Lynne Graham - A Spanish Affair

Alejandro studied her with stunning dark golden eyes ringed and enhanced by black inky lashes. His charismatic appeal was so powerful that she couldn’t take her attention off him and her mouth ran dry.

‘We can’t reasonably hope to share a child when we’re living in different countries,’ he told her.

Jemima tensed and smoothed her skirt down over her slight hips with moist palms. ‘Other people manage it—’

‘I want my son to grow up in Spain—’

‘Well, you can’t always have what you want,’ Jemima pointed out flatly.

Alejandro set down his empty cup and strolled across the floor towards her. ‘I too gave this matter serious thought last night. I can give you a choice…’

Her spine went rigid, her eyes flying wide with uncertainty. ‘What sort of a choice?’

‘Option one: you return to Spain and give our marriage another chance. Or, option two: I take you to court over Alfie and we fight for him.’ As Jemima lost colour and a look of disbelief tautened her delicate pointed features Alejandro surveyed her with unblemished cool. ‘From my point of view it’s a very fair offer and more than you deserve.’

As an incendiary response leapt onto Jemima’s tongue she swallowed it back and welded her lips closed, determined not to say anything before she had thought it through. But sheer shock was ricocheting through her in wave after wave. Alejandro was asking her to go back to him and live with him as his wife again? She was totally stunned by that proposition and had never dreamt that he would consider making it. ‘That’s a crazy idea,’ she said weakly.

‘If you take into account our son’s needs, it’s a very practical idea,’ Alejandro contradicted levelly.

Jemima breathed in slowly and tried to concentrate her mind solely on her son’s best interests, even though her brain was in a total fog at what he had just suggested. Many children might be more contented with two parents rather than one but that wasn’t the end of the story. ‘If we’re not happy together, how could Alfie possibly be happy? I don’t understand why you’re even discussing the idea of us living together again.’

‘Are you really that naïve?’ His intent gaze was semi-screened by lush sooty lashes to a hot glitter of gold while the muscles in his strong jaw line clenched hard. ‘I still want you. If I didn’t I wouldn’t be offering you this alternative.’

The heat of that look welded Jemima to where she stood and colour ran in scarlet ribbons into her cheeks. Once again he had taken her by surprise. ‘Are you saying that you’re able to forgive me for the past?’

Alejandro loosed a harsh laugh of disagreement. ‘No, I couldn’t go that far. I’m saying that if I get you back into my bed, I will make the effort to overlook your past transgressions.’

Her bosom swelled with wounded pride and resentment as she drew in a very deep and steadying breath. ‘Fortunately for me, I haven’t the slightest desire to be married to you again. You may have considered it an honour the first time around, but for me it was more like living in purgatory.’

Alejandro dealt her a stony look that chilled her to freezing point and she knew that she had angered him. She recognised that he believed that he was making an enormously generous concession in offering her—an unfaithful wife—the opportunity to live with him again. She even recognised that lots of women would bite off his hand in their eagerness to accept such an offer. After all, he was drop-dead gorgeous, amazing in bed and open-handed with money…as long as you could tell him what you’d done with it, she completed inwardly and suppressed a shiver, flinching from her bad memories. But at heart Alejandro was as flint-hard and unyielding as his centuries-old castle. He believed she had betrayed him and he was not the forgiving type and would never come round to seeing or understanding her side of the story. He thought she was a slut and even if she lived with him for another twenty years he would die thinking that she was a slut.

‘I’ve made a life for myself now in the village and I enjoy my life there,’ Jemima responded in a stiff tone of restraint that did not come naturally to her. ‘I was miserable in Spain and you didn’t seem any happier with me as a wife. Why would you want to revisit the past?’

‘Only because we have a son.’ Alejandro gave her a sardonic appraisal. ‘And this time around life could be much more straightforward.’

‘How?’ Jemima prompted baldly, wanting every detail of his thoughts even though she had no intention of accepting his offer.

‘I know you for who you are now. I would have no false expectations, no sentimental ideas. Our marriage would merely be a convenient agreement for Alfie’s benefit. All I would require from you would be the superficial show—’

‘And sex,’ Jemima added in a tight-mouthed undertone, because she felt demeaned that he had dared to include that aspect.

‘Be grateful that you still have that much appeal, mi-dulzura . Without the pull of that angle, I wouldn’t even have considered taking you back.’

Clashing unwarily with hot golden eyes, Jemima experienced a deeply mortifying sliding sensation low in her pelvis. It infuriated her that she could still react to him that way when so much else was wrong between them. Her body took not the smallest account of her brain or even of common sense, for being attracted to Alejandro was destructive and stupid and likely to get her into serious trouble. It occurred to her that maybe he felt the same way about her and that was such a novel suspicion that she stared at him, wondering if he too could be fighting the same rearguard action against his own natural inclinations.

‘You don’t like the fact that you still find me attractive,’ Jemima commented, daringly taking a stab in the dark.

‘But I can handle it. Familiarity breeds contempt—isn’t that what they say?’ His brilliant eyes were lit by a sensual golden glimmer that as his gaze wandered over her seemed to burn over her skin like a tiny point of flame. ‘I believe that this arrangement will give me a healthy chance of working you right out of my system.’

Jemima could not resist the sensual temptation of imagining what it would be like to be put to that kind of work in the marital bedroom. The more responsive parts of her treacherous body hummed with enthusiasm until shame and pride combined to suppress her facetious thoughts. She had never been able to escape the fear that wanting and loving any man as much as she had once loved and wanted Alejandro was weak and pathetic. It had inspired her into making numerous attempts to play it cool with him, most of which had blown up in her silly face as she had lacked both subtlety and good timing. She had acted all cool, for instance, once he’d stopped sleeping with her while she was pregnant; rather a case of closing the barn door after the horse had already bolted, she recalled impatiently. Those final weeks of their marriage he hadn’t seemed to notice her at all and his increasing indifference and long working days had made her feel invisible and insignificant.

‘I couldn’t just go back to Spain,’ she told him again. ‘I’ve worked hard to build up my business. I don’t want to lose it—’

‘I’m willing to cover the cost of a manager for several months. That would give you the time and space to come up with a more permanent solution.’

Cut off at the knees by that unexpectedly practical proposal, Jemima muttered, ‘I couldn’t live with you again.’

‘That decision is yours to make.’ Alejandro shifted a broad shoulder in a fluid and fatalistic shrug, his lean, strong face full of brooding dark Spanish reserve and pride. ‘But I’ve already missed out on two years of my son’s life and I don’t want to waste any more time. My English lawyer is waiting to hear whether or not I wish to proceed with a custody claim.’