One Night in Madrid: Spanish Billionaire, Innocent Wife / The Spaniard's Defiant Virgin / The Spanish Duke's Virgin Bride

His broad shoulders lifted in an expressive shrug, but even though the gesture seemed to dismiss her question as irrelevant something new flared in the deep bronze pools of his eyes. Something that sent a shiver of apprehension skittering down her spine as she realised that her uneasiness had caught on his nerves and what she saw in his gaze was coldly burning suspicion.

‘You tell me—after all, you were the one who invited me in. And coffee was your excuse for doing so.’

‘It wasn’t an excuse …’

The knowledge of why she had really invited him into her flat, the worry that she still hadn’t dared to broach the subject, made her voice croak in a way that she knew sounded as if she had something to hide.

‘No?’ Raul questioned harshly. ‘Then why am I here? Because you will not convince me that coffee was uppermost in your mind.’

‘Not uppermost,’ Alannah conceded but then she saw the way that his head went back, his eyes narrowing, and her throat closed up sharply, preventing her from going any further.

‘Sí?’ Raul questioned sharply. ‘So if the coffee was not the most important thing—then what was? Tell me why I am here—why you invited me to your flat in the first place.’

Pushing a hand into his jacket pocket, he pulled out a slim black mobile phone and held it up between them.

‘And tell me the truth or I will call Carlos and tell him to come now …’

His thumb moved, hovered over the speed-dial button.

‘No—wait …’

She couldn’t let him go, not until she had told him the truth that he had demanded—the truth about Chris and the accident and. But how could she tell him without carefully leading up to it? She couldn’t just blurt it all out, throw it in his face without any lead-in or preparation. That was why she had made such a fuss about the coffee.

But where could she start? How could she tell him when she knew already just what his reaction would be?

She should start with Chris … but just the thought of the name of her adored younger brother made her mind freeze in pain, unable to frame a single word but Chris.

‘Alannah …’

She had waited too long, her thoughts preoccupied by her worries, and Raul was growing impatient, his use of her name a low growl of warning. As she forced herself to focus she saw his thumb move again, threatening to press the button.

‘No—please wait!’

To her intense relief he hesitated, stopped the movement, his thumb barely a centimetre above the surface of his phone. The bronze eyes he turned on her seemed to burn over her skin, searing away a fine layer and leaving her feeling raw and exposed, desperately apprehensive.

‘Then tell me.’

‘I will—I promise. But not here. Not like this. Why don’t we go and sit down? We’d be more comfortable in the living room.’

But comfortable for how long? She had to tell him now; had to get it out in the open or he would walk out before she managed it. But she didn’t dare to think of what would happen after she’d told him. Deep in the pit of her stomach all the nerves twisted into tight, cruel knots of trepidation until she felt that she might almost be sick.

‘I need to be comfortable for this?’

That note of suspicion had deepened, darkened, intensifying all her fears just to hear it.

‘It would be more—more civilised. Look, just give me a minute to get a drink, a glass of water—you might not want one but I do. And then I’ll—then we can talk.’

For an uncomfortable second she thought he was going to refuse. The cynical, sceptical glance he turned on her face made her stomach muscles tighten in apprehension. But then, just when she thought he wouldn’t, he inclined his dark head in agreement.

‘OK,’ he said as he turned and walked back into the living room. ‘I will wait—but only a minute. I am not a patient man and I want to know just what the hell is going on.’

Left behind, Alannah snatched up a glass and shoved it under the tap, splashing cold water into it until it spilled over, flooding down the sides and over her fingers. Wrenching off the tap with one hand, she lifted the drink to her mouth and took several long, thirsty gulps of the cool liquid then lifted it to her forehead, rolling the wet glass above her eyebrows in an effort to calm herself down, ease the tension that was already tight as a steel band around her skull.

She had to get a grip on herself. She had to go in there and talk to him as calmly as possible—tell him everything that had happened and then.

She winced inside as she anticipated Raul’s probable reaction, the dark thunderstorm that would probably break right over her head as soon as she finished speaking. But it had to be done—and soon too. Thirty minutes, he had said, and they had already used up more than half of those. If she didn’t hurry then Carlos would turn up again and she would be unable to say what she had to say in front of him.

Putting the glass down on the worktop, she drew a deep breath and squared her shoulders.

She was going to do this —now.

She was barely inside the other room when the sight that met her eyes drove all the breath from her body in a shocked rush. Raul was waiting for her, but it wasn’t just the sight of him standing there, big and dark and disturbingly formidable, feet planted firmly on the woven rug before the gas fire, that shook her world. It was the picture frame he held in his hand, head bent, hooded eyes intent on the image in the photograph it held.

And the look on his face twisted her heart in her chest. She knew that look and she knew exactly what it meant. But the real problem was that she knew that what she was about to say could only make things so much worse.

CHAPTER FOUR

THE photograph WAS the first thing that Raul had seen when he walked back into the room. Because with Alannah’s instruction in his head that he should sit down he’d been heading for one of the armchairs grouped around the small gas fire, and he was facing that way for the first time, towards the wall and the small round table that stood against it. The table was crammed with photographs, all in frames of different shapes and sizes, some wood, some polished silver, some old, like the picture of her grandmother he recognised from when he had known her before, and some obviously very recent.

It was one of these that had caught his attention.

And what he saw had the power to make him feel as if a brutal knife had just slashed open his heart, letting out all the pain and the loss he had been fighting to hold back ever since he had been dragged away from a business meeting by the worst phone call he had ever received in his life.

‘Lorena … Lori …’

The name escaped his lips on a whisper, the pain even of speaking it searing into his soul. His eyes blurred so badly that for a moment he thought—hoped—that he had been wrong and the subject of the photograph was not who he thought it was. But blinking hard as he snatched it up did nothing to help that feeling. In fact it only made it so much worse as it cleared his vision and made it agonisingly plain that he had not been wrong.

Lori’s beautiful, delighted face smiled up at him from behind the glass. Her grin was wide, her brown eyes sparkled, her dark hair was tossed by some unseen breeze. She looked totally happy, totally wonderful.

Totally alive.

His hands clenched tight on the picture frame, so tight that he almost felt that the light pine wood would shatter under the pressure of his fingers.

This was wrong—so wrong. Lori was so young. Too young. She was too young—had been too young. With a terrible lurch of his heart he adjusted the tense of his thoughts as he had had to do so many times in the past twenty-four hours. As he would have to do for the rest of his life—at least until he got used to it.

And he didn’t want to get used to it. Never!

How could his little sister—his precious, beautiful baby sister, the sister who had been put so carefully into his arms when she was less than a day old and had moved straight into his heart in an instant—be dead while he was still alive? It went against all the laws of nature that he had already had ten years more of life than she would ever know. That at twenty-one her life was already over—finished.

It didn’t bear thinking about. He couldn’t think about it … His numbed, bruised and battered brain just couldn’t take it in.

The photograph was almost invisible behind the burning haze in his eyes. He wanted to lift a hand to brush at them fiercely but somehow his grip wouldn’t loosen on the photograph he held. He couldn’t let go …

‘Raul …’

The voice was low, feminine, gentle … as gentle as the soft fingers that touched his hand, very lightly, very carefully.

‘Raul …’