‘I’m not trying to pick you up, señorita.’ He tried again with what he considered was remarkable patience.
Her narrow back told him what she thought about that claim.
‘You clearly didn’t get the message. Lulu,’ he added dryly.
The use of her name had the intended effect. She peered at him cautiously over her shoulder, reminding Alejandro absurdly of a timid creature sticking its head out of a hole.
‘H-how do you know my name?’
He folded his arms.
‘I’m your ride,’ he said flatly.
‘My ride?’
As soon as she said it Lulu felt herself go red.
She didn’t have a dirty mind—truly she didn’t. She was always the last one to get the blue jokes that ran like quicksilver around the dressing room before shows at L’Oiseau Bleu, the Parisian cabaret where she danced in the chorus, but right now something seemed to have gone wrong with her. It had something to do with the way he looked at her—as if he knew exactly how she looked in her underwear.
Earlier he’d looked at her as if she was a bug he’d wanted to squash. Better to think about being the bug.
To her embarrassment she stepped back and almost tripped over her hand luggage. His hand shot out and grasped her elbow, saving her from a fall.
‘Careful, bella,’ he said, his warm breath brushing the top of her ear.
Her knees went to jelly.
She tried to tug herself free, confused. ‘Will you let me pass?’
‘Señorita,’ he said, holding her in place, ‘I am Alejandro du Crozier, and I will be driving you to the wedding.’
Her eyes flew to his. He knew about the wedding? That meant he was a guest too.
‘But Susie and Trixie are driving me to the wedding.’ As soon as she said it she realised those plans had possibly changed.
‘I know nothing of these women. I only know of you.’ His expression said that this wasn’t making his day.
Which was fine, Lulu decided. That made two of them. She gave another tug and he let go.
‘I don’t make a habit of going off with strange men, Mr—Mr—’
He pulled out his phone and held it up in front of her. She peered at the message on the screen and then looked at him in mute astonishment.
‘Khaled sent you?’
He gave that question the look it deserved. But he didn’t have to stand so close, did he? And he didn’t have to look at her mouth as if there was something about it that interested him. She most definitely didn’t have anything to interest him.
Weirdly, her heart was hammering.
His amber eyes, lushly lashed, met hers with a splintering intensity.
‘Unless you’re interested in walking, chica, I suggest you come with me now.’
He didn’t give her a chance to object. He was walking away. He clearly expected her to follow him.
Lulu stared after him.
He was the rudest man.
She found herself struggling one-handed with her stick-and-stop trolley, her hand luggage banging painfully against her leg.
She most certainly was not travelling with him in a car for three or four hours.
She would find a taxi.
She would entrust her person and her luggage to a man she had paid to do the task—not one who thought he was doing her a big favour.
Money was a woman’s greatest ally and protection. She knew it to be so. Without money her mother had been unable to escape her violent father.
Even now, with her mother blissfully married to another man, Lulu pushed her to keep her own bank account and manage her own money. Money gave you options. Lulu lifted her chin. Right now her own personal bank account gave her the ability to pay her way to Dunlosie Castle.
But when she emerged from the building it was into an overcast Edinburgh day. There was a light rain falling and Lulu stopped to retrieve her umbrella, opening it against the elements and peering about. She spotted the cab rank but there was a queue.
All right, sometimes those options a woman had weren’t optimal, but there was no help for it.
She pushed resolutely in that direction, aware that her pretty harlequin seamed stockings were receiving tiny splashes of dirty water with each step from the washback beneath the wheels of her trolley. The fact that she felt depleted from withstanding her own anxieties in the air for the last couple of hours wasn’t helping. Lulu wanted nothing more than to be warm and comfortable inside a car, with her shoes off, watching this bad weather through a windscreen.
Maybe she’d been a little hasty...
Which was when she saw the lovingly restored red vintage Jaguar.
The passenger side window came rolling down.
‘Get in,’ he instructed.
LULU KNEW SHE had a decision to make.
She lifted her umbrella to take another look at the queue. Then she looked at her ‘ride’.
Hot and sexy and far too full of himself—and he had looked at her as if she was a bug.
Her pride pushed to the fore. She was not climbing into a car with a man who didn’t even have the decency to open the door for her. And what about her luggage?
Lulu was tempted in that moment to phone her parents, who would be arriving at the castle tonight. But how would that look? And she couldn’t lean on Gigi this weekend of all weekends.
She gasped as another splash of muddy water, this time from passing pedestrians, hit her shoes and saw the mud now attached to her sadly limp blue ribbons. Her pride wavered.
Dieu, she knew she’d regret this.
She grabbed her trolley and pushed it towards the back end of the car.
It was really completely unfair, but frankly she’d be a fool if she passed this up.
She stood there. In the rain. Waiting.
He took his time.
Lulu narrowed her eyes on his languid stroll around to the boot, all shoulders and confident attitude, looking infinitely rugged and male and capable.
But she knew differently. Knew how a sturdy exterior could mask all kinds of weaknesses and flaws.
She’d bet this man had plenty. For one thing, he didn’t like women. The things he’d said to her on the plane... The way he’d curled his lip at her shoes... She’d seen the way he’d looked at them. He had no idea how secure these shoes made her feel. She stamped one of them, because he was making her wait deliberately.
‘Open the boot, would you?’
He looked her up and down. She wasn’t going to apologise for her rudeness. He needed to know she was onto him.
All the same, she took a shuffling step backwards.
She drew herself up, happily over six feet in her shoes, but still gallingly forced to tip up her chin to look him in the eye.
With a half-smile, as if he knew what she was doing, he unlocked the boot, and Lulu was mollified—and a little relieved—when without a word he began hauling her luggage inside.
He handled the matching