of blonde, well-bred rugby groupies circulated amongst them, flirting and flattering.
Henry Calthorpe, the England rugby coach, had made a big deal about holding the party to announce the new squad at his stunning ancestral home, claiming it showed that they were a team, a unit, a family. Remembering this now, Alejandro couldn’t stop his lips curling into a sneer of savage, cynical amusement.
Everything about Harcourt Manor could have been specifically designed to emphasise exactly how much of an outsider Alejandro was. And he was damned sure that Henry Calthorpe had reckoned on that very thing.
At first Alejandro had thought he was being overly sensitive, that years in the English public school system had made him too quick to be on the defensive against bullying and victimization—but lately the coach’s animosity had become too obvious to ignore. Alejandro was playing better than he’d ever done, too well to be dropped from the team without reason, but the fact was that Calthorpe wanted him out. He was just waiting for Alejandro to slip up.
Alejandro hoped Calthorpe was a patient man, because he had no intention of obliging. He was at the top of his game and he planned to stay there.
Draining the champagne in one go, he put the glass down on a particularly expensive-looking carved chest and glanced disdainfully around the room. There was not a single person he wanted to talk to, he thought wearily. The girls were identikit blondes with cut-glass accents and Riviera suntans, whose conversation ranged from clothes to the hilarious exploits of people they’d gone to school with, and whom they assumed Alejandro would know. Several times at parties like these he’d ended up sleeping with one just to shut her up.
But tonight it all seemed too much effort. The England tie felt like a noose around his neck, and suddenly he needed to be outside in the cool air, out of this suffocating atmosphere of complacency and privilege. Adrenalin pounded through him as he pushed his way impatiently through the groups of people towards the door.
And that was when he saw her.
She was standing in the doorway, her head lowered slightly, one hand gripping the doorframe for support, giving her an air of shyness and uncertainty that was totally at odds with her short black dress and very high heels. But he didn’t notice the details of what she was wearing. It was her eyes that held him.
They were beautiful—green perhaps, almond shaped, slanting—but that was almost incidental. What made the breath catch in his throat was the laser-beam intensity of her gaze, which he could feel even from this distance.
His footsteps slowed as he got closer to her, but her gaze didn’t waver. She straightened slightly, as if she had been waiting for him, and her hand fell from the doorframe and smoothed down her short skirt.
‘You’re not leaving?’
Her voice was so low and hesitant, and her words halfway between a question and a statement. He gave a twisted smile.
‘I think it would be best if I did.’
He made to push past her. Close up, he could see that behind the smoky eye make up and the shiny inviting lip gloss she was younger than he’d at first thought. Her skin was clear and golden, and he noticed the frantic jump of the pulse in her throat. She was trembling slightly.
‘No,’ she said fiercely. ‘Please. Don’t leave.’
Interest flared up inside him, sudden and hot. He stopped, looking down at her sexy, rebellious dress, and then let his gaze move slowly back up to her face. Her cheeks were lightly stained with pink, and the eyes that looked up at him from under a fan of long, black lashes were dark and glittering. Seductive, but pleading.
‘Why not?’
Lowering her chin, she kept them fixed on his, while she took his hand and stepped backwards, pulling him with her. Her hand felt small in his, and her touch sent a small shower of shooting stars up his arm.
‘Because I want you.’ She smiled shyly, dropping her gaze. ‘I want you to stay.’
CHAPTER ONE
Six years later.
LEANING against the wall of the players’ tunnel at Twickenham when the final whistle went was a bit like being trapped inside the body of a giant beast in pain. Tamsin hadn’t been able to face watching the game, but she knew from the great, roaring groan that shook the ground beneath her feet and vibrated through her whole body that England had just fallen.
St George might have slain the dragon, but he’d certainly met his match in the mighty Barbarians.
Not that Tamsin was bothered about that. The team could have lost to a bunch of squealing six-year-old girls for all she cared, as long as they looked good while they were doing it.
She let out a shaky breath, pushing herself up and away from the wall, and discovering that her legs felt almost too weak to hold her up. This was the moment when she had to find out whether all the work of the past few months—and the frantic damage-limitation panic of the last eighteen hours—had paid off.
Like a sleepwalker she moved hesitantly to the mouth of the tunnel and looked out into the stadium, which stretched around her like some vast gladiatorial arena. Heads bent against the thin drizzle, shoulders stooped in defeat, the England team was making its way back towards the dressing room. Tamsin looked anxiously from one player to the next and, oblivious to the dejection and bewilderment on their exhausted faces, felt nothing but relief.
The players might not have performed brilliantly, but as far as she could see their shirts had, and to Tamsin—designer of the new and much-publicised England strip—that was all that mattered. She had already been on the receiving end of numerous barbed comments about what a coincidence it was that such a prestigious commission had been landed by the daughter of the new RFU chairman, so any whisper of failure on her part would be professional suicide.
Wearily, she dragged a hand through her short platinum-blonde hair and rubbed her tired eyes. That was why it was kind of important that news of last night’s little crisis with the pink shirts didn’t get out.
At the entrance to the tunnel, the bitter east wind that had made kicking so difficult for the players all afternoon almost knocked her over, slicing straight through her long ex-army greatcoat to the flimsy cocktail dress she wore beneath it. She’d left last night’s charity fashion-gala early and gone straight to the factory, and hadn’t had time to go home and change. Ten hours, numerous therapeutic phone-rants to Serena and a lot of very black coffee later, they’d had just enough newly printed shirts for the squad, but she’d spent the whole match praying there would be no substitutions. Only now did she feel she could breathe more easily.
The feeling lasted all of ten seconds.
Then she felt her mouth open in wordless horror. Looking up at the huge screen at the top of the south stand, the air was squeezed from her lungs and replaced with something that felt like napalm.
It was him.
So that was why the England squad had lost.
Alejandro D’Arienzo was back. And this time he was playing for the opposition. Tamsin’s heart seemed to have jumped out of her ribcage and lodged somewhere in her throat. How often in the last six years since that wonderful, devastating night at Harcourt had she thought she’d seen Alejandro D’Arienzo? Even though in her head she knew that he’d
