Exotic Affairs: The Mistress BrideThe Spanish HusbandThe Bellini Bride

by Michelle Reid

  In his neat black robe with its round white collar the father eyed her thoughtfully from his thin, wise face. ‘Is it a problem for you?’ he countered eventually.

  ‘Only if you expect me to make a sudden conversion,’ she answered candidly.

  ‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘I do not expect that sacrifice of you—as I would hope your English church would not expect the same thing of Luiz if the situation were reversed. See, we are emancipated here.’ He smiled then. ‘Even in our sleepy little valley.’

  ‘But there is a problem?’ Caroline prompted shrewdly. It was written in his thoughtful stare.

  ‘The problem is more one of—sincerity than religion,’ he murmured slowly, and when Caroline began to frown in confusion he seemed to come to a decision. ‘Let me be blunt, Miss Newbury,’ he said. ‘It has come to my attention that you and Don Luiz are intending to exchange sacred vows with each other which may not be exactly truthful, and indeed are merely a means to a rather sinister end…’

  Sinister? Caroline picked up on the word and pondered it frowningly, suddenly very wary as to where the priest was going with this. ‘Are you trying to suggest that every marriage in your church has been a perfect love-match?’ she questioned, aware that if any culture was known for arranging loveless marriages, then surely Spain had to be it!

  ‘In this particular case, it is only your marriage to Don Luiz that I am concerned with,’ the priest replied smoothly. ‘You met for the first time only five days ago, I have been led to believe. Within hours of that meeting Don Luiz was announcing your intention to marry and your own father was collapsing due to the shock. It has also been suggested that your father is in debt to Don Luiz for a rather large amount of money which may well be the motive behind this—arrangement.’

  ‘Suggested by whom?’ Even as the full weight of his words came as a bit of a blow Caroline’s hackles were rising—and it showed in the sudden glint in her amethyst eyes.

  ‘The source of my information is not really important,’ he dismissed with a wave of one slender hand. ‘My concern here is really for you, señorita,’ he explained. ‘I came here today with serious concerns that you were being—coerced into the marriage for reasons beyond your control.’

  ‘Are you trying to tell me, that you are refusing to marry Luiz and I?’ she challenged, coming stiffly to her feet. She simply had not been expecting him to question their sincerity like this.

  Inherent good manners made him rise to his feet also. ‘No,’ he denied. ‘Don Luiz is the new conde here in this valley. If he tells me to marry him to a lady gagged and chained to his side, then I marry them.’ He shrugged, adding with a wry smile, ‘There, the old ways are not quite dead, heh?’ And now it was his turn to flick her a twinkling smile.

  But Caroline was in no mood to twinkle back at him. ‘Then let me put your mind at rest,’ she said coolly. ‘Your information is wrong,’ she declared. ‘Luiz and I have known each other for seven years. We have been lovers for seven years.’ Which was not quite a lie, even if it wasn’t quite the truth. But in this situation it served her purpose very nicely to make that point.

  Surprised though the priest undoubtedly was by her correction, it didn’t faze him. ‘But have you loved Don Luiz for seven years?’ he threw right back.

  Love? Caroline repeated to herself, and smiled a half-smile that was more rueful than cynical, though she had a feeling it should have been the other way round. ‘I’ve always loved Luiz,’ she responded dryly. ‘But if you are going to ask me if he feels the same way about me,’ she added, ‘then please don’t.’

  ‘Then of course I will not,’ he instantly conceded, and with eyes which conveyed a gentle apology for making her feel compelled to add that final remark, he gently touched one of Caroline’s hands. ‘Forgive my intrusion into what you clearly feel is your private business. But I had to be sure that you cared for Don Luiz before I could carry out his father’s last wish.’

  His father’s last wish? Her eyes grew curious, but the priest had already turned away and was walking across the room to where a rather bulky attaché case she hadn’t noticed before lay on a table by the door.

  ‘I am now going to place something into your care señorita,’ he explained, ‘that I must make you promise to guard with your life and show to no one…’

  For some obscure reason, watching him open the attaché case as he spoke those words made her feel suddenly afraid. ‘If it’s something that will hurt Luiz, then you can keep it,’ she told him.

  ‘I commend your desire to protect him,’ he replied, turning with what looked like several thin ledgers in his hands. ‘And—yes—these will hurt Don Luiz if he ever sees them. He is, of course, the one exception to the promise I am about to make you swear. Can you read Spanish as well as you speak it?’ he asked suddenly.

  Caroline nodded. She had spent most of her summers since she was a small child right here in Spain, and that meant that Spanish had become her second language.

  ‘Then, having read these—’ he indicated the ledgers ‘—I will leave it to your discretion to decide whether you think he needs to know all that has been written in here…’

  He began to approach her, and it was all Caroline could do not to snatch her trembling hands behind her back. For whatever it was he was about to give her, she knew she didn’t want. He saw it in her face and paused two steps away.

  ‘These are the diaries of Don Luiz’s papá,’ he informed her. ‘Left in my care long before Don Carlos was taken ill. They explain why Don Luiz inherits all and Don Felipe very little. They explain why Don Luiz has been his papá’s beneficiary for the whole of his thirty-five years. So take them,’ he urged. ‘Read them and understand—for Luiz’s sake, please, señorita…’

  Sombrely he held them out to her. Reluctantly Caroline accepted them, her fingers turning cold as they closed around the diaries; worse her heart felt as if it had turned to stone. She didn’t know why, didn’t understand what any of this was about. But she knew one thing as surely as she knew her name was Caroline: these books were dark things—dark and awful things.

  ‘I’ll read them,’ she promised.

  The priest nodded in silent understanding of the expression on her face and simply turned without another word to take his leave. But as he reached the door he paused, glanced back at her, still standing where he had left her in the middle of the room with the books clutched between tense white fingers.

  ‘You know, señorita,’ he murmured thoughtfully, ‘it is, I think, quite a curious coincidence that you should have known Don Luiz for seven years. For it was also seven years ago that he first agreed to come here and meet his papá for the first time, only to abruptly change his mind. The reason he gave for that change, was that he had met the woman he was going to marry. Courting her, it seemed, was more important to him then than meeting his father. He did, though, promise to wed her here, in the church of the Valle de los Angeles, as was tradition. It seems he is about to keep that promise, hmm?’

  He smiled. Then, before she could remark on that fresh piece of shock information, he was turning away again. ‘Read the diaries, Miss Newbury. And learn about the man who loves you as much I think as you love him,’ he advised as he left her alone.

  Hours later she wished to God that she hadn’t read the diaries. She wished to God that the whole Vazquez family had kept to their old ways and stayed right out of Luiz’s life.

  She hid the books away in her room on the top of a great oak wardrobe that stood against a wall. Then she went outside into the afternoon heat and paced the garden, lost in dark thoughts filled with heartache and betrayal, and the cruel sacrifice of one innocent child for the sake of another.

  ‘History repeating itself,’ Felipe had called it. Luiz had called it feuds and fortunes. Caroline called it unforgivable. And if Luiz knew only half of what she had just discovered via those diaries, then it was no wonder he had shut himself away inside an invisible suit of armour since coming here. This family was poiso
n to anyone who touched them. Which brought to mind yet another remark made by his uncle the doctor. ‘Take a food-taster with you,’ he’d advised. He too knew that there was poison in this beautiful place.

  The only bit of good she had gleaned from those diaries had been confirmation that the priest had been telling the truth about Luiz’s intentions towards her seven years ago. But even that truth had its poisonous side.

  For, if Luiz had loved her then, why had he gone from her arms directly to a card table to try and bankrupt her father night after night?

  When the sound of a helicopter came whirring over the mountain, she wished Luiz had stayed away. She was still too upset, too confused. She needed more time to think, to absorb, and decide how much she was going to tell him about what she had learned today—if she was going to tell him anything at all.

  Yet as the helicopter landed on its newly prepared site she found herself standing there waiting for him. As he stepped down onto solid ground her heart began to fill with a multitude of emotions she just couldn’t separate.

  Dressed in a dark grey business suit with needle-sharp tailoring, bright white shirt and a steel-grey tie, he looked the true tycoon, the true nobleman. In fact no one looking at his lean, dark, proudly arrogant profile would believe he had spent the first twenty years of his life living literally from hand to mouth.

  He also looked sombre, she noticed, as if the worries of the whole world had suddenly descended upon him. She knew the feeling, since she was experiencing the very same thing herself.

  The fault of this valley? Was the fatal flaw in its beauty its need to taint all that came here?

  Fanciful though she knew she was being, she knew suddenly that she needed to be close to him—very badly. She also knew that she needed to get away from here, if only for a little while, to think, to regain some perspective.

  So the moment he was free of the helicopter’s lethal blades she began walking across the lawn to meet him. He saw her coming towards him and stopped and stared, as if he was seeing his life’s dream, before those heavily defended eyes were hiding as usual.

  And for no other reason than because she needed to, she wound her arms around his neck and kissed him urgently. His surprise was evident in the moment of tension she felt grip him, and for a couple of horrible seconds she thought he was actually going to thrust her away.

  Then his arms looped around her—tightly enough to crush her against his hard-packed body—and he began to kiss her back with a hunger that easily matched her own.

  It was like finding herself after being lost in a dark place for days upon end. Whatever else was between them that didn’t make sense, this always—always—felt so very right.

  He broke the kiss. She would have been content to remain right there, kissing him like this for ever. But those dark eyes of his were frowning down at her, probing the whitened pallor even the kiss had not managed to dispel. ‘What’s wrong?’ he demanded. ‘Who has upset you?’

  Caroline just shook her head. ‘I missed you, that’s all,’

  she told him huskily. ‘I’ve been missing you for days, though you didn’t seem to notice.’

  ‘I noticed,’ he murmured gruffly. ‘I just thought it was better if I gave you time to yourself to—come to terms with all of this…’

  ‘All of this’ being the fairytale castle standing behind them, that had suddenly become a very haunted castle for Caroline.

  ‘I don’t need time to come to terms with it,’ she denied. ‘I have something similar of my own in England, if you recall—though I admit it isn’t as grand as this. But—Luiz…’ Despite trying to, she couldn’t keep the strain from creeping into her tone. ‘Can we get away from here for a little while?’ she begged. ‘Just you and me, somewhere—ordinary? Can that thing fly us out—just for a couple of hours? Please?’

  ‘You don’t like it here,’ he sighed.

  ‘I love it here,’ she insisted, knowing it was a lie and that at that precise moment she hated this valley and everything in it. ‘I just need some time away from it for a little while. Is that too much to ask?’

  ‘No.’ He was still frowning, because he knew she wasn’t telling him the entire truth, but one of his hands flicked a staying motion at the pilot aimed to make him keep the engine running. ‘Where would you like to go? To Marbella?’ he suggested. ‘We can be there in—’

  But Caroline was shaking her head. ‘There’s this little place I know. A secret place,’ she whispered confidingly, and her eyes began to warm with sensual promise. ‘It has the softest bed on this earth, I think. No air conditioning and a bathroom down the hall. But it has the most wonderfully cool and crinkly starched cotton sheets on the bed, and there won’t be a frosty face in sight…’

  He was gazing down at her as if having to convince himself that she was suggesting what it seemed that she was. And Caroline’s breath snagged in her chest while she waited for some kind of response.

  Agreement or rejection? He was so unpredictable, burning hot, turning cold. Pounce and retreat. Trying to preempt his response was impossible, she acknowledged as his silence began to sew fine threads of tension beneath the surface of her skin.

  Then a sleek brow arched, mockery spiked his eyes. ‘Is this your ladylike way of inviting me for a dirty weekend, by any chance?’ he questioned sardonically.

  Put like that, it sounded so brazen that she felt her cheeks go red—then she caught the beginnings of his lazy smile and she smiled too. ‘I suppose I am,’ she admitted. ‘Though if you prefer the company of your family,’ she added innocently, ‘then I am open to compromise…’

  His dark head went back and he started laughing. It was the best sound she had heard in days. Her heart literally swelled on the pleasure of it, and he was still laughing after he’d captured her hand and walked her back towards the waiting helicopter.

  Neither saw his half-brother watching them from the shrubbery. Neither saw the malignant glint in his eyes as he watched them lift off and fly away.

  They were dropped off in a clearing just outside Los Aminos and walked into the village hand in hand. They must look an odd kind of couple, Caroline decided wryly, with Luiz in his razor-sharp suit and her in her simple cream skirt and lavender top.

  The hotel proprietor was the same, and his eyes rounded as they stepped through the door. At the appearance of an exorbitant amount of money, the round-eyed look changed to one of obsequious respect which produced the same key to the same room with exactly the same bed.

  ‘I’m even wearing the same clothes,’ Caroline whispered to Luiz as they climbed the stairs hand in hand.

  ‘And the same pink bloom on your cheeks,’ he added teasingly. And as the bloom deepened on her first realisation of what she had actually dared to propose here, he shut the door with one hand and reached for her with the other.

  They didn’t go back to the castle that night. It was a wonderful warm, enchanted experience, where Caroline felt as if she had found the lover she had carelessly lost—not once but twice, when she thought about the last few lonely days.

  They made love as if there would be no tomorrow. They touched and kissed and caressed each other as if this would be their last opportunity. It was all very hot, very serious and intense.

  ‘You were my first true love,’ she softly confessed to him at one point.

  His eyes turned black in their sleepy sockets. ‘And you, believe it or not, were mine,’ he replied.

  But—no, she couldn’t accept that. For a man who loved someone didn’t take her family for every penny he could squeeze out of it, she thought sadly, and to bury the sadness she took his dark face between her hands and brought his mouth crushing down on top of her own.

  Maybe he sensed her sadness, maybe he saw it just before she buried it away. Whatever—something thrust him onto a whole new plane of passion. It was devastatingly rich, and left her floating in a place of boneless satiation from which she didn’t return for ages.

  When she eventually did decide
to open her eyes, she found herself curled into Luiz’s side with her cheek resting on his shoulder; it was growing dark outside.

  ‘We didn’t tell anyone we were leaving,’ she remarked—without much concern for the omission.

  ‘I sent the pilot back to make our excuses,’ he replied. ‘They are to expect us when they see us.’

  He sounded so arrogant then, so much the lord of his valley that she released a soft chuckle. The sound brought his hand to her nape so he could make her look at him.

  ‘That was the first sound of genuine amusement I’ve heard from you since we met again,’ he told her huskily.

  ‘What did you expect?’ She pouted. ‘When you’ve done nothing but blackmail and bully me!’

  It was supposed to be a tease, but Luiz didn’t smile. Instead his eyes remained darkly probing. ‘I didn’t bully you to get you here tonight,’ he quietly pointed out.

  ‘No,’ she agreed. She had been the one doing the bullying this time.

  ‘Are you ready to explain to me now what happened today to make you want to run away like this?’

  So he knew she hadn’t been telling the truth back at the castle. She turned her face down again, and began watching the way her fingers were drawing whirls into his chest hair.

  ‘I had a visitor,’ she said, deciding to come clean with the truth—or part of the truth anyway. ‘The village priest,’ she explained.

  Luiz had gone still; even his heart seemed to have slowed beneath her resting cheek. ‘And…?’ he prompted very quietly.

  ‘And he wanted to know if our planned wedding was a sham.’ She smiled.

  ‘Was he threatening not to marry us?’

  Clever, quick Luiz, she thought. ‘No,’ she denied. ‘In fact he assured me that if el conde came to his altar with his bride chained and gagged he would marry them.’

  ‘Then what was his point?’

  Now there was a question, she thought, and on a soft rueful laugh she sat up, to run her fingers through her tangled hair. ‘His point was, I think,’ she began slowly, choosing her words with care, ‘to make me aware that certain—rumours were circulating the valley about the sincerity of our feelings for one another.’