had her in the fiercest of holds.

A long brown finger skimmed along the quivering line of her white throat, pausing to flick the tiny pulse flickering wildly above her collarbone. ‘It’s what you want too—’

‘No,’ Jemima gasped strickenly, feeling her self-discipline shatter like glass in the ambience and below it the roar of need she had resisted for so long.

‘Liar,’ Alejandro countered without hesitation, his confidence in his own powers of seduction absolute.

Her slender body vibrating with awareness, she still managed to tear free of him and step back. It hurt like hell. She couldn’t think; she could only fight the craving that she recognised as a dangerous weakness. ‘Leave,’ she urged again, wanting to hug herself in consolation for the rush of cold and disappointment enveloping her.

‘Call me when you come to your senses,’ Alejandro drawled, hooded dark golden eyes undimmed by rejection as he tossed a business card down on the little shelf in the hallway.

And in a moment he was gone and she was left in a disturbing mess of conflicting emotions and regrets. She was furious with herself because she hadn’t sorted out anything. Sex had got in the way and had only exacerbated the tensions between them. But she should have risen above the challenge to concentrate on Alfie and on Alejandro’s threats. He had wanted to stay the night with her. He had wanted to share a bed with her again. The blood ran hot below her fair skin. For just a moment he had been as vulnerable as she to the powerful attraction that could still flare between them. She adjusted that thought the instant she thought it. No, Alejandro had not been vulnerable. If she had let him he would have slept with her again but it wouldn’t have meant anything to him or led anywhere. He believed she had slept with Marco and he hated her for it. She lifted his business card and threw it down on the dining table in a fever of self-loathing. Alejandro was calling the shots again and she didn’t like that at all.