drive out to find him and give him his phone,’ she assured Maria, when the PA went into a lengthy explanation about an urgent matter that required his immediate attention.
The Velaquez estate was huge, with miles of vineyards, but she guessed that Ramon would be at his estate manager’s cottage. It was too far to walk in the hot afternoon sunshine, and so she slid behind the wheel of the sports car that was his latest gift to her, lowered the roof, and was soon speeding along the dusty tracks, with the warm breeze blowing through her hair.
It was a glorious feeling, and she couldn’t help smiling. She hadn’t thanked him properly for her car yet, but tonight she planned to wear a new sexy black negligee and show her appreciation by seducing him.
There was no sign of Ramon’s Jeep outside the cottage. So he could be anywhere on the estate, she thought with a frown, as she brought her car to a halt and stared along the endless rows of vines. She sat for a few moments, wondering what to do, and was relieved when one of the estate workers ambled up the track.
‘The boss not here,’ the man told her in answer to her query. ‘He used to come Fridays, but not now.’
Do you know where he spends every Friday afternoon?
Pilar Fernandez’s curious question on the day of Valentina’s twins’ christening stole into Lauren’s mind, and despite the hot sun beating down on her shoulderblades ice trickled down her spine.
There would be a perfectly reasonable explanation as to Ramon’s whereabouts, she told herself firmly. She smiled at the worker. ‘Do you know where el Duque is?
The man shrugged. ‘Sometimes I see him drive along this track.’
‘And the track leads where?’ Lauren queried patiently.
‘To Casa Madalena.’
All the joy went out of the day, and all the heat drained out of the sun. Lauren shivered and hugged her arms around herself, nausea churning in her stomach. So Ramon spent every Friday afternoon at the home of Pilar Fernandez, and had apparently done so for weeks—despite the fact that he had told her he visited the vineyards on Fridays. Why had he lied? she wondered, and gave a bitter laugh. It could only be because he did not want her to know about his regular visits to Pilar.
Her mother had told her that her father had pretended for years that he played squash at his sports club every Friday evening, when in fact he had been having an affair with his secretary.
Oh, God! Pain ripped through her, and she sagged against the car. She had been such a fool. When she had first met him Ramon had been a playboy who had never been faithful to any of his numerous mistresses for more than five minutes. He had married her because he wanted his son, and had bluntly admitted that she was not his ideal wife. But he had said that he wanted their marriage to work, and she had been so blinded by her love for him that she had seized on the nice things he had done for her as a sign that he was beginning to care for her.
Maybe he had encouraged her to accept a place at university in Bilbao so that she would be out of the way for a couple of days a week? Maybe he intended to invite Pilar to the castle, so that she could get to know Matty before he divorced her and married the aristocratic Spanish beauty who would make him a much more suitable bride?
Her overwrought imagination battled with her common sense. Ramon would have to be Superman to have the energy for an affair when he made love to her every night. But he had never given any indication that the wild passion they shared was anything more to him than simply good sex. He liked variety, she thought bleakly, remembering his reputation when she had first met him in London.
She climbed back into the car and stared along the track in the direction of the Fernandez home. She could go back to the castle and pretend that she did not know where Ramon really went on Fridays. Her mother had silently accepted her father’s affairs for most of their marriage, and for the first time Lauren truly appreciated how much Frances must have loved her husband to have tolerated a situation that was both humiliating and heartbreaking.
The worst thing was that she was actually tempted to do as her mother had done, she realised, wiping away her tears with shaking fingers. She loved Ramon so much that the thought of losing him lacerated her heart. But she could not live a lie. She had to know the truth.
So, heart pounding, she swung the car towards Casa Madalena.
THE sight of Ramon’s Jeep parked in the courtyard of Pilar’s home made Lauren grip the steering wheel so tightly that her knuckles whitened, and her legs felt weak as she walked up the front steps of the house.
‘Sí, Señor Velaquez is here,’ a uniformed butler confirmed when he came to the front door. ‘He is in the pool house.’
It was obvious that the pool house was the new-looking glass-roofed building to one side of the main house. Lauren hurried across the courtyard, her heart racing with a mixture of anger and trepidation at the prospect of finding Ramon and Pilar together. No doubt the model would be wearing a skimpy bikini that showed off her stunning figure—or maybe she would be wearing nothing at all?
Swallowing the bile that had risen in her throat, Lauren pushed open the pool house door—and came to an abrupt halt as three startled faces stared at her.
Ramon and another man dressed in medical overalls were lifting a much older man, who could only be Cortez Fernandez, into a wheelchair.
Lauren glanced wildly around the poolside.
‘Oh! I thought…Pilar…’ She trailed to a halt as she met Ramon’s narrowed gaze.
‘Pilar is abroad on a modelling assignment. What did you think, Lauren?’ he queried in a hard tone—and in that moment she knew that she had made a dreadful mistake.
‘I thought…’ She swallowed. ‘I’m so sorry for my intrusion,’ she mumbled to the elderly man, who was now sitting in the wheelchair. He shook his grey head and gave her a faint smile.
‘It is I who should apologise, for stealing so much of Ramon’s time,’ he said in Spanish. ‘I should have known that a new bride would want to be with her husband.’
The nurse wheeled Cortez away, and Lauren bit her lip as she watched Ramon stride towards her. His wet swim-shorts moulded his muscular thighs, and droplets of water clung to the whorls of dark hairs that covered his chest. The sight of his near naked body made Lauren feel weak for a very different reason.
He hadn’t been cheating on her with Pilar. Relief overwhelmed her. But when he halted in front of her she sensed his anger and met his gaze warily.
‘What did you expect to find when you rushed in here, Lauren?’ he asked quietly, his voice suddenly sounding curiously bleak.
‘Pilar said… Well, no, implied…’ she corrected herself honestly. ‘That you spent every Friday afternoon with her. I had put it out of my mind until today, when I went to the vineyard to give you your phone and discovered that you had lied about inspecting the estate, and in actual fact you came here every week.’
Ramon exhaled heavily. ‘I do come every week. Cortez suffered a stroke six months ago, which left him unable to walk. His
