One Night in Buenos Aires: The Vásquez Mistress

He’d never considered a plain white shirt to be sexy, but Faith managed to turn it into something that could have become a top seller in a sex shop.

It wasn’t the shirt, he decided grimly, it was the woman.

Faith would have looked sexy dressed in her grandmother’s clothes.

And she was looking straight at him, her green eyes wide and intelligent. ‘Talk to me, Raul,’ she urged softly, all the fight suddenly leaving her. ‘Tell me why you’re thinking like this. Is there something I need to know? Did someone hurt you? Did someone betray your trust?’

She’d changed tactic in mid-fight but this alternative, gentler assault was infinitely more deadly than the fierce blast of her temper.

She was getting close. Too close. Closer than any woman had ever dared tread before.

‘We’ve been talking non-stop,’ he said coldly, retreating mentally and physically from the question he saw in her eyes.

‘Maybe we haven’t been talking about the right things.’

Swiftly, he sidestepped an issue he had no intention of exploring further. ‘You betrayed my trust.’

‘No.’ She shook her head slowly. ‘Why would you even think that?’

‘Because you went to astonishing lengths to drag me into this marriage.’

‘That is not what happened!’

‘Then what did happen, Faith? Why are we standing here, as husband and wife, because I sure as hell don’t know!’ His words thickened, his usually faultless accent tinged with a hint of his South American heritage.

She stood in front of him and he could actually see her slim legs shaking. In fact she was shaking so badly that for a moment he wondered whether she might actually collapse. Her face had lost every last hint of colour and she looked as though she were in shock. ‘We’re here because I thought it was what you wanted. You proposed, Raul. You asked me to marry you.’

‘Because you gave me no other option! Have you listened to anything I’ve said over the past ten months?’ With a supreme effort of will, he kept his voice level even though the temptation to vent his wrath was extreme. ‘Right from the beginning I made it clear to you—no marriage, no babies. If that’s what you had planned then you should have been with another man.’

But even as he uttered the words he knew them for a lie. He would never have let her go to another man.

‘I didn’t have anything planned. I didn’t plan any of this!’ Some of her spirit returned. ‘I came to your wretched estancia because the job was interesting and I wanted to see something of South America. All you were to me was a name. A guy who knew about horses!’

Watching her trembling and shaking in front of him, Raul frowned. ‘Calm down.’ She looked impossibly fragile and he watched with a mixture of concern and exasperation as she grew more and more agitated, her slender hands clasping and unclasping by her sides.

‘Don’t tell me to calm down! How can I possibly calm down when you’re accusing me of planning as though I’m some sort of s-s—’ she stumbled over the word ‘—scheming woman, out to trap you. I’m not scheming. I never planned or plotted. I had an accident! It happens to millions of women every day! And it wasn’t just my fault! You were there, too! You’re very quick to blame me, but I wasn’t alone in this. I didn’t have sex by myself. You were there, Raul, every time. You were there in our bed every night. You were there in the shower, in the stables, in your office, in the fields—wherever I was, you were. I didn’t do this by myself!’

Her passionate diatribe conjured up images of such disturbing clarity that it took him a moment to formulate a response. ‘You assured me that you were protected.’

‘Well, it seems that nothing is foolproof. I’ve thought about it and thought about it.’ Faith swallowed. ‘I was sick, if you remember. I picked up that bug when we spent the night in that hotel outside Cordoba, when you were looking at a horse. I didn’t even think of it at the time, but it was probably enough—’

He digested that information in silence. ‘It’s history now.’

‘No, it isn’t history. I can’t be with a man who would think that badly of me!’

‘All marriages hit sticky patches.’

‘But not within hours of the ceremony! I hate you, Raul.’ The tears spilled down her cheeks and she started to sob. Not delicate, controlled sobs designed to win a man round, but tearing, anguished sobs that seemed to place great strain on her slender frame. ‘I hate you for not believing me, I hate you for marrying me when that wasn’t what you really wanted, but most of all I really, really hate you for not caring that I lost the baby.’

Raul swore fluently and stepped towards her but she held up a hand to stop him.

‘Don’t come near me,’ she choked. ‘Don’t you dare touch me or I’ll injure you.’

He stiffened. ‘You’re obviously distressed—’

‘And you are the reason for that distress! Make up your mind, Raul. You can’t accuse me of lying and manipulating one minute and then offer to support me the next. When I told you that I’d lost the baby—that was when I needed your support.’ Her voice was thickened and clogged with tears. ‘But what did you do? You accused me of having become pregnant on purpose to trap you into marriage. I didn’t just lose the baby, I lost you because I realised then that I couldn’t be with a man who would think me capable of something like that.’

‘What was I supposed to think?’ Infuriated by her totally unjust accusations, Raul felt his own tension levels soar.

‘ You were supposed to think that I wouldn’t have done that to you. To us! That was what you were supposed to think.’ Her face was streaked with tears but for some reason she didn’t look pathetic or sorry for herself, just angry and passionate and very, very beautiful. ‘I know you find it hard to show your feelings, but I assumed you loved me. I assumed you cared about me. It didn’t occur to me to even question that because I thought we were happy together. So at the time, all I was really thinking about was the baby and how sad I was.’

Raul turned away and raked his fingers through his hair. ‘It might have helped if you’d told me about the miscarriage before the wedding.’

‘Well if I’d known how jaded and cynical you are then perhaps I would have done, although goodness knows when!

You arrived five minutes before the ceremony! If I’d talked about it then I would have broken down and I thought it would be bad for your image to be seen marrying a woman who was sobbing.’

‘Faith—’

‘Answer me honestly, Raul.’ Her voice trembled and shook with emotion. ‘Why did you propose to me? If you were truly so against marriage, why did you propose? If you remember, when I first discovered I was pregnant I told you that I did not expect you to marry me.’

‘Yes, that was clever.’

‘It wasn’t clever! It was how I felt.’ Increasingly agitated, Faith paced across the floor, her back to him as if she couldn’t bear to look him in the eye. ‘It was bad enough finding myself pregnant and knowing that you were going to blame me for that. Do you know how much courage it took to tell you I was pregnant? Do you know?’ She turned, her eyes flashing. ‘I could have vanished into the sunset and brought your baby up on my own, but I didn’t do that because I decided that it wasn’t right or honest. I decided that it wouldn’t be fair to you.’

Raul stilled, black clouds from his past rolling towards him like a deadly storm. ‘I would not have wanted you to do that,’ he said hoarsely, sliding a finger round the neck of his shirt in an attempt to ease his breathing. ‘I wouldn’t have allowed that.’ Never.

‘Why not? If you’re really so allergic to the thought of parenthood, then that would have been a perfectly reasonable option to consider.’

Not for him. Ruthlessly battling to rein in emotions that he hadn’t experienced for years, Raul rubbed his fingers over his temples in the hope that touch might erase the memories. Not now. He wasn’t going to think about this now. And not later, either. It was gone. Done. Finished.

‘I’m trying to understand you, Raul.’ Her eyes glittered like jade. ‘And you’re not helping.’

He inhaled deeply. ‘When you told me that you were pregnant, I did not react badly.’

‘You stood there, looking as though you’d been shot through the head at close range.’ She turned away from him and he saw her chest rise and fall under the soft fabric of his shirt. She looked traumatised, fragile and desperately upset. ‘What is going on here, Raul? Is this some sort of billionaire hang-up? Is that it? Woman gets pregnant so it must be because she wants your money?’

Raul watched her in tense silence. Their relationship was in shreds around them and he had no idea how to fix it because he’d never actually bothered fixing a relationship before. If it wasn’t right, it ended. Simple as that.

So why wasn’t he ending this one? ‘You need to calm down—’

‘Stop telling me to calm down! I don’t feel calm. I’m angry, Raul. Angry with you. And angry with myself for believing that we had something special. It was bad enough telling you that I was pregnant, but I reassured myself that our relationship was strong enough to take it. We loved each other, or so I thought. I really believed that we’d weather this and make it work.’ Her voice faltered and she gave a tiny intake of breath. ‘And then I lost it.’ That last statement was an anguished gasp and Raul felt his own tension rocket and every muscle in his body tensed in readiness for more female tears.

‘Why didn’t you tell me? I called you that night,’ he reminded her. ‘I called you every night I was away on business. You had ample opportunity.’

‘I just couldn’t do it over the phone …’ Her voice faded to a whisper and she dropped back onto the sofa as if her legs had lost their strength. ‘How do you do that? I don’t know—

I mean, should I have said, “How was your day, dear? By the way, I lost the baby”?’