Raul's Revenge. JACQUELINE BAIRD

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СКАЧАТЬ chauffeur opened the door of a waiting limousine and, without a word being spoken, Penny found herself in the back seat with Raul beside her.

      ‘I suppose I should be honoured you can actually spare the time to take me to the airport,’ Penny sniped, still hurting at his high-handed action in shipping her back to Spain. A long arm curved around her slender shoulder and Raul’s other hand caught her chin and turned her face towards his.

      ‘Penny. My darling girl. Please don’t be angry.’ One long finger traced the outline of her mouth and a soft sigh escaped her. Why was she fighting with him? She loved him; one touch, a tender word and she ached for him.

      ‘I’m not angry.’ She smiled slightly. ‘Only sad. It’s just hit me that we have never spent a night apart from the day I moved in with you. I will miss you,’ she confessed with blunt honesty.

      Raul hugged her to him as his dark eyes caught and held hers. ‘I hate for us to be apart even for one night. You must know that, honey. But I wasn’t totally honest with you last night. I was furious that you met the Sheikh but it wasn’t just that. The trouble at the plant was a contributing factor for my appallingly bad temper.’

      ‘Oh, Raul, you should have confided in me. That’s what partners do, you know,’ she chided him gently, adding, ‘I’m not dumb; you can discuss your work with me.’

      ‘I should not have called you dumb,’ he admitted, planting a brief kiss on her nose. ‘Naive, maybe, but I had no right to insult your intelligence. Only, it is hard for me, this relationship thing! I have been too many years on my own. But I will try and do better, I promise.’

      His dark head bent and his mouth gently covered hers. A long, satisfying kiss followed, Raul finally ending it by easing her head back against the seat and groaning, ‘I have a suspicion that kissing in public, even in a car, is against the law here.’

      Penny snuggled into the curve of his broad shoulder. Once more at ease, she prompted, ‘So tell me about the plant. It sometimes helps to talk out a problem with a third party, I find.’ And it might stop her thinking about the hardness of his thigh against her own, and what she would really like to be doing.

      ‘Such wisdom from one so young,’ he mocked, but continued in a more serious vein. ‘I was your age—twenty-three—fresh out of university with a degree in engineering specialising in design. I thought I would work at a large firm in Granada and live happily at the hacienda, helping out on the estate for the rest of my days. Unfortunately my father died. I discovered the ranch was mortgaged to the hilt, and that a salary, however good, would not allow me to redeem the mortgage in one lifetime. That is why I started my own business—’

      ‘I didn’t realise. I simply assumed you had always been disgustingly wealthy,’ Penny interrupted teasingly.

      ‘So did I,’ he said with dry irony. ‘Until I found out different. It is only in the past ten years I have actually been solvent. And this desalination plant in Dubai was to be my crowning achievement.

      ‘I designed it. It is an innovative and slightly controversial design. Unfortunately one small part needs to be rethought. I have to stay here and solve the problem, because the rewards if I succeed are astronomical—not solely in monetary terms but in human terms. Think of the millions that die each year in Africa alone because of drought, and yet in some countries the sea is there to be used but is ignored.

      ‘I can foresee the design being used not just in the Middle Eastern countries but any coastal area in the world where a shortage of water is a major problem—including my own country.’

      Penny was stunned. This was a new Raul, talking about his life and work as he never had to her before, and she was enormously impressed at the depth of his commitment and flattered that he had confided in her. She felt as though it marked a new phase in their relationship, increasing her belief in him and his love for her.

      ‘So you see, Penny, much as I want to keep you with me, to be honest, I cannot afford the distraction.’

      He stretched a hand across her chest to cup the underside of her breast, and she shivered in reaction, the nipple peaking blatantly beneath the soft cotton of her top. She glanced sideways at his rugged face and caught his wry smile.

      ‘And you, querida, are a major distraction,’ he husked throatily. ‘At least if I know you are at home waiting for me I will have the incentive to work all the harder, simply to get back to you.’

      It was her turn to move and press her lips to his. ‘I do understand, Raul, and I will be counting the days.’

      He hauled her into his arms, local laws forgotten, and kissed her thoroughly. Then he murmured against her softly parted lips, ‘And I will be counting the nights. Dios, Penny, you must know you can ask anything of me—anything in the world—and I would move heaven and earth to get it for you.’

      As an avowal of love, Penny couldn’t have asked for more, and, with his words warming her heart as his kiss still lingered on her lips, fifteen minutes later she boarded the waiting aircraft. Her confidence in their love was at an all-time high... And she never imagined for a second that two weeks later the reverse would be true...

      

      Penny slowly opened her eyes and groaned. Her sleep had been haunted by dreams; her body burning and aching with need, as she had spent a restless night in the huge four-poster bed. She glanced down at the fine cotton sheet tangled around her naked body and sighed. So this was what sexual frustration did to one, she thought grimly, and wished for the hundredth time that Raul was back.

      She yawned and stretched; then, slowly untangling herself from the sheet, she swung her long legs to the floor. Raul’s ‘a few days’ had lengthened into two weeks, and, much as she loved the hacienda, if she was honest with herself, after months of doing absolutely nothing she was beginning to get bored. She was slowly reaching the conclusion that she hadn’t been cut out to be a lady of leisure.

      A deep sigh escaped her and she sat for a moment on the side of the bed. She pushed the unruly mass of her long hair back from her face and glanced idly out of the window. Another scorching hot day, but her flesh was burning with a different heat—the heat of arousal unfulfilled.

      Still, she told herself bracingly, breakfast and down to the stables for a long gallop on her own small Arab mare, Daisy—a present from Raul the first time she had stayed with him in Spain. Followed by lunch, a swim... Who was she trying to fool? She had done the same thing every day for weeks, and was fed up.

      What would her mother have said, she mused, if she could have seen her precious daughter now, a wealthy man’s mistress? Her blue eyes hazed with tears. Deep in her innermost being Penny knew the answer, and it gave her no joy. Her parents had been a wonderful loving couple; they might have tolerated her lifestyle because she was their beloved daughter, but they would never have approved in a million years.

      Her thoughts went back to the past. As the much loved only child of the local doctor in a small town in West Sussex, she had had an idyllic upbringing until her father had been killed in a car crash when on a night call to an elderly patient. Even after his death she had still been relatively content; she had grown even closer to her mother and life had gone on.

      It had been when she was seventeen that the final disaster had struck: her mother had been diagnosed as having cancer. A braver woman never lived, Penny thought with some pride. Her mother had insisted that Penny stay at school and take her final exams. She had been destined to follow in her father’s footsteps and had been accepted for medical school.

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