hadn’t immediately placed the middle-aged man and his wife bearing down on her as the tour guide was in full flow. Then as she’d looked beyond the shorts and garish shirt she’d recognised a colleague of Gordon’s and his wife. She’d vaguely recalled meeting them on a few social occasions.
‘Matt…Susan.’ She called out to the couple.
They did the usual ‘small world, fancy meeting you here’ stuff, and then the older man looked around expectantly. ‘Gordon not with you?’
‘No, he couldn’t get away, I’m afraid.’
If he had, there was no way she’d have got to take this excursion; Gordon wouldn’t have budged from the five-star luxury of the hotel. If she had suggested that they go and see the real inland Andalucia, with its olive groves and rolling hills, he would have thought she was crazy.
‘Not surprised,’ the other man confessed. ‘He must be up to his eyes in it with his new venture. I couldn’t believe it when I heard on the grapevine he was leaving. I admit, I thought Gordon was a permanent fixture like me.’
Miraculously Lily’s smile stayed superglued in place. ‘So did I, Matt.’
‘And he was a sure bet for that promotion.’
Lily nodded in agreement. ‘He did mention that.’ One of the few things he had mentioned, it seemed.
‘But good for him, I say. You need to be a risk-taker sometimes.’ He looked across the square. ‘Is that your group moving on?’
‘Yes, it is. Lovely to see you.’
Blissfully oblivious to the fact that with a few words he had revealed her marriage to be a total joke, Matt shouted cheerily after her, ‘Remember me to Gordon and wish him all the luck in the future.’
He’s going to need all the luck he can get when I get hold of him. ‘I will,’ Lily promised with her best sincere smile.
Of course, she had known for some time that their marriage had problems, but she hadn’t suspected until now that they might be insurmountable.
My husband is leading a double life! What the hell is he up to?
At the first opportunity Lily slipped away from her tour group and sought refuge in the town’s delightful flower-filled plaza. She sat in a pavement café and ordered coffee, then, changing her mind, asked instead for wine in her clumsy, faltering Spanish. The proprietor brought a bottle.
She sat sipping the rich-bodied red and thinking about what she was going to do next. Didn’t a woman in her situation need a plan of action?
She could run up a credit-card bill, one guaranteed to bring tears to Gordon’s eyes. It wouldn’t be hard. Gordon had a deep, almost spiritual connection with his wallet—in fact, not to put too fine a point on it, he was as mean as hell!
Then again, she mused, she could take the direct approach and get the next plane home, tell him straight if he didn’t want her to walk he’d better come clean about what he’d been up to. But was it a good idea to confront him when she wasn’t even sure any more if she wanted to save their marriage?
She could always cut the sleeves off his favourite designer suits, give the bottles of wine he’d put down as an investment to the church raffle…But, no, that had been done before by other, more imaginative wronged wives. But wasn’t she jumping the gun? Maybe her deepest suspicions were off and another woman wasn’t involved.
Sure, because Gordon’s never cheated before.
Lily toyed with the idea of sleeping with the first attractive man she saw. It would certainly be one way to have her revenge.
She knew the alcohol was partially responsible for her audacious line of thought, but for a while it was good to feel daring and in charge, not a damned victim.
When the bottle was empty she still hadn’t decided what course, if any, to take. The helpful proprietor of the café offered to call her a taxi and for once she thought, Hang the cost, and let him.
Given the day’s revelations and the fact she spent the rest of the afternoon sleeping off the unaccustomed alcohol, Lily never expected to sleep that night, and she didn’t, but not for the reason she had anticipated. No, all thoughts of her secretive husband and his mysterious new venture were crowded out of her head by the dark, chiselled features of a total stranger! This probably said something about her character. Lily wasn’t sure what, but she doubted it was flattering.
The next morning the solitude of the pool and exercise had the desired therapeutic effect, or so she naively believed at the time. After several slow, steady lengths she succeeded in rationalising what had happened in the hotel restaurant the night before. So she had been the victim of instant lust—it happened, she told herself with a mental shrug. Admittedly never before to her.
It was silly to get hung up about it.
It wasn’t as if she had done anything awful like cheat—at least only in her mind. And she suspected every woman who ever laid eyes on the tall, dynamic Spaniard with his sinfully sexy smile and incredible voice was guilty of that.
By the time exhaustion forced her to flip over onto her back and get her breath back Lily had reached the comfortable mental position of concluding she had handled the evening pretty well, under the circumstances.
The circumstances being she had hardly been capable of stringing two words together in the man’s presence, but there was no need to dwell on that! As for that frisson when their eyes had met and the tug, the feeling of connection, she had felt, such things did not happen between total strangers except in her feverish imagination.
Sensual fantasies aside, their brief encounter had actually been pretty much a non-event.
Lying on her back in the water, she couldn’t help her thoughts drifting back to the moment she had seen him. Lily involuntarily inhaled as the tall figure with a dark, classically featured face crystallised in her head.
He had achingly perfect, chiselled cheekbones, a proud nose, a strong jaw, dark, smouldering eyes and a sternly sexy mouth that just had to have fuelled countless female fantasies.
She had been lending half an ear to the elderly couple who had invited her to share their table at dinner when she had seen him framed in the doorway.
A tall, dark figure, dressed in a pale linen suit and open-necked shirt that revealed a tantalising section of olive-toned skin and undoubtedly had a designer name hand-stitched into the lining.
It hadn’t just been her, lots of people had looked, but Lily had carried on looking a lot longer than most others. She hadn’t been able to help herself. The stranger had been quite simply spectacular!
He’d been deliciously dark in a typically Spanish way, but nothing else about him had been typical! For a start he’d been much taller than the average Spanish male; she’d estimated that he had to be six four or five. Even the way he’d moved, with a fluid animal grace that had made her tummy muscles quiver, had been rivetingly different. His features had been classical, but strong. Her fascinated glance had lingered on his sensually moulded mouth.
It had felt like a long time, but it had probably only been a few seconds, before she’d managed to drag her hungry eyes clear, but in the process
