The Caged Tiger. PENNY JORDAN

could have come after us,’ Davina reminded him levelly. ‘If you’d really wanted us….’

      He made a harsh, guttural sound in his throat, his eyes darkening to anger. ‘Is that what you wanted in a husband, Davina, a man who would prove himself to you over and over again? And the man you left me for? The Englishman who meant more to you than your marriage vows—what happened to him, or did he no longer want you when you stopped calling yourself the Condesa de Silvadores?’

      Davina had never been able to think of the title in connection with herself, but she was too bewildered by what Ruy had said to pay too much attention to his reminder that she had stopped using his name when she left his house. There had been no man in her life since the day she met Ruy, apart from his son, and it infuriated her to think that he dared to berate her about some imagined lover when he…

      ‘There was no one!’ she started to protest angrily, but Ruy’s expression said that he did not believe her.

      ‘No?’ he sneered. ‘You are lying to me, querida. You were seen with him in Seville. And it is known that you left Spain with him, taking my child with you.’

      From the past Davina conjured up the memory of a bearded, fair-haired fellow-Briton she had met in Seville. He had been an artist, and with this common bond between them they had started talking. Davina dimly remembered that her mother-in-law had found them chatting enthusiastically to one another in a small pavement café, and she, innocent that she was, had assumed the older woman’s contempt sprang from discovering her drinking coffee in such a shabby little place, but now, with the benefit of hindsight, she realised that the Condesa must have thought she was having an affair, perhaps as a means of getting back at Ruy. So now she knew why Ruy had been so reluctant to believe that Jamie was his—and she hadn’t helped. Although she had known of her pregnancy she had said nothing for several months, trapped in the bitterness of knowing herself unloved and keeping the knowledge of Jamie’s conception to herself as though she could use it as a talisman to ward off the threat of Carmelita.