by Lucy Ellis
Staff came trooping past with her luggage.
‘How many people live here?’ she asked.
‘There’s eight permanent staff for the house, but they come in daily, the gauchos who work on the estancia, and I keep an office manager here on the estate—he lives in one of the guest houses.’
Alejandro was frowning at her, possibly because she had stuck herself to the wall.
Edging forward just enough not to look completely foolish, Lulu told herself she would cope.
‘I’ll take you on a tour…’
‘No! I mean… I’m tired. Can I go to my room?’
She hated how abrupt she sounded, but it was difficult to speak normally when her vocal cords felt as if they were freezing.
He frowned.
Her phone buzzed.
‘Again?’
She shook her head. ‘My mother worries.’ She read the message.
Alejandro watched her face fall as she read the text and it had his own tension levels knotting. He knew what it was like to be on the end of a tugging string of phone calls and texts. His disaster of a mother couldn’t make a decision without dragging him into it. It was probably why he only ever had relationships with women who could take care of themselves.
Lulu clearly couldn’t draw that line with her mother. He told himself not to get involved.
Her pleated brow didn’t change as she put the phone away.
‘Do you want me to throw your phone into the lake?’
Lulu looked up in surprise and then remembered the other night, when she’d wanted to throw her phone across the room. Her mouth trembled into a reluctant smile. ‘That might be a bit extreme,’ she said.
How had he known?
‘Your mother is a nightmare.’
Her forced smile faded. ‘How can you say that? You don’t even know her.’
‘How many times has she rung you today?’
‘We’re close—I’m her only daughter.’
‘I saw her in action back at the castle. She treats you like a little girl.’
‘She has her reasons.’
‘Your medical condition?’
Lulu’s heart began to speed up.
‘I’d like to go to my room right now, if that’s all the same to you.’ She sounded curt even to her own ears. ‘It’s been a long day.’
‘Lulu—’
‘No,’ she said, her voice rising. ‘This is not your business.’
To her confusion he looked as if she had slapped him, when all she’d been trying to do… What had she been doing? Didn’t she want to change things? But it was so hard, Lulu thought as she followed him closely up the stairs, when your mind and body betrayed you at every turn.
‘This is your room,’ he said at the top of the stairs, opening the door for her.
‘The thing is,’ Lulu blurted out, ‘when I was looking to push my life in a different direction I didn’t factor in pregnancy.’
He leaned back against the door frame. ‘It wasn’t exactly on my radar.’
No, she guessed not.
If the latex hadn’t split would she even be with him right now? It was a confrontational thought. Just because he’d come looking for her the night before last it didn’t mean anything. He hadn’t used any words to her that had even hinted at them pursuing anything beyond the weekend.
He raked a hand through his tousled chestnut hair, stepping closer to her as if he wanted to take things in another direction, and the masculine scent of him tugged on all those new sexual responses she had to him.
‘Do you want to talk about it?’
Lulu bit her inner lip. The urge to confide was very strong. To tell him what was going on with her…to share a little of the struggle she faced on a daily basis. But, given he wasn’t interested in trying a relationship with her, it was probably not a good idea.
She knew now that she’d misread everything on the eve of Gigi’s wedding.
Sex was part of Alejandro’s normal life—it wasn’t some big deal. She didn’t have a normal life—let alone a sex-life—and somehow in her inexperience she had made it into something it wasn’t.
They were both doing the right thing: waiting for confirmation together. It was good of him to put her up in his home, but it didn’t mean she should be holding him hostage to her issues.
It was the house that had thrown her. Managing the space. She couldn’t share any of that with him. She couldn’t share it with anyone.
Lulu had never felt more alone.
‘There’s nothing to talk about, is there? We don’t know yet—it might all be worry for nothing.’ She needed to get out of his sight before she burst into tears. ‘I’m really tired, Alejandro…’ She turned away. ‘Let me go to bed.’
Alejandro found himself standing alone in the hall, staring at Lulu’s closed bedroom door.
There wasn’t anything more to say, was there?
He’d learned long ago that trying to help someone who didn’t want to be helped was a dead-end road. He’d tried to help his mother, and then his sisters to launch their lives free of the estancia, but it had earned him nothing from the girls but requests to butt out.
He didn’t open himself up like that any more. He’d offered support—Lulu didn’t want it. There wasn’t much more he could do.
He’d seen her face as they drove up. The way her features had frozen to mask her disappointment. He knew now he should have left her at the hotel.
She’d made it obvious she was uncomfortable here. He had vivid memories of long before his ex-wife had made it clear she hated it there—of his mother, dropping them at the house and then tearing back up the drive in a cloud of dust. But worse had been the times his grandfather had insisted she remain, when she’d closeted herself away in her rooms, from which she’d refused to emerge.
Sí, eyeing Lulu’s closed door brought back many memories. None of them good.
He turned away abruptly. He didn’t need reminding.
*
Lulu got up the next morning and ventured across the echoing parquet floors from sumptuous room to room, trying not to hear the silence or look out at the immense flatness around them, rising to low blue hills in the distance.
She felt almost unmoored in large open spaces. They were worse than being locked up in the cabin of a plane. But as long as she could establish a routine here for the next few days and have her touchstones—her room, Alejandro, knowing the people around her—she would do fine.
Only then she discovered Alejandro was gone. She stood in the kitchen with Maria Sanchez, who acted as his housekeeper, and learned that he wasn’t expected back until Thursday.
Two whole days!
‘He works hard,’ said Maria in English, when Lulu asked if he’d said where he was going. ‘I tell him his grandfather had his two brothers to help—and he didn’t have the pressures of a polo team. But he does not listen. He is like his grandfather that way. He sets his mind on something and nothing will deter him.’
‘You’ve worked for the du Croziers a long time?’
‘Over thirty years.’ Maria looked proud. ‘I came here when Alejandro’s grandfather was El Patron. It is a shame he never knew what a success his grandson has made of the estancia—especially after that son of his.’
‘Alejandro’s father?’
Maria made a face. ‘Fernandez never cared for the land…never cared for the people here. His grandfather took Alejandro under his wing and sent his parents away. Good riddance, I say. Now we have the best pure-bred Criollos in the country.’
Lulu frowned. ‘He sent his parents away?’
Maria drew herself up, clearly relishing an audience for her views. ‘El Patron could see how it was tearing Alejandro and his sisters Isabella and Luciana apart, watching them fight. Fernandez was never here, but Marguerite aired their dirty laundry to anyone who would listen. People felt sorry for her, because of Fernandez and his women, but she manipulated everyone with her weakness. A real woman works. Instead she liked
the easy money.’
Lulu thought of her own mother, married at eighteen with no job skills. Married to a man who had only shown his true colours when she’d had a small child and another one on the way and had been trapped.
Félicienne had remarried now, and she worked. She had her own flourishing import business. She’d never be trapped again.
‘Are you his sweetheart?’
‘P-pardon?’ Lulu stammered.
‘Alejandro doesn’t bring his women here. Yet you are here.’
‘I’m not his sweetheart…um…girlfriend.’ Lulu knew she was babbling, but what did Maria mean by his women? ‘I’m not anything.’ Which was a sobering thought.
Lulu discovered that she felt even more unmoored.
‘You are something,’ said Maria wryly, and turned towards the oven.
Lulu moved faster, slid on oven mitts and opened the oven.
‘Gracias.’
Lulu stayed in the kitchen, helping Maria prepare the food. It was easier than explaining why she didn’t want to go outside.
She told herself she would venture out tomorrow. She just needed to get her bearings.
She also needed a routine for her meals—something Maria was agreeable to after all her help in her kitchen.
The three weeks stretched out interminably. There was no way she could hide her problem for that long. There would be an incident, and Alejandro would witness it, or somebody else here in the house, and they would tell him, and she would be humiliated, and—baby or no baby—he wouldn’t want her.
Nobody would want to be around her. Whatever happened, he wouldn’t want her when he found out.
*
There was a problem with his champion stallion, Chariot. According to the phone call Alejandro had got that afternoon the old boy was still limping, and he wanted to have a look at that injured fetlock himself. It was the only reason he’d walked out of a reception for the team in one of Buenos Aires’s better hotels tonight and torn up the highway to home.
At least he told himself that.
By the time he was striding through the house he’d heard from Miguel Sanchez, his steward, that Señorita Lachaille had not wanted to be shown around the estancia. That in fact no one had seen her emerge from the house for two days. From Maria he learned that Lulu wasn’t sick, but that she appeared to prefer to eat her meals in her room.
His housekeeper didn’t seem to think this was a problem—which was unusual, as Maria complained about most things.
He took the stairs by threes, then stood at Lulu’s door.
His door.
The guest room door.
Memories swamped him. Of sitting slumped at another door, listening to his mother crying on the other side. Of his mother sending for him to relay her complaints about the food, about the way she was being treated.
His hand hovered over the door. He wanted to thump on it, but if Lulu was exhibiting behaviour that pushed his buttons he knew he didn’t have all the facts.
He knocked softly. ‘Lulu?’
Nothing.
He knocked more heavily. Again nothing. He pushed it open and stepped inside.
Ten minutes later it was apparent that she wasn’t in the house.
‘Check the outbuildings,’ he told the men he’d gathered in the courtyard.
He eyed the lake and told himself he was being overly dramatic.
He was crossing towards it when he saw the light in the high gable of the brick stables. Nobody was supposed to be in there. Chariot was in there. He’d given orders.
Lulu?
His chest was tight with adrenalin as he slipped through the half-open door, his tread light on the gravel. If it wasn’t Lulu, then someone was in there illegally. There was several million euros’ worth of horseflesh alone in these stalls.
It was dark and quiet, but around the corner a light shone over Chariot’s stall.
He heard the light murmur of her voice. He’d have known it anywhere, even if she hadn’t had that French accent, sexy and flowery with all those soft Vs.
As Alejandro drew closer he realised she was talking to someone. He stopped.
‘You have to stay there. If you come any closer I don’t know what I’ll do.’
Every muscle in his body tensed. Was someone threatening her?
‘Bien, be a good horsey and let me pass. If you don’t I know what happens from experience—and it’s not good. You really don’t want be around me when I lose it. And I mean lose it. No one wants to be around that.’
He stepped around the corner and looked over the stable door. Chariot was standing quietly, rocking a little from side to side, and Lulu was pressed up against the far wall, eyes huge, face white. There were traces of blood on her blouse and scratches on the fine skin just below her collarbone, which worried him, and she was cradling something to her breast.
‘Lulu?’
She looked up and relief swept over her face, but she kept herself plastered against the stable wall.
‘It’s all right, hermosa,’ he said in a quiet voice. ‘Just stay where you are. I’m coming in to get you.’
‘That would be good…’ she choked.
Chariot lifted his head at Alejandro’s familiar scent. ‘Hello, boy…nice and easy. I’m just taking the lady with me. You’ve got that lovely harem and this one is mine.’
The moment he was between her and Chariot, Lulu sidled behind him and he backed her out of the stall, keeping his eye on the stallion.
Anyone else and he would have had no sympathy.
There were signs. Any damn fool would know enough not to enter a stallion’s stall. Chariot’s mood was dicey, at best, and with an injured fetlock he wasn’t making friends at the moment. One of those hooves, precisely placed, could have knocked the life out of her.
But when he turned around Lulu was crouched on the ground, head bent.
He was beside her in an instant.
‘Can’t breathe…’ she gasped.
He settled her back, only to realise she was still cradling something against her breast. He disengaged what turned out to be a newborn kitten from her hands and, at a loss as to what to do with it, slipped it into his shirt pocket. Then he returned his attention to Lulu, who had drawn her knees up. He gently encouraged her to keep her head between them while he rubbed her back in concentric circles, counting breaths for her. All the while she made wheezing sounds that sent him cold.
When her breathing was less laboured she lifted her face. ‘Oh…’ she said, and reached out gently to touch the head of the tiny creature hanging over the side of his pocket, its blue eyes barely open.
He was beginning to get a picture of why Lulu had been in the stall. ‘I believe you two are friends?’
Lulu insisted on wobbling to her feet, with his help, and indicated the neighbouring empty stall. ‘They’re in here,’ she said.
Sure enough there was a barn cat, with a litter of four kittens lying in a nest of fresh, fragrant hay. Lulu restored the fifth to the pile. They couldn’t be more than a few hours old.
She stood looking down at them. He noticed she had colour in her face again, but the expression in the eyes she lifted to his took him off-guard. She looked almost jubilant.
‘I did it,’ she said.
‘Did what?’ he asked huskily. ‘Rescued the kittens?’
‘Managed…’ She bit her lip. ‘Almost.’
He gave in to his frustration with her. ‘You could have been killed.’ His voice was hoarse, as if he’d been yelling. But he never raised his voice. He’d grown up with adults for whom screaming matches had been part of a daily ritual.
Lulu made a face. ‘I know. It was stupid. But I was passing and I saw the light on. I wanted—I wanted to pat the horses.’
‘You wanted to what?’
She sank down into the hay, as if her legs weren’t going to hold her, and he remembered she’d had a significant fright. Hell, he wasn’t feeling so crash-hot himself. Seeing her pinned up against that wall…
‘I saw the cat at the rear of his stall with her kittens and I had to get them out.’
‘You mean you went in more than once?’
‘Three times.’
His gaze dropped to what he could see of her chest, crisscrossed with scratches. He hunkered down and took hold of her hands, equally bloodied, pushing up the long sleeves to find her wrists red and white with raised welts.
‘Dios…’
‘I’ll mend,’ she said, almost impatiently, pulling her hands back.
‘Woman…’ he breathed, and the urge to shake her was subsumed in the need to hold her close. He dragged her in tight against him. She came.
‘What made you come out here so late in the day?’ he asked, holding her so that she rested against him in the hay.
‘I wasn’t ready until now,’ she said haltingly.
‘Ready for what?’
He looked at her as if she was speaking another language. Another minute of this and he was going to look at her as if she was a complete flake.
Lulu swallowed hard. She could convince herself that she had to tell him the truth now because whatever happened he was going to think she was crazy anyway. Or tell herself that he’d just rescued her and she owed him an explanation.
But right now what she really wanted was to tell him the worst thing about herself and hope he might overlook it and see the woman beneath.
‘I have an anxiety condition.’
Put like that, it sounded utterly underwhelming. But Alejandro was looking into her eyes as if what she was telling him was of the utmost importance. It gave her the courage to continue.
‘It’s a form of agoraphobia.’
‘A fear of open spaces?’
‘No—that’s a common misconception. I have panic attacks if I’m in a situation where I don’t think I can control the outcome. If I’m out of doors and I feel my safety is threatened it can come on… If I’m in an enclosed space and don’t have access to an exit it can come on… But with me it’s more of a fear of losing control. In public.’
Alejandro stroked the curls back from her eyes. ‘You should have told me.’
‘It’s a bit tricky,’ she said softly, ‘telling people you’re not normal.’
‘It’s a medical condition, Lulu, not something that’s a judgement on your character.’