The Spaniard's Woman

‘Marcus is my business partner, my godfather and a long-time family friend.’ A slight smile curved the sculpted lines of that wicked mouth and Rosie felt her stomach turn over. A lump of irrational disappointment lodged behind her breastbone; she had hoped he was just another employee, more on her level, not a member of the wealthy, exalted clan she and her poor dead mother had been excluded from. Though why she should think that way, she had no idea. Except—

To her shame she felt another of those wretched blushes crawling over her face and dipped her head so that her hair, which had finally escaped its ponytail, fell forward and hid her burning cheeks. Trust her to have silly thoughts about a man who was so far out of her reach he might just as well be inhabiting a parallel universe, a man who had the kind of looks which only existed in female fantasies!

Sebastian grinned with wry amusement. Females who moved in his social circles didn’t blush when spoken to. They bridled, pouted, husked, and sent explicit messages from calculating eyes. Rosie Lambert’s reaction to him was a new and intriguing experience. And she had beautiful hair. It fell around her face like a waterfall of softest, palest silk and a curl of string, presumably used to tie it out of the way, was tangled up in the silky strands.

Ignoring the impulse to pluck the string away—she would probably faint like a Victorian virgin if he so much as touched her—he heard her mumble, ‘I’ll get out of your way.’

Her slight body was trembling as she turned back to her bucket, her spine rigid with tension. Unaccountably, he had a compelling urge to ask why she was so uptight, try to help. Sensibly, he ignored it. She would probably run a mile if he became personal on such a short acquaintanceship. It would have to wait. Instead, he said blandly, ‘No, please carry on with your work. It’s got to be done and you won’t be bothering me.’

Somehow Rosie found the strength to turn and look at him. He was shrugging out of his leather jacket, revealing a torso of utterly perfect proportions covered by a dark, fine wool sweater. And he had endless legs; sexily narrow hips. Her mouth ran dry and she couldn’t breathe, because there was the strangest, most unnerving sensation of heat deep inside her.

And, for a big man—he had to be well over six feet tall to her diminutive almost three inches over five feet—he moved with surprising grace, she noted as he walked to the vast hanging cupboard to stow away his jacket.

Sebastian Garcia was the first man who had ever made her feel this weird, almost as if she no longer had any control over her body or her thoughts. But thankfully he hadn’t noticed the way she was gawping at him or suspected the effect he was having on her, she told herself as she finally turned back to her bucket and dropped down on her knees.

As he’d said, her presence in what was obviously his bedroom didn’t bother him. Why should it? She attacked the few remaining drops of dried paint with a violent surge of energy. She was just a cleaning lady—someone who, if she wasn’t being given instructions, became completely invisible.

So admitting, even to herself, that he really turned her on, would be stupid. As stupid as coming here in search of a father who had never wanted her.

CHAPTER TWO

ROSIE sat on the edge of her bed, her shoulders slumped dejectedly. It was her birthday and she had never felt so lonely.

She had no problem with the fact that she had spent the whole day on her hands and knees; she was being paid as a cleaner, after all. She didn’t want fuss or fanfares or piles of gift-wrapped goodies, nothing like that. It was the long evening ahead she dreaded.

She and Mum had always made birthdays special. There had been no money for fancy gifts but there had always been something extra nice for supper, a candle on the table and a bottle of inexpensive wine to share—an innovation that had appeared on her sixteenth birthday.

It was her mother she missed so dreadfully, her tired features magically seeming youthful and carefree again in the candlelight, her chatter and laughter.

A hard knot of anger turned her stomach upside down. It needn’t have been like that, her mother taking any menial job she could find to support them, scrimping and scraping, making light of hardship, while her father lived in the lap of luxury here, completely unconcerned as to the fate of the girl he’d seduced, their baby.

As the anger threatened to pull her slender frame to pieces, she leapt to her feet and began to pace the small attic room she’d been given.

Growing up, she’d learned not to ask about her father. She had always got the same answer. ‘We loved each other so much. But it wasn’t to be.’ Which had told her nothing, so she’d stopped asking, primarily because whenever she brought the subject up her mother looked so sad.

But a few days before her death, as if sensing her end was near, her mother had confessed, ‘Your father never knew of your existence. I was still living with your grandparents and I left home as soon as I knew I was pregnant. He was married and if I’d told him I was expecting you he would have been put in a terrible position. So, as far as he was concerned, I just disappeared. I thought it best for all of us.’ Her eyes had flooded with tears. ‘I don’t want you to think badly of him; I couldn’t bear that. He was a fine man.’

Rosie hadn’t believed that. She still didn’t. She really would like to, but she couldn’t. She was pretty sure her mother had been trying to put her lover in a better light just so her daughter wouldn’t spend her life bearing a grudge against the man her poor mother had so obviously still loved.

Unconsciously, she put her hand to her breast. She could feel the pendant through the faded fabric of her T-shirt. Proof of her identity, she supposed, should she ever try to use it.

Her face went pale as she recalled how her mother had asked her to pass her the small tin box she’d found at the bottom of her underwear drawer and had opened it to reveal a dazzling starburst of sapphires and diamonds on a heavy gold chain.

‘Your father gave it to me all those years ago, as a token of his love, so it’s very special. I want you to have it.’

‘Is it real?’ Rosie’s face had felt so tight she’d barely been able to get the words out, and her mother’s radiant, dewy-eyed smile had cancelled out her immediate and uncharitable thought that the glittering thing was just as much a tawdry sham as his love had been.

‘It’s very valuable, darling. So you must take great care of it. He told me it had been in his family for many years.’

Then you should have sold it, made life a bit easier for yourself—but Rosie had bitten the words back. She really couldn’t be so cruel when the wretched ‘love token’—or pay-off?—had meant so much to her mother.

Coming up against the dressing table, Rosie met her stormy eyes in the looking glass and vowed that if she ever got to meet her father she’d give the pendant right back to him. He could give it to his new wife, she thought furiously. She didn’t want the hateful thing!

Screwing her eyes shut, Rosie took a deep breath and let it out slowly. The situation was really getting to her. She wasn’t a vindictive person; on the contrary Jean had always maintained that she was too trusting and anxious to please for her own good. So she would stop thinking nasty thoughts about the man her mother had loved, the man she was in no position to judge, and get on with what she’d come here to do.

Though precisely what that was she had no clear idea. Coming face to face with her father had been her objective; in his absence all she could do was explore the house that his family had inhabited for many generations and hope, somehow, to pick up some clues to his personality.

There were four bedrooms and a bathroom on the attic floor. Sharon had grumbled. She didn’t see why they should be stuffed up there when there were loads of unoccupied grand bedrooms on the first floor. She fancied living in luxury for once in her life. ‘I only took this poxy job to get some cash for when I move into my boyfriend’s pad in town. I’ve had it up to here with being stuck in this village—it’s a one-horse dump!’

Privately, Rosie thought that the rooms they’d been given were lovely. Full of character, with their sloping ceilings, uneven plaster and dipping floors and pretty sprigged curtains at the windows set high beneath the eaves. And from the little she’d seen of the village it was lovely, too, and she was looking forward to Sunday, her day off, when she could explore and find the cottage where her grandparents had lived all their married lives and see where her mother had been born and raised.

But she’d kept her opinions to herself because—short though their acquaintance had been—she’d quickly learned that when Sharon grumbled she wasn’t to be argued with.

Picking her way down to the first floor, she stood for a while listening to the silence. She had the house to herself.

Sharon’s boyfriend had picked her up as soon as they’d finished supper. She’d been dressed in a purple mini skirt and a glittery black sweater, neither garment doing anything to disguise her bountiful lumpiness. Mrs Partridge, rising from the table to stack the dishwasher, had reminded her, ‘I lock up at eleven and, no, you can’t have a key, Sharon, so don’t bother asking. If you’re not back by then you’ll be locked out.’ To Rosie, when the other girl had swung out of the room with a defiant toss of her startlingly red curls, she’d added, ‘Feel free to watch television and make yourself a hot drink if you want one. I’m off to my own quarters to put my feet up.’

And, in spite of the Spaniard’s saying that he was here to oversee the mammoth spring cleaning exercise, Rosie hadn’t clapped eyes on him since that encounter in his bedroom. From what she could gather, from Sharon’s gossipy chattering and probing over the meals they’d shared with Mrs Partridge, Sebastian Garcia had had a call from the London head office of Troone and Garcia and had made a swift exit.

Which was just as well, Rosie thought, with a wry smile for the sheer immensity of her folly. He had just about knocked her for six at that initial, brief meeting and she wasn’t here to embarrass herself by mooning over someone so completely unattainable and show herself up for the naive and foolish creature that she was by blushing and stammering whenever he was around.

So she had her father’s unnervingly large, rambly and upper-crusty home to herself. It was the sort of place whose interiors she’d seen in the quality magazines she’d flicked through in the dentist’s waiting room. Her legs beginning to shake because she was feeling like a sneak thief all over again, she turned her back on the narrow stairs that led down to the kitchen regions and headed for the main polished oak staircase.

Creeping down, she had to remind herself very sternly that she wasn’t doing anything wrong. She had a right to be here—well, a sort of right, surely? And all she wanted to do was soak up the atmosphere and see if she could find out from the books he read, family photographs, maybe, what kind of man her father really was.

The main hall was lit by a solitary table lamp and the glow from the dying fire, and just as she set her feet on the massive flagstones a grandfather clock chimed the hour of eight from a dim and shadowy corner and made her jump out of her skin.

She’d been about to scurry back to her attic room, and her hand shot up to steady her bumping heart. It was the shape of the pendant beneath her T-shirt that gave her the courage to go on. To stiffen her spine and cross the floor to open doors and flick on lights. Large rooms led to much smaller, tucked-away ones, the furniture shrouded against the depredations of the departed and unlamented decorators.

At last, descending two worn stone steps, she thrust open an ancient door of highly polished broad oak planks and found herself in what had to be Marcus Troone’s work room. Her eyes widened as she took in the book-lined study with its low, heavily beamed ceiling. It had been brought into the twenty-first century by the addition of a long custom-built desk which housed a computer system, fax machine, a bank of files and two telephones.

The book-filled shelves drew her. Beautifully bound classics—both ancient and modern—tomes devoted to viticulture, the poems of Wilfred Owen, masses of biographies, three yards worth of paperback whodunits and a whole tranche of gardening books. And, what she’d been looking for, right at the far end of one of the lower shelves: a bulky photograph album.

Her mouth going dry, Rosie carried it to the desk. Her hands shook as she opened it to a series of wedding photographs. Her father? A blond, craggily handsome young man with a beautiful dark-haired girl wearing a dream of a wedding dress, posing outside a small weathered stone church. Lots more—she flicked through the pages, met the smiling eyes of the dark-haired girl holding the reins of a pony, a small grinning boy on top. The same girl in a wheelchair, apparently directing operations while a middle-aged man was planting a tree. Could it be her grandfather? It was difficult to tell.

So far there were no more photographs of Marcus Troone: presumably he’d been behind the camera, she decided frustratedly. Until, right at the back of the album, a threesome standing in front of a huge greenhouse. Her grandfather, the stern features she remembered from her childhood relaxed and happy, her mother, a slender slip of a girl, clad in a checked shirt and old corduroy trousers, her blonde hair blowing in the breeze, her smile radiant. And Marcus Troone—her father—standing at her side, smiling down at the vitally lovely young Molly Lambert. Her mother.

Rosie felt sick.

Her mother had looked so happy back then. She would have had no idea what the future held for her on that long-ago summer’s day.

Hands shaking, her heart thumping, she closed the album and carried it back to where she’d found it. But putting it back proved a problem. It just wouldn’t go!

Biting her lip, she got down on her hands and knees and pulled out a book that seemed to be obstructing progress. That last photograph had really upset her; the album seemed to be burning her unsteady hands. She wanted rid of it.

She dropped it and could have screamed her head off when a few loose pictures fluttered to the floor. She shouldn’t have touched the wretched thing. She wished she hadn’t!

Passing through the hall, Sebastian paused to throw more logs on the dying fire. He was tired and hungry. The place felt deserted. Madge would have retired to her rooms. He guessed he could stretch to making himself an omelette and wind down in front of the fire with a glass of wine. Or two.