KIM LAWRENCE lives on a farm in rural Anglesey. She runs two miles daily and finds this an excellent opportunity to unwind and seek inspiration for her writing! It also helps her keep up with her husband, two active sons, and the various stray animals which have adopted them. Always a fanatical consumer of fiction, she is now equally enthusiastic about writing. She loves a happy ending!

Don’t miss Kim Lawrence’s exciting new novel, Unworldly Secretary, Untamed Greek, available in September 2010 from Mills & Boon.

Chapter One

FLEUR STEWART woke up and after a few minutes of lying there listening to bird song she forced her eyelids open. Yawning, she squinted at the clock on the bedside table. It was eight-thirty.

It was also her birthday. She was twenty-five, an entire quarter of a century. She resisted the temptation to ask herself what she had done with the first twenty-five years, because that would have inevitably led to her asking herself what she planned to do with the next twenty-five.

And Fleur didn’t know.

She wasn’t making any plans at all. She was going with the flow. Because life, she reflected, pulling the duvet over her head and burrowing down, never quite turned out the way you expected.

She had only ever wanted to act. The dream had been born the day her parents had taken her to see a matinee performance of a West End musical when she was eight. It had died midway through her second term at drama school. To be precise, on the day she had badly botched an audition everyone had thought was hers and realised that the only thing standing between her and a glittering career was a complete absence of talent.

The next day, and still in the same self-pitying, despondent frame of mind, she had met Adam Moore, a final-year law student. Good-looking Adam had been incredibly supportive and sympathetic when, over her second glass of wine, she had confided her doubts. A kindred spirit, he had seen her point immediately. What was the point staying on at drama school if you were only ever going to be mediocre?

This had been a lot easier to hear than, ‘You’ve got to develop a thicker skin,’ which was the attitude her friends, who hadn’t taken her crisis of confidence seriously, had adopted.

Adam had told her that a girl with her brains could do a lot better for herself than acting and Fleur had been flattered and believed him. Or at least she had convinced herself she believed him. Deep down even then Fleur had known that what she was really doing was choosing the easy option.

Three months later she and Adam had been engaged and she’d been happily waiting tables. And if she’d ever stopped to wonder what she was doing or ask herself if she was really happy, she’d reminded herself that this was a purely temporary measure. And the tips had been very good, which had been great because it had made sense for Adam to concentrate on his studies without worrying about little things like paying the rent.

Contemplating the painful naïveté of her younger self inevitably made Fleur despise herself, so she tried hard not to revisit the past. She tried to live in the present.

The present was actually surprisingly good.

Four years on there was no Adam. Admittedly there was no stage career either, but happily she was no longer waiting tables!

She loved her job teaching drama at the local college. Her colleagues were a decent bunch, the work was challenging and she loved the buzz of being around young, and, for the most part, enthusiastic people. If ever any of her students felt like throwing in the towel, Fleur told them that, sure, they might not have what it took, but they’d never know for sure if they didn’t show a little backbone when the going got tough.

The biggest plus of the job was that nobody here knew about her recent history. That being so, there were none of the sympathetic looks she hated or ‘I do admire you, you’re so brave for getting on with your life’—as if she had a choice—remarks to deal with.

No matter how much you enjoyed your job it was still a nice feeling come Saturday to wake up and pull the covers over your head and have a nice lazy lie-in. This Saturday, birthday or no, the lie-in was not a long one. The late-August sun shining through the thin curtains of her bedroom was just too tempting. It made her think of blackberries, walking the rescue dog her friend Jane had foisted on her the previous month and the million and one things that needed doing in the garden.

For a town girl she had adapted to the rural existence really well.

Fleur was still in her pyjamas when the phone rang.

She set aside an unopened birthday card and took a slurp of her freshly brewed coffee before padding barefoot through to the hallway to answer it.

‘Happy Birthday!’ The sound of Jane’s voice brought a smile to her face. Jane, a fashion photographer with copper hair and a sarcastic tongue, was the sort of person whose enthusiasm for life was infectious.

Sometimes Fleur wished she had half of Jane’s energy. It was Jane who had encouraged her to move out of London after the miscarriage, and after Adam’s infidelity had been exposed, and it had been Jane who had told her to go for it when the job in the drama department had been advertised.

‘Did you get my card?’

‘I was just about to open it.’

‘I wish I could be there. Next week, though, we’ll really let down our hair,’ Jane promised. ‘Get out your sexiest shoes, I have plans.’

Fleur winced. She had a horrible suspicion that her friend’s plans would involve pushing her at a member of the opposite sex. The problem with Jane, she brooded, was she imagined she was subtle. She was anything but! ‘There’s not a lot of call for sexy shoes around here.’

‘Now you just sound sad,’ Jane informed her tartly. ‘There is always room in a girl’s life for sexy shoes. It makes me really mad when I think how you waste your legs.’ She sighed enviously. ‘Look at me—legs like a Welsh Corgi, but do I sit at home nights moping? No, I—’

‘All right, I get the message,’ Fleur protested. ‘I’ll make an effort.’

‘Have you got anything planned for tonight?’

Fleur knew that admitting the only thing she had planned was a night in front of the TV would earn her a stern lecture on the need to get out there, so she got creative. ‘A drink with some friends from work.’ Nobody at work, where she had cultivated a reputation for being reserved, actually knew it was her birthday.

‘Well, that’s good. And how is our dog?’

‘Our dog is eating his way through my furniture. I don’t possess a chair without teeth marks. You’ve no idea how happy I am you decided I needed the company.’

An overlong pause followed her teasing comment.

‘You know I’m only kidding…?’ Fleur frowned. It wasn’t like Jane not to come back with a sarcastic retort. ‘I love the mutt.’

‘It’s not like you’re not totally over him. You are, aren’t you? Over him, that is.’

‘I assume you’re talking about Adam?’ This much Fleur had managed to extract from her friend’s disjointed monologue. ‘I’m insulted you can ask, but, yes, I am very much over him.’

‘Paula’s pregnant,’ Jane blurted. ‘She and Adam are having a baby.’

It was a guilty-sounding Jane who eventually broke the lengthening silence.

‘I’m sorry, Fleur, I didn’t know whether to tell you…’

Fleur took a deep breath and pressed a hand to her churning stomach. A baby…!

She inhaled deeply, recognising her reaction to the news her ex-fiancé and his new wife were having a baby as irrational. Recognition didn’t make the feeling go away; crazily it felt more of a betrayal than learning about his affair had.

‘No, I’m glad you did, Jane,’ she said, trying hard to sound as though she meant it.

‘I thought Adam might have mentioned it…?’

‘I haven’t spoken to him for months.’ Not since her ex-fiancé had married the woman she now knew he had started sleeping with while she’d been pregnant.

A perfectly natural reaction, he had belligerently claimed for a man who had found himself forced against his will into fatherhood. The implication, false though it was, that she had deliberately trapped him with the pregnancy had hurt and angered Fleur incredibly deeply at the time. But then she had still harboured some daft idea that her ex wasn’t a total loser!

God, how was I ever that stupid?

‘The slimy rat!’ Jane, never one to hold back, observed viciously. ‘That pair deserve one another.’

‘I suppose Adam’s allowed a life.’

With a sigh she brushed her hair from her face anchoring it at the nape of her neck, and wondered, Am I jealous? Not of Adam and Paula. She had long ago recognised that her feelings for Adam had never amounted to love, not the lasting variety. But maybe of what they had…?

What she would never have. It wasn’t men she didn’t trust, just her own judgement.

‘After what he did to you! The only life slimy rat is allowed is one filled with misery and suffering!’ Jane, not a big believer in turning the other cheek, bellowed down the other end of the line.

Holding the receiver away from her ear, Fleur heard Jane add bitterly, ‘The man was in bed, your bed, with that woman when you were in hospital…sorry, Fleur,’ she added immediately, sounding contrite. ‘Me and my big mouth…I didn’t mean to open old wounds.’

Fleur eased her bottom onto the edge of the small console table and fiddled with the top button of her pyjama jacket. ‘Don’t worry about it, Jane. I was going to find out some time,’ she said, thinking some wounds never did heal. And the wound in question wasn’t actually such an old one.

Sometimes it felt like a lifetime ago and other times it felt like yesterday, but in reality it had been eighteen months since Fleur had been rushed into Casualty midway through what had been a difficult pregnancy.

Jane, who had been there with her, had desperately tried to contact Adam for her while the grave-faced doctor had told Fleur that he was very sorry but there was no heartbeat.

‘I do worry. It’s my fault you split up…’

‘Because you caught them in bed?’ When she had not been able to locate Adam Jane had offered to go to the flat to fetch Fleur’s night things. She had found more than she had expected! ‘Don’t be stupid, Jane. How could it possibly be your fault?’ Fleur protested angrily.

‘They say personal tragedy can make people closer than ever…?’ From her voice Fleur could imagine the look of guilt on Jane’s face. ‘If I’d just—’

Fleur cut her off. ‘If we’d been that close I doubt if you’d have found him in bed with someone else.’

In retrospect it didn’t seem possible that she had missed the signs that Adam was having an affair. Nothing had clicked with her—not his unexplained absences, or the caller who had always rung off when Fleur had picked up the phone. Fleur had been concerned, but only about Adam’s increasing resentment of the restrictions the doctors had placed on her after the threatened miscarriage earlier on in her pregnancy.

‘He started an affair with Paula weeks after we moved into the flat.’ And it is not my fault, she told herself firmly. ‘You and I both know that the split-up was inevitable. If I hadn’t fallen pregnant I think it would have happened sooner,’ she admitted.

Once she had discovered she was having a baby, Fleur had pushed her growing doubts about their relationship to one side. She’d had to make it work, for the baby’s sake. A child needed two parents.

‘I didn’t mean to, I really didn’t, not after what you’d just been through. I was going to wait until you were better, and then he turned up at the hospital with those stupid flowers, all concerned. Ugh! He looked so smug and smarmy and had the nerve to act as though nothing had happened, I just flipped. I couldn’t help myself. It was a red-mist moment.’

‘I’m glad you did flip.’ Of course, gratitude hadn’t been Fleur’s response at the time, but later she had come to appreciate she had actually had a lucky escape.

She would never again let a man do to her what Adam had.

Let one try, Fleur thought, her eyes narrowing as she contemplated what she would do to any man unwise enough to attempt to locate her heart. She was no longer the hopeless romantic; her defences were totally impregnable.

He was gifted, rich, handsome and then some. If pressed to explain the secret of his success, Antonio Rochas explained there was no magic formula—he just didn’t accept less than excellence from himself.

Only the previous week his face had graced the cover of no fewer than three internationally acclaimed financial journals. His reputation alone swung deals.

His reputation cut no ice with one particular female.

Antonio had been a father for a week.

He wasn’t excelling at parenthood!

If his colleagues wondered about the source of uncharacteristic moodiness displayed by their charismatic and normally even-tempered boss during the last week, they had not done so outloud.

Huw Grant, a top-notch criminal lawyer and one of Antonio’s closest friends, was less restrained.

‘You don’t look like a man who has just won…now they have reason to look less than happy,’ Huw observed, watching from the privacy of the penthouse executive office suite as a trio of dark-suited figures far below left the London Rochas building. ‘The poor guys came here thinking they could steal a march on you, Antonio…’

Always a fatal mistake, thought the shorter man, studying the hard lines of his friend’s classically featured lean face. It occurred to him, and not for the first time, that it was infinitely preferable to be this man’s friend than his enemy.

Antonio, who was sitting staring broodingly into the distance, shrugged and brushed away an invisible fleck from his impeccable jacket. ‘They did not do their homework,’ he observed dismissively.

‘But you did…?’

The network of fine lines fanning Antonio’s electric-blue eyes deepened as his long dark lashes lifted from the slashing angle of his high cheekbones. ‘I always do my homework, Huw.’

Just as he had more recently done his homework on Charles Finch.

But then when a man walked into your office and calmly announced you were the biological father of his thirteen-year-old daughter you had a lot of questions that needed answering.

He now had the answers to some of those questions, including the results of a DNA test.

According to the information that had landed on his desk, the only thing Charles Finch and his late wife had had in common was a mutual loathing and the fact they had spent more time in other people’s beds than their own.

Miranda’s reason for staying in the sham marriage had been obvious. As Antonio was only too well aware, she had had expensive tastes and social aspirations to match.

Charles Finch’s reasons had been less immediately obvious. But then why, he mused, did people stay in bad marriages? Marriages that looked perfect on the surface, but underneath had more in common with open warfare than mutual support or love?

Presumably the other man had got something he’d needed from the twisted relationship, though what it was Antonio could not even begin to imagine.

Huw moved from the window and observed, ‘And this time your homework just made you a conservative twenty million. Of course, being as ruthless as hell with no scruples to speak of helps.’

Amusement flickered in Antonio’s blue eyes, eyes made more arresting by the contrasting Mediterranean colouring of his skin. ‘You think I represent the ugly face of capitalism?’

‘Not ugly,’ the other man objected wryly.

Though if Huw’s own wife was to be believed, it wasn’t just his perfect features and lean, athletic body that made women unable to take their eyes—and hands—off Antonio. It was the aura of earthy sensuality that he apparently exuded from every pore.

Not, his wife had hastily assured him, that she was affected by it.

‘But you really should carry a government health warning. I mean, when was the last time someone got the better of you financially speaking? Oh, I know you’re not interested in money for the sake of it,’ he admitted. ‘But you can’t deny that you enjoy winning.’

Antonio’s brows lifted. ‘Doesn’t everyone?’

‘Well, you don’t look like you do,’ his friend observed frankly.

‘Let’s just say I have other things on my mind…’ Abruptly Antonio stopped sorting files and sought the other man’s eyes, then shook his head and said, ‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘Clearly it does,’ Huw said, his curiosity whetted by this uncharacteristic behaviour. ‘You’ve been odd all week.’

Antonio leaned back in his seat and stretched his long, long legs in front of him. He rested his chin on his steepled fingers. ‘You know Finch…?’

‘The law firm Finch? Finch, Abbott and Ingham…Finch?’

Antonio nodded.

‘Cold guy. Got a really classy-looking wife, as I recall.’

‘The classy-looking wife is dead,’ Antonio said. Cancer, her husband had said.

Miranda was dead. Antonio still struggled with the impossible concept.

In his head she was so alive, her image frozen in his memory as she had been the summer he had met and fallen in love with her. He could see her laughing, her head thrown back to reveal her lovely throat. She had laughed a lot, especially when he had announced he loved her and wanted to take care of her.

‘What a sweet boy you are,’ she had said when she had finally realised he was deadly serious. ‘Look, what we had was fun, that’s all. Don’t spoil it by being silly about this.’

When he persisted she was more brutal.

‘Be serious—what would a woman like me want with a penniless waiter? When I get married it won’t be because he’s good in bed, and, darling, you really are. I can get sex anywhere. When I get married it will be to a man who can give me the life I deserve.’

Unable to interpret the edge in his friend’s voice, Huw frowned. ‘Bad luck. I only met him around, as you do. What’s he got to do with anything?’

‘He came to see me last month. It appears that his daughter isn’t…’

‘Isn’t what?’ asked Huw, looking confused.

‘His. She’s mine.’

Chapter Two

ANTONIO almost smiled as Huw’s face fell, increasing his resemblance to a startled spaniel. A resemblance that belied the criminal lawyer’s sharp intellect and had lulled many an adversary into a false sense of security.

‘Yours…?’

Antonio ran a long brown finger down the spine of a book on his desk. ‘It would seem so. I have a daughter who is thirteen and she thinks I’m a monster. She tells anyone who will listen that I’m kidnapping her.’

‘Kidnapping…?’

‘Finch told her he’s fighting a strenuous legal battle to get her back.’

‘Get her back!’ Huw exclaimed. ‘What legal battle? You mean the girl is staying with you? Is that a good idea?’

A nerve in Antonio’s jaw clenched as he observed grimly, ‘There wasn’t much time to consider the options.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘After he broke the news to me Finch explained he had Tamara waiting in the car complete with overnight bag. The rest of her things were delivered the next day. He made it pretty clear to me in private that he wants nothing more to do with her.’

‘Nothing…?’ Huw struggled with the concept.

A nerve clenched along Antonio’s firm jaw. His lashes swept downwards concealing the glow of rage that lit his blue eyes. ‘He never wants to see her again.’

‘What a total bastard!’

Antonio could not disagree with this shocked assessment.

‘A bastard who can act.’ Antonio got to his feet and pushed aside his chair.

His friend watched him walk across to the window and wondered, with a touch of envy, what it would be like to effortlessly dominate any room you were in with mere physical presence.

‘It was quite a performance,’ Antonio admitted, looking out at the cityscape. ‘Finch made a very convincing heartbroken father. The law is apparently on my side—’

‘That’s debatable.’

‘And it seems I woke up one morning and decided to snatch the child, who apparently I rejected as a baby, away from her loving home.’

And Antonio had been forced to stand there and listen, unable to deny the barrage of lies without revealing the man his daughter had called Father for the past thirteen years was discarding her like a worn-out toy.

He was no psychologist, but Antonio couldn’t think this would make any kid, let alone one who had recently lost her mother, feel particularly secure!

‘That’s what the girl thinks? No wonder she’s telling people you’ve kidnapped her! The man’s a—’

‘Suffice it to say that Finch does not have a warm loving personality. I think he must have been one of those children who got their kicks pulling the wings off flies.’

‘Sociopathic tendencies,’ Huw inserted knowledgeably.

‘If you say so.’ Antonio was not really interested in labels. ‘He does like to see people squirm.’

Huw frowned, unable to believe his friend was as calm as he appeared. Just imagining how such a shocking revelation would rock his own comfortable world brought him out in a cold sweat.

‘Antonio, if this guy is out for revenge and he doesn’t care about hurting the girl, isn’t his next port of call going to be the tabloids? I know you don’t give a damn what they write about you, though I still think that if you were more litigious they’d think twice, but—’

‘Now there,’ mocked Antonio, ‘speaks a lawyer. Don’t worry, there will be no story.’

Huw studied his friend’s face with a frown. ‘You’re sure about that?’

Antonio nodded. The smile that lifted the corners of his expressive mouth did not touch his eyes. They were arctic-cold. ‘Absolutely sure. Charles Finch is in no position to throw stones.’

Huw’s eyes widened as comprehension dawned. ‘You’ve got some dirt on him, haven’t you?’ He should have known that Antonio would already have that base covered. The other man did not leave things to chance.

‘Let’s just say that our Mr Finch has sailed a little close to the wind, legally speaking, on several occasions. I have often observed it is often the way with greedy men,’ he remarked contemptuously.

‘And he—Finch—knows you know about these indiscretions?’ Huw suggested.

‘I might have mentioned it,’ he admitted casually.

Huw gave a sigh of relief. ‘Well, that’s something. Antonio, I hope you’re not taking this guy’s word…just because you knew his wife…?’ Huw touched on the subject cautiously. Antonio was notoriously tightlipped when it came to his personal life.

Sometimes he thought that was why the tabloids’ pursuit of the wealthy Spaniard was so relentless. They simply couldn’t deal with his total and, as far as Huw could tell, genuine indifference to them.

‘It was before she was his wife.’ Antonio, his expression unreadable, dextrously twirled a pen between his long fingers. ‘Apparently she kept a diary for years, a detailed diary, which is how Finch came to discover Tamara wasn’t his.’

‘Being in a diary doesn’t make something the truth. I kept a diary when I was a kid, it was a work of total fiction. And if you were going to invent a fictional father for your kid the rich and powerful Antonio Rochas would be a pretty good choice, don’t you think?’

‘This was nearly fourteen years ago. The rich and powerful Antonio Rochas did not exist. I was a college student pleasing my father by learning the business from the bottom up. I was working as a waiter in one of our hotels.’

‘She didn’t know you were the boss’s son?’

‘Nobody but the manager knew who I was. Besides, I just knew the moment I saw the girl that she was mine.’

Huw was appalled by the harsh admission. ‘God, you can’t rely on gut instincts, Antonio!’

‘Don’t worry, this isn’t a total leap of faith. Finch was considerate enough to supply Tamara’s DNA. I had the required tests done.’

‘So there’s no doubt…?’

Antonio shook his head.

‘Hell I don’t know what I’d do if it happened to me. What are you going to do?’

‘Go back to the Grange.’

‘She’s there?’

Antonio nodded. ‘It seemed less traumatic than dragging her back to Spain with me.’ The home where his English mother had been brought up and where he had spent happy vacations as a child had passed to him on his grandfather’s death. Going there had seemed a good alternative to returning home.

‘Your mother’s there?’

‘My mother is on her world cruise,’ Antonio reminded him. ‘She offered to come home, but I thought it might be better if we had some time alone.’ That had been eight days ago. If asked again today, Antonio was not sure his response to the maternal offer would be the same!

‘Is there anything I can do…?’ Huw tried not to look too obviously relieved when Antonio assured him there wasn’t.

The door slammed. Antonio was beginning to suspect that his immediate future held a lot of door slamming.

There had to be a solution to this problem, he told himself. Experience had taught him there was always a solution.

He just didn’t know what it was yet.

‘You don’t want me any more than I want you,’ his new daughter had yelled before her dramatic exit from the room. ‘You wish I don’t even exist! Do you wish I hadn’t been born? Stupid question—of course you do. You’re not even English. And,’ she added, glaring up into his lean dark face, ‘it’s your fault I’m so horribly tall! I got your genes!’

‘I am your father.’

The gentle reminder precipitated her flight.

Hand on the door handle, she turned back, tears sparkling in her eyes.

‘Biological father!’ she sneered, making it sound like the worst insult in the world. ‘And why are your eyes so blue? They’re spooky…like a wolf or something with those dark rings around the iris. This place isn’t my home and if anyone here calls me Miss Rochas again I’ll scream. My name is Finch. I can’t even pronounce Rochas. I hate it and I hate you! I wish you were dead!’

At intervals he heard the slamming of several more doors.

Well, that went well.

As he looked out through the full-length Georgian windows to the green sweep of manicured lawn beyond, Tamara, her hair flying out behind her, was running as though the devil himself were on her heels.

Antonio knew that this role had been assigned to him in her eyes.

It would be dark in another hour and, though the evening was one of his favourite times to walk the woods, he was pretty sure a town-bred girl would not enjoy the experience.

On his way out, he shrugged on a jacket and shoved a torch in his pocket.

He was in luck—well, it had to happen some time—the gardener had seen her heading in the direction of the west wood. By the time he had vaulted over a stile and entered the wood the shadows were deepening and so was his concern.

Alternately calling her name and pausing to listen, he made his way deeper until finally his efforts were rewarded by suspicious rustling sounds a few hundred yards to his right, where he knew there was a clearing.

‘Tamara! This is pointless. It is—’ Before he had time to complete his appeal a dog, possibly the most unattractive animal he had ever seen in his life, shot out of the undergrowth blocking his path. It bared its teeth and emitted a ferocious growl.

Antonio regarded the animal with irritation rather than fear. It was small, and animals liked him—they always had.

‘Clear off!’ he said, using a firm, calm tone.

Animals responded well to a firm, calm tone.

Nobody had told this dog about the firm, calm tone. It carried on growling, if anything more ferociously. Ignoring the warning signs, Antonio went to move past him, at which point the animal went for his ankle. He looked down in total astonishment at it, then rolled his eyes and cursed.

Could this day get any worse?

He soon discovered that it could.

12 3 Keying.

The Spaniard's Pleasure: The Spaniard's Pregnancy Proposal / At the Spaniard's Convenience / Taken: the Spaniard's Virgin

Kim ushbu kitobni izlagan bo`lsa,o`qimoqda

The Spaniard’s PleasureKim LawrenceMargaret MayoLucy Monroe

The Spaniard’s Pregnancy Proposal

Kim Lawrence

About the Author

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Muallifning boshqa kitoblari

The Spaniard’s Pleasure
Kim Lawrence
Margaret Mayo
Lucy Monroe