The Alcolar Family: The Twelve-Month Mistress / The Spaniard's Inconvenient Wife / Bound by Blackmail

So for the time it took for the memories he had lost to return, Cassie had to live with him and pretend that nothing was wrong. She would have to act as if they had never rowed, never split up, never…

With a soft moan, she stopped dead, leaned back against the wall and covered her face with her hands, struggling for control. She had to pretend that all was well, while all the time knowing that as soon as Joaquin discovered the truth—or what he believed to be the truth—he would see this time she spent with him as one of deliberate deception, perhaps even trying to win him round by concealing the truth.

She had no way out. She was damned if she did, damned if she didn’t. She had never really understood the phrase about being caught in a cleft stick before, but she did now. She could not go forward, and she could not go back. She could only stay where she was, marking time, and knowing that one day, with a dreadful inevitability, the truth would all come out.

CHAPTER EIGHT

‘I THOUGHT we would never get here!’

Joaquin’s impatient stride into the house matched the irritation in his tone.

‘When did you become such an old woman when you drive?’

‘I was taking care of you,’ his brother pointed out reasonably, his soothing tone grating on Joaquin’s already badly rattled nerves. ‘You’ve just had a—’

‘A nasty accident—I know, I know!’ Joaquin snapped. ‘But I’m not an invalid. I don’t need wrapping in cotton wool!’

He pushed his hands into the pockets of the black jeans that Cassandra had brought to the hospital that morning, shoulders hunched under the white polo shirt, and glared at his brother. Ramón appeared totally unconcerned by his irritation.

‘And I don’t want to be responsible for you suffering any sort of setback.’

‘Oh, I don’t think there’s much likelihood of that! Unless you count the possibilities of exhaustion from the length of time it took to get here. Cassandra would have had time to get to your place, collect whatever it was that she’d left there and still get here before us.’

If she was here at all, some nasty little voice inserted into his brain. Deep down, he knew that this was the real reason for his irritation and that he was taking it out on Ramón quite unnecessarily.

His real anxieties centred around Cassandra, and the problem was that he had no idea why. But he had seen the look on her face when he had said that he wanted to come home, and she had fled from the hospital room looking as if all the hounds in hell were after her. All he could imagine was that they must have had some sort of a major row in the time he couldn’t remember.

That was something he was determined to get to the bottom of. But first he had to get rid of Ramón. Only when he and Cassandra were alone together could he start to find out anything that mattered.

A sound from upstairs caught his attention, had him moving to the foot of the stairs.

‘Cassandra! Is that you?’ he called, then frowned as something swirled inside his head.

It was just a hint. Just a momentary flash on the screen of his mind. A feeling that he had done this before.

But then, of course, that was inevitable. This was his home. He must have done this or something similar dozens—more—times over the time he and Cassandra had been together. It was nothing.

‘I’m here.’

She had appeared at the top of the stairs while his mind was distracted, and now she started down towards him, a welcoming smile on her face.

‘I was just making up the bed—putting fresh sheets on it. Yes—I know!’

She had caught his expression and interpreted it with unnerving accuracy.

‘You don’t want to have to lie down—and you don’t have to, so long as you take things easy. But I wanted things ready. Then if you do feel tired…’

A swift glance at his face had her trailing the words off.

‘All right, I won’t fuss. But you must take things steady. It’s so good to see you back here.’

Moving up close, she gave him a swift, firm hug. But when his arms would have closed around her, holding her tight, enveloping her in the sort of hug that had been impossible while he was stuck in the hospital bed, she seemed to almost slip out of his grasp like water through his fingers, drifting away again, out of reach before he had even had a chance to be aware that she’d moved.

‘I’ve missed you,’ she said.

Amen to that! was the thought that echoed inside Joaquin’s head. That hug, the contact, brief though it had been, had brought home to him just how much he had missed her.

Just to touch her, to feel the warmth and softness of her body in his arms, to inhale her scent, the mixture of some herbal shampoo on her hair, the light, tangy perfume that she wore, was enough to switch his senses into overdrive. But it was the deeper, more intensely personal, faintly musky aroma of her skin that kicked him deep in the gut, hardening him in an instant, setting off the sort of hot, clamouring demand that had him gritting his teeth against a betraying groan.

He wanted her so badly. He felt as if he had been starved of her for weeks, not just the couple of days he had been in the hospital.

If his brother hadn’t been here then he would never have let her go. Even as she slipped away, he would have grabbed her, hauled her hard up against him, pulled her face up to meet his own and taken her mouth with all the force of the hunger he was feeling. Kissing her until they were both out of their minds with need.

But Ramón was here, damn him. And so he had to smile and say as calmly as he could that he had missed her too. And yes, coffee would be nice. He was parched, could kill for a drink.

What he could really kill for was not coffee.

If he couldn’t have Cassandra, in his bed, naked underneath him, right now—then a glass of the finest crianza might come a reasonable second. But he could just see Cassandra’s frown if he suggested that. Not yet, she would say. You’re supposed to be taking things steady.

He would erupt if one more person told him to take things steady.

Oh, he knew why, of course. He understood. He even saw the sense in it—if he had to. But the trouble was that he didn’t feel steady, or sensible, or even calm, though he supposed he must look it on the surface to both his brother and his woman. Long experience of discussing business terms, negotiating deals, had taught him how to wear a controlled, affable mask when he needed to conceal his real feelings. But what he felt was a different matter.

What he felt right now was like a ticking bomb. He had lost a month out of his life in the blink of an eye and everyone seemed to expect him to just accept it, go with the flow, until things came back to him.

If they ever came back to him.

But everyone else knew what had happened in that month, while he’d had it wiped from his mind. He’d lived through four weeks that he didn’t remember and those four weeks…

Those four weeks—what? Hell, he didn’t know! He couldn’t even begin to guess. But if the way that Cassandra was behaving was anything to go by, then something had happened in that time. Because she sure as damnation wasn’t the same with him as the Cassandra he remembered.

That Cassandra hadn’t been edgy with him, elusive, impossible to pin down. She wouldn’t have come into his arms and then dodged out of them, flighty as a butterfly. And she hadn’t had those shadows in her eyes, the ones that lurked at the back of this woman’s eyes. The ones that darkened and clouded the bright blue of her gaze and made him feel that there was something he just didn’t understand.

And even that could be wrong.

Damn it, he didn’t know anything. He could be jumping to conclusions, imagining things. And the worst thing was that he couldn’t even ask! If he did, then no one would tell him because he was supposed to wait for it all to come back to him.

Wait for what to come back to him?

‘Joaquin?’

Cassandra was waiting by the sitting room door, watching him in obvious concern. Just how long had he been standing there, locked in his thoughts, unaware of anything else?

With an effort he dragged his attention back to the present.

‘Sorry. It’s just rather weird knowing that I’ve lived here for the past month and I can’t remember anything of it.’

‘It must be,’ she said, giving nothing away. ‘Why don’t you come and have this coffee? Ramón can’t stay long…’