Maggie Cox - The Spaniard's Summer Seduction - Under the Spaniard's Lock and Key / The Secret Spanish Love-Child / Surrender to Her Spanish Husband

This could not be happening.

The face she was looking at demonstrated how slim the line between beauty and average was; it was her face if her features had been perfectly symmetrical, if her lips had been less generous and her nose had been straight.

The woman stood and Maggie thought she could be looking in the mirror if she were four inches taller and half a stone lighter.

Nobody was shouting any more; they were all staring at her. She never had liked being the centre of attention, she thought, struggling to control the bubble of hysteria lodged in her throat.

The silence that had followed the shouting was unbearably loud.

‘I dropped the plate.’

Her voice was the catalyst for a fresh bout of yelling. This time the woman joined in and the baby—no, babies —in the pram started to cry.

Feeling strangely disconnected from the drama unfolding and, for that matter, her own body, Maggie listened to the exchange of insults and accusation—a lot of accusation, and most of it aimed at Rafael, who made, it seemed to Maggie, only a token effort to defend himself.

His attention was constantly straying from those who were energetically jabbing the finger of blame at him to Maggie.

‘How could you, Rafael! My daughter…you have betrayed every trust I ever had in you!’

‘What gave you the right to assume.? I am not like your father… I thought we were friends…’

Maggie sucked in a breath, caught up in this strange nightmare moment but distant from it—distant from these people who were not her people.

The need for the comfort, the familiarity, of those she knew were there for her no matter what rose up inside her until she had to act on it.

‘Nice to meet you, but I have to go now.’

Even though her voice had been barely more than a whisper the acoustics in the room were such that every word echoed around the room.

Silence broke out all over again.

Maggie dropped to her knees. ‘I’ll just…’

Rafael was at her side, taking her hand and cursing as he saw blood oozing steadily from the superficial cut.

‘I could do with a dustpan, really.’

‘Madre di Dios!’ he breathed, lifting her into his arms.

He turned his head, murder in his eyes in response to an angry comment from the male half of the couple, before he strode up the stairs with Maggie in his arms. She didn’t resist, she did not do anything—the blank look in her eyes scared him more than anything in his life!

He sat her on the bed and cleaned and dressed the wound. He pushed a glass of brandy into her hand. For a moment she looked at it blankly, then he saw something move at the back of her eyes a moment before, with calm deliberation, she tipped the contents on the floor.

‘Was that who I think it is?’

‘Yes, it was. Your mother is married to my cousin.’

The muscles along her jaw quivered as she looked at him with dark unfriendly eyes.

‘No, she isn’t, because my mother,’ she said in a voice that quivered and shook with emotion, ‘my mother looked after me when I had chicken pox and wanted to scratch the spots—she stopped me. She read my teacher the Riot Act when I was being bullied at school. She listened to my spellings when I had a test. I only need one mother and that woman is nothing to me…a stranger.’

‘I know it must be hard for you to understand now, but Angelina was very young and her family—’

Maggie shook her head and covered her ears. ‘I don’t want to know her name. I don’t want to know how sad and sorry she is. I want nothing from her. Do you understand? Nothing!’

‘You’re pretty judgemental. Haven’t you ever made a mistake?’

The question drew a bitter smile from Maggie. ‘Several, but the one I’m looking at right now makes the others fade into insignificance.’

She saw him flinch as her words hit home and she didn’t care. She was glad. She wanted him to hurt as much as she was, even though that was impossible.

The burst of anger had actually cleared the fog of confusion in Maggie’s brain, leaving cool, clear clarity in its place. As the argument’s main points sifted through her mind she looked at her bandaged hand and noticed it had stopped shaking.

‘Let me get this straight—is it true what that man said?’

‘Alfonso my cousin.’ Who now, it seemed, hated and despised him—there was a lot of it around! The next time anyone asked his advice he was going to develop selective deafness—not that this was likely to happen any time soon; most, if not all, of the people he cared about were not talking to him.

‘Was he right? You slept with me to stop me confronting her and spoiling a family party. You could,’ she suggested bitterly, ‘have just explained it wasn’t a good moment. And I wasn’t…’

‘You weren’t?’

‘I have never wanted to trace my birth mother. I even split up with Simon because he did just that and now you…’ She dropped her head into her hands. Rafael had seemed so different, but actually he wasn’t.

He was worse!

She pressed her fingers to her pounding temples. Rafael covered them with his own and tilted her face to his. ‘I admit it started out that way.’

‘And then you fell desperately in love me…yes… Save your breath, Rafael, for the next starry-eyed fool who thinks every word you utter is gospel.’

‘I have never lied to you, Maggie.’

‘No, but you were pretty economic with the truth and anyway you didn’t need to lie, did you? Because, let’s face facts, I was easy!’

Rafael swore.

Maggie flinched away from his outstretched hand. ‘It was all an act, wasn’t it? And in the end such a waste of your valuable time, because I never presented any danger. I was not a scandal waiting to happen. I was just a silly girl who believed you were as special as you seemed. And you’re not, you’re not special, you’re…’ Her voice quivered as the tears began to seep unchecked from her eyes. ‘I hate you and I wish we’d never met!’ She raced to the wardrobe and began to pull her possessions off the rail. ‘I’m going home.’

The dark lines of colour scoring Rafael’s razor-edged cheekbones deepened as he watched her. ‘I did not ask you to stay with me only because of Angelina and you did not stay because you hate me.’

Maggie spun back, her dark eyes glowing with scorn. ‘Like you said yourself, I’m a fast learner, and actually hating is not so hard!’ Maggie drew a hand across the nape of her neck to free the hair trapped under her shirt before sweeping it back from her face and securing it behind her ears.

‘Do not be dramatic.’

The terse recommendation drew a low growl of incredulity from Maggie’s throat.

‘You could not regret the sex any more than I do…’

Maggie’s head went back as though he had struck her. She bit her trembling lip.

‘You were not so open,’ he charged angrily. ‘You did not tell me you were a virgin.’

Maggie’s jaw dropped as she shook her head in disbelief—as if what he had done could compare. ‘What was I meant to do—carry a sign around my neck? Call me an idiot, but I had this crazy idea I was missing out on something marvelous, that the experience would be liberating! How was I to know that it was all hype and no substance?’

He received the information with an aggravating air of disbelief. She wondered what it would take to dent this man’s ego. More than a bad review from her, clearly—though it had been noted on more than one occasion that she was a bad liar.

‘That is not what you said last night.’ The memory sent a surge of lust through his body that Rafael was powerless to control.

Maggie gave a sniff and fixed him with a glittering glare, channelling cynical woman of the world as she admitted, ‘I’m a great actress…sigh…gasp.’ She let her head fall back and moaned, ‘Please…please…you’re so good at this,’ before straightening up and smoothing back her hair.