Shock Marriage For The Powerful Spaniard

SOFIA EYED THE crystal-clear swimming pool with a mixture of headiness and apprehension.

Under a dazzlingly bright-blue sky, the flat turquoise water glittered and shimmered and beckoned on a day of soaring temperatures.

Of course, she’d used the pool before, but only when the children had been around, splashing and yelling, with the little one clinging to her while she did her best to make sure Josh wasn’t going to do himself permanent damage by flinging himself into the water from the side of the pool while helping his younger sister to keep afloat without arm bands.

This time round...

Sofia closed her eyes and took a few steadying breaths while she mentally confronted the position she now found herself in.

‘Out of her comfort zone’ summed it up.

More than out, she thought giddily. More like teetering on the edge of a precipice with the comfort zone no longer in sight.

Amazing what a week could do!

First of all, she had let herself be talked into a sightseeing tour of Buenos Aires.

‘Live a little,’ he had whispered in a dangerously soft voice and even more dangerous glint in his dark eyes.

Then, in quick succession, there had followed various little jaunts in and around the city, while she had relaxed more and more and found herself dropping her guard and laughing, her curiosity about the stranger who had landed on the Walters’ doorstep growing with each passing second.

A stranger who had not bothered to go near the long list of must-dos that her employer had meticulously and maliciously printed off.

A stranger who had not, in fact, been near the tool shed, the ride-on mower, the green house or any implement connected to gardening.

His audacity thrilled her.

She wasn’t going to lose her head, because he wasn’t ‘settling down’ material, and he would be gone in the blink of an eye. But where was the harm in having a bit of fun, as he had cleverly suggested to her?

And she was having fun. Lots of it.

Even her aunt had noticed.

The evening before, she had gone to visit Misa, who lived on the other side of the city where the tall, shiny towers of the city and the exclusive retreats of the wealthy were as out of reach as the moon—even though, from the bedroom window of the derelict house in which she lived, Misa could spy them in the distance.

‘You’re glowing,’ her aunt had announced, pleased. ‘It’s the first time you’ve actually looked like a young girl since you returned to Buenos Aires. There must be a man in your life. Someone special, Sofia?’

‘I’m not glowing,’ Sofia had protested, but she knew that she was somehow different.

She had hardly been able to focus on Miguel, her cousin, who as always was in his room, immobile and frustrated, facing certain physical disabilities after a motorcycle accident at the age of sixteen.

For once, instead of sitting back and listening to his despair, Sofia had talked about the stranger who had landed on the doorstep like a breath of fresh air.

She’d been full of it.