tricked into falling for it again.
He was older and smarter now. He never let his feelings get in the way of a good business deal. He never let his feelings cloud his judgement, colour his thinking or distract him from a task. He hadn’t rebuilt his father’s failing empire by feeling. He had done it by blood and sweat and outsmarting the opposition. Whatever roadblocks were put in front of him he stepped over, circumvented. Obliterated.
This would be no different.
* * *
‘Where is she?’ Alejandro asked the immaculately dressed and imperious-looking butler who answered the door at Marlstone Manor in Wiltshire.
Bushy brows as white and hairy as two caterpillars gave an austere frown over rheumy blue eyes. ‘Miss Teddy is currently engaged.’
Now that was funny. If only she were engaged. To someone else.
‘I’m sure she’ll shoehorn me into her busy schedule.’ He suppressed a cynical snort. Miss Theodora Marlstone was probably waiting for her spray tan to dry, or her nail polish, or curling her eyelash extensions or some such nonsense. Could there be any woman more vacuous than a pampered daddy’s girl?
And what the hell sort of name was Teddy? What did she think she was—a toy or a person?
‘If you will kindly wait here I will tell her you have requested an interview with—’
‘Look, no offence, buddy,’ Alejandro cut in, ‘but I haven’t got the time or the inclination to hang around and wait for your mistress to glue her fake nails on. You either lead me to her or I go looking for her. Which is it to be?’
‘Neither,’ a cool voice said from behind him.
Alejandro turned to see a small figure standing in the frame of the doorway off the black and white tiled hall. There wasn’t a fake nail in sight or a spray tan. She was wearing clothes that looked as if they had been sourced from a charity bin and her hair looked as if she had dived in head first to retrieve them. It was a wild cloud of dark brown tresses around her head and shoulders, wavy rather than curly, but clearly no effort had been spared to tame it. If anything, it looked as if she had recently mussed it up with her hands. Her trousers were a dirty shade of brown, the checked shirt unironed, and the cable sweater she wore over it was covered in balls of lint. The outfit was masculine and too big for her small frame, swamping her like a tent draped over a toothpick.
Why on earth had she dressed in such an appalling manner? What was she trying to prove? The girl was an heiress to a spectacular estate worth millions. She could afford to wear the best of high street fashion. Why was she dressing like a bag lady?
His eyes went to the bone-handled walking stick she was leaning on in what he could only describe as a proudly defiant manner.
He felt something jerk in his chest like a foot did when it missed a step.
So that was why.
‘Miss Marlstone?’
‘Señor Valquez, how nice to see you again.’
Alejandro didn’t like the feeling of being at a disadvantage. Of her knowing more about him than he knew about her. Keep your friends close and your enemies closer was a credo he lived by. And yet there was something about her that appealed to the protector in him. ‘We’ve...er...met before?’
She gave him a stiff movement of her lips that passed for a smile but he noticed it didn’t involve her arctic-cool grey-blue eyes. ‘Yes.’ Her chin rose ever so slightly. ‘Don’t you remember?’
Alejandro quickly checked his mental hard drive. He dated a lot of women. Slept with even more. But nowhere in his memory could he find a girl with eyes so deeply set they looked darker than they actually were. She had prominent eyebrows and lashes thick and dark without the boost of mascara. Cheeks sharply defined and haughtily high and a nose that looked as if it spent a lot of time up there with them. A mouth that was full and young and innocent-looking and yet with an angle of cynicism to it that matched his own.
‘I’m afraid you’ll have to remind me.’ He stretched his own lips into a half-mast smile. ‘I meet a lot of people in my line of business.’
Her eyes were unnervingly steady as they held his. It was as if she were seeing past his urbane man-in-control-of-his-universe façade to the shy boy of ten who’d had to step up to the plate after his father’s accident and his mother’s desertion. Her face was free of make-up. No mask of cosmetics to hide behind and yet he couldn’t help feeling she was a little too composed.
‘We met at British Polo Day some years ago.’
‘We did?’
‘It was the same event where you met your ex-fiancée.’
Alejandro clenched his jaw behind his polite smile. She had gone for the jugular. Bitch. Like father, like daughter. Playing games with him. Toying with him. Mocking him.
Reminding him.
He hated being reminded of his foolishness back then. At twenty-four he had stupidly believed love existed. Back then he had believed he could have a happy and fulfilling life with someone who loved him as much as he loved them. That how much money he had or didn’t have wouldn’t count. He had been swept away by the notion of building a new family like the one his mother had destroyed when she’d left his shattered father six months after the accident.
He had been wrong.
‘I’m sorry I have no recollection of our meeting.’ He ran his gaze over her as he tried to judge her age. She looked to be in her early to mid-twenties but, without make-up and wearing those dreadful tomboy ragbag clothes, she looked far younger. ‘Were we formally introduced?’
‘Yes.’
Alejandro still couldn’t place her. But then he met a lot of people during polo events. His brother played on the field while he worked the business end of things. Sponsors and corporate kings often pushed their daughters under his nose but he was always careful to keep business and pleasure separate. She had obviously taken it as a slight that he hadn’t singled her out in the past. But then why would he? She was as far away from his usual type as could be. ‘You must have been quite young at the time.’
‘Sixteen.’
So that made her twenty-six now. A plain Jane single woman sliding down the slippery slope to the big three-oh, so Daddy had agreed to set her up with a mail order groom.
Alejandro’s gut curdled with bitterness. Why had she chosen him? Why not some other guy who could stomach the thought of matrimony? Or was this some sort of payback for snubbing her in the past?
‘Is there somewhere we could talk?’ He threw a glance at the hovering butler, who looked as if he’d just stepped off a film shoot on a period drama. ‘In private?’
‘This way.’
Alejandro frowned as he followed her. She had a pronounced limp that made the action of walking look not only awkward but also painful, in spite of the use of the stick. One leg dragged slightly as if the muscles weren’t strong enough to take her full weight. Not that she was heavy or anything. She looked as if a gust of wind would send her into the next county. Was it a recent injury?
