Under the Spaniard's Lock and Key

by Kim Lawrence

  She released a small sigh of relief when he straightened up. It was becoming increasingly difficult to maintain a semblance of sanity when she became a mass of craving hormones every time he so much as glanced her way.

  As he leaned back in his seat Rafael’s eyes brushed her flushed face. Maggie, her palms damp with the effort of maintaining eye contact, was too caught up in her own struggle to notice the dark bands of colour etched across the angles of his razor-edged cheekbones.

  ‘You inspire strong feelings in everyone who meets you.’

  This cryptic response drew a frown from Maggie. Thanks for nothing, she thought. ‘How tactful.’

  ‘Tact is not something I’m known for.

  ‘You didn’t tell me that you were your mother’s carer when you were younger.’

  Maggie’s air of studied nonchalant defiance fell away at this, she felt a surge of anger.

  ‘I was not her carer. We all mucked in. Mum was always very independent.’

  ‘That’s not what she said.’

  ‘I wouldn’t know—I wasn’t there. You were talking about me behind my back.’

  ‘Did you never resent that you didn’t have a normal childhood?’

  His curiosity made Maggie see red. She drew herself up poker-straight, ignoring the pain from the belt digging into her bruised shoulder as anger burned away the last shreds of her restraint.

  ‘Of course I never resented Mum or anything else—I had a great childhood. Don’t you dare feel sorry for me!’ she growled. ‘I’m not the one with the hang-ups and emotional scars, I can express my feelings. I don’t have to reduce everything to the lowest common denominator—’ She stopped, appalled by what she had said. ‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that…’ Maggie cast a stricken look at his face before her eyes fell. ‘My parents would never discuss me with a total stranger.’

  ‘You had sex with a total stranger.’ He watched her flinch and shook his head, regret etched in the drawn lines of his strong features. ‘Now we have both said things we should not have. I’m not a total stranger, Maggie.’

  The emotion she heard in the husky addition brought her head up, but it was not anger she saw stamped on his dark features; it was a raw need that made her stomach muscles contract and flip.

  Her eyelids, suddenly heavy, half closed as she registered the sensual glow in his eyes. She struggled to retain control; she felt an erotic shiver trickle down her spine.

  Control…? She swallowed and ran her tongue over her dry lips. Who was she kidding?

  She definitely had more control over the direction her glance drifted than she did the dramatic dilation of her pupils. As her eyes moved slowly across the sensual curve of his incredible mouth she thought about his lips on hers, his tongue sliding into her mouth.

  ‘Maggie.’

  The sound of her name brought her eyes back to his, the tension climbed as she read the silent message in his hot hooded stare. A tiny gasp left her lips as desire tightened like a fist low in her belly.

  The fog of sexual tension in the confined space grew denser, almost tangible and totally unbearable, she felt torn apart as conflicting desires and fears battled inside her skull.

  She lifted a hand to her heaving chest as she struggled to draw enough air into her lungs.

  She could almost see the breaking point she was about to collide with when a sudden thump on the car broke the spell. She jumped instinctively towards Rafael.

  ‘Relax.’

  Maggie was too tense to register the rough-edged strain in his thickened voice as he soothed her.

  ‘What?’ she asked as the car slowed and she heard several more thuds.

  Then Rafael was drawing her towards him. ‘It’s just the reporters camped outside my place. This will only take a minute and we’ll be inside.’

  Maggie silently accepted the support of the arm he placed across the back of the seat; she tried to tune out the sound of muffled yells outside and the further thuds on the paintwork of the limo as she responded to the pressure of the fingers on her shoulder and shuffled her bottom across the space separating them.

  She allowed her head to rest on his shoulder closing her eyes as his arm tightened around her. It was such a relief to stop fighting for a minute and give her natural instincts free rein. She felt his fingers light on skin as he brushed the hair from her brow, and she sighed, allowing herself to enjoy the intimacy that she craved.

  ‘We’re here.’

  Maggie lifted her head. She hadn’t even been aware of the car stopping, but the driver was standing holding the door open. She saw that they were in what appeared to be an underground parking area.

  Maggie in the grip of emotions too strong and unfamiliar for her to put a name to, felt a strong reluctance to move and break the intimacy of the moment. Misinterpreting her hesitation, Rafael placed an encouraging hand between her shoulder blades.

  Once they left the limo he immediately went to speak to the man he had introduced as Luis, who had climbed out of the second limo that had been travelling close on their tail the whole way. Of the car that had preceded them there was no sign.

  Trying to orientate herself, Maggie stood and watched the two men speak. The shaven head of the shorter man turned in Maggie’s direction several times and she felt increasingly uncomfortable. What, she wondered, were they saying about her?

  Behind the respectful attitude, what were Rafael’s staff saying about her?

  Was she just getting paranoid?

  She watched as the other man got into the car, which reversed at speed towards large electrically controlled doors that opened, letting in a blast of noise before silently closing behind it.

  ‘Where are we?’ she asked as Rafael joined her.

  ‘This is my London home.’

  ‘Is this where you wanted me to come yesterday?’ she asked. ‘Go on,’ she added. ‘Say it—you’re right…’

  Rafael’s dark brows lifted at her accusing tone but the corners of his wide mouth lifted as he dragged a hand across the dark shadow on his normally clean-shaven jaw and he nodded agreement. ‘Generally, but could you narrow it a little? What particular rightness are we discussing at the moment?’

  ‘If I’d let you bring me here last night none of that craziness would have happened.’ Maggie shrugged in the direction of the big electric doors that shielded them from prying eyes.

  She turned her head and found his eyes were welded to her face, a raw, hungry expression that made her hopelessly susceptible heart thud loud against her ribs glowing in the grey depths.

  ‘Don’t look at me like that.’

  The husky plea made him blink and shake his head as if dispelling a mental image.

  ‘The women I know dress to impress,’ he said, still seeing the jewelled collar around her neck.

  The collar he had found himself buying two days ago because he had known the rubies he had glimpsed in the display cabinet would look incredible against her luminous skin.

  He had stood outside the exclusive establishment with the boxes in his pocket—once inside he had seen other items that had tempted him—when he had realised that he had just bought jewels worth a small fortune for a woman he never intended to see again.

  Well, not intentionally see again—for a man not given to fantasizing, he had been spending a considerable amount of time imagining scenarios where they accidentally bumped into one another.

  She would of course have realised in the interim that she had made a massive mistake and discovered that actually she could not live without him.

  In the imagined scene he took her back, of course on his terms.

  And as he stood there he recognised that there was a flaw in this scenario: the accidental part.

  He was not a man who had ever left things to chance.

  Why, he had asked himself, start now?

  He had walked back to his office with a new sense of purpose—purpose that had been sadly lacking over the last few weeks.

  He needed to work her o
ut of his system. Dios, had he really been that stupid? Then he would regain the focus that had deserted him. He needed to tire of her because it was obvious that the woman and her damned eyes and the soft skin he woke up craving to touch were only still in his head because she had left him, she had walked.

  Something no other woman had ever done, and she had done so before he had exhausted his interest in her.

  Then he could move on.

  It was rational to seek her out.

  His self-delusion now seemed ridiculous in the extreme, but ridiculous or not it had lasted until last night when the truth had hit him with the force of a proverbial lightning bolt.

  Why had he been afraid of admitting he loved her?

  Maggie flushed at her own stupidity. She was seeing what she wanted to. He wasn’t overcome with lust—he was just wondering what he had ever seen in a bag lady.

  ‘Colour co-ordination wasn’t high on my list of priorities this morning, and anyway,’ she dismissed, ‘you don’t look so hot yourself.’

  With a rueful expression Rafael ran a hand across his jaw. ‘I would have asked your father to lend me a razor but he—’

  ‘Has a beard,’ she completed for him.

  ‘And I don’t think your brothers have started shaving yet.’

  Maggie was distracted by the image of him in her home. ‘You actually spent the night there?’ She experienced a spasm of alarm as she noticed the greyish tinge to his normally vibrant skin. ‘You obviously didn’t get much sleep,’ she observed concealing her anxiety behind a spiky attitude. ‘You look worse than I do.’

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  MAGGIE stepped out of the lift from the garage and stopped, a small laugh drawn from her parted lips.

  ‘Just how many houses do you have?’ she asked, tilting her head back to look at the massive chandeliers suspended from the high ceiling. The wide sweeping staircase was perfect for making an impressive entrance. As she looked at it she could almost hear the swish of a silken skirt and feel the sensuous smoothness of the fabric on her bare skin.

  ‘It’s like a film set.’ And I’m a character from another film, she thought, glancing down at her scuffed trainers that made no sound on the marble. Her jeans were a long way from the ball gown in her head and she was a long way from the sort of woman Rafael invited to host his London parties.

  ‘What film did you have in mind?’

  Maggie resisted the temptation to respond in a hushed tone—appropriate to this awe-inducing setting—and levelled a glare at his lean face, waiting until he had stopped speaking to a uniformed figure who had materialised before she narrowed her eyes and said, ‘A film about someone with tasteless wealth, who kidnaps women!’

  A flicker of impatience appeared in his eyes. ‘This is not a kidnap—and we both know it—any more than it was the first time.’

  Unable to bring herself to concede the truth of his edgy observation and feeling churlish because she supposed most people would acknowledge that he had actually rescued her, she pursed her lips and lowered her eyes.

  ‘Myself, I always had a soft spot for misunderstood heroes.’

  This comment brought her head up; her scornful scowl faded as she was hit by a badly timed debilitating surge of lust.

  God, he was utterly gorgeous and his gorgeousness was not diminished by the dark shadow of stubble on his jaw or the exhaustion etched into his bronzed face.

  The camera would love those strong angles and planes, and if it had been able to pick up even a fraction of the dark, smouldering, sexy aura he projected he would have been box office gold.

  ‘Your problem is I do understand you,’ she lied, thinking he had to be the most complex man on the planet; just when she thought she had figured him out he did something that totally threw her.

  ‘But you think I am a hero—I’m flattered.’

  ‘I might believe you if I didn’t know you don’t give a damn for anyone’s opinion.’ She stopped, wondering why they were wasting time on semantics.

  She folded her arms over her chest and adopted a businesslike manner, always easier to do when your shaking hands were tucked safely out of view, and glanced at the doors leading off the hallway.

  To her dazzled and slightly disorientated eyes there seemed to be dozens.

  ‘So what next?’ It was a question she hardly dared ask, let alone think about.

  How did your life go back to any sort of normality after you had your face plastered all over the tabloids? How long in this situation did it take for the furore and speculation to die down…or maybe it never would?

  Would she always be labelled the woman that a billionaire playboy gave a black eye?

  On the brink of total panic she took a deep breath; all this speculation right now was pointless—what she needed to do was sort out one thing at a time.

  Prioritising was not hard, and it was one of the few things in her life she still retained control of. She could at least concentrate on the positive: that she was not pregnant.

  Struggling to capture that elusive positive frame of mind, she squeezed her eyelids closed, but the freeze-frame image that had formed in her head did not vanish.

  For several moments she was forced to stare at Rafael gazing down proudly at the baby in his arms before she successfully banished it.

  Dabbing the beads of sweat along her upper lip, she put a name to the tight, achy feeling in her chest: loss.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  Maggie’s eyelashes lowered in a protective sweep. The sooner she cleared up the baby issue, the better, and how hard could it be to say there wasn’t one?

  He would probably break out the champagne.

  He might even see the funny side of it, then again maybe not, she thought as she read the suspicion in his narrowedeyed scrutiny.

  Pasting on a smile brittle enough to break at the lightest touch or wrong word, she said brightly, ‘I’m fine, it’s just I think…’

  Rafael, who had been watching the fluctuations of colour in her face, felt a stab of anxiety at the bluish discoloration of her lips. ‘Are you going to faint?’ He extended a hand that she patted irritably away.

  Maggie breathed through a wave of nausea, tried to remember when she had last eaten and couldn’t. Damn!

  ‘I don’t faint, just a blip. I’ll be fine in a minute.’

  ‘You are clearly not fine.’ And it was his fault—everything was his fault.

  Maggie lifted her head. ‘Just a blood-sugar dip. I could just do with a cup of tea, that’s all, and maybe a biscuit.’

  Rafael was relieved to see that, though she was still pale, the blue discolouration around her lips had faded, but braveface attitude did not fool him.

  He studied her pale face, loving the curve of her cheek the tilt of her nose, her delicious mouth, loving even her stubbornness and fierce independence, but seeing past it to her fear.

  She was holding it together, but only just. The need that rose up inside him, the need to remove the weight from her shoulders, to care for her, was totally outside his experience.

  It was as strong in its own way as the wild, elemental attraction that existed between them. He was shaken to recognise it as part of the whole—it came with loving.

  ‘Look, I know you must be scared. I know you must feel as if your life is over before it had begun.’

  Maggie, confused by the intensity of his manner, looked startled and warily shook her head.

  ‘But it doesn’t have to be this way, Maggie. You may not believe it but if you could—’

  He stopped abruptly and Maggie’s level of bewilderment deepened as, in an utterly uncharacteristic action, his eyes slid from hers. He paused, the ripple of the muscles in his brown throat visible as he swallowed hard.

  It was almost as if he were struggling to find the right words, which couldn’t be right. Sure, Rafael was nobody’s idea of chatty, and he never saw the need to fill a silence, but he was also extremely articulate.

  As his head lifted the bands of
colour along his cheekbones drew Maggie’s attention to the slashing contours. If this had been anyone else she would have said they were self-conscious—but this wasn’t anyone else, it was Rafael, supremely confident Rafael, who she had never seen display anything approaching insecurity, even when he was stark naked. Palms damp with the effort, she pushed aside the erotic image of his lean, streamlined, golden-skinned body gleaming as shafts of moonlight hit…Focus, Maggie…

  Moonlight and his body out of the equation one thing remained obvious: she was misreading the signs.

  ‘One day you might look back and think this is the day your life, it began.’

  She was startled not just by his words, but by the driven intensity of his manner and the emotion packed into his words. Her eyes lifted to his face and she saw the same intensity reflected in his smoky eyes as their glances locked.

  ‘This is not something that you have to do alone.’

  The husky resonance in his voice made her shiver. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I’m saying that I will not be an absent father. When we are married you will not have to worry about being a solo parent. I have much to learn,’ he admitted.

  The uncharacteristic display of humility passed right over Maggie’s head. All she heard was married… He had said it so matter-of-factly that Maggie thought she had misheard.

  ‘It’s just as well I know your opinion of marriage, Rafael. For a moment there,’ she admitted with a hollow little laugh, ‘I thought you said married.’

  Rafael did not share her mirth. ‘A man can change his opinion.’

  Maggie stared, drawn as always by the brooding strength in his face, but totally sure this was a case of crossed wires. Anything else was, well…impossible!

  ‘You’re suggesting we get married?’ This time the laugh got locked in her aching throat.

  His head reared back and he looked at her, hauteur and offence etched into every line of his dark patrician features. ‘You thought I would not?’