He cut between the buildings built around a quadrangle and across the lawn, ignoring the burning of his shoulder muscles, spurred on by the soft moans of the woman he carried.
He walked straight through the massive double doors of the front entrance and into the vaulted hallway. It was empty. He opened his mouth to yell when Josef appeared. Normally insouciant Josef’s eyes widened when he saw his boss with a semi-conscious woman in his arms.
‘Where is my brother?’
‘With the doctor. He’s rather unwell.’
‘Ramon is ill, too?’ Santiago closed his eyes. Two invalids on his hands, one literally, and an errant daughter to collect from the station. When they spoke of it never raining but pouring, his was presumably the day they were referring to.
‘Can I help with the young lady, sir?’
‘No, you can get Martha and the new girl … Sabina, and ask them to come to the west-wing suite … inform the doctor he is required there and have the helicopter ready to take off in thirty minutes. Gabby is coming home early.’
Josef waited as he reeled off the instructions and then, with a nod, vanished. A man of few words, Josef; Santiago liked that about him.
‘You’re so pretty.’
Lucy blinked and pushed her way free of the last layers of sleep. The figure standing by the window came into focus. To her relief, it was not a hallucination—unless hallucinations spoke and wore braces.
She blinked at the small elfin features of Gabby.
‘Thank you,’ Lucy replied, easing herself carefully up on one elbow and turning her curious gaze around the room. She had not been that interested in her surroundings the previous night when Santiago had brought her in here and relinquished her to the care of the doctor and the two women who had stayed with her during the night.
One of them had spoken perfect English, the other was the sweet girl who had cut her hand, both had been incredibly kind.
‘I thought you were in school.’
‘I ran away.’
Lucy was weak enough to feel a fleeting moment of sympathy for Santiago.
‘What time is it?’
The furniture in the room that was massive enough to lose the enormous four-poster she was lying in was dark and heavy and looked like museum pieces. The stone walls were covered with tapestries and portraits of severe-looking historical persons. The personal touch of an arrangement of garden flowers in the gleaming copper bowl set in the empty cavernous fireplace filled the room with their scent and lightened the general museum-style gloom.
‘It’s two o’clock.’
Lucy was startled. She had fallen asleep in the early hours. ‘Why didn’t someone wake me?’ She brushed her hair from her face and struggled to tear her eyes from the portrait of a hatchet-faced woman in a jewelled turban. The eyes looked spookily familiar, an ancestor presumably of the present incumbent. Clearly hauteur was not a new Silva characteristic, any more than the masterful nose.
‘They said to let you and Sara sleep.’
Lucy yawned and dragged her attention back to the girl. ‘Sara?’ Her brow crinkled. Was she meant to know the name? At that moment she was struggling with her own.
‘She’s one of the maids. She ate some of the bad salmon that was for the cook’s mother’s cat, too.’
Struggling to follow this information overload, Lucy moistened her lips with her tongue—they felt dry and cracked—and recalled the smoked salmon and cream cheese bagel that Ramon had produced when she had said she couldn’t possibly go riding until she had had her breakfast.
‘I haven’t eaten either but not to worry, I have it covered,’ he had said, producing the breakfast treat wrapped in a linen napkin.
When she had laughed and conceded he had thought of everything she hadn’t known that had included food poisoning! Could he have escaped unscathed?
‘Ramon?’
‘Oh, Uncle Ramon was much worse than you.’
‘But he’s better now?’ Lucy was just relieved that Harriet, who she had cooked breakfast for before she went out to attend to the donkeys—six a.m. was not a time of the day that Lucy personally felt happy eating—had not shared the breakfast.
‘I don’t know. Ramon was really sick. He had to go to hospital.’
‘Hospital!’ Lucy exclaimed in alarm. She nodded. ‘Papá said it serves him right for raiding the pantry.’
Gabby took a seat on the brocade bed cover using the crewel-work curtains that draped the bed for leverage.
Lucy discovered that she was wearing a long white Victorian-style nightgown in a fine, exquisitely embroidered fabric. Her memory of how she came to be wearing this period-looking piece was sketchy, but she was sure—almost—that Santiago had not been involved.
Having delivered her, he had immediately made himself scarce and she didn’t blame him, though … Her brow furrowed. She did have a vague recollection of hearing a deep male voice and feeling cool fingers on her forehead at one point during the night, but that might have been part of a dream.
Running the flat of her hand down the gossamer-thin floaty sleeve of the nightdress, she lifted her gaze to find the child watching her. Santiago’s daughter was a pretty little thing with a roundish face, big dark eyes and a cupid’s bow mouth and dimpled cheeks—did she look like her dead mother?
‘That’s mine off Aunt Seraphina. Awful, isn’t it? She always buys me stuff that’s massive for me to grow into, but I never do.’ The little sigh made Lucy smile—clearly the size thing was an issue with her.
‘ Papá says it’s good to be petite but what does he know? He’s a man and ten feet tall …’ she grumbled, adding enviously, ‘Like you. Is your hair real … not extensions?’ She viewed the silken skein that framed Lucy’s face with a mixture of curiosity and envy. ‘I’d like to bleach my hair but Papá would kill me. It might be worth it, though,’ she added with a grin. ‘And who knows? It might be the final straw and they’ll expel me this time.’ She caught Lucy’s quizzical look and added, ‘I hate school.’
The description made Lucy think wistfully of the time when her own father had seemed the biggest thing in the world. She repressed a smile.
‘The hair is all my own,’ Lucy admitted, reaching for the water on the bedside table and taking a sip. Her throat felt dry and raw. ‘Well, your papá is right—there’s nothing wrong with being petite. I always wished I was.’ But it was never good to be different and at this girl’s age she had towered above her contemporaries.
‘ Papá is right …? Can I have that in writing?’
Lucy slopped water all down the front of the borrowed nightdress and turned to see Santiago standing framed in the doorway.
The sight of his tall dynamic figure sent a wild rush of energising adrenaline through her body. Dressed in a white tee shirt and jeans, his slicked wet hair suggesting he had just stepped out of the shower, he oozed a restless, edgy vitality.
He also looked sinfully gorgeous and Lucy didn’t have the energy or for once the inclination to go through the entire ‘sexy but not my type’ routine … She was hopelessly attracted to him. Just sex, she told herself, drawing back from deeper examination of the tight knot of emotions lying like a leaden weight behind her breastbone.
‘What are you doing here?’ she quivered accusingly.
He arched a brow and said mildly, ‘I live here.’
She flushed and heard the words king of the castle in her head as she followed the direction of his quizzical gaze. It led