to get the meal over and done with and get back to her room, shut herself in with the sleeping baby, and try to work out what to do.
Facing him across the oval table, Cathy spread her linen napkin over her lap with a fierce twist of her wrist and waited for Paquita to serve her with, as she proudly announced, ‘Sopa de mariscos al vino de Jerez,’ which, for her benefit, Campuzano translated more prosaically as sherry and shellfish soup.
Whatever, it was delicious and welcome. Cathy ate quickly and appreciatively, fully aware that she wouldn’t have agreed to share his table at all if she hadn’t been ravenously hungry.
The warm crusty bread served with the tangy, ocean-flavoured soup was irresistible, and Cathy, her mouth full, saw the lean brown hand slide a glass over the linen cloth, found her eyes held by the dusting of dark hair between the white of his cuff and the soft leather strap of his wafer-thin watch, and felt her throat close up for no reason at all.
‘Manzanilla makes the perfect accompaniment. Part of the pleasure of savouring a meal,’ he said softly, coolly, and she replaced the spoon in her bowl and swallowed her mouthful with immense difficulty. He was letting her know that her table manners were no better than a greedy child’s. He never lost an opportunity to put her down. Her appetite disappeared very suddenly.
‘This comes from the Campuzano vineyards in the area of Sanlúcar de Barrameda. It is believed that the breeze from the Atlantic gives it its unique and slightly salty flavour.’ He took a reflective sip from his own glass, his lightly veiled eyes challenging her fulminating violet stare and, more as a reflex action than anything else, she took an apprehensive sip. Salty sherry?
But it was crisp and cold and intriguingly tangy, paler in colour than the chilled fino he had given her as an aperitif, and if he noted the surprise, followed by the pleasure in her eyes, he made no comment other than, ‘Finish your soup. Paquita will be devastated if you don’t clear your plate.’
‘I am not a child,’ Cathy returned stiffly.
She felt his eyes slide over the lush curves of her breasts, heard him agree, ‘Obviously not,’ and decided to maintain a dignified silence, and managed to do exactly that, right through the Sevillana salad, the chicken with garlic and one glass too many of a light Rioja wine.
‘You will take a little caramel flan?’ Paquita had withdrawn, and the silver cake knife was poised in long, lean fingers. Cathy shook her head. She couldn’t eat another crumb, and the wine, on top of all that sherry, had gone straight to her head. She wasn’t used to alcohol in such profligate quantity.
The silver serving knife was gently placed back on the linen-covered table and Campuzano leaned elegantly back in his chair, his attractively accented voice much too smooth as he remarked, ‘I hear you have made Rosa redundant.’ A smile curled at one corner of his wide, sensual mouth, but his eyes were cold. ‘If it was done in an attempt to persuade me of your sterling qualities as a mother, it was misguided.’ Again the unmistakable challenge in those deep grey eyes, and Cathy bit back the heated words of rebuttal. She couldn’t trust herself to speak without getting her tongue in a tangle and could have boiled herself in oil for drinking all that sherry—not to mention the wine.
Hoping he would put her silence down to a refusal to dignify his snide remark with any comment at all, she rose from her seat, wobbled alarmingly as her head began to spin, and sat straight down again, only to hear his dry, sarcastic, ‘For Juan’s sake, I hope he is not in need of your ministrations tonight. If he is, then might I suggest you call Rosa out of her enforced retirement?’
Drunk in charge of a baby! Cathy thought, her head whirling. The hateful wretch had probably done it on purpose, feeding her one innocuous-looking measure of alcohol after another, inviting her opinion in that suave, wickedly sexy voice of his, intent on giving himself the proof that she wasn’t a fit mother for an earthworm—let alone his nephew!
How she regained her feet and got herself to the door in more or less a straight line, she never knew. She even managed a stiff ‘Goodnight’ before he slewed round in his chair, one black brow tilted in sardonic enquiry as he questioned,
‘Tell me, you say your name is Cathy, so why do your colleagues and friends know you as Cordy—or Cordelia?’ A very slight shrug, an even slighter smile. ‘I am sure there is a logical reason, but I don’t like puzzles. So humour me.’
Cathy could only stare at him, her eyes going so wide that they began to ache. He suspected; she knew he did. Had he waited until her fuddled brain would be incapable of thinking up some credible lie? Was that another of his devious reasons for systematically getting her drunk?
Somehow her tongue had got fused to the roof of her mouth, and her heart, tripping with alarm, didn’t help her to think clearly, and his smile had a definite feral quality as he added with a cool politeness that made her skin crawl, ‘Perhaps your memory requires a little help.’ White teeth glittered between those sensual lips. ‘After I read those letters, particularly the second, telling of the existence of my brother’s alleged son, I made a few initial enquiries. I found the signature indecipherable, as you recall, but my description, my reminders of the party to mark the end of the assignment you were part of, all produced the same name. Cordelia Soames. Or Cordy to her friends—who, I might say, seemed to be numerous and almost exclusively male and, practically to a man...intimate.’
If nothing else could have sobered her, the hateful inflexion he placed on that last word did the trick. How dared he make her sister out to be a tramp, happy to fall in bed with anything in trousers? Cordy simply loved the reflected glamour of her job, the glitzy parties and socialising. And flirting was just a game to her, had been since she was fifteen years old. She wasn’t promiscuous, not really. Surely the fact that she had got pregnant pointed to that? If she’d been in the habit of sleeping around she would have made sure she was protected.
Her head now miraculously clear, Cathy gave him a withering smile, her voice dripping with acid as she told him, ‘Far be it from me to allow you to lose any sleep over such a tricky puzzle, señor. Cordelia was my professional name. I thought plain old Cathy a little too homespun. Satisfied?’
He would have to be, she thought as she swept out of the door. He would have to come up with better trick questions than that before he caught her out—tipsy or sober. She was getting quite expert at the game of deceit!
Cathy closed her eyes against the brilliant white dry heat and pulled the shady brim of the floppy straw hat Rosa had lent her further down over her face.
She had hitched a ride on a tractor with Rafael, the eldest of Paquita and Tomás’s brood, right to the edge of the vineyards, and now she set her sights on the shade offered by the grove of parasol pines she could see in the distance.
Behind her the tractor roared out of sight, leaving a cloud of white dust on the still air—the dust of the Albariza soil which made this vast triangle, stretching between the sherry towns of Jerez, Puerto de Santa Maria and Sanlúcar de Barrameda and encompassed by the rivers Guadalquivir and Guadalete, the one place in the world where the unique wine could be produced. So much she had teamed from Rosa, who had been determined to educate as well as befriend her, Cathy thought with a quirky smile.
In fact her unexpected sense of relaxation was probably due as much to Rosa’s friendship, the way she had taken pains to tell her so much about the area, as to the absence of Campuzano.
Not that he had left the finca; he hadn’t. But he dined out every night. With his mother, Rosa said, but, with a cynicism that had appeared out of nowhere, Cathy had expressed her doubts. The lady he dined with so regularly would
