Her daughter, Beatriz, hurried into view and twisted her hands together in an ineffectual protest. ‘Jemima, how lovely to see you again…Mamá, please, please…we must respect Alejandro’s wishes.’
Her sister-in-law’s anxious, embarrassed face was painful to behold. That her loyalties were tearing her in two was obvious.
The driver carted over two suitcases while Beatriz stared out at the child she could see peering through the window of the estate vehicle. ‘Oh, is that Alfie, Jemima? May I go and see him?’
For once impervious to her mother’s mood, Beatriz hurried out to the car. The driver hefted up the luggage and stepped past Doña Hortencia with a subservient dip of his head.
‘Good afternoon, Doña Hortencia,’ Jemima said stoically, following the driver indoors with her flight bag on her shoulder. She was determined not to react in any way to the dirty looks she was receiving and believed that she was a good deal less likely to be bullied than she had been two years earlier. The older woman would certainly make the attempt but Jemima had learned to care less about the impression she made.
Aglow with satisfaction, Beatriz returned holding Alfie’s little hand in hers. ‘Mamá, look at him,’ she urged with enthusiasm.
Doña Hortencia gazed down at her first grandchild and her forbidding stare softened for an instant before she shot a grim glance at her daughter-in-law. ‘This little boy, Alejandro’s son and heir, is the one and only thing you have got right.’
Swallowing back the urge to retaliate in kind, Jemima said nothing. What was there to say? Alejandro’s mother would never like her or accept her as an equal. Her son had married an ordinary working woman and a foreigner, rather than the wealthy Spanish aristocrat whom the older woman had thought his due, and Doña Hortencia was too stubborn, arrogant and prejudiced to revise her attitude. When Jemima had first come to the castillo, the Spanish woman had done everything possible to ensure that her daughter-in-law’s daily life was as miserable as she could make it. This time around, however, Jemima had no plans to accept victimhood.
Beatriz accompanied Jemima up the carved staircase and made small talk as if her life depended on it. Dark gloomy oil portraits of Alejandro’s ancestors lined the hall and landing walls. Serious though Alejandro so often was, Jemima reflected helplessly, he was a positive barrel of laughs when she compared him to his predecessors.
‘Alejandro has engaged a nanny to help you with Alfie,’ Beatriz announced.
‘How very thoughtful of your brother,’ Jemima remarked after a noticeable pause.
‘Placida is the daughter of one of our tenants and a very able girl,’ her companion extended anxiously.
Jemima did not want to make Beatriz feel uncomfortable. ‘I’m sure she’s perfect for the job.’
‘This is the room I chose for Alfie,’ Beatriz announced with pride, throwing wide the door on a fully furnished nursery complete with a cot, a junior bed and piles of toys. ‘Of course, you may prefer to choose another.’
‘This is lovely. Did you organise all the toys?’
Beatriz laughed. ‘No, that was my brother. Can you believe that Alejandro went shopping for his son?’
‘I wouldn’t have believed it if you hadn’t told me,’ Jemima admitted, as Alejandro’s dislike of shopping was well known. Bitter as she was about finding herself back in Spain, she could only be touched by the effort he had made on Alfie’s behalf. Equally quickly, however, her thoughts travelled in the opposite direction. Of course, wouldn’t Alejandro’s actual presence mean more than the purchase of expensive toys? In fact wasn’t Alfie receiving his first dose of the same benign neglect that Jemima had once endured as Alejandro’s wife?
Undisturbed by such deep and troubled mental ruminations, Alfie pelted across the room to grab a toy car with an eager hand. His aunt watched him, entranced. ‘You must be so proud,’ Beatriz remarked.
Not for the first time, Jemima felt sorry for Beatriz, who was only thirty-five years old but very much on the shelf of her mother’s making, for no young man capable of winning Doña Hortencia’s approval had ever come along. A dutiful daughter to the last, Alejandro’s older sister lived the sedate life of a much older woman.
Placida, the small dark-haired nanny, came to be introduced. After chatting for a while, Jemima left Alfie with Placida and Beatriz and crossed the corridor. The elaborate suite of tower rooms in which she had lived with Alejandro before her pregnancy had brought all sharing to an end was unrecognisable to Jemima at first glance. All the furniture had been changed and a pale yellow colour scheme had banished the dark ornate wallpaper that she had once hated, but that Doña Hortencia had informed her was hand-painted, exceedingly rare and there for eternity. A maid was already busily unpacking her cases and putting her clothes away in the dressing room.
A weird and worrying sense of déjà vu was now settling over Jemima. Alejandro’s non-appearance at the airport had first ignited the suspicion that she was about to discover that nothing had changed in the marriage she had left behind. He had also just demonstrated his engrained habit of taking authoritarian charge of anything and everything that came within his radius. In hiring Placida over her head, Alejandro had shown that only his opinion mattered and Jemima did not appreciate being made to feel superfluous in her child’s life.
Once the maid had gone, Jemima went for a shower and padded through to the dressing room to extract fresh clothes. It was a shock to open the closets and find that they were already stuffed full of brand-new garments and the drawers packed with equally new lingerie, all of it in her size. Her own small collection of clothes looked shabby in comparison. Evidently, Alejandro, the guy who hated to shop even for himself, had ordered her a new wardrobe. Such generosity was very much his trademark but it made Jemima feel uncomfortable. Perhaps he didn’t trust her to dress smartly enough. Perhaps her lack of formal fashion sense had once embarrassed him. Maybe that was why he had gone shopping for her…
Yet the prospect of dining with her haughty mother-in-law garbed like a poor relation in more humble clothing had surprisingly little appeal and Jemima succumbed to the temptation of the new clothes. She selected an elegant sapphire blue dress and slid her feet into delicate sandals before hurriedly going to check on Alfie. He was playing happily in the bath while Placida watched over him. Using her slightly rusty Spanish, Jemima established that Alfie had already eaten his evening meal and she returned to the bedroom.
While she was combing her rebellious hair into a less tumbled style the door opened and she froze. Alejandro, already in the act of removing his tie, appeared. His immaculate grooming was, for once, absent. Indeed, in the bright light of the sunset flooding into the room through the windows, his tailored suit looked crumpled and almost dusty, his black hair tousled, while a dark shadow of stubble heavily accentuated his angular jaw line. But, even with all those flaws taken into consideration, he still looked spectacular, awesomely masculine and awesomely sexy. As she studied him, her body reacting with treacherous enthusiasm even as her pride rejected those earthy responses, hot, heady anger threatened to consume her.
‘I told Maria we would dine alone next door tonight. Give me ten minutes for a shower,’ Alejandro urged her carelessly, but the scorching golden eyes that raked over the mane of strawberry-blonde curls framing her heart-shaped face, before roaming down to the pouting curves defined by the fine fabric of her dress, were in no way casual. That appraisal was so hot she was vaguely surprised that her body didn’t start smoking and if anything that bold, sensually appreciative appraisal only increased her resentment.
‘Where
