Under the Spaniard's Lock and Key

The ruddy colour rising up his neck had reached his cheeks, darkening the skin to magenta as he’d glared at her in furious frustration. ‘I…I’ll…’

Pretending not to notice the fingers tightening painfully around her wrist, she had cut across him. ‘Look, I’m sorry if I touched a raw nerve, but your sexuality is not a subject that interests me.’

Simon had looked at the ring she held out to him and released her arm.

She had dropped it into his palm, walked away and not looked back.

Maggie threw the newspaper into the back seat and fastened her belt with a click. Her chin lifted. Being sensible had got her nothing but humiliation; it was time for a bit of recklessness.

But maybe not this much, she thought half an hour later as they seemed to finally arrive at their destination. The village cut into the hillside was small, in a matter of moments they had driven through.

Keeping her voice carefully casual, Maggie turned her head in time to see the village lights disappear as the road began to climb steeply and asked, ‘Aren’t we stopping?’

Maggie recognised the extreme vulnerability of her position; she was in a car miles from anywhere with a man who could, for all she knew, be a homicidal maniac and nobody knew where she was.

She should be seriously scared, so why wasn’t she?

‘Relax, Maggie, I’m quite harmless.’

She looked at his profile and thought, If you were I wouldn’t be here. It was a bit late to recognise that it was the danger he represented that had drawn her here.

He was her rebellion against the self-imposed rules she had lived her life by.

‘Relax—you will enjoy yourself, you know.’ She looked at him with big wary eyes and he expelled a sigh. ‘That was not a threat, you know, and you can take your hand off the door—it’s locked.’

‘Why didn’t we stop in the village?’

‘Because,’ he said, pulling the car onto a patch of rocky ground beside a number of other vehicles, ‘the villagers are all here.’ He released the central lock. ‘You are sorry now that you came?’