thinking if ever there was a cue to walk this was it. This was not a subject that total strangers discussed. His next comment made it clear he did not share her inhibitions. She was starting to think he might not have any.
‘Lovers start out as strangers.’
He smiled at her with his eyes and her stomach flipped and quivered.
She recalled Millie’s friendly advice on how to add some spice to her holiday.
‘Act available, Maggie,’ she had counselled. ‘When your eyes meet his and your heart starts to thud and you get that delicious fluttery kick in your belly, don’t look away. A guy needs some encouragement.’
Maggie took a deep breath and didn’t look away.
It was just dinner, there would be other people, and she’d be experiencing some of the local culture, which was what she liked about foreign travel.
‘Will they have room at this paella place?’
Just for once it would be good to break away from her sensible image—not too far, obviously. And they were not talking the head banging, no-strings sex thing—this was dinner.
Where would be the harm?
As his strangely hypnotic eyes swept slowly across her upturned features. It probably made her pathetic, but she really wished she’d put on more make-up than a swipe of lip gloss and a smudge of eyeshadow.
As he examined the fine-boned features Rafael was struck once more by the startling resemblance between mother and daughter, but now he was equally conscious of the dissimilarities. The younger woman would be considered by most to have less claim to classical beauty, but when it came to sex appeal she was streets ahead.
‘They will always make room for me. Come…’
No shocker that he should issue commands—he had that written all over him. The shock was that she allowed him to steer her through the throng.
Looking back on the moment and the ones that followed later, Maggie was left to wonder if her body had not been taken over by an alien.
Maggie paused, ducking her head to look through the door he held open for her. The sumptuous interior looked just as impressive as the exterior of the long, low, powerful-looking car.
‘This is yours?’
‘You are going to lecture me on my carbon footprint or car theft?’
She slung him a cross glance and slid inside, lifting the newspaper that lay on the passenger seat. The headline was in Spanish but the image was one that had graced several front pages across the world that week—a well-known Hollywood star with his long-term partner making their relationship official at a civil ceremony.
The image of the two hand-in-hand, smiling men shifted her thoughts back to her dad’s parting words when Maggie had been startled to realise that her dad, at least, had his own ideas about what had caused her to break off the engagement.
‘I respect the fact you don’t want to talk about it, love, but the fact is, Maggie, some men…just because Simon has issues with his…leanings…’
Maggie had stared, astonished, as her father, red-faced, had cleared his throat before finishing huskily. ‘Never think you were the problem or it was your fault.’
‘No,’ she had responded faintly, thinking, Was I the only one who didn’t have a clue?
And she hadn’t—not until that final argument when things had got pretty ugly.
Maggie had never seen the normally restrained Simon so angry before, and the trigger to him losing it totally had of all things been a throwaway comment in the heat of the moment, because he didn’t have the faintest idea why she was angry. ‘I don’t think you even like women!’
‘Who have you been listening to? I am not gay!’
Before Maggie had been able to assure him she hadn’t meant that at all he had grabbed her arm and wrenched her towards him, lowered his face to her and snarled, ‘If you spread lies like that I’ll…’
Startled by his aggressive reaction, Maggie had frozen with shock, but had not lowered her gaze from his menacing glare. She knew from past experience it was a mistake to show fear to bullies. And Simon was a bully.
Why had she not known that before?
Anger had come to her rescue; her chin had come up and she had asked with cold disdain, ‘You’ll what, Simon?’
The ruddy colour rising up his neck had reached his cheeks, darkening the skin to magenta as he’d glared at her in furious frustration. ‘I… I’ll…’
Pretending not to notice the fingers tightening painfully around her wrist, she had cut across him. ‘Look, I’m sorry if I touched a raw nerve, but your sexuality is not a subject that interests me.’
Simon had looked at the ring she held out to him and released her arm.
She had dropped it into his palm, walked away and not looked back.
Maggie threw the newspaper into the back seat and fastened her belt with a click. Her chin lifted. Being sensible had got her nothing but humiliation; it was time for a bit of recklessness.
But maybe not this much, she thought half an hour later as they seemed to finally arrive at their destination. The village cut into the hillside was small, in a matter of moments they had driven through.
Keeping her voice carefully casual, Maggie turned her head in time to see the village lights disappear as the road began to climb steeply and asked, ‘Aren’t we stopping?’
Maggie recognised the extreme vulnerability of her position; she was in a car miles from anywhere with a man who could, for all she knew, be a homicidal maniac and nobody knew where she was.
She should be seriously scared, so why wasn’t she?
‘Relax, Maggie, I’m quite harmless.’
She looked at his profile and thought, If you were I wouldn’t be here. It was a bit late to recognise that it was the danger he represented that had drawn her here.
He was her rebellion against the self-imposed rules she had lived her life by.
‘Relax—you will enjoy yourself, you know.’ She looked at him with big wary eyes and he expelled a sigh. ‘That was not a threat, you know, and you can take your hand off the door—it’s locked.’
‘Why didn’t we stop in the village?’
‘Because,’ he said, pulling the car onto a patch of rocky ground beside a number of other vehicles, ‘the villagers are all here.’ He released the central lock. ‘You are sorry now that you came?’
Maggie, her lips curved in a happy smile, shook her head. ‘No.’ When he’d said the village was here he had not been exaggerating; the area of flat ground fringed by trees was full of people.
She felt his eyes on her and turned her head.
Her
