Don Joaquin's Pride. Lynne Graham

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СКАЧАТЬ he murmured softly, long brown fingers splaying across her midriff to ease her back into position again.

      When he talked, soft and low, he had the most beautiful dark honeyed accent, she thought abstractedly, and never had she been as outrageously aware of anything as she was of that lean hand pressing just below her breasts. Her heart was pounding like a hammer inside her ribcage.

      ‘You’re holding me too tightly,’ she complained uneasily, horrified and embarrassed by the effect he was having on her.

      ‘You are not in any danger,’ Joaquin Del Castillo drawled silkily above her head. ‘I am not attracted by stunted women with bleached hair and streaky fake tans.’

      A lump ballooned in Lucy’s convulsed throat. Mortified pink chased away her strained pallor. ‘You really are the most loathsome man,’ she gasped. ‘And I can’t wait to see the back of you! When will we reach Fidelio’s ranch?’

      ‘Tomorrow—’

      ‘Tomorrow?’ Lucy croaked in stunned disbelief.

      ‘In an hour, we will make camp for the night.’

      Camp…camp? Aghast at the prospect of spending the night outdoors, Lucy swallowed back a self-pitying moan with the greatest of difficulty. ‘I thought we would be arriving soon—’

      ‘We have not made good time, señora.’

      ‘I had no idea that the ranch was so far away,’ she confided miserably.

      They rode on in silence, and slowly the sun became a fiery orb in its sliding path towards the horizon. Lucy was by then dazed with exhaustion and half asleep. She was plucked from the stallion’s back and set down on solid earth again, but her legs had all the strength of bending twigs. She staggered, aching in bone and muscle from neck to toe. Dimly she focused on a trio of gnarled palm trees silhouetted against the darkening night sky and experienced a vague sense of déjà vu. But they couldn’t possibly be the same trees she had noticed hours back! No doubt one set of palm trees looked much like another, Lucy conceded wearily, and she definitely couldn’t recall the slender ribbon of river she could now see running nearby.

      With every step she cursed her own bodily weakness. She had lost a lot of weight while her mother had been ill, and only the previous month had come down with a nasty bout of flu. After two solid days of travelling she had no energy left, and was indeed feeling far from well. It had not occurred to either her or Cindy that Fidelio’s ranch might lie in such a remote and inaccessible location.

      The Guatemalan lowlands had looked infinitely less vast and daunting on the map than they were in reality, and, torn from the familiarity of city life and her own careful routine, Lucy felt horrendously vulnerable. Her twin might have travelled the globe but this was Lucy’s first trip abroad. Freedom had been the one thing her adoring but possessive mother had refused to give her.

      Joaquin was seeing to the horses by the river when Lucy returned. She saw him through a haze of utter exhaustion. Her legs were trembling beneath her. She sank down on the grass. He dropped a blanket beside her.

      ‘You must be hungry,’ he murmured.

      Lucy shook her head, too sick with fatigue to feel hunger. Slowly, like a toy running out of battery power, she slumped down full length. ‘Sleepy,’ she mumbled thickly.

      Surprising her once again, he spread the blanket for her. Then, bending down, he shook her even more by sweeping her up in one easy motion and laying her down on the blanket. ‘Rest, then,’ he drawled flatly.

      Joaquin Del Castillo was a male of innate and fascinating contradictions, Lucy acknowledged sleepily. Fiercely proud and icily self-contained in his hostility towards her, yet too honourable, it seemed, to make her suffer unnecessary discomfort.

      Against the backdrop of the flaming sunset, he stood over her like a huge black intimidating shadow. ‘You look like the devil,’ she whispered, with a drowsy attempt at humour.

      ‘I will not take your soul, señora…but I have every intention of stripping you of everything else you possess.’

      Stray words fluttered in the blankness of Lucy’s brain. They did not connect. They did not make sense. With a soundless sigh of relief, Lucy sank into the deep, dreamless sleep of exhaustion.

      CHAPTER TWO

      LUCY opened her eyes slowly.

      A small fire was crackling, sending out shooting sparks. No wonder she had awakened, she thought in astonishment. The night was warm and humid, yet Joaquin Del Castillo was subjecting her to the heat of a fire. She scrambled back from it, her eyes adjusting only gradually to his big dark silhouette on the other side of the leaping flames.

      Pushing a self-conscious hand through her tangled curls, Lucy sat up just as a hair-raising cry sounded from somewhere out in the darkness. Lucy flinched, her head jerking as she glanced fearfully over her shoulder.

      ‘What was that?’

      ‘Jaguar…they hunt at night.’

      Lucy inched back closer to the fire and her companion and shivered. He extended a tin cup of coffee and she curved her unsteady hands round the cup and sipped gratefully, even though the pungent bitter brew contained neither sugar nor milk. ‘How soon tomorrow will we get to Fidelio’s ranch?’ she pressed.

      In the flickering light his strikingly handsome features clenched, the lush crescent of his ebony lashes casting fan-like shadows on his hard cheekbones. ‘Early.’

      ‘I suppose we would have got there tonight if I’d been able to ride,’ Lucy conceded, striving to proffer an olive branch for the sake of peace. He might despise her, but she was remembering the plane tickets he had sent at his own expense. He didn’t look as if he was terribly well off, yet he had made a very generous gesture. Without doubt Fidelio had a caring and concerned neighbour, willing to go to a lot of trouble on his behalf. She might loathe Joaquin Del Castillo, and every bone in her body might feel battered by that almost unendurable ride, but she could still respect the motives which had prompted him to demand that Cindy visit her father-in-law.

      Joaquin shrugged a sleek, muscular broad shoulder and passed her a plate.

      Lucy surveyed the roughly sliced bread and cheese, and a fruit she didn’t even recognise, and then tucked in with an appetite that surprised her.

      Having cleared the plate, and drained the coffee in a final appreciative gulp, she felt the continuing silence weigh heavily on her. ‘Perhaps you’ll tell me now how Fidelio really is,’ she prompted, with a small uncertain smile of encouragement.

      ‘You will see the situation soon enough.’

      His cool steady gaze and his sonorous accented drawl had a curiously chilling quality. A faint spasm of alarm crawled up Lucy’s spine and raised gooseflesh on her arms. But as quickly as she found herself reacting in fear, she told herself off. Being brought up by a mother who hated and distrusted all men had made her over-sensitive.

      Lucy had been seven when her father met another woman and demanded a divorce. Cindy, always his favourite, had become a real handful after he’d moved out. Infuriated by her daughter’s increasingly difficult behaviour, their mother had complained that it wasn’t fair that she should be left to raise both children alone. In the end СКАЧАТЬ