She thinned her mouth as, probably in retaliation for her stubborn silence, glittering charcoal eyes veiled by thick black lashes made a lazy inventory of the curves she privately thought had grown a little too lush just lately. Her body burned hotly where his eyes touched and she tried to squirm away, aware that her breath was thick in her throat. His unanswered question and the explicitly intimate way he was looking at her was beginning to fill her with embarrassment and confusion.
What did he know about how she had felt? The sense of inadequacy, the beginnings of the shame that had grown right throughout their marriage because he had obviously decided she was frigid, not worth the trouble of going to her room at night.
His fingers tightened on her arm, his other hand resting lightly on her waist, just above the feminine roundness of her hips; his voice was sultry and wicked as he asked, ‘I wonder if a year apart has made any difference? Perhaps we should try to find out. Would you still reject me if I came to you in the night?’
‘Don’t!’ It was wrenched from her. She went rigid. She had taught herself not to cry; she wasn’t going to forget those harsh lessons and disgrace herself now.
Once—it seemed like a lifetime ago now—she had thought she loved him, had worshipped him, believed him to be the most perfect being ever to draw breath.
Now she knew better. He couldn’t get to her on any level if she didn’t let him. She threw back her head and challenged him, ‘If you think I’m going to oblige you, lie down on the floorboards while you satisfy your sexual curiosity, then you can think again!’
She slapped his hands away, one after the other, and headed for the door, her lips clamped together to stop herself screaming with all the remembered pain, and he drawled behind her, ‘I had something rather more civilised in mind, mi esposa. Share my bed for the next three months and satisfy my…sexual curiosity, and I won’t bring charges against your brother.’
CHAPTER TWO
‘YOU need time to think about it?’ Roman asked as the brittle silence stretched until it was painful. The soft, almost scornful strand of amusement in his voice finally snapped her out of her state of numbing shock.
‘You can’t be serious!’ The thin, wavery bleat of her own voice secretly appalled her. She hadn’t meant to sound so utterly withering. Cassie swallowed convulsively and tried again, tried to do better. ‘You must be desperate if you have to resort to blackmail to get a woman to share your bed!’
This time the contempt she felt must have echoed in her tone because she saw his eyes narrow, his jawline harden. He was a passionate man; she knew that—passionate about his work, the land he loved, the family name, his women. Never about her, though, and they both knew it. Her taunt would have damaged his inbred, fierce Spanish pride.
‘Not blackmail—a condition,’ he corrected harshly. ‘Non-negotiable. You are free to take my offer, or leave it.’
‘My body’s not a commodity to be bartered,’ she stated, suddenly feeling shivery, as if her flesh had been plunged into a deep freeze. What he was suggesting was completely out of the question.
But he obviously wasn’t seeing it that way because his voice roughened. ‘It was before, if I remember correctly. Your body in my bed in exchange for my ring on your finger, a life of luxury, payment of your father’s debts—and let’s not forget that nice soft option for your brother, which we now know he abused. And again, with you, I got the rough end of the bargain and found myself sharing a bed with a block of ice. My bride made me feel like an animal with depraved and intolerable appetites—it was not an experience I wished to repeat.’
So he had left her completely alone. And he hadn’t had the sense to understand that she’d been terrified.
Not of him, because she had loved him then, but scared half to death of failing the shatteringly sexy, passionate and experienced man who had swept her off her feet with one smile from those sensually moulded lips, one glance from those sultry, smoky eyes. The man who hadn’t seen that his family’s displeasure at his choice of wife had already made her feel inferior and totally inadequate.
And she hadn’t had the courage to explain all of that to him, to at least try to tell him how she felt. Cassie shook that unwanted thought out of her head and closed her eyes as she dragged in a deep lungful of air; when she opened them he was holding the door open, his powerful body graceful, relaxed.
Showing her out? Bored? Impatient to get rid of her now he knew she would have nothing to do with his outrageous suggestion?
So why did she feel giddy with relief when he told her, ‘I’m not suggesting something immoral. You are my wife.’
‘We’re separated,’ she reminded him, defensively putting her light-headedness down to the trauma of the last few days, the expenditure of courage that had been needed to bring her to face him again.
‘Not by my wish,’ he stated dismissively. He swung on his heels.
Catching her breath, she followed him along the stone-flagged passageway that connected the old farmhouse to the newer, more comfortable addition that had been built in his father’s lifetime. Surely there was room for negotiation? Surely she could make him see that his cruel suggestion simply wasn’t practical, then ask him to reconsider her original offer?
‘Roman!’ If there was a desperate edge to her voice, she couldn’t help it. Her brother’s future depended on her ability to make her estranged husband change his mind. ‘Even if I wanted to come back to you—’ which she most definitely did not ‘—I couldn’t. I have a living to earn, a job to go back to. I told Cindy I’d only be away for a couple of days. It’s one of our busiest times.’
He stopped, turned, his impressive figure framed in the archway that led into the main hall. He lifted wide shoulders dismissively. ‘No problem. I’ll phone my cousin and explain. She’ll understand.’
Of course she would! Cindy idolised Roman, she hadn’t been able to believe her ears when Cassie had returned to England with the news that her marriage was over.
The relationship wasn’t as close as Roman had stated. Cindy’s grandmother had been Don˜a Elvira’s eldest sister. She’d married a Scot and they’d lived in England, producing Cindy’s mother. Although the Fernandez family hadn’t approved of the alliance with a mere foreigner, Don˜a Elvira and her surviving sisters had remained in contact.
Cassie and Cindy had been best friends since they’d met at school as five-year-olds, and it had been to her and her warm and loving family that Cassie had turned when her and Roy’s father had died from a heart attack.
They couldn’t have been more supportive. When the shock news had come that the house Cassie and Roy shared with their widowed father would have to be sold to cover his debts, Cindy’s mother had suggested, ‘We’ve been planning a holiday in Spain, visiting relatives on my mother’s side. Why don’t you and Roy come with us? I know they’ll make you welcome when I explain the circumstances. And it would give you and Roy a chance to get your heads round what’s happened.’
That was how she’d met Roman; that was when the short and, with hindsight, strangely distant courtship had begun. And the rest, she thought tiredly, was history. A history she wished had never been written.
‘Any other objections?’ he enquired flatly. ‘Or is the resumption of our marriage for three short months too high
