‘I can’t understand why you are not staying with your sister at my grandmother’s home,’ Antonio admitted, assisting her into a long, low-slung fire-engine-red sports car that would have looked at home in a Bond movie.
‘I didn’t want to intrude—’
‘I’m not happy that you should be staying in an apartment alone. I do not wish to imply criticism of your sister, but you should be relaxing and enjoying my family’s hospitality. I’ll wait while you pack,’ Antonio imparted with the quiet but absolute authority of a male accustomed to instant obedience to his every expressed wish.
‘But I’m not alone…er, I’m with friends,’ Sophie protested awkwardly, recognising the impossibility of naming her father when Belinda had begged her not to tell a living soul that they were actually only half-sisters because their late mother had had an extramarital affair. Her sibling had been ashamed of that history, had already refused to share it with Pablo and had been determined that his aristocratic relatives should not find out about it either.
‘Friends?’ Antonio queried, his bewilderment visibly growing.
‘Yes, I decided to make a holiday out of my trip over here…nothing wrong with that, is there?’
‘No, there is not,’ Antonio drawled in a measured tone. ‘But you only arrived in Spain this morning and are perhaps not the best judge of good accommodation. My cousin owns a local business and he tells me that the tourist complex where you are staying has a bad name. The police are often called there to deal with fights and drunks.’
She resisted a flippant urge to tell him that her father would be very much at home there. ‘I’m not a delicate flower…I’ll manage.’
‘But you should not have to manage,’ Antonio murmured gently.
The idea that she might look to a man to protect her from the evils of the world was a really novel concept to Sophie. She lay awake that night on her uncomfortable sofa bed in the apartment’s tiny reception area. While she strove to block out the noise of the argument between her father and his girlfriend in the room next door she discovered that she could not stop thinking about Antonio.
At every point where she had consciously expected Antonio to reveal his male feet of clay, she had been confounded. He had listened to every little thing she’d said as if he was interested. He had not once shouted at her or sworn at her or eyed up other girls. He did not drink and drive. Nor had he at any stage attempted to ply her with alcohol or make a pass at her. Indeed Antonio Rocha had in some mysterious and romantic way contrived to make Sophie feel special and cosseted and worthy of attention and care for the first time ever.
At twenty years old, Sophie had never had a serious boyfriend. She was a virgin because she was totally terrified of sliding down the same slippery slope that had wrecked the lives of most of her father’s girlfriends. Unlike them, she hadn’t had to worry about becoming a mother at too young an age. But she had observed that placing faith and energy in countless casual relationships could result in low self-esteem, even a disrupted education and poor employment prospects, thus trapping one in poverty. She had told herself that she was too clever to succumb to the dangerous allure of casual sex, but the real truth was that she had never been remotely tempted to succumb to the coarse advances she had met with.
Never before had she lain awake until dawn counting the hours until she would see a guy again. Never before had she agonised over whether or not a man liked her or whether in fact he was simply being polite. Never before had she fantasised like mad over what it would be like if that same man were to kiss her. In fact her imagination was so extravagantly exercised by Antonio that when she saw him face to face again embarrassment afflicted her with blushes, stammers and painful shyness for the first time in her life. She had floated through Belinda’s wedding festivities on a cloud of such intense happiness that the wake-up call of cruel reality had been all the harder to bear twenty-four hours later…
Antonio stayed behind at the solicitor’s to clarify certain matters for his own benefit. Even the vague facts that he was able to establish stamped the kind of reflective frown to his lean, dark features that put his employees on their mettle.
Evidently, Belinda had been penniless at the time of her death and working as a barmaid. Yet when she had married Pablo, the beautiful blonde had been a receptionist in a London modelling agency, her comfort and security ensured by the healthy amount of cash and property she had inherited from her parents. Antonio had little need to wonder who or what had been responsible for bringing about Belinda’s reduced circumstances and angry regret gripped him. That his late sister-in-law had been living with another man did go some way to satisfying his need to know why Belinda had apparently been determined not to ask her late husband’s family for help.
It took a lot to shock Antonio but he was stunned when, having asked for Sophie’s address, he learned where exactly she was living. He could not initially credit that she resided in a trailer park. Was his criminally dishonest brother responsible for her impoverishment as well? The limousine paused outside the entrance while his chauffeur double-checked his destination with his employer. Alighting outside the run-down office, Antonio decided that Sophie was a problem best cured by the liberal application of money.
Sophie was cleaning the floor in one of the smarter mobile homes on the site when a brisk knock sounded on the door. Scrambling up, she pushed it open and froze when she clashed with dark-as-midnight eyes set below level black brows. She knew she should not but she stared, drinking in the dark, sexy symmetry of his bold, masculine features. Her heart started to beat very, very fast. ‘You said seven o’clock,’ she reminded him. ‘What are you doing here this early?’
‘Is this not a good time for you?’ Antonio enquired, his keen gaze raking from the torrent of her curls gilded to gold by the sunlight to the vivid intensity of her animated face and then back to centre on the soft, ripe curve of her mouth. Taken individually her features were ordinary and flawed, he reflected grimly. But that did not explain why she continually gave him the impression of being ravishingly pretty.
‘No, it’s not… I mean, I’m working and Lydia’s asleep and it’s just not convenient,’ Sophie broke into an enervated surge of protest.
‘I appreciate that but I have nothing else to do in this locality while I wait. I’m also understandably eager to meet my niece,’ Antonio responded without apology. There was a brooding coolness in his decisive scrutiny as he suppressed the absurd spark of desire she always generated. He could only think she had the deceptive allure of the unfamiliar for him. ‘May I come in?’
Feeling ridiculously flustered, Sophie edged back into the trailer’s small lounge area and surreptitiously moistened her dry mouth. He strolled up the steps and took up what felt like every square inch of space.
‘You’ll have to wait until Lydia wakes up from her nap.’
Impatience tautened Antonio’s striking bone structure. ‘Meeting her uncle should be rather more fun than sleeping. I haven’t got much time to spend in the UK. I’d be grateful if you tried not to make matters more complicated than they need be.’
By the end of that little speech Sophie was breathing a little heavily. She had put Lydia down for a nap so that the baby would be less tired when Antonio made his visit. His early arrival had thrown that schedule into chaos. Her small, slight body stiff with annoyance and concern, she bent her curly head and pinned her lips tight on the tart comments eager to flow from her ready tongue. Antonio Rocha, Marqués of Salazar, was loaded. The solicitor had treated him like royalty and had treated her like trash to be tolerated. The warning was clear: she could not afford to make Antonio a bitter enemy. If push came to shove, he would always win the upper hand by virtue of his wealth and status. Therefore, even if it choked her, she had to be polite for Lydia’s sake and swallow Antonio’s every demand with as much grace as she could manage.
‘Lydia will be a little cranky if we waken her before she’s ready,’ Sophie said hesitantly.
‘I want to see