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

But now she was forced to wonder if she had just been imagining things. Had she only seen in his face what she had wanted to see and deceived herself to what was really there?

‘There’s nothing to stay for now. Everything’s been done …’

Alannah was thankful that Raul’s attention was on his phone. He’d switched it on and was checking the missed-calls register, so he didn’t see the way her face changed in reaction to that dismissive ‘nothing to stay for’. She had a welcome moment to catch herself up, push the foolish weakness aside, and even managed to inject some much needed lightness into her tone when she asked, ‘Have you missed anything important?’

‘Most from my father.’ Raul was still scrolling through the numbers. ‘He wants minute-by-minute reports of everything.’

‘It must be very hard for him.’

Alannah’s voice was low as she thought of the desperate state her mother was in, unable to believe that her beloved son was gone for good. She hadn’t eaten a thing since the accident and only that morning Helena had declared that she had nothing to live for, that she could see no reason to go on.

‘He’s lost his daughter.’

‘He’s lost more than that.’

Something had put a new harshness into Raul’s voice and his sudden stillness alerted her to the fact that he had stopped messing with his phone and his dark head had lifted, bronze eyes looking straight at her.

Cold bronze eyes looking straight at her.

‘What is it?’

‘You don’t know?’ The way he said it made it clear that he believed she was just pretending. ‘Know what?’

She had to have been fooling herself when she’d thought that he was looking vulnerable—had she actually used the word lost? There was nothing in the least bit lost about him now and his face was set in such harsh lines that there was no way at all she could spot any chink in his personal armour. He was angry, he was cold, he was totally closed off against her and she had no idea why. The man who had invited her in, the man she had glimpsed so briefly when he had actually joked about making her coffee, had disappeared completely and it was because she had seen him, even for such a short time, that she felt the loss like some brutal slash across her heart. Just for a moment she had seen the other Raul, the man she had thought he was. The man she had given her heart to, and now he was gone.

But had he ever truly existed? Was that man just a figment of her imagination and this one, this cold-eyed, bitter-mouthed, icily angry monster before her the real Raul? The one he had never let her see until it was too late.

‘Tell me,’ she said when he simply glared at her without speaking. ‘Raul, tell—’

‘So you’re claiming you didn’t know? That there was something your precious brother didn’t tell you? Some secret he didn’t share?’

‘There must have been or I wouldn’t be asking now. Raul—what are you talking about?’

‘The baby.’

The words came at her like bullets fired from a gun, hard and fast and meant to be lethal, as Raul slammed the phone down on the table without a care for any damage he might do to it.

‘Did you know about the baby?’

‘What baby? Whose baby? Are you saying …?’

She broke off sharply as realisation dawned, her hand going to her mouth in shock. Raul’s savage silent nod seemed to confirm her fears but still she had to say the words to make sure they were the truth.

‘Lo—Lori was pregnant?’

Again came that curt, cold nod that was somehow far more terrifying than if he had lost his temper and raged at her. The fearful control he was imposing on himself to remain so silent, so still after that one violent gesture with the phone spoke more eloquently of the way he was feeling than any words could possibly do.

‘But how …?’

A savage, burning glare from those molten eyes told her just how stupid he thought that question. And that was something she didn’t need telling. Of course she hadn’t needed to ask. There was only one person who could have fathered Lorena’s baby.

‘Chris … How far gone was she?’

‘Almost two months, they said.’

‘I didn’t know.’

Once more those dark eyes flashed in her direction, warning her that he didn’t believe her. ‘I didn’t know!’

There was a long, terrible silence. A silence that tugged and twisted painfully on Alannah’s nerves, and then at last, just when she had given up all hope of it, Raul slowly nodded.

‘No, I don’t think you did. You would have told me if you knew when—when you told me all the rest.’

‘Yes, I would.’ Alannah’s tone was soft. ‘And if it helps any, I think she was planning on telling you—or at least her father—very soon. They said they had a secret but that I’d have to wait to find out.’

She’d thought it was that they were going to get engaged. But perhaps they had planned on that too. The tears burned like acid at the backs of her eyes but surprisingly none of them fell. For the first time in days she felt as if she was all cried out, no tears possible to moisten her dry, aching eyes.

‘Though I suspect that my mother knew.’

Only now, looking back, did she see this as some further explanation of just why her mother had reacted so very badly to the news of Chris’s death. Now, at last, she understood the way that Helena had kept muttering about the way that her future had been taken from her as well as her son. At the time it had only made partial sense.

‘That would explain why she’s so very desolate about this. If she’s lost not just my brother but her dream of a grandchild too then it’s no wonder she’s so desperately low. Nothing seems to even get through to her. Which would be understandable if they told her before they left.’

‘While I have still to tell my father. I have to tell him how when your brother died he not only took my father’s daughter, my sister, with him but he also took the one thing my father wanted most in all the world: a grandchild to hold in his arms.’

The roughness of his voice told her just how hard he was going to find it.

On an impulse she headed for the mini-bar, found a small bottle of the cognac Raul favoured and tipped half of it into a glass. Without a word she held it out to Raul and watched as he tossed it back. The way that the lean bronze lines of his throat tightened as he swallowed made a small kick of response jerk in her stomach.

‘Gracias.’

Understanding was what had made her react in this way, and understanding was what kept her close. She knew what he was going through, having endured it herself. She knew what had put the shadows under his eyes, the grey tinge on his skin. And she knew how he must be dreading telling his father. Matias Marquez Marcín had come late to fatherhood. He had been forty when his son was born, ten years older when his second child, his daughter, Lorena, had come into the world. His health had taken a battering in the past few years and this latest sorrow must have hit him hard.

‘Is your father still unwell?’

Raul nodded slowly, the shadows in his eyes and his sombre expression revealing more than his deliberately controlled response.

‘He had another stroke just before Christmas. He looks so fragile that I fear a puff of wind would blow him away.’

‘There will be other grandchildren.’

‘Mine?’

The single word was raw with bitterness and the golden eyes burned with unspoken accusation. He didn’t say that the grandchildren he had hoped to give his father would have been the ones he’d planned on having with her, the only reason he had asked her to marry him, but he didn’t need to actually speak the words. They were there, in the atmosphere, like letters shaped in ice that came between them with their bitter memories of the past.