The Valquez Bride

‘But surely a man with his sort of wealth could buy it when it goes on the market?’

The lawyer shook his head. ‘I’m afraid that is not possible. Your father has strictly stated that the property will be sold to a developer if Alejandro refuses to comply with the terms of the will. A local developer has already shown some interest and will snap up the property in a heartbeat as soon as it’s released. I would imagine Alejandro wouldn’t relinquish that land lightly, even if it meant marrying a perfect stranger. Looking at it like that, it’s a win-win for both of you.’

Teddy’s bile rose like frothing acid. Did her father’s lawyer—like everyone else—think she had no hope of finding a husband any other way? She pulled her shoulders back and gave the lawyer one of her trademark arctic looks. ‘You can tell Señor Valquez there is no possible circumstance I can think of where I would ever agree to marry him.’

* * *

‘Are you kidding me?’ Alejandro glared at the legal representative from Marlstone Incorporated in his London office.

‘If you want the Mendoza land Clark Marlstone bought off your father, then that’s what you have to do.’

‘He didn’t buy it off my father,’ Alejandro said through clenched teeth, ‘he stole it. He paid a fraction of what it was worth. He took advantage of my father’s financial situation after the accident. He manipulated things so he could get his hands on that land while making everyone think he was doing us a favour.’ Bastard.

‘Be that as it may, you have a chance to get it back without having to pay a single peso for it.’

Alejandro sucked in a lungful of air through his nostrils. He would have to pay for it all right. With his freedom. The thing he valued above all else. ‘I don’t even remember meeting Marlstone’s daughter.’ He glanced at the name and frowned. ‘Theodora, is it? Who is she? What’s she got to say about this, or is she the one behind it?’

He could already picture her. Pampered and spoilt. Another cheap little gold-digger wanting to marry up. A social climbing daddy’s girl who wanted her life made easy. He could just imagine how she had talked her ailing father into engineering things so she would be home free. Married to a rich trophy husband, all without having to bat a coquettish eyelid.

Not on his watch, damn it.

‘She’s as annoyed as you are,’ his lawyer said. ‘She intends to contest the will.’

As if. Alejandro knew the way women played all too well. Theodora Marlstone would protest and make a fuss for show. To put him off the scent of her avaricious motives. Of course she’d want to marry him. He was considered a Prize Catch. One of the most eligible bachelors in Argentina, if not the entire world. ‘What are her chances?’

‘Not good,’ the lawyer said. ‘The will is ironclad. Clark Marlstone wrote it while of sound mind. He got three doctors to confirm it, one imagines because he suspected one or both of you would resist his instructions and try and find a loophole. It would be a costly and lengthy exercise to try and overturn it. My advice is to do what it says and make the best of it. It’s only for six months.’

Easy for you to say.

Alejandro ploughed a hand through his hair. He already had too many responsibilities with his fostering of two street kids, Sofi and Jorge, providing food, shelter, education and a sense of family for them, or at least as far as it was possible for a bachelor to do. He didn’t need a wife to add to his troubles. Fifteen-year-old Jorge was still in that tricky stage of deciding whether to rebel or respect authority, reminding him of his younger brother Luiz at that age and the lengths he’d had to go to and the sacrifices he’d had to make to keep him from harm. While eighteen-year-old Sofi was a little more mature, she had recently expressed a desire to move to Buenos Aires to study hair and beauty. He wasn’t completely comfortable with the idea of her living in the big city without the close support he and the rest of his household staff provided for her.

Marrying would be a hard enough decision to make if he cared about someone enough to consider that sort of commitment. But how was he supposed to marry a perfect stranger? He felt antsy at the thought of marriage. Of being tied down. Of allowing someone the power to be there one minute and not there the next. Like his mother had been for his father. Proudly wearing his ring and rearing his sons one minute, bolting out of the gate to a new life in France, leaving the ring and divorce papers and two bewildered little boys behind the next.

Alejandro had tried commitment once and it had failed. Spectacularly. Even worse, he hadn’t seen it coming. It annoyed him that he had let what he felt block out what he knew. In his experience women wanted one thing and he’d been foolish to think otherwise. They wanted money and security. They did anything they could to get it. They fell in love and out of love according to the size of a man’s wallet. He didn’t care if it was hardwired into their primitive DNA. He would not be manipulated, cajoled, tricked into falling for it again.

He was older and smarter now. He never let his feelings get in the way of a good business deal. He never let his feelings cloud his judgement, colour his thinking or distract him from a task. He hadn’t rebuilt his father’s failing empire by feeling. He had done it by blood and sweat and outsmarting the opposition. Whatever roadblocks were put in front of him he stepped over, circumvented. Obliterated.

This would be no different.

* * *

‘Where is she?’ Alejandro asked the immaculately dressed and imperious-looking butler who answered the door at Marlstone Manor in Wiltshire.

Bushy brows as white and hairy as two caterpillars gave an austere frown over rheumy blue eyes. ‘Miss Teddy is currently engaged.’

Now that was funny. If only she were engaged. To someone else.

‘I’m sure she’ll shoehorn me into her busy schedule.’ He suppressed a cynical snort. Miss Theodora Marlstone was probably waiting for her spray tan to dry, or her nail polish, or curling her eyelash extensions or some such nonsense. Could there be any woman more vacuous than a pampered daddy’s girl?

And what the hell sort of name was Teddy? What did she think she was—a toy or a person?

‘If you will kindly wait here I will tell her you have requested an interview with—’

‘Look, no offence, buddy,’ Alejandro cut in, ‘but I haven’t got the time or the inclination to hang around and wait for your mistress to glue her fake nails on. You either lead me to her or I go looking for her. Which is it to be?’

‘Neither,’ a cool voice said from behind him.

Alejandro turned to see a small figure standing in the frame of the doorway off the black and white tiled hall. There wasn’t a fake nail in sight or a spray tan. She was wearing clothes that looked as if they had been sourced from a charity bin and her hair looked as if she had dived in head first to retrieve them. It was a wild cloud of dark brown tresses around her head and shoulders, wavy rather than curly, but clearly no effort had been spared to tame it. If anything, it looked as if she had recently mussed it up with her hands. Her trousers were a dirty shade of brown, the checked shirt unironed, and the cable sweater she wore over it was covered in balls of lint. The outfit was masculine and too big for her small frame, swamping her like a tent draped over a toothpick.

Why on earth had she dressed in such an appalling manner? What was she trying to prove? The girl was an heiress to a spectacular estate worth millions. She could afford to wear the best of high street fashion. Why was she dressing like a bag lady?

His eyes went to the bone-handled walking stick she was leaning on in what he could only describe as a proudly defiant manner.

He felt something jerk in his chest like a foot did when it missed a step.

So that was why.

‘Miss Marlstone?’

‘Señor Valquez, how nice to see you again.’

Alejandro didn’t like the feeling of being at a disadvantage. Of her knowing more about him than he knew about her. Keep your friends close and your enemies closer was a credo he lived by. And yet there was something about her that appealed to the protector in him. ‘We’ve...er...met before?’

She gave him a stiff movement of her lips that passed for a smile but he noticed it didn’t involve her arctic-cool grey-blue eyes. ‘Yes.’ Her chin rose ever so slightly. ‘Don’t you remember?’

Alejandro quickly checked his mental hard drive. He dated a lot of women. Slept with even more. But nowhere in his memory could he find a girl with eyes so deeply set they looked darker than they actually were. She had prominent eyebrows and lashes thick and dark without the boost of mascara. Cheeks sharply defined and haughtily high and a nose that looked as if it spent a lot of time up there with them. A mouth that was full and young and innocent-looking and yet with an angle of cynicism to it that matched his own.

‘I’m afraid you’ll have to remind me.’ He stretched his own lips into a half-mast smile. ‘I meet a lot of people in my line of business.’

Her eyes were unnervingly steady as they held his. It was as if she were seeing past his urbane man-in-control-of-his-universe façade to the shy boy of ten who’d had to step up to the plate after his father’s accident and his mother’s desertion. Her face was free of make-up. No mask of cosmetics to hide behind and yet he couldn’t help feeling she was a little too composed.

‘We met at British Polo Day some years ago.’

‘We did?’

‘It was the same event where you met your ex-fiancée.’

Alejandro clenched his jaw behind his polite smile. She had gone for the jugular. Bitch. Like father, like daughter. Playing games with him. Toying with him. Mocking him.

Reminding him.

He hated being reminded of his foolishness back then. At twenty-four he had stupidly believed love existed. Back then he had believed he could have a happy and fulfilling life with someone who loved him as much as he loved them. That how much money he had or didn’t have wouldn’t count. He had been swept away by the notion of building a new family like the one his mother had destroyed when she’d left his shattered father six months after the accident.

He had been wrong.

‘I’m sorry I have no recollection of our meeting.’ He ran his gaze over her as he tried to judge her age. She looked to be in her early to mid-twenties but, without make-up and wearing those dreadful tomboy ragbag clothes, she looked far younger. ‘Were we formally introduced?’

‘Yes.’