‘It must have hurt like mad and she didn’t say a word.’ The girl’s silence was obviously a symptom of an atmosphere of oppression in the workplace, she decided.
She turned back to the girl, the frost in her eyes warming to concern. ‘Look … sorry, I don’t know your name?’
‘Sabina.’
‘Well, Sabina, I think your hand needs cleaning—there might be some shreds of glass in it—and it needs dressing.’
The girl looked confused and Lucy turned to her fellow diners with an expression of exasperation. ‘Will someone help me out here?’ Her Spanish did not stretch to a translation.
It was Santiago who reacted first. Pushing aside his chair, he moved across to the timid-looking maid and spoke to her in Spanish. Lucy listened, unable to follow the rapid flow of words, noticing how different his voice sounded when he spoke to the girl, how kind and gentle.
Whatever he said made the girl smile and look less terrified. Across the table Ramon added something that drew a weak laugh from her.
Lucy was still holding the napkin to the wound but the girl was staring with starry-eyed devotion up at Santiago. Lucy bit her lip and looked away. Was there a female on the planet who didn’t think he walked on water? She thought, Am I the only person who sees him for what he is?
‘You can let go now, Miss Fitzgerald.’
Lucy started as the sound of Santiago’s deep voice jolted her out of her brooding reverie.
‘Josef will take over from here.’
‘What? Oh, yes, of course.’ She nodded to the sober suited solemn-faced man standing at her side and removed her hand from the makeshift dressing. ‘You need to apply pressure.’
‘Josef is more than capable, Miss Fitzgerald.’ Santiago’s dismissive glance swept across her face before he turned back to the girl, his manner changing as he spoke to her softly before she was led from the room by the older man.
‘Perhaps you would like to clean up, Miss Fitzgerald?’
She glanced down to hide her hot cheeks, mortified as her body reacted with dramatic tingling awareness to the critical clinical stare directed at the smears of blood on the upper slopes of her breasts.
She could see his point, a little blood could go a long way and the smears did look awful.
‘And obviously you will send me a bill for the cleaning.’
Actually he was just realising that nothing about this woman was obvious.
She had had an expensive dress ruined and, obviously, spoilt, self-absorbed materialist that she was, there should have been tantrums. But no, what did she do? Go all Mother Teresa on him! And he’d seen her face—her concern was either genuine or she was the best actress he had ever seen.
So maybe she was not all bad, but her redemption was not his business. Saving his brother was.
For Lucy the faint sneer in his voice was the last straw. She could almost hear the sound of her control snapping as she turned on him, eyes blazing, bosom heaving.
‘I can pay my own bills. Do you think I give a damn about the dress? I …’ She stopped, horrified to feel the prick of tears behind her eyelids. ‘I’ll go wash up!’ she blurted, making a dash for the door.
OUTSIDE the room Lucy had composed herself enough to ask for directions to the bathroom when she was approached by a staff member in the bewildering baronial hallway.
In the decadently appointed bathroom she had been directed to, Lucy stood with her hands under the running water, waiting for the desire to cry her eyes out to subside.
Finally feeling marginally more composed, she looked at her reflection in the mirror above the marble washbasin. The lighting above it emphasised the waxy pallor of her oval face; she didn’t even have her bag with her to make running repairs to her make-up.
With a deep troubled sigh she set about sponging the smears of blood from her skin and clothes.
Reluctant to leave the marble lined sanctuary, Lucy stood with her back against the cool wall. She shook her head, still totally bewildered. She had no idea what had been going on in there, didn’t have a clue why she had blown up that way.
Her efforts to analyse what had happened and why were hindered by the fact that every time she felt an answer to the puzzle was in reach, the image of his dark face and sleek body rose in her head, effectively blanking everything else.
What is your problem Lucy? He was meant to think she cared more about dresses than people, that had been the idea, so why had she reacted that way?
She had no idea how long she had been standing there before there was a tentative tap on the door. It was followed by a voice calling her name.
‘I just wondered—are you all right, Lucy?’
Lucy straightened her shoulders, took a deep sustaining breath and opened the door. An anxious-looking Ramon, who was standing directly behind it, took a step back.
‘I’m fine,’ she said, forcing a smile as she emerged. ‘Sorry about that but I’ve never liked the sight of even a speck of blood.’ She stopped and shook her head and looked at him with eyes dark with emotion. ‘I’m fine with blood, Ramon, but not your brother. I can’t do this … over the years I’ve developed a thick skin but somehow he manages … I’m tired of being judged,’ she finished with a weary sigh.
Ramon shook his head and looked remorseful as he enfolded her in a comforting bear hug. ‘God, no, it’s me. I shouldn’t have asked you to do this. It’s my problem, not yours, and to be honest I wasn’t expecting Santiago to be quite so …’ His hands slid down her arms and stayed there.
Standing in the loose circle of his arms, Lucy gave a shrug. ‘And you thought I could take it? I thought so, too,’ she admitted. ‘I really don’t care what your brother thinks of me,’ she hastened to assure Ramon. ‘But this stopped being my idea of a fun evening when he started making snide remarks about my family.’
‘I understand,’ Ramon said.
Lucy was wondering a little uneasily about the inflection in his voice when he reached out and touched her forehead. ‘God, you’re going to have a bruise there,’ he said, touching the discoloured area that was developing on her forehead. ‘You really took a bang.’
Santiago stood in the minstrels’ gallery, his unblinking stare trained on the couple below, tension vibrating in every taut fibre of his lean body as he listened to the buzz of their soft voices, unable to make out the words, but you didn’t need words to see the intimacy in the way they stood close together.
When his brother touched her face tenderly he turned, biting back a harsh gasp as he felt something kick hard and low in his belly.
‘I’ll try and stay in character,’ Lucy promised Ramon. ‘But after tonight that’s it.’
She returned to the dining room with some trepidation, but the rest of meal passed relatively uneventfully. Their host showed little inclination to make conversation other than a few passing asides to Carmella, which should have been a good thing but turned out not to be.
Lucy was painfully conscious of his eyes following her and spent the entire meal waiting for him to pounce, so tense that every bone in her body ached with it.
And of course she did what she always did when she was nervous: she babbled like an idiot until the sound of her own bright chattering voice was giving even her a headache. Afterwards she didn’t have a clue what she had been talking about, which was probably a good thing.
Santiago