by Lynne Graham
At the beginning, pretending to be Cindy had been like a game she’d played, she saw now. Exotic travel and fancy clothes had been seductive trappings for a young woman bored with her own dull and uneventful life. Nor could she blame Cindy for persuading her into that disastrous masquerade. Her twin had had no suspicion that Joaquin Del Castillo had sent the plane tickets to snare a woman he believed to be a con-artist.
Yet Joaquin had had right on his side in what he’d been trying to do. She had even recognised that reality. She had tried to persuade herself that she was still lying for her sister’s sake, but by then hadn’t she been just as afraid that telling Joaquin the truth would wreck any chance she had with him? Not until she had witnessed Joaquin’s absolute revulsion had she registered just how inexcusable her continuing deception had become. Like many other people, Joaquin couldn’t stand liars. And Lucy had never felt so miserable in her life.
Outside the church after the ceremony, when the photographer had almost finished his task, Roger strolled over to Lucy’s side, bent his head and said to her with a grin, ‘Have I got a surprise for you!’
Her brow furrowing, she turned to ask her new brother-in-law what he meant, but Roger and Cindy were already heading for the car which would ferry them ahead of their guests to the reception. However, Lucy did not have very long to wait to discover the surprise in store for her. The very first person she saw when she walked into the hotel function room was Joaquin!
Sheathed in the dark suit that fitted his wide-shouldered, slim-hipped physique to perfection, his white shirt and elegant silver-grey silk tie accentuating his bronzed skin and black hair, he looked stunningly handsome. But what shocked Lucy even more was that Joaquin was with Roger, and the two men appeared to be conversing with all the ease and familiarity of old friends.
Breaking away from a group of guests, Cindy made a beeline for her twin. ‘When Roger arrived at the church, he saw you outside with Joaquin. He guessed who he was and he jumped out of the car before Joaquin could drive off and persuaded him to come to the reception. Roger trying to play cupid…I still can’t believe it!’
‘Yes, well…’ Lucy was all too well aware of why Roger had made that effort on her behalf. Roger knew that she was carrying Joaquin’s baby, news that she still had to share with her sister.
‘And Roger didn’t even tell me what he’d done until we were on the way here, and now, for goodness’ sake, they’re getting on like a house on fire!’ Cindy marvelled with a rueful but accepting laugh. ‘Isn’t that just like men? They just ignore all the drama and start talking about sport!’
One of the bridesmaids settled a drink into Lucy’s hand. Across the foyer, Joaquin finally took note of Lucy’s presence. Brilliant, unreadable green eyes rested on her taut face, and with a final word to Roger he strode over to her.
‘Well, this is a surprise,’ Lucy began awkwardly.
Joaquin elevated a sardonic brow. ‘Is it? Roger stepped into the breach with admirable common sense. Fidelio’s problems may be at an end but your brother-in-law knows that ours are not. Even if I wanted to, I’m not in a position to just walk away now.’
At that grim assurance, Lucy’s chin came up, her violet blue eyes furious. ‘You can walk away any time you like! OK?’
So the baby was a problem. Well, what other attitude had she expected from Joaquin? Few men would welcome being saddled with the consequences of a one-night stand! At least he was being honest, she tried to tell herself, seeking some saving grace in that blunt admission, but she still felt cut to the bone. She hadn’t asked to be pregnant and she didn’t want to be pregnant. In fact, right at that moment, the knowledge that there was a baby growing inside her just filled her with fright. She felt more like a teenager than the adult she had believed herself to be.
Joaquin closed long fingers over hers as she attempted to move away. ‘We’ll talk later,’ he spelt out warningly, tightening his grip when Lucy engaged in a covert tug of war with his hand, and then disconcerting her entirely by using his other hand to separate her from the wine glass she was still holding. ‘I’ll get you a mineral water. I seem to recall that alcohol is not recommended, es verdad?’
‘Will you just keep quiet about my condition?’ Lucy hissed at him out of the corner of her mouth, seething emotions washing about inside her to such an extent that she believed she might explode from the pressure.
‘My apologies,’ Joaquin breathed with icy hauteur. ‘But at this moment I can think of nothing else.’
Quelled by that confession, which was a most ironic match for her own troubled state of mind, they headed for the top table where a place had been made for Joaquin. As she passed by her sister, Cindy broke off her conversation with her father-in-law, rose from her seat with a beaming smile and enfolded Lucy in a sudden effervescent hug. ‘Congratulations, sis! Doesn’t Joaquin move fast? I’m so happy for you I could cry!’
A bewildered look stamped on her face as Cindy dropped back into her seat, Lucy muttered, ‘What on earth…?’
Joaquin urged her further down the table and into a chair. ‘Naturally I informed Roger of my intentions.’
‘What intentions? Roger?’ Lucy questioned in a daze, still struggling to work out what her twin had been congratulating her on.
‘Dios mio…he is your closest male relative. To whom else would I have spoken?’ His crystalline green eyes veiled from her view by lush black lashes, Joaquin sank with fluid grace down into the seat beside her. ‘But never before have I been so aware of the gap between your culture and mine. Had Roger been Guatemalan, he would not have waited for me to approach him. He would have demanded the same result with a gun to my head and the church already booked!’
‘J-Joaquin…’ Lucy whispered shakily, her throat closing over as what he was saying began to make sense. But she was hampered by the reality that she just couldn’t credit the ‘result’ he was talking about. ‘Exactly what are you saying?’
His beautiful mouth hardened. Tilting back his arrogant dark head, he dealt her a cool, unimpressed glance that questioned her apparent inability to follow his meaning. ‘That we will be married just as soon as I can arrange it, querida. What else?’
CHAPTER TEN
AT THE same instant, Roger stood up to make a speech. But Lucy was welded to the formidable challenge in Joaquin’s cool gaze. Her mouth running dry, she tore her shaken eyes defensively from his.
Strange how a proposal she would have received with joy just a few days ago now filled her with a deep sense of hurt and humiliation, Lucy conceded painfully. No wonder Roger and Joaquin had got so chummy so fast! But what did Joaquin expect from her? Applause? Grovelling gratitude? He had not even proposed to her! Although nothing had yet been discussed between them, although many explanations had yet to be made on her part, Joaquin had decided all on his own that there was only one solution. An old-fashioned shotgun marriage with a bridegroom set on doing what he felt he ought to do rather than what he wanted to do!
Lucy thrust up her chin. ‘With reference to the proposal you put before my brother-in-law before you even thought to mention it to me,’ she countered tartly. ‘No, thanks!’
At that point, Roger insisted on giving a toast to ‘Cindy’s just-got-engaged-sister, Lucy.’ Lucy shrank in her seat, face flaming with self-consciousness and growing outrage. What was wrong with everybody? Without one word of personal assent from her, her relatives were happy to assume she was getting married. Of course, it would certainly get her out of their apartment. The minute she thought that silly petty thought, she suppressed a groan and struggled to get a rational grip on herself.
‘Let’s dance,’ Joaquin suggested when the meal was at an end and the floor had filled.
‘Forget it,’ Lucy snapped, after maintaining the longest and most sullen silence in history.
‘You’re behaving like Yolanda!’ Joaquin lowered his head to give her what felt like the ultimate put-down, brilliant green eyes exasperated.
Lucy reddened, stood
up, and fought off an overwrought urge to both hit him and burst into tears. Joaquin tugged her into his arms. The achingly familiar scent of him enfolded her and did something crazy to her pulses and her heart. She closed her eyes, shaken to find that her wretched body was indifferent to her mental turmoil. The lure of that hard muscular physique against hers and the tantalising heat of him was almost impossible for her to fight. Little quivers of darting warmth glanced through her taut limbs, stirring up the hunger she would have done just about anything to stamp out. She trembled.
“‘No thanks”?’ Joaquin husked in effective repetition of her refusal an hour earlier, his silken derision sliding along her sensitive nerve-endings and then striking like a whip. ‘If you were in my bed now you would give me a very different answer, gatita.’
At that crack, she stiffened, and missed a step. ‘That’s what you think—’
‘That’s what I know, for your desire for me is the only honest thing you ever gave me!’ Joaquin breathed in a harsh undertone.
Lucy paled. ‘All right… I should’ve told you the truth sooner—’
‘You did not tell me the truth at all,’ Joaquin slotted in with crushing precision.
‘I was scared you would confront Cindy and cause more trouble between her and Roger before the wedding,’ she argued feverishly.
‘Poor little Lucy, always sacrificing her own best interests for those of others,’ Joaquin countered with deeply sardonic bite. ‘But isn’t it remarkable that instead of becoming my mistress you will now become my wife?’
Her teeth gritting at that comeback, Lucy saw red. She stretched up on her toes to gasp into his ear, ‘I wouldn’t be your mistress if you paid me.’
‘Por Dios…did you think I expected you to share my bed for nothing?’ Joaquin enquired, smooth as glass. ‘I cut my teeth on women considerably more calculating than you. I expected a price, but even I could never have dreamt that it would be a wedding ring!’
‘Rot…in…Hades!’ Lucy hissed the last word like a spitting cat and stalked off the floor to take refuge in the cloakroom.
That louse was the guy she thought she loved? She rinsed her hands under cooling water and shivered with angry confusion and a deep, deep sense of loss. Why was it she was now remembering his teasing warmth that morning he had called, before everything had gone catastrophically wrong? Though now she knew what the warmth had been angled at achieving, didn’t she? Joaquin had still been planning to make her his occasional bed partner. So if she was in shock right now, so was he.
She clutched the edge of the vanity unit and breathed in deep on that latter acknowledgement.
Joaquin was still—quite understandably—seethingly angry with her. He might be putting on a show of cool for the sake of appearances, but just a couple of hours ago Joaquin had discovered that she had engaged in a really massive deception and that virtually everything he had believed he had known about her had related to her sister Cindy instead! Then Roger had seized probably the worst possible moment to persuade Joaquin into attending the reception. Why the heck had Joaquin agreed?
‘Even if I wanted to, I’m not in a position to just walk away now,’ Joaquin had said. So Joaquin had allowed Roger to smooth things over in the aftermath of all the bad feeling over Fidelio simply because Lucy was going to have his baby. But why had he immediately informed Roger that they were getting married? Relieved to see such a tidy conclusion to an impending drama, Roger had naturally been delighted to hear and share that news.
So what was she going to do? Stick her nose in the air and walk away just to show that she could do it? Or recognise that right now Joaquin had a perfect right to be furious at the games she had played in Guatemala? But had he really planned to make her his mistress? Recalling her visit to his London home, and the passion which would very probably have plunged her back into bed with him again, she flushed with embarrassment.
If making her his mistress had been Joaquin’s ambition, he had been progressing well on that score. She might have found herself involved in a heartbreaking affair in which she was always waiting for his next phone call. Lucy spread thankful fingers across her still flat tummy. If there was a choice…and it was by no means certain that there was a choice—for she didn’t want a reluctant bridegroom—she knew she loved Joaquin, and that she would rather be his wife than his mistress…
When she returned to the table, she saw Joaquin standing with Roger and Cindy. She watched his charismatic smile flash out, but noted that it didn’t quite reach his eyes. For a male in the mood he was in, he was, however, putting on a heck of an impressive show. And why not? He was rich, he was sophisticated, he was the original Mr Cool on the surface…but underneath? He absolutely fascinated her. A secretive smile brought a dreamy curve to Lucy’s mouth as she kept her distance and mingled with the other guests.
When it was time for Cindy to change so that she and Roger could head for the airport, her sister took her up to the hotel room with her. ‘So my former worst enemy is going to join the family…only you could have pulled that off in so short a time!’
‘It’s not quite as simple it sounds. I’m going to have a baby,’ Lucy finally told her twin.
Cindy was dumbstruck. ‘But of the two of us you’re supposed to be the cautious, sensible one.’
‘Human, too.’
‘But you were only over there a few—’
‘Long enough,’ Lucy slotted in ruefully.
Cindy grinned. ‘So I’m going to be an aunt and get to see what it’s like being a mother before I try it for myself.’ She hesitated, her face colouring. ‘I guess Joaquin will bring you up to speed on the other business.’
Lucy frowned. ‘What other business?’
‘Never mind now. It’s not something I want to think about any more,’ Cindy gabbled in a rush, but she gave her twin a rueful glance. ‘But I can tell you one thing… Joaquin’s a really decent guy!’
On the way downstairs again, having refused to satisfy Lucy’s curiosity as to what she had been talking about, Cindy paused to throw her bouquet. A crowd of young females gathered but Cindy threw her flowers wide and high and with deadly accuracy at Joaquin. ‘I wanted you to have it,’ she whispered to her twin.
Ten minutes later, the bridal couple having departed, Lucy climbed into Joaquin’s Ferrari. ‘I suppose we’re about to talk,’ she said tautly.
‘Not a good idea while I’m endeavouring to hold on to my temper, querida,’ Joaquin drawled in succinct warning.
‘Feeling like that, it’s just insane to talk about us getting married,’ Lucy sighed.
‘I don’t see it in that light. I have a duty to my child and to my family name. There is no choice about how we handle this with my sixteen-year-old sister in the same household. We’ll be married within three days.’
‘Three days?’ Lucy echoed in disbelief.
‘If I cannot get a special licence for us to marry here within that time-frame, I will fly you back to Guatemala and have the deed done there.’ His bold bronzed profile grim, Joaquin filtered his car somewhat aggressively into the traffic flow. ‘The sooner we are married, the better. If I can contrive to shield my sister from the consequences of my own stupidity, I shall do so.’
Lucy hadn’t thought of Yolanda, but now she did and she cringed with discomfiture. An out-of-wedlock pregnancy was not the way to impress a teenage sister with the principles which Joaquin would wish to instil.
‘I…I could go away somewhere… I mean, obviously, I wouldn’t keep in touch with her—’
‘Don’t be foolish. A child cannot be hidden for ever. Or perhaps you are thinking that the child should not be born. It is my wish that it should be!’ Joaquin shot at her in a harsh but anxious undertone.
Lucy paled. ‘It’s my wish too.’
‘Por Dios…then why are you arguing with me?’
She closed her aching eyes. Joaquin wasn’t giving her a choice, but she still knew that she had a choice. Did she marry him because she loved him and she
was carrying his child and hope that somehow, some way, they could work a miracle together? It could not be said that Joaquin was in a mood to be easily persuaded. It could not be said either that working miracles was on his mind.
‘Why don’t you just talk out how angry you are with me for pretending to be Cindy?’ she muttered ruefully. ‘I can take it…’
The silence just sizzled. He had so much emotion, but it was all under firm lock and key. He thought strictly in shades of black and white. She was pregnant. For him, that was a problem. He seemed to believe he could solve that problem as if it was any other everyday problem. He took no account whatsoever of emotions. Did he feel anything for her apart from anger?
Lucy surfaced from sleep and slowly pushed herself up on her elbows to find herself lying on a bed in an unfamiliar but decidedly masculine bedroom. The light by the bed gleamed over a silk tie lying across the arm of an antique chair. The last thing she recalled was being in Joaquin’s car.
She checked her watch. It was almost midnight. As she sat up, the door opened and Joaquin entered. When he realised she was awake, he stilled and studied her with veiled eyes. Self-conscious beneath that scrutiny, Lucy pushed her tumbled caramel hair back from her face and tucked her feet beneath the white dress pooled around her.
‘Your sister didn’t choose that gown,’ Joaquin commented. ‘It’s too elegant.’
Taken aback, Lucy coloured, but he was right. Cindy had stipulated the colour but her mother-in-law had chosen the style.
His penetrating gaze still glittering over her, Joaquin vented a roughened laugh. ‘You look the very picture of Victorian innocence. In Guatemala, you wore only revealing clothes designed to attract male attention. Too short, too tight, too provocative.’