Aware that it might appear he was staring at the heaving contours of her full breasts, which he was, but with total clinical objectivity—not everyone might get the objectivity—Santiago dragged his gaze clear.
‘Your leg.’ For the first time he saw the damage done to the well-worn jodhpurs that clung to her hips and the long lines of her magnificent legs. Along the outside of the right leg the fabric was torn, from thigh to ankle it gaped, revealing a section of bare skin.
His fingertips barely brushed her calf before she snatched her leg up. ‘It’s fine—a graze.’ With a dismissive shrug she tucked the limb underneath her and concentrated on the pain in her calf to stop herself thinking about how much she had wanted him to touch her.
Perhaps she had had a knock on the head?
Friday night it had been the glass of wine, or so she had told herself through the long, sleepless, guilt-racked night that had followed, and now it was a bang on the head—what excuse would she have the next time she found herself craving this man’s touch?
There isn’t going to be a next time.
He arched a sardonic brow and shrugged. ‘If you say so.’ The doctor might have other thoughts. The groove above his nose deepened as he glanced down the track—where was the doctor?
‘I do,’ she said firmly.
As he replayed the phone conversation of moments before in his head the oddness of Ramon’s response to his request to call for a doctor struck Santiago for the first time.
‘Good idea,’ his half-brother had said without asking why or for whom medical assistance was required.
Hand on the back of her neck, she angled a cautious look at Santiago’s face. She knew the lull in hostilities would not last; this reprieve was definitely only temporary. Even when she hadn’t ridden off on his favourite horse he couldn’t open his mouth without being snide and cutting.
Now she actually was in the wrong the comfort of the moral high ground was a dim and distant memory … Oh, God. She took a deep breath and thought, Take it like a man, Lucy. Bite the bullet and when you run out of clichés, apologise. She closed her eyes and thought, What the hell was I thinking?
She hated admitting she was wrong at the best of times, but admitting it to Santiago made it a hundred times worse. She could take his anger—it was the knowing she deserved it that she struggled with.
Crazily, with all the legitimate things she had to stress about, it was the irrational one that was giving Lucy the most problems. She knew he couldn’t read her mind—he just liked to leave the impression he was all-seeing, all-knowing—yet she couldn’t shake the conviction that he was going to look at her and know she had spent the last few nights fantasising about him.
‘Did Santana run home?’ she asked in a small voice.
Santiago’s head jerked towards her, his silent anger more articulate than a stream of abuse.
Unable to take her eyes off the errant muscle that was clenching and unclenching spasmodically in his cheek, in the face of his fury she leapt to the obvious conclusion. She began to shake her head in denial.
‘Oh, no, he isn’t injured …!’ The thought of being responsible for an injury to that beautiful and expensive animal … God, no wonder he looked as if he wanted to throttle her. ‘He’s …’ Her blue eyes widened in her milk-pale face as she whispered fearfully, ‘He’s not dead, is he?’
‘Would you care if he was?’
A sound close to a whimper emerged from her throat and Santiago, who never had been comfortable with kicking someone when they were down, took pity on her obvious distress.
‘I have no idea how Santana is,’ he admitted, before adding with a scowl, ‘But he was so spooked when I saw him that it will probably take a week for him to calm down and an army to catch him.’ He lied, well aware that the animal would have gone straight back to his stable.
‘I’m so, so sorry.’
‘For stealing a valuable horse, for proving you can’t handle anything bigger than a donkey or for getting caught?’
Her blue eyes flew wide. ‘I didn’t steal anything!’
He arched a brow at the protest. ‘Tell that to the police.’
She regarded him in horror. ‘You wouldn’t call the police.’
He smiled and arched a sardonic brow. ‘You think?’
Was he serious? Lucy refused to let him see that his threat had scared her. ‘I think you’re a total bastard.’
‘Not illegal last time I researched the subject.’ He gave a nasty smile. ‘Unlike horse stealing.’
‘I wasn’t stealing your horse, I was just … riding him.’
‘Why?’
She blinked, struggling after the fact to explain even to herself the impulse that had made her take the horse out. ‘Why not?’ She shrugged.
‘So this is a case of anything Lucy sees and wants Lucy has to have even if it belongs to someone else?’ Didn’t she understand that a person could not have anything they wanted? There were rules, like the unwritten one that said a man did not muscle in on his brother’s girlfriend—did it count when you’d be saving your brother from a terrible fate? Did the unwritten rule stand when the brother in question didn’t possess your own ability to keep your sexual appetites and your emotions separate from a terrible fate?
Lucy saw where he was going with this. ‘Ramon doesn’t belong to anyone else, even though you went out of your way to make it seem like he does.’
Santiago’s scowl deepened. He had thrown Carmella, with her crush on Ramon, into the mix hoping she would offer a distraction with her youth and innocence. He was ready to admit that his plan had failed miserably and he felt guilty for using the kid.
‘But Denis Mulville did.’ What chance would any wife have if Lucy Fitzgerald decided she wanted a man?
At the name Lucy’s face lost any colour it had regained. The condemnation on his face was nothing new. She had seen similar expressions on the faces of virtually everyone she met four years ago, and some of those faces had belonged to people she had considered friends.
At the centre of a storm of ill will Lucy had felt every cruel word and jeer until she had taught herself not to care about the opinion of others. People could and would think what they liked, but so long as she knew the truth that was all that mattered … at least in theory.
Reality meant that there had still been nights when she had cried herself to sleep and days when she had longed to put her side of the story, but she had maintained her dignified silence even after the gagging order was lifted.
Not once had she yelled at one of her accusers—’I never slept with the man. He was a creep!’
As she did now, ironically to someone whose good opinion meant nothing to her, someone who dismissed her words with a contemptuous shrug.
There was a chance, Santiago thought, that she told the literal truth—a man who got her in bed would not be likely to fall asleep!
‘How did you justify breaking up a family?’ A hissing sound of disgust issued from between his clenched teeth as he dragged a hand through his ebony hair. ‘Do you tell yourself that he wouldn’t look at you if he had a happy marriage? That there wouldn’t have been an affair if the marriage hadn’t been in trouble to begin with—isn’t that what the other woman always says?’
‘You tell me! You seem the expert on the subject.’
She broke off, wincing as she experienced a stomach cramp a lot sharper