A Spanish Affair. Lynne Graham

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СКАЧАТЬ the other kind. After her mother’s death, her father had urged her to become a dancer at a club run by his mate and had hit her and thrown her out of the family home when she’d refused to dress up in a skimpy outfit and attend an audition. It was years before she saw her father again and then in circumstances she preferred to forget. Yes, Jemima had learned at an early age that people always expected more from her than she ever seemed able to deliver and, sadly, her marriage had proved no different. It was for that reason that making her own way in life to set up and run her business had added greatly to her confidence; for once she had surpassed her own expectations.

      Yet when she had first met Alejandro and he had swept her off her feet, he had seemed to be her every dream come true, which in retrospect seemed laughable to her. But love had snatched her up like a tornado and made her believe in the impossible before it flung her down again. Somehow, and she had no idea how, she had truly believed that she could marry a rich, educated foreigner with a pedigree as long as her arm and make a go of it. But in practice the challenges and the disparities had proved insurmountable. Her background had come back to seriously haunt her, but her biggest single mistake had been getting too friendly with her brother-in-law, Marco. Although, she reasoned defensively, had Alejandro been around more and made more effort to help her come to terms with her new life in Spain she wouldn’t have been so lonely and wouldn’t have jumped at the offer of Marco’s company. And she had adored Marco, she acknowledged abstractedly, recalling how wounded she had felt when even after her marriage broke down he had made no attempt to get in touch with her again.

      ‘You were too good for that husband of yours,’ Flora told Jemima with strong emphasis. ‘But you really should tell Alejandro about Alfie instead of staying in hiding as if you have something to be ashamed of.’

      Jemima turned her head away, her cheeks colouring as she thought, If only you knew… Telling the whole unvarnished truth would probably turn her closest friend off her as well, she reckoned painfully.

      ‘I honestly believe that if Alejandro found out about Alfie, he would go to any lengths to get custody of him and take him back to Spain to live,’ she replied heavily. ‘Alejandro takes his responsibilities towards the family very seriously.’

      ‘Well, if you think there’s a risk of Alfie being snatched by his father, you’re wise keeping quiet about him,’ Flora said, although there was an uncertain look on her face when she voiced that opinion. ‘But you can’t keep him quiet for ever.’

      ‘Only, for now, it’s the best option,’ Jemima declared, setting down her coffee to attend to a customer as the shop bell on the door sounded.

      Soon afterwards, she went out to deliver a floral arrangement for a dinner party to one of the big houses outside the village. On the way home she collected Alfie, his high energy dissipated by a couple of hours of horseplay. The tiny terraced cottage she rented on the outskirts of the village enjoyed a garden, which she had equipped with a swing and a sandpit. She was proud of her small living space. Although the little house was inexpertly painted and furnished cheaply with flat-pack furniture, it was the first place she had ever been able to make feel like her home since childhood.

      Sometimes it seemed like a dim and unbelievable fairy tale to recall that after she had married Alejandro she had lived in a castle. Castillo del Halcón, the Castle of the Hawk, built by his warrior ancestors in a mix of Islamic and European styles and filled with history, luxury and priceless artefacts. Moving the furniture or the pictures around had been forbidden and redecorating equally frowned on because the dowager countess, Doña Hortencia, could not bear any woman to interfere in what she still essentially saw as her home. Living there, Jemima had often felt like a lodger who had outstayed her welcome, and the formal lifestyle of changing into evening clothes for dinner, dealing with servants and entertaining important guests had suited her even less.

      Had there been any redeeming features to her miserable marriage? she asked herself, and instantly a picture of Alejandro popped up unbidden inside her head. Her spectacularly gorgeous husband had initially felt like a prize beyond any other she had ever received, yet she had never quite been able to stifle the feeling that she didn’t deserve him and he deserved better than her. It crossed Jemima’s mind that most of the best things that had happened to her in life had occurred seemingly because of blessed accidents of fate. That description best covered Alfie’s unplanned conception, her car choosing to break down in Charlbury St Helens after she had run away from Spain, her marriage, and ironically it even covered her first meeting with Alejandro…

      He had knocked her off her bike in a car park or, rather, his driver’s overly assertive driving style had done so. She had been on her day off from the hotel where she was working as a receptionist and riding a bicycle was a necessity when she was employed in a rural business and buses were scarcer than hens’ teeth. The opulent Mercedes had ground to a halt and Alejandro and his chauffeur had emerged to check out the damage done while she was struggling to blink back tears from the pain of her skinned knees and bruised hip. Before she had known what was happening to her, her damaged bike was stacked in the local repair shop and she was ensconced in the luxury Mercedes, being swept off to the nearest hospital A and E department by the most gorgeous-looking guy she had ever met in her life. It was a shame that she really hadn’t noticed that day just how domineering and deaf to all argument Alejandro could be, for he had refused to listen when she declared that she did not require any medical attention. No, she had been X-rayed, cleaned up, bandaged and bullied within an inch of her life all because Alejandro’s dazzling smile had cast a spell over her.

      Love at first sight, Jemima labelled with an instinctive frown of antipathy while she shifted about restlessly in her bed that night. She had never believed in love at first sight, indeed had grown up promising herself that she would never allow any man to wield the kind of power over her that her father had always exercised over her mother. But despite the hard lessons she had believed she had learned at her mother’s knee, Jemima had taken one look at Alejandro Navarro Vasquez and fallen as hard and as destructively for him as a brick thrown from a major height. And the real lessons she had learned she had picked up from Alejandro himself, only she had failed to put what she learned to sensible use.

      Long before Alejandro had shocked her with his proposal of marriage, he had put her through months of dating hell by not phoning when he said he would, by cancelling meetings last minute and by seeing other women and getting photographed with them. Even before she’d married him he had battered her heart and trodden her pride deep in the dirt. But she had understood even then why he was giving her the runaround. He was, after all, a Spanish count, while she worked for peanuts at a little hotel that he considered to be a dump. He had known she was not his equal on any level and the disparity had bothered him deeply from the outset of their acquaintance. Six months after that first encounter, however, Alejandro had seemed to shed that attitude…

      ‘Sol y sombre…sun and shade, querida mia,’ Alejandro had murmured then as he compared the pale skin of her slender arm to the bronzed vibrancy of his darker colouring. ‘You cannot have one without the other—we belong together.’

      But they had mingled as badly as oil and water, Jemima conceded with the dulled pain of acceptance that she had learned she had to live with, and she finally dropped off to sleep around two in the morning by dint of trying to forget the delivery she had to get up for the next morning.

      There was hardly any floor space left in the shop once she had loaded the fresh blooms into the waiting containers. Her fingers numbed by the brisk spring morning temperature and too much contact with wet stems and water, Jemima rubbed her hands over her slim jeans-clad hips and tried not to shiver, because she knew that one shiver would only lead to another half-dozen and that in the end she would only feel colder. After all, winter or summer, the shop was always cool. It was an old building with poor insulation and she was always quick to remind herself that too much heat would only damage her stock. She went into the back room and dragged СКАЧАТЬ