to come back with a clever comment but she was mesmerised by the perfect symmetry of his angular features, which were softened a little by his blatantly sensual mouth.
‘But you’re not worried that I might fall in love with you?’ She’d intended to sound sarcastic, but instead her voice was annoyingly breathless.
‘I don’t recommend that you do,’ he said in a hard voice. ‘I do not believe in love,—or marriage, for that matter. I’m not crazy,’ he insisted. ‘I have a genuine reason for needing to be married.’
He swore when his phone rang, and then took his mobile out of his jacket pocket and cut the call.
‘We can’t talk now. I’ll meet you this evening and we can discuss my proposition.’
She shook her head. ‘I’m not interested.’
‘Not interested in earning yourself five million pounds for being my wife for a couple of months?’ He reached across her and put his hand over hers to prevent her from opening the car door. ‘At least give me a chance to explain, and then you can make up your mind whether I’m crazy or not. Although, frankly, you would be foolish to miss out on the chance to earn a life-changing amount of money. Think what you could do with five million pounds. You would never have to worry about the cost of buying your little girl a pair of shoes ever again.’
‘All right.’ Juliet released a shaky breath. He was relentlessly persuasive. She couldn’t think properly when his face was so close to hers that as he leaned across her body she was able to count his thick black eyelashes. ‘I’ll meet you to discuss your proposition, but I’m not saying that I’ll agree to it.’
She pressed herself into the leather seat, hoping he would not notice the pulse at the base of her throat that she could feel thudding erratically. It would add to her humiliation if he guessed that she was attracted to him—especially as he quite obviously did not feel the same way about her.
‘It will have to be after nine,’ she told him. ‘I work the evening shift as a cleaner at a shopping centre close to where I live.’
Juliet felt a mixture of relief and disappointment when Rafael straightened up and moved away from her.
He handed her a business card. ‘Here is my phone number. Text me your address and I’ll collect you from your home at nine-fifteen.’ He frowned. ‘What about your daughter? Does someone look after her while you are at work in the evenings?’
‘Of course I have childcare for Poppy. I certainly wouldn’t leave her on her own,’ she said indignantly, stung by his implication that she might be an irresponsible mother.
It was the accusation that Bryan’s lawyer had levelled against her, and remembering the custody battle she was facing over her daughter evoked a heavy sense of dread in the pit of her stomach.
Five million pounds would enable her to hire her own top lawyer to fight Bryan’s claim on Poppy, Juliet thought as she climbed out of Rafael’s car and ran through the rain back to her van. But she would be nuts even to consider the idea.
* * *
Rafael parked his Lamborghini outside a grim-looking tower block and his conviction that it had been a mistake to suggest to a woman he had never met before today that she should marry him grew stronger. He visualised Juliet Lacey, who had resembled a drowned rat when he’d shoved her into his car out of the rain. Her voluminous apron had covered her figure, but from what he’d been able to see she was skinny rather than curvaceous. Her face had been mostly hidden behind by the peak of a baseball cap that was surely the most unfeminine and unflattering headwear.
In Rafael’s opinion women should be elegant, decorative and sexy, but the waif-like sandwich-seller failed on all counts. His fury that she had damaged his beloved Lamborghini had turned to impatience when she’d burst into tears. He was well aware of how easily women could turn on the waterworks when it suited them. But as he’d watched Juliet literally fall apart in front of him he’d felt a flicker of sympathy.
He had heard a woman sob brokenly only once before, in the slum where he had spent the first twelve years of his life. Maria Gonzales had been a neighbour, a kind woman who had often given food to him and his sister. But Maria’s teenage son had been drawn into one of the many drug gangs who’d operated in the slum and Pedro had been stabbed in a fight. Rafael had never forgotten the sound of Maria’s raw grief as she’d wept over the body of her boy.
When Juliet had told him of her financial problems and her fear that she might lose custody of her young daughter the idea had formed in his mind that she would make him an ideal wife. The money he was prepared to pay her would change her life, and more importantly she would have no expectations that their marriage would be anything other than a business deal.
Maybe he was crazy, Rafael thought as he climbed out of his car and glanced around the notoriously rough housing estate—a concrete jungle where the walls were covered in graffiti. A gang of surly-looking youths were staring at his car, and they watched him suspiciously when he walked past them on his way into the tower block. He guessed that the older male in the group, who was wearing a thick gold chain around his neck, was a drug dealer.
Rafael had grown up in a shanty town on the outskirts of Madrid, where dire poverty was a breeding ground for crime and lawless gangs ruled the street. His father had been involved in the criminal underworld, and as a boy Rafael had seen things that no child should see.
His jaw tightened as he took the lift up to the eleventh floor and strode along a poorly lit walkway strewn with litter. The tower block was not a slum but a sense of poverty and deprivation pervaded the air, as well as a pungent smell of urine. It was not a good place to bring up a child.
Juliet and her young daughter were not his responsibility, he reminded himself. But it was hard to see how she would turn down five million pounds and the chance to move away from this dump.
He knocked on the door of her flat and it opened almost immediately. Rafael guessed from the unbecoming nylon overall Juliet was wearing that she must have returned from her cleaning job only minutes before he’d arrived. Without the baseball cap hiding her face he saw that she had delicate features, and might even have been reasonably pretty if she hadn’t been so pale and drawn. Her hair was a nondescript brownish colour, scraped back from her face and tied in a long braid. Only her light blue eyes, the colour of the sky on an English spring day, were at all remarkable. But the dark shadows beneath them emphasised her waif-like appearance.
A suspicion slid into Rafael’s mind, and when Juliet took off her overall to reveal a baggy grey T-shirt that looked fit for the rag bag he studied her arms. There were none of the tell-tale track marks associated with drug addiction.
He flicked his gaze over cheap, badly fitting jeans tucked into scuffed black boots and thought of glamorous Camila Martinez, the daughter of the Duque de Feria and his grandfather’s favoured contender to be Rafael’s bride.
The difference between aristocratic Camila, who could trace her family’s noble lineage back centuries, and Juliet, who looked as if she had stepped from the pages of Oliver Twist, was painfully obvious. It would show his grandfather that he was not a puppet willing to dance to the old man’s tune if he turned up at Hector’s birthday party and announced that he had married this drab sparrow instead of a golden peacock, Rafael mused, feeling a flicker of amusement as the scene played out in his imagination.
‘I told you to call me when you arrived and I would meet you outside the flats,’ Juliet greeted him. ‘If you’ve left
