Contracted For The Spaniard's Heir

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER ONE (#ue3e2a30c-da9b-5f45-8982-cc72937f694d)

‘SHALL I BRING the girl in now, sir?’

Sprawled back in his swivel chair, Luca Ross looked at his housekeeper, Miss Muller, who was standing to attention by the door.

In short order, he had sacked the nanny, sat his godson down for a talk to find out what the hell was going on and now, item number three on the agenda, was the girl waiting in the kitchen. It was fair to say that his day had been shot to pieces.

He nodded curtly at his housekeeper, who was as forceful as a sergeant major and one of the few people not intimidated by her aggressive and powerful boss.

‘And make sure those hounds don’t come with her,’ he said flatly. ‘Lock them outside if you need to. If it’s raining, then they’ll get wet. They’re dogs. They’re built for that. Just make sure they don’t destroy any more of my house.’

In the cold confines of his home office—which was better equipped than most commercial offices, with all the accoutrements necessary for him to keep in touch with his myriad companies that spanned numerous time zones—Luca Ross sat back and contemplated this latest, unwelcome development.

He had failed. It was as simple as that. Six months ago, out of the blue, he had inherited a six-year-old cousin once removed, a boy he had briefly met when he had accepted—with cavalier nonchalance, he now realised—the role of godfather.

Luca had few relatives, and certainly none with whom he kept in active contact, and the request, coming from his cousin, had seemed perfectly acceptable. A compliment, even.

His cousin had then set off for foreign shores to seek his fortune, breathtakingly naïve in his assumption that the streets of California were really and truly paved with gold, and Luca had promptly lost touch.

Life was hectic. Emails had been few and far between and his conscience when it came to the role of godfather had been easily soothed by the occasional injection of cash into the bank account he had set up for his godson shortly after his cousin and his young wife had set off to sail the seas and make their fortune.

Job done.

He had not banked on actually being called upon to take charge of anyone, least of all a six-year-old child, but fate, unfortunately, had had other plans.

Jake’s parents had been tragically killed in an accident and Luca had been left with a godson who had no place whatsoever in his highly controlled and extremely frenetic life.

Naturally, Luca had done his best and had flung money at the unexpected problem. But now, sitting back in his office while he waited for the tiny, dark-haired thing who had returned his godson two hours earlier, he had to concede that he had failed.

That failure was an insult to his dignity, to his pride and, more than that, signalled a dereliction of the duty he had blithely taken upon his shoulders when he had accepted the position of godfather.

Once this chaotic mess was brought to a conclusion, he would have to rethink the whole situation or else risk something far worse happening in the not-too-distant future.

What, precisely, the solution to that problem might be, Luca had no idea, but he was confident he would be able to come up with something. He always did.

* * *

Standing outside the door, where she had been delivered like an unwanted parcel by the fearsome middle-aged woman with the steel-grey hair and the unsmiling face of a hit man, Ellie wasn’t sure whether to knock, push open the door which was ajar or—her favoured option—run away.

She instantly and regrettably ruled out the running away option because right now, in the pouring rain, the dogs she was looking after were mournfully doing heaven only knew what in the back garden of this stupidly fabulous Chelsea mansion. She couldn’t abandon them. If she did, she quailed to think what their fate might be. Neither the hard-faced housekeeper nor her cold-as-ice employer struck her as the types who had much time for dogs. They would have no problem tossing all three dogs into the local dogs’ home faster than you could say ‘local dogs’ home’.

She licked her lips. Hovered. Twisted her hands together. Tried hard not to think about the towering, intimidating guy to whom she had spoken briefly an hour and a half previously when she had rung the doorbell to deliver one runaway six-year-old back to his home. She’d had no idea to whom the blond child belonged, but she certainly hadn’t envisaged the sort of drop-dead gorgeous man who had greeted them with an expression that could have frozen water. He had looked at her and the dogs and then taken charge of the situation in a manner that had brooked no debate, dispatching her to the kitchen where she had been commanded to sit and wait; he would be with her shortly.

She tentatively knocked on the door, took a deep breath and then walked into the room with a lot more bravado than she was currently feeling.

Like the rest of the house she had glimpsed, this room positively screamed luxury.

In her peripheral vision, she took in the cool greys, the marble, the built-in bookcase with its rows of forbidding business tomes. On one wall, there was an exquisite little painting that she vaguely recognised. On the opposite wall, there was an ornate series of hand-mounted clocks, all telling different times, and of course the vast granite-and-wood desk on which were three computers, behind which...

‘My apologies if you have been kept waiting.’ Luca nodded at the leather chair facing his desk, his cool, dark eyes never leaving Ellie’s face. When she had shown up at his front door, with Jake in one hand and a series of leads attached to dogs in the other, Luca had thought that he had never seen such a scrappy little thing in his life. Small, slender, with short hair and clothes he associated with the sort of people with whom he had minimal contact. Walkers, ramblers, lovers of great open spaces...

He’d barely been able to see what sort of figure she had because it had been hidden under a capacious jumper that was streaked with muddy paw-prints. Her jeans had been tucked into similarly muddy wellies and she had forgone the nicety of an umbrella as protection against the driving summer downpour in favour of a denim hat from beneath which she had glared at him with unhidden, judgemental criticism.

All in all, not his type.

‘Sit. Please.’

‘I don’t know what I’m doing here, Mr Ross. Why have I been made to hang around, waiting to see you? My whole day has been thrown out of kilter!’

‘Tell me about it. And I’m betting that your out-of-kilter day is somewhat less catastrophic than mine, Miss...Edwards, is it? When I left for work this morning, the last thing I anticipated was being called back here because my godson had done a runner.’

‘And it was a good job I was there to bring him back!’ Ellie stuck her chin out defiantly, recalling in the nick of time that she was really furious with this man, who clearly ran such a rubbish ship on the home front that his godson had absconded, crossing several main roads and endangering his life to get to the park where anything could have happened, because this was London.

Anger felt very good, because the alternative was that unsettling awareness in the pit of her stomach because the guy staring at her, as grim-faced as an executioner, was also one of the most ridiculously good-looking men she had ever set eyes on.

An exotic gene pool was evident in the rich bronze of his skin and the midnight darkness of his stunning eyes while his features were perfectly and lovingly chiselled to exquisite perfection. One look at him had been enough to knock the breath out of her body and, sitting here, the effect of those remote, thick-fringed dark eyes on her was threatening to do so again.

‘You have no idea how dangerous London can be,’ she emphasised, tearing her gaze away from his with visible difficulty. ‘A young boy wandering through a park...? That’s a disaster waiting to happen.’

‘Yes. There is no doubt about that.’ Luca sat back and stared at her coldly and thoughtfully. ‘Incredibly fortuitous that you were on the scene, ready to return him.’

‘Yes. Yes, it was.’

‘Should I tell you at this point how fortunate you are that you’re not currently being quizzed by the police?’

Ellie stared at him blankly while her brain tried to crank into gear and make sense of what he was saying.

‘Police?’

‘My initial reaction when my housekeeper phoned to tell me that Jake couldn’t be found was to suspect kidnap.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Look around you, Miss Edwards.’ Luca waved his hand carelessly to encompass the luxurious surroundings of his office, where an original Picasso rubbed shoulders with an impressive sculpture of an elongated woman that rested on a glass stand.

Ellie duly looked.

‘I have never,’ Luca continued, ‘considered the necessity for bodyguards—or kidnap insurance, for that matter—but then I have never been in charge of a young and unpredictable child. Had you not shown up when you had, my next phone call would have been to the police, and you would now be sitting here being interrogated by them. However, here you are, and, in answer to your original question, the reason I kept you waiting was because I thought it necessary to establish what role, if any, you played in my nephew’s disappearance.’

‘I’m sorry, but I’m not following you.’

‘In which case, I’ll give you a few moments to digest what I’ve just said. I think, once you’ve done that, you’ll know precisely where I’m going with this.’

‘You think that I...that I...’

‘I’m not a man who takes chances. I’ve always found that it pays to take what people tell me with a generous pinch of salt.’ Luca shrugged. ‘For all I know, you could have lured the boy out with the bait of those three hounds frolicking in my back garden.’