A Spanish Affair: Naive Bride, Defiant Wife / Flora's Defiance

‘This is lovely. Did you organise all the toys?’

Beatriz laughed. ‘No, that was my brother. Can you believe that Alejandro went shopping for his son?’

‘I wouldn’t have believed it if you hadn’t told me,’ Jemima admitted, as Alejandro’s dislike of shopping was well known. Bitter as she was about finding herself back in Spain, she could only be touched by the effort he had made on Alfie’s behalf. Equally quickly, however, her thoughts travelled in the opposite direction. Of course, wouldn’t Alejandro’s actual presence mean more than the purchase of expensive toys? In fact wasn’t Alfie receiving his first dose of the same benign neglect that Jemima had once endured as Alejandro’s wife?

Undisturbed by such deep and troubled mental ruminations, Alfie pelted across the room to grab a toy car with an eager hand. His aunt watched him, entranced. ‘You must be so proud,’ Beatriz remarked.

Not for the first time, Jemima felt sorry for Beatriz, who was only thirty-five years old but very much on the shelf of her mother’s making, for no young man capable of winning Doña Hortencia’s approval had ever come along. A dutiful daughter to the last, Alejandro’s older sister lived the sedate life of a much older woman.

Placida, the small dark-haired nanny, came to be introduced. After chatting for a while, Jemima left Alfie with Placida and Beatriz and crossed the corridor. The elaborate suite of tower rooms in which she had lived with Alejandro before her pregnancy had brought all sharing to an end was unrecognisable to Jemima at first glance. All the furniture had been changed and a pale yellow colour scheme had banished the dark ornate wallpaper that she had once hated, but that Doña Hortencia had informed her was hand-painted, exceedingly rare and there for eternity. A maid was already busily unpacking her cases and putting her clothes away in the dressing room.

A weird and worrying sense of déjà vu was now settling over Jemima. Alejandro’s non-appearance at the airport had first ignited the suspicion that she was about to discover that nothing had changed in the marriage she had left behind. He had also just demonstrated his engrained habit of taking authoritarian charge of anything and everything that came within his radius. In hiring Placida over her head, Alejandro had shown that only his opinion mattered and Jemima did not appreciate being made to feel superfluous in her child’s life.

Once the maid had gone, Jemima went for a shower and padded through to the dressing room to extract fresh clothes. It was a shock to open the closets and find that they were already stuffed full of brand-new garments and the drawers packed with equally new lingerie, all of it in her size. Her own small collection of clothes looked shabby in comparison. Evidently, Alejandro, the guy who hated to shop even for himself, had ordered her a new wardrobe. Such generosity was very much his trademark but it made Jemima feel uncomfortable. Perhaps he didn’t trust her to dress smartly enough. Perhaps her lack of formal fashion sense had once embarrassed him. Maybe that was why he had gone shopping for her…

Yet the prospect of dining with her haughty mother-in-law garbed like a poor relation in more humble clothing had surprisingly little appeal and Jemima succumbed to the temptation of the new clothes. She selected an elegant sapphire blue dress and slid her feet into delicate sandals before hurriedly going to check on Alfie. He was playing happily in the bath while Placida watched over him. Using her slightly rusty Spanish, Jemima established that Alfie had already eaten his evening meal and she returned to the bedroom.

While she was combing her rebellious hair into a less tumbled style the door opened and she froze. Alejandro, already in the act of removing his tie, appeared. His immaculate grooming was, for once, absent. Indeed, in the bright light of the sunset flooding into the room through the windows, his tailored suit looked crumpled and almost dusty, his black hair tousled, while a dark shadow of stubble heavily accentuated his angular jaw line. But, even with all those flaws taken into consideration, he still looked spectacular, awesomely masculine and awesomely sexy. As she studied him, her body reacting with treacherous enthusiasm even as her pride rejected those earthy responses, hot, heady anger threatened to consume her.

‘I told Maria we would dine alone next door tonight. Give me ten minutes for a shower,’ Alejandro urged her carelessly, but the scorching golden eyes that raked over the mane of strawberry-blonde curls framing her heart-shaped face, before roaming down to the pouting curves defined by the fine fabric of her dress, were in no way casual. That appraisal was so hot she was vaguely surprised that her body didn’t start smoking and if anything that bold, sensually appreciative appraisal only increased her resentment.

‘Where do you get the nerve to look at me like that?’ Jemima launched at him in furious condemnation of that familiarity and the evident plan for a romantic meal for two. It would take a great deal more than that one tiny effort to turn her into the compliant wife he so obviously wanted and expected.

His well-shaped ebony brows drew together as he shed his jacket and embarked on the buttons of his shirt. ‘You’re too eye-catching to ignore,’ he told her teasingly

Jemima was fighting to hang onto her temper. She didn’t need a crystal ball to tell her that it was never cool to rail at a man for keeping his distance and even less cool to complain of a lack of attention. So she spun away and glowered at her own frustrated reflection in a tall cheval mirror. Why should she give him the satisfaction of knowing that she had been disappointed when he failed to show up at the airport? Or when he didn’t even take the trouble to phone to make a polite excuse for his absence from home? Yet that lack of consideration for her feelings was so familiar from the past that she couldn’t help wanting to scream and shout in complaint.

‘I’m such an idiot!’ she suddenly exclaimed, unable to hold back her seething emotions and keep her tongue glued to the roof of her mouth any longer. ‘Somehow I thought it would be different…that you’d make more of an effort to make this work this time—’

‘What are you talking about?’ Alejandro demanded in the act of shedding the shirt to reveal a superb bronzed muscular chest sprinkled with dark curling hair and a hard, flat stomach that easily met the attributes of the proverbial six-pack.

Jemima spun back to face him. A pulse was beating so fast at the foot of her throat that it was a challenge to find her voice. With every fibre in her body she was blocking out and refusing to respond to his mesmeric physical appeal. ‘I arrived here a couple of hours ago. What did you think it would be like for me to be confronted with your mother before I even saw you again? Obviously it didn’t occur to you that for once in your life you should have been here for me!’

‘I left a message with my mother for you. Are you saying that you didn’t receive it?’ Alejandro prompted in a tone of hauteur that only set her teeth on edge more.

‘Your mother hates me like poison. Are you still so naïve that you think she would take the trouble to pass on a message to me?’ Jemima fired back at him.

‘If you didn’t get the message, I can only apologise for the oversight,’ Alejandro drawled smooth as glass, casting off the remainder of his clothes with incredible cool and strolling into the bathroom as lithe and strikingly naked as a sleek bronzed god.

That non-committal and reserved response made Jemima so mad, she was vaguely surprised that the top of her head didn’t blow off. ‘Don’t pull that aristocratic indifference act on me to try and embarrass me into silence!’ she hissed, stalking after him into the bathroom.

‘Since when has it been possible to embarrass you into silence?’ And with that cutting comeback Alejandro switched on the shower and forced her to swallow back her ire as she assumed that he could no longer hear her above the noise of the water beating down on the tiles.

But Jemima was so irate she still couldn’t shut up. The suave assurance with which Alejandro had stripped off in front of her and calmly entered the shower had acted like an electric shock on an already raw temper. ‘I hate you when you treat me like this!’ she yelled.

While Alejandro showered, Jemima paced in the doorway, all recollection of her past unhappiness as his wife returning then and there to haunt her. Not for anyone would she go through that experience again! And yet hadn’t she just signed up again for a rerun on Alfie’s behalf? How could it benefit Alfie that she wanted to kill his father in cold blood?

The water switched off and the fleecy white towel on the tiled wall was snatched off the rail. Jemima was trembling and she wrapped her arms round herself. Alejandro reappeared with the towel knotted round his narrow hips, his damp black hair slicked back from his brow and his big powerful body still beaded with drops of moisture. He surveyed her with infuriating, deeply offensive assurance.

‘You don’t hate me. Of course you don’t,’ he told her drily.

‘And how do you make that out? By the time that I walked out on our marriage, I couldn’t stand you!’

Alejandro moved towards her and she backed into the bedroom. ‘But why?’ he queried in the most reasonable of voices. ‘Because I had realised what you were up to with Marco? Because I asked you to explain what happened to all that money? Any man would have demanded answers from you.’

‘First and foremost I left you because you wouldn’t believe a word I said, but I did have lots of other good reasons,’ Jemima flung, her eyes bright as violet stars below her fine brows as she challenged him.

Alejandro frowned darkly. ‘I’m hungry. I want to get dressed and eat. I don’t want to get into a big scene right now.’

Such a surge of rage shot through Jemima’s tiny frame that she genuinely felt as though she had grown physically taller. ‘Alejandro…there’s never a right time with you. But I suggest that for once you look at what you did to contribute to the breakdown of our marriage and stop blaming me for everything that went wrong—’

‘Leave the past behind us.’

‘Don’t you dare say that to me when you continually throw everything I did back at me!’ Jemima hissed.

Alejandro groaned out loud. ‘So, say what you have to say in as few words as you can manage.’

‘You forced me to live under the same roof as your mother—’

‘The castle is very large. Such living arrangements are common in Spain—’

‘It was never that simple. Doña Hortencia loathes me and she made my life a misery the last time I was here. What did you ever do to stop her?’ she condemned fiercely.

‘You always exaggerate. How was your life made a misery?’ Alejandro countered in a discouraging tone of disbelief.

‘If I asked any of the staff to do anything they had to run it by your mother first because she insisted that she was still the mistress of this household. Usually, whatever I wanted I didn’t get and I found that humiliating. She criticised everything I did, refused to speak to me at mealtimes when you weren’t there and insulted me to my face in front of visitors. Ask your sister. Beatriz avoids trouble like the plague but she won’t tell you any lies if you ask the right questions.’

Alejandro had screened his brilliant gaze and his wide sensual mouth was compressed by the time she had finished speaking. ‘I’ll check it out.’

Jemima knotted her hands into fists. ‘So, you can’t take my word on that either?’

‘Since it looks as though I am destined to go hungry tonight, what else do I stand accused of?’ Alejandro enquired with sardonic bite.

His derisive intonation made Jemima’s teeth grind together. She was shivering with temper and her gaze locked accusingly to his. ‘It’s your fault that I fell pregnant with Alfie!’

Alejandro studied her in obvious bewilderment. ‘You love our son. You can scarcely hold his conception against me.’

‘I did when I first discovered that I was pregnant. You chose to be careless with contraception but I paid the price for it,’ she challenged, flushing as she recalled the passionate bout of lovemaking in the shower that had led to her unplanned pregnancy. ‘We had only been married a few months and I was still quite young for motherhood. I didn’t feel ready for a baby and being so sick while I was carrying him didn’t help. It made me feel more trapped than ever here but you didn’t understand how I felt, did you?’

‘No, I didn’t, but then you didn’t tell me at the time,’ Alejandro countered levelly. ‘Naturally I realised that you were unhappy but I assumed that was because you were unwell. I would’ve thought that by now you would have put any bitterness behind you on that score.’

Jemima regarded him with seething resentment. ‘So you get a clean slate while I get reminded of my every mistake?’

‘Alfie is not a mistake, Jemima. He is most probably the best thing that ever happened to either of us,’ Alejandro proclaimed in an undertone of driven emotion that was rare for him, his stunning golden eyes unusually eloquent.

Her eyes suddenly stung with prickling tears. ‘I didn’t mean that he was a mistake…’

‘Then what did you mean?’