she wore.
Of course there were decent and genuinely good people—people like Angelina. He liked to think he was not without the odd scruple, but this woman was not one of life’s innocents.
It always amazed Rafael how that vulnerable minority managed to get through life with their ideals and their lives intact while most people were out for what they could get regardless of the people they trampled over in their pursuit of whatever ambition drove them.
What was driving Angelina’s daughter?
Greed, revenge…possibly a combination?
A child genuinely wishing to discover a parent would hardly choose a public occasion to do so.
Then as he watched she stepped off the pavement. Dios, he might not have to worry about scandal—the girl was a traffic statistic waiting to happen!
It was pure luck that she reached his side of the road before disaster struck—or almost. He watched as she jumped in response to the blast of a scooter horn as it whizzed past her, lost her footing and began to fall back into the moving traffic.
CHAPTER FOUR
MAGGIE lifted her head, a smile of gratitude ready to thank the person who had leant a steadying hand and pulled her onto the safety of the pavement.
‘Thank you…’ The words and the smile died a death as she found herself looking into the lean face of her saviour.
The sound of the traffic retreated somewhere into the recesses of her shell-shocked brain. She was looking into the dark face of the most beautiful man she had ever seen or even imagined.
She was too startled to disguise her reaction. Maggie’s gaze travelled in wide-eyed appreciation over his strongly sculpted features.
This was not a face anyone would forget in a hurry.
As a child Maggie remembered wondering what her mum had meant when she spoke of someone’s ‘beautiful bones.’
He was what she meant.
The genetic gene pool had been very generous to this tall Spaniard, who had been gifted cheekbones sharp enough to cut yourself on, a strong aquiline nose and a firm, angular jaw.
His unlined brow was broad and intelligent and he possessed the most striking eyes she had ever seen—pale icy grey, almost silver, the striking colour intensified by the dark ring around the iris, they were fringed by incredibly long spiky lashes that were as dark as his strongly delineated ebony brows.
But it was his mouth that Maggie couldn’t take her eyes off. Was it the hint of cruelty she saw in the sensual curve of his sculpted lips that tugged so strongly at her senses and made the aura he projected so overtly sensual and masculine?
Close your mouth, Maggie, you’re drooling.
In an effort to respond to the ironic voice in her head, she gave herself a mental shake.
It didn’t help. Her head remained a swirl of impressions and her nerve endings continued to thrum, sending shivers across the surface of her overheated skin.
She’d had too much sun, Maggie decided, shading her eyes as she struggled to find an explanation for being struck dumb and foolish at the same moment—an explanation that did not involve being in the presence of a six-feet-four black-haired Mediterranean male who looked like a fallen angel who worked out!
The fine lines around his marvellous eyes deepened as he looked down with concern into her face.
‘Are you all right? There is someone you’d like me to call, perhaps?’
Oh, my God, even his voice was sexy! Deep and slightly gravelly, his cultured voice contained a faint and attractive foreign inflection.
‘I…I…’ She gulped, then he smiled and she thought, Wow!
Get a grip, girl. So you were smiled at by a good-looking man—there is no need to act as though you’ve just been released from a convent.
‘You’ve had a shock. You’re shaking…’ Rafael pushed aside an intrusive flicker of genuine concern. Save it, he told himself, for Angelina and her marriage.
Besides, in his expert opinion this was about sex, not the sun or a blow to the head. He was not the only one to feel the sexual charge in the air. This was not a thing he could have anticipated, but Rafael knew that such things were easier to work with than fight against—not, obviously, to the extent that he followed the advice of the loud voice telling him that what he really wanted was to know what she would taste like when he kissed her!
Though had the circumstances been different, who knew…?
The comment drew Maggie’s gaze to the fingers still curved around her upper arm. She made no attempt to break the contact; in fact she was conscious of a strange reluctance to do so.
She could feel the warmth in his long brown fingers through the thin fabric of her cotton top and sense the strength in them…in the man himself.
Her eyes lifted and the impression of strength she picked up from the light contact intensified. He was a big man, broad-shouldered and athletically built—he was both lean and hard.
He projected an undiluted force-field of raw masculinity. It was utterly overwhelming and…seductive?
The latter question made Maggie’s eyes widen with shock. Curbing the imaginative dialogue in her head, she began to pull her arm away, then stopped as she encountered the flash of concern in his silver grey eyes.
She swallowed past the sudden emotional thickness in her throat and blinked as her eyelids prickled. She looked away, embarrassed by her emotional response to this cursory show of concern.
‘I’m fine…oh!’ Maggie grunted as a passerby bumped into her. ‘Sorry…’
‘You are sorry?’ Her rescuer mumbled something under his breath and directed a glare of such autocratic outrage at the retreating back of the clumsy culprit that Maggie would not have been surprised to see the burly figure disintegrate into a pile of dust.
‘You’re very kind.’
Her low-pitched voice with the husky timbre came as a surprise—not an unpleasant one. ‘You’re English?’
Had he needed confirmation, this would have been it. He knew that Angelina had been shipped to England to have her baby.
She had not gone into details, but he could only imagine that the experience of being sent away from family and friends at such a time must have been a terrifying ordeal for a sixteen-year-old.
Maggie saw the flicker of expression move at the back of his incredible eyes and interpreted it as surprise. She had seen a lot of that when people realised she was not Spanish. There had been several occasions on this trip when unable to respond when, someone spoke to her in Spanish, she had had to explain that she was English.
It was difficult not to think about her genetic heritage when for the first time in her life her colouring made her blend in, not stand out.
She
