Postcards From Madrid: Married by Arrangement / Valdez's Bartered Bride / The Spanish Duke's Virgin Bride

‘Didn’t you realise who he is?’ she scolded Sophie. ‘You shouldn’t even be talking to him. That’s Pablo’s big brother…the one with the title and the castle… the Marqués of Salazar.’

For a real live Spanish marquis, Antonio had, on first brief acquaintance at least, seemed refreshingly hip and normal. Sophie was savagely disappointed to discover how far he was out of her reach and annoyed that Antonio had not spelled out exactly who he was. Impervious to Belinda’s clumsy attempts to keep them apart, Antonio intervened to sweep Sophie off to meet some of the younger people present. When the evening came to a close, it was Antonio who had to drive Sophie back to the holiday resort: in all the excitement of being the centre of attention as the bride, Belinda had forgotten about her sister’s transport needs.

‘I can’t understand why you are not staying with your sister at my grandmother’s home,’ Antonio admitted, assisting her into a long, low-slung fire-engine-red sports car that would have looked at home in a Bond movie.

‘I didn’t want to intrude—’

‘I’m not happy that you should be staying in an apartment alone. I do not wish to imply criticism of your sister, but you should be relaxing and enjoying my family’s hospitality. I’ll wait while you pack,’ Antonio imparted with the quiet but absolute authority of a male accustomed to instant obedience to his every expressed wish.

‘But I’m not alone…er, I’m with friends,’ Sophie protested awkwardly, recognising the impossibility of naming her father when Belinda had begged her not to tell a living soul that they were actually only half-sisters because their late mother had had an extramarital affair. Her sibling had been ashamed of that history, had already refused to share it with Pablo and had been determined that his aristocratic relatives should not find out about it either.

‘Friends?’ Antonio queried, his bewilderment visibly growing.

‘Yes, I decided to make a holiday out of my trip over here…nothing wrong with that, is there?’

‘No, there is not,’ Antonio drawled in a measured tone. ‘But you only arrived in Spain this morning and are perhaps not the best judge of good accommodation. My cousin owns a local business and he tells me that the tourist complex where you are staying has a bad name. The police are often called there to deal with fights and drunks.’

She resisted a flippant urge to tell him that her father would be very much at home there. ‘I’m not a delicate flower…I’ll manage.’

‘But you should not have to manage,’ Antonio murmured gently.

The idea that she might look to a man to protect her from the evils of the world was a really novel concept to Sophie. She lay awake that night on her uncomfortable sofa bed in the apartment’s tiny reception area. While she strove to block out the noise of the argument between her father and his girlfriend in the room next door she discovered that she could not stop thinking about Antonio.

At every point where she had consciously expected Antonio to reveal his male feet of clay, she had been confounded. He had listened to every little thing she’d said as if he was interested. He had not once shouted at her or sworn at her or eyed up other girls. He did not drink and drive. Nor had he at any stage attempted to ply her with alcohol or make a pass at her. Indeed Antonio Rocha had in some mysterious and romantic way contrived to make Sophie feel special and cosseted and worthy of attention and care for the first time ever.

At twenty years old, Sophie had never had a serious boyfriend. She was a virgin because she was totally terrified of sliding down the same slippery slope that had wrecked the lives of most of her father’s girlfriends. Unlike them, she hadn’t had to worry about becoming a mother at too young an age. But she had observed that placing faith and energy in countless casual relationships could result in low self-esteem, even a disrupted education and poor employment prospects, thus trapping one in poverty. She had told herself that she was too clever to succumb to the dangerous allure of casual sex, but the real truth was that she had never been remotely tempted to succumb to the coarse advances she had met with.

Never before had she lain awake until dawn counting the hours until she would see a guy again. Never before had she agonised over whether or not a man liked her or whether in fact he was simply being polite. Never before had she fantasised like mad over what it would be like if that same man were to kiss her. In fact her imagination was so extravagantly exercised by Antonio that when she saw him face to face again embarrassment afflicted her with blushes, stammers and painful shyness for the first time in her life. She had floated through Belinda’s wedding festivities on a cloud of such intense happiness that the wake-up call of cruel reality had been all the harder to bear twenty-four hours later…

Antonio stayed behind at the solicitor’s to clarify certain matters for his own benefit. Even the vague facts that he was able to establish stamped the kind of reflective frown to his lean, dark features that put his employees on their mettle.

Evidently, Belinda had been penniless at the time of her death and working as a barmaid. Yet when she had married Pablo, the beautiful blonde had been a receptionist in a London modelling agency, her comfort and security ensured by the healthy amount of cash and property she had inherited from her parents. Antonio had little need to wonder who or what had been responsible for bringing about Belinda’s reduced circumstances and angry regret gripped him. That his late sister-in-law had been living with another man did go some way to satisfying his need to know why Belinda had apparently been determined not to ask her late husband’s family for help.

It took a lot to shock Antonio but he was stunned when, having asked for Sophie’s address, he learned where exactly she was living. He could not initially credit that she resided in a trailer park. Was his criminally dishonest brother responsible for her impoverishment as well? The limousine paused outside the entrance while his chauffeur double-checked his destination with his employer. Alighting outside the run-down office, Antonio decided that Sophie was a problem best cured by the liberal application of money.

Sophie was cleaning the floor in one of the smarter mobile homes on the site when a brisk knock sounded on the door. Scrambling up, she pushed it open and froze when she clashed with dark-as-midnight eyes set below level black brows. She knew she should not but she stared, drinking in the dark, sexy symmetry of his bold, masculine features. Her heart started to beat very, very fast. ‘You said seven o’clock,’ she reminded him. ‘What are you doing here this early?’

‘Is this not a good time for you?’ Antonio enquired, his keen gaze raking from the torrent of her curls gilded to gold by the sunlight to the vivid intensity of her animated face and then back to centre on the soft, ripe curve of her mouth. Taken individually her features were ordinary and flawed, he reflected grimly. But that did not explain why she continually gave him the impression of being ravishingly pretty.

‘No, it’s not… I mean, I’m working and Lydia’s asleep and it’s just not convenient,’ Sophie broke into an enervated surge of protest.

‘I appreciate that but I have nothing else to do in this locality while I wait. I’m also understandably eager to meet my niece,’ Antonio responded without apology. There was a brooding coolness in his decisive scrutiny as he suppressed the absurd spark of desire she always generated. He could only think she had the deceptive allure of the unfamiliar for him. ‘May I come in?’

Feeling ridiculously flustered, Sophie edged back into the trailer’s small lounge area and surreptitiously moistened her dry mouth. He strolled up the steps and took up what felt like every square inch of space.

‘You’ll have to wait until Lydia wakes up from her nap.’

Impatience tautened Antonio’s striking bone structure. ‘Meeting her uncle should be rather more fun than sleeping. I haven’t got much time to spend in the UK. I’d be grateful if you tried not to make matters more complicated than they need be.’

By the end of that little speech Sophie was breathing a little heavily. She had put Lydia down for a nap so that the baby would be less tired when Antonio made his visit. His early arrival had thrown that schedule into chaos. Her small, slight body stiff with annoyance and concern, she bent her curly head and pinned her lips tight on the tart comments eager to flow from her ready tongue. Antonio Rocha, Marqués of Salazar, was loaded. The solicitor had treated him like royalty and had treated her like trash to be tolerated. The warning was clear: she could not afford to make Antonio a bitter enemy. If push came to shove, he would always win the upper hand by virtue of his wealth and status. Therefore, even if it choked her, she had to be polite for Lydia’s sake and swallow Antonio’s every demand with as much grace as she could manage.

‘Lydia will be a little cranky if we waken her before she’s ready,’ Sophie said hesitantly.

‘I want to see my niece now,’ Antonio decreed, having decided that Sophie responded best to firm authority.

After a pause for consideration, Sophie nodded, for she wanted to be fair. There had been a lot of little boys and girls at Belinda’s wedding and her sister had once told her that the Spanish were particularly fond of children. Antonio was obviously accustomed to babies and confident of being able to handle his niece. She pushed open the door of the narrow bunkroom where she had stowed Lydia to sleep undisturbed in her little travel cot.

Antonio gazed down at the small hump under the blanket, which was topped by a fluff of light brown curls. His niece looked worryingly tiny. Both Pablo and Belinda had been tall. On the other hand Sophie barely reached the top of Antonio’s chest, so it was perfectly possible that the baby was naturally undersized and still quite fit. He reminded himself that when he took Lydia back to Spain she would be checked over. The family doctor, who was an old friend, had suggested that giving the baby a full medical examination would be a wise precaution: one or two babies in the most recent generation had been born with heart murmurs.

Mastering his own reluctance, Antonio decided to show an appropriate level of interest in the child by lifting her out of the cot for a closer inspection. He brushed back the blanket and scooped the baby up.

Almost instantly, the baby went as stiff as a tiny steel girder and looked up at him with enormous stricken brown eyes. Her mouth opened wide enough to treat him to an unwelcome view of her miniature tonsils and a yell that would have roused a graveyard exploded from her. Her face turning scarlet, the baby shrieked blue murder as if she were being attacked. Antonio stared down at his niece in paralysed horror.

‘What’s wrong with her?’ he demanded.

‘Have you ever been snatched out of bed by a stranger and dangled in mid-air like a toy?’ Sophie asked fiercely, resisting the urge to haul Lydia from his inept and unfeeling hands.

Hearing Sophie’s voice, Lydia twisted her little head round. The baby squirmed like mad and stretched out her hands towards her aunt in a movement that was as frantic as it was revealing.

‘Perhaps you should have made the effort to introduce us first,’ Antonio censured, and without further ado he deposited the screaming bundle into Sophie’s waiting arms.

His sculpted mouth curling, his ears still ringing from that appalling bout of shrieking, he watched his tiny niece clamp onto Sophie’s shoulder like a limpet restored to its favourite rock. An immediate and very welcome silence fell. While the baby clung with what he considered to be quite unnecessary drama, Sophie rewarded that show of extreme favouritism with an enormous amount of petting and kissing and soothing whispers.

‘I had no idea that the child would be quite so attached to you,’ Antonio admitted flatly.

‘I’ve been looking after Lydia since she was born.’ Restless with tension, Sophie moved out of the bunkroom and back into the lounge. ‘Belinda was ill at first…and then later, well, there were reasons why she wasn’t able to spend as much time as she would have liked with her daughter.’

‘What reasons?’ Antonio prompted.

‘Belinda started seeing a bloke who wasn’t fussed about kids and when she moved in with him, Lydia stayed on with me,’ Sophie explained grudgingly.

‘Here…in this place?’

‘We should be so lucky.’ Sophie loosed an uneasy laugh. ‘This is a luxury holiday home. The one I live in is at least twenty years older and without frills.’

Antonio spread his attention round the confines of a room that he found claustrophobically small. Frills? What frills? The décor was abysmal and so jazzy and cheap it offended his eyes. This was what she called luxury? He bit back an incredulous comment.

‘If you don’t live in this, why are you here?’

‘I’m cleaning it for the holiday-makers coming to stay tomorrow.’

Appalled by that admission, Antonio stared at her with concealed disbelief. ‘You are employed on the park as a cleaner?’

Sophie curved Lydia even closer to her taut length. ‘Have you got a problem with that?’

His strong jaw line squared, for he had hoped she had been joking. ‘Of course not. You said that my brother robbed your sister. Did you lose money too?’

‘I’ve never had money to lose,’ Sophie answered in surprise, and then, realising that he did not understand why that should be the case, she sighed and surrendered to the inevitable. ‘There’s a skeleton in my family cupboard and Belinda didn’t like me to talk about it. Belinda and I may have had the same mother but we had different fathers. I didn’t meet my sister until I was seventeen.’