Читать книгу Don Joaquin's Pride - Линн Грэхем, Lynne Graham - Страница 7

‘I COULDN’T possibly pretend to be you…’ Lucy’s shaken voice trailed away, her incredulity unhidden.

‘Why not?’ Cindy demanded sharply. ‘Guatemala is half a world away and Fidelio Paez has never met me. He doesn’t even know I have a sister, never mind an identical twin!’

‘But why can’t you just write back and explain that you’re not in a position to visit right now?’ Lucy asked uneasily, struggling to understand why her sister should have suggested such an outrageous masquerade in response to a mere invitation, and why on earth she was getting so worked up about the matter.

‘I wish it was that simple!’

‘You’re getting married in a month,’ Lucy reminded her soothingly. ‘As I see it, that makes a tactful refusal very simple.’

‘You don’t understand. It wasn’t even Fidelio who wrote to me. It was some neighbour of his, some wretched interfering man called Del Castillo!’ Cindy’s beautifully manicured hands knotted together in a strained gesture, her full mouth tightening. ‘He’s demanding that I come over and stay for a while—’

‘What business is it of his to demand anything?’

Cindy gave her an almost hunted look. ‘He thinks that as Fidelio’s daughter-in-law, his only surviving relative…well, that I owe the old boy a visit.’

‘Why?’ In other circumstances Lucy would have understood the demand, but it seemed rather excessive when seen in the light of her twin’s short-lived first marriage five years earlier.

While working in Los Angeles, Cindy had enjoyed a whirlwind romance with the son of a wealthy Guatemalan rancher. However, her sister had been widowed within days of becoming a bride. Although a young and apparently healthy man, Mario Paez had died of a sudden heart attack. At the time, Guatemala had been suffering severe floods. The whole country had been in uproar, with the communications system seriously disrupted. With what little she had known about her late husband’s background, Cindy had found it impossible to get in touch with Mario’s father in time for the funeral, so it had gone ahead without the older man and afterwards Cindy had flown straight back home to London.

‘You know, you never even mentioned that you still kept in touch with Mario’s father,’ Lucy admitted, her violet-blue eyes warm with approval.

High spots of colour lit Cindy’s taut cheekbones. ‘I thought keeping in touch was the least I could do, and now that Fidelio’s sick—’

‘The old man’s ill?’ Lucy interrupted in dismay. ‘Is it serious?’

‘Yes. So how can I write back and say that I can’t visit a dying man because I’m getting married again?’

Lucy winced. That would indeed be a most unfeeling response. In fact, from Fidelio’s point of view it would only serve as a horribly cruel reminder of the tragically premature death of his only son.

‘That man, that neighbour of his, has actually sent me plane tickets! But even if I wasn’t getting married to Roger I wouldn’t want to go,’ Cindy confessed in a sudden raw rush of resentment. ‘I hate sick people! I can’t bear to be around them. I would be totally useless at being sympathetic and all that sort of stuff!’

Lowering her gaze, Lucy suppressed a sigh, unhappily aware that her twin was telling the truth. When their mother had become an invalid, Cindy had been hopeless. On the other hand, her sister’s financial help had eased the more practical problems of those long difficult months when she herself had been forced to give up work to nurse their mother. Cindy had bought them a small apartment close to the hospital where their parent had been receiving treatment. Right now that apartment was back on the market; Lucy was keen to repay her sister’s generosity.

‘But you could easily cope with Fidelio,’ Cindy pointed out, her eagerness to persuade her twin to take her place unhidden. ‘You were absolutely marvellous with Mum. Florence Nightingale to the life!’

‘But it wouldn’t be right to deceive Fidelio Paez like that,’ Lucy interposed uncomfortably. ‘I think you should discuss this with Roger—’

‘Roger?’ Cindy froze at that reference to the man she adored and was soon to marry. ‘He’s the very last person I want to know about this!’ Crossing the room, she reached for her sister’s hands, a pleading look in her eyes. ‘If Roger knew how much I owe Fidelio he would probably think that we should cancel the wedding so that I could go over there…and I couldn’t bear that!’

Lucy stared back at her twin in bewilderment. ‘What do you owe Fidelio Paez?’

‘Over the years, he’s…well, he’s sent me a lot of money,’ Cindy admitted with visible discomfiture.

Lucy’s brows pleated, for her sister lived in some comfort and had never to her knowledge been short of cash in recent years. ‘Why would Mario’s father have sent you money?’

‘Well, why shouldn’t he have?’ Cindy demanded almost aggressively. ‘He’s loaded, and he’s got nobody else to spend it on. I got nothing when Mario died!’

Lucy flushed at her twin’s frank annoyance over that reality.

Cindy’s taut shoulders bowed then, and she breathed in deep. ‘Yet in spite of all Fidelio’s invitations I never visited him, and when he tried to arrange a date to come over here to meet me a couple of years back, I made excuses.’

Lucy was shocked by that confession. ‘For goodness’ sake, why?’

Cindy grimaced and shrugged. ‘I haven’t always been the world’s nicest person, like you are, Lucy!’ she muttered irritably, wiping away the tears in her eyes with an infuriated hand. ‘Why would I want to go and stay on some ranch in the back of beyond with an old man? And why would I have wanted to be landed with entertaining him here in London? I always had something better to do, but I did intend to meet him sooner or later…only right now happens to be lousy timing!’

‘Yes.’ Lucy could see that, and no longer wondered why her sister’s conscience was troubling her so much.

‘Roger knows nothing about Fidelio, and I wouldn’t like him to know about the money because he wouldn’t think very much of me for just taking and taking and never giving anything back,’ Cindy confided grudgingly, biting at her lip, her eyes filling with tears again. ‘There’s a lot that Roger doesn’t know about my past, Lucy. I’ve put it behind me. I’ve changed. I made a new start when I got back in touch with you and Mum last year, and I haven’t taken a penny from Fidelio since then—’

‘It’s all right,’ Lucy muttered, her own eyes smarting at her twin’s desperation and her uncharacteristic honesty.

‘It will be if you go to Guatemala for me. I know I’m asking a lot, especially when I haven’t exactly been honest about some things,’ Cindy continued tautly. ‘But I really do need your help with this, Lucy…and if you can do this one thing for me, I swear I’ll be your best friend for ever!’

‘Cindy, I—’ Enveloped in a huge, grateful hug, Lucy was touched to the heart, because her sister was rarely demonstrative.

The twins had been separated by their divorcing parents at the age of seven and had spent the following fifteen years apart. Only recently had Lucy had the chance to get to know her sister again, and that had not been an easy task. Until now Cindy had hidden behind a reserve foreign to Lucy’s more open nature, and their lifestyles and interests were so different that it had been a challenge to find shared ground on which to bridge those years of estrangement.

But now, for the first time since they were children, Cindy had confided in Lucy again and asked for her help. The idea that she could be needed by her infinitely more glamorous and successful sister astonished Lucy, but it made her feel proud as well. Once the quieter, more dependent twin, Lucy had been devastated when her bossier, livelier sister had disappeared from her life. She had never lost that inner ache of loneliness and loss, and Cindy’s appeal for her help, Cindy’s need for her, touched a deep chord of sympathy within her. Blocking out the more practical misgivings threatening at the back of her mind, Lucy smiled with determined eagerness to offer all the assistance within her power.

Cindy drew back and surveyed her twin with the critical eye of a woman who had worked as both a make-up artist and a fashion buyer and who took a great deal of interest in her own appearance.

Ironically, few identical twins could have looked more different. Lucy never used make-up and tied her defiantly curly caramel-blonde hair back at the nape of her neck. Her blue denim skirt was calf-length, her check shirt sensible and her shoes flat and comfortable.

‘I sent Fidelio a photo of me last year and I was dressed to kill. I’m going to have my work cut out turning you into me!’ Cindy confessed with a rueful groan.

Lucy just stood there, slightly dazed, suddenly not quite sure she could have agreed to do such an outrageous thing as pretend to be her sister instead of herself. Her homely self. Now that they were both adults, she simply couldn’t imagine looking like her twin. Cindy had the perfect grooming of a model and confidently revealed far more than she concealed of her slim, toned figure. Her blonde mane of hair hung in a smooth fall down her back, both straightened and lightened. Not one inch of Cindy was less than perfect, Lucy conceded, hurriedly curving her bitten nails into the centre of her palms and sucking in her stomach.

Outside the shabby bar, which was little more than a shack with a tin roof, a wizened little man in a poncho tied up his horse to the roadside post available and stomped in out of the sweltering heat. He joined the tough-looking cowboys standing by the bar and within ten seconds he was gaping at Lucy with the rest of them. In a badly creased pale pink designer suit and precarious high heels, she was a sight such as was rarely seen at this remote outpost in the Guatemalan Petén.

The humidity was horrendous. Pressing a crumpled tissue to her perspiring brow, Lucy studied the scarred table in mute physical misery. Cindy had insisted that she would need to dress to impress throughout her stay. But Lucy felt horribly uncomfortable and conspicuous in her borrowed finery. Furthermore the wretched shoes pinched her toes and nipped her heels like instruments of torture.

Yesterday she had flown into Guatemala City and connected with a domestic flight to Flores, where she had spent the night at a small hotel. She had expected to be taken from there to the Paez ranch, but instead she had been greeted with the message that she would be picked up at the crossroads at San Angelita. Once her ancient rattling cab had turned off the main highway the landscape had become steadily more arid, and the road had swiftly declined into a rutted dirt track. That incredibly long and dusty journey had finally brought her to a ramshackle little cluster of almost entirely abandoned buildings in the middle of a dustbowl overshadowed by what looked very much like a volcano and, according to her guidebook, probably was. Exhaustion and a deep, desperate desire for a bath now gripped Lucy, not to mention an increasingly strong attack of cold feet.

Suppose Fidelio realised that she wasn’t Cindy? Suppose she said or did something that exposed their deception? It would be simply appalling if her masquerade was uncovered. A sick old man certainly didn’t require any further distress. But what would have been the alternative? Lucy asked herself unhappily. Cindy wouldn’t have come, and the thought of Fidelio Paez passing away without a single relative to comfort him filled Lucy with helpless compassion.

Belatedly registering that the noisy clump of men at the bar had fallen silent, Lucy looked up. A very tall male, who looked as if he had walked straight out of a spaghetti western in the role of cold-blooded killer, now stood just inside the doorway, spurred and booted feet set slightly astride. Intimidated by one glittering glance from beneath the dusty brim of the black hat that shadowed his lean, hard-boned features, Lucy gulped and hurriedly endeavoured to curl her five foot tall body into an even less noticeable hunch behind the table.

The barman surged out from behind the counter and extended a moisture-beaded glass to the new arrival. A doffing of hats and a low murmur of respectful greeting broke the silence. Emptying it in a long, thirsty gulp, the man handed the glass back and sauntered with disturbing catlike fluidity and jingling spurs across to the far corner where Lucy sat.

‘Lucinda Paez?’ he drawled.

Lucy focused wide-eyed on the leather belt with gleaming silver inserts that encircled his lean hips. Then, not liking the menacing manner in which he was towering over her, she thrust her chair back and hurriedly scrambled upright. Even in her four-inch heels, it didn’t help much. He had dwarfed the other men at the bar. He had to be six foot three, and the crown of her head barely reached his shoulder. Wondering if she was going to need her Spanish phrase book to make herself understood, she gazed up at his aggressive jawline and swallowed hard. ‘You’re here to collect me?’ she queried weakly. ‘I didn’t hear a car.’

‘That could be because I arrived on a horse.’

For a split second his smooth grasp of colloquial English took her by surprise, and then an uneasy laugh escaped her. He could only be cracking a joke. You didn’t turn up on horseback to collect a person with luggage. Tilting her golden head back, and fighting her natural shyness with all her might, Lucy said apologetically, ‘Could you show me some identification, please?’

‘I’m afraid I have none to offer. I am Joaquin Francisco Del Castillo, and I am not accustomed to doubt on that point.’

Lucy tried and failed to swallow on that staggeringly arrogant assurance. He had thrown his head high as if she had insulted him, his strong jawline rigid. ‘Well, Señor…er…Del Castillo, I am not accustomed to going off with strange men—’

‘Es verdad? You picked up Mario in a Los Angeles bar and shared his bed the same night. That knowledge does not lead me to believe that you are a particularly cautious woman,’ he drawled, his growling accent roughening the vowel sounds.

Lucy was nailed to the spot, still focusing on that firm male beautifully modelled mouth. She blinked, her soft lips opening and closing again in shock. She just could not believe that he had said something so offensive right to her face. Burning colour slowly crawled up her throat. ‘How dare you?’ she whispered in a shaken undertone. ‘That is a complete untruth!’

‘Mario and I grew up together. You are wasting your time putting on an act for my benefit. Save it for Fidelio. Are you coming…or are you staying here?’

‘I’m not going any place with you! They can send someone else out from the ranch,’ Lucy informed him with restraint, from between clenched teeth.

‘There is no one else, señora.’ And, with that clipped retort, Joaquin Del Castillo simply turned on his heel and strode back outside, command and cool writ large in his straight back, wide shoulders and fluid measured carriage.

Still awash with sheer paralysed shock at being treated with so shattering a lack of respect, Lucy stayed where she was. The men at the bar were talking between themselves. She stole a cringing glance at the growing male huddle, appalled by the suspicion that one of them might have understood enough English to follow what Joaquin Del Castillo had slung at her. Her cheeks aflame with colour, she grabbed up her heavy suitcase and struggled back outside with it.

Joaquin Del Castillo was waiting for her.

‘You are the most rude, foul-mouthed man I have ever met,’ Lucy announced, giving him only the most minimal sidewise glance of acknowledgement. ‘Please do not speak to me again unless it is absolutely necessary.’

‘You can’t bring that case.’ Before she could even guess his intention he had swept it up in one lean brown hand, planted it down in the dust and sprung it open.

‘What are you doing?’ Lucy gasped, her frigid air of desperate dignity fracturing fast.

‘It’s a long ride and I want to make good time. You will have no need for all these fripperies on the ranch,’ Joaquin Del Castillo asserted grimly. ‘Pick out a few necessities and I’ll put them in the saddlebags. The bar owner will look after your case until you return.’

‘A long ride…?’ Lucy repeated weakly. ‘Are you seriously expecting me…to get on a horse?’

‘Fidelio sold his pick-up.’

‘A h-horse?’ Lucy said again, even more shakily.

‘In a few hours it will be getting dark. I suggest you go behind the bar and change into a more appropriate outfit for the journey.’

Fidelio had sold his pick-up? Certainly a seriously ill old man would have little need of personal transport. But Fidelio Paez was also a wealthy man, and Lucy would have thought that any big ranch needed at least one vehicle. But what did she know about ranching? she asked herself, ruefully conceding her abysmal ignorance on the subject. Evidently Joaquin Del Castillo didn’t have motorised transport either, and she had seen for herself how poor and few were the roads in the Petén.

Lucy snatched in a deep shuddering breath. She had never been on a horse’s back in her life. ‘I can’t ride…’

A broad muscular shoulder sheathed in fine black cotton shrugged. It was fluid, it was dismissive, it was impatient. In fact Joaquin Del Castillo had the kind of highly expressive body language that made speech quite unnecessary. With the heel of one lean brown hand he pushed back the brim of his hat and surveyed her without pity. Sunlight illuminated his lean dark features for the first time.

Lucy’s breath tripped in her throat. He was so incredibly handsome she just stared and kept on staring, involuntary fascination gripping her.

His eyes were a clear startling green, framed by spiky ebony lashes and shockingly unexpected in that bold sun-bronzed face. His high, proud cheekbones were dissected by a lean, arrogant blade of a nose, the brilliant eyes crowned by flaring black brows, the whole brought to vibrant life by a mouth as passionate and as wicked as sin. He was just so gorgeous she was transfixed to the spot.

Their eyes met. An infinitesimal little tremor ran through Lucy. Her heart skipped a beat, began thundering in her ears instead. Green like emeralds, green like fire. A thought which didn’t make any sense at all, but then nothing that Lucy experienced in that moment had anything to do with normal thought. She watched the colour score his fabulous cheekbones with a level of wonderment that was undeniably mindless. Insidious heat curled up in the pit of her stomach, making her suck in her breath and blink, and at the same moment she blinked he turned away.

Sudden appalled embarrassment engulfed Lucy as she realised how she had been behaving. She was supposed to be choosing clothes from her case. What on earth had she been doing, gaping at him like some starstruck schoolgirl? Mortified by her own adolescent behaviour, Lucy crouched down beside her case and struggled to concentrate. ‘I can’t ride,’ she muttered afresh.

‘The mare is quiet.’ His rich, dark drawl had a disturbingly rough edge.

Her hands were trembling as she rooted clumsily through all the designer clothing which her twin had given her on loan. He was standing there watching her, and every time she turned up a piece of lingerie she blushed furiously and thrust it hurriedly back out of sight. He looked like a film star but he had the manners of a pig. But then he probably didn’t know any better, born and bred in the back of beyond, surrounded by a lot of cattle and grass, she told herself bracingly. She pulled out a pair of pale blue stretch cotton pedal pushers and an embroidered gypsy top, neither of which she fancied wearing—but unfortunately they were the only remotely casual garments which Cindy had been prepared to include.

‘I can’t get changed without privacy,’ she told Joaquin tautly.

‘You’re not modest…why pretend? Not two months after Mario died you were flashing everything you’ve got in a men’s magazine centrefold!’

Lucy closed stricken eyes in horror and chagrin. She knew so little about her twin’s life during the years they had been apart. And this hateful, dreadful man seemed to be revelling in making offensive allegations. How did he know so much about Cindy? Had her sister met Mario in a bar and slept with him the very same night? Lucy cringed, knowing she was a real prude but unable to stifle her shame on her sister’s behalf. Had Cindy engaged in nude modelling before she’d decided to train as a make-up artist?

But then stripping off for the camera was not the shocking choice it had once been, Lucy reminded herself bracingly. Famous actresses did it now, proud and unashamed of their beautiful bodies. Adam and Eve had been unclothed and unashamed too, until the serpent got at them. How dared this crude backwoods rancher sneer at her twin?

‘I believe I asked you only to address me again if it was unavoidable,’ Lucy reminded him in the same icy tone she would have used to quell a very badly behaved child in the library where she had once worked.

Behind the bar, which rejoiced in nothing as sophisticated as a window on the back wall, she kicked off her shoes and peeled off her tights at frantic speed, and then hauled up the clinging pedal-pushers beneath her skirt. By the time she reappeared her elaborately teased mane of carefully coiffed hair, which she had refused to have straightened or tinted, was flopping into a wild torrent of damp ringlets, and the nape of her neck, the slope of her breasts and her face were wet with perspiration.

Joaquin Del Castillo then subjected Lucy to the kind of long, slow scrutiny she was wholly unused to receiving from his sex. But Cindy enjoyed attracting male attention and chose her wardrobe accordingly. So the pedal-pushers were a tight fit, chosen to accentuate the lush female curve of hip and thigh, and the cropped gypsy top was thin and low-cut. Lacking her sister’s confidence, however, Lucy was plunged by that insolent male appraisal into instant red-hot discomfiture.

The silence seemed to go on and on and on. Her cheeks burned. She was conscious of her body in a way she had never been conscious of it before. Her breasts felt oddly full and heavy, stirring with the increased rapidity of her breathing. He looked, and she…and she? She couldn’t think straight.

Joaquin Del Castillo veiled his gaze.

In bewilderment, Lucy lowered her own gaze, dismayed by the accelerated thump of her own heartbeat, the shortness of her breath, that lingering sense of being dislocated from time. She frowned at the space where she had left her case earlier and muttered unevenly, ‘Where’s my case?’

Without the slightest warning, Joaquin strode forward and dropped a rough wool poncho over her shoulders, engulfing her in yards of scratchy malodorous fabric. ‘What on earth are you doing?’ she cried, pulling at the garment with distaste.

Impervious to her reaction, Joaquin Del Castillo planted a battered straw hat on her head. ‘Treat the sun with respect or you will burn your skin to a withered crisp!’

‘Where’s my case?’ Lucy demanded afresh.

‘I packed for you. Come on. We have no more time to waste.’

‘You went through my personal things?’ Lucy was aghast at the idea of a man rustling through her panties and her bras.

‘Let’s go,’ he grated impatiently.

For some reason there was a general exodus from the bar at the same moment. The cowboy horde poured out through the door to watch Joaquin prod a deeply reluctant Lucy round to the side of the sleek brown mare tethered to the rail.

‘You grasp the rein, place your left foot in the stirrup and then you swing yourself up into the saddle,’ he instructed smoothly.

Lucy’s teeth gritted. She could hear suppressed male laughter behind her. Planting a canvas-shod foot into the stirrup cup, she hauled herself up by dint of sheer determination, but she didn’t raise her other leg quite high enough and simultaneously the mare changed position. Unbalanced, Lucy fell back hard on her bottom and snaked her flailing legs back in fright as the mare’s hooves skittered too close for comfort.

A powerful hand closed over hers and hauled her upright again with stunning ease. ‘Would you like some help, señora?’

Sardonic amusement was audible in that honeyed dark drawl. A tide of unfamiliar rage drew Lucy’s every muscle taut. She snatched her fingers free of his patronising hold. ‘I’d have managed if the blasted horse hadn’t moved!’ she told him with furious resentment. ‘And I’ll do it without your help if it kills me…so stand back and snigger with your friends, because it’s obvious that that’s all that you’re good for!’

A line of dark colour highlighted his amazing cheekbones. Then that expressive mouth set like moulded steel. ‘As you wish…but I would not like to see you injured.’

‘Get out of my way!’ Lucy snarled, a tiny proportion of her brain standing back in disbelief at her own fiery behaviour.

Grasping the rein afresh, Lucy was now powered by so much temper she could have swung up high enough to touch the sun. Seconds later, she found herself surveying the ground from an elevated position. Squaring her slight shoulders, she tried to ease her right foot into the other stirrup. But it was done for her. Long cool fingers clasped her ankle and provided guidance. Lucy was in no way mollified by that belated piece of assistance, but she said thank you in a cold little voice just to show that she had been better brought up than he had been.

‘I will attach a leading rein to the mare. You will not be in any danger,’ Joaquin Del Castillo asserted with a chilling lack of expression.

Briefly her forehead indented. He sounded for all the world like a drawling, icily self-contained aristocrat depressing the rude pretensions of a member of the lower orders. She shook her head at that foolish false impression.

Obviously her outburst had offended him. Good, she told herself. He had been asking for it. Boy, had he been asking for a metaphoric slap in the face in front of their now silent audience! Nobody was smirking or sniggering now; she might feel somewhat shaken by the experience of having shouted at someone for the first time in her life, but in the aftermath she was proud of herself. And then the living, breathing animal beneath her rigid hips shifted with alarming effect.

‘Joaquin…?’ Lucy whispered with sick but definite emphasis. ‘The horse is m-moving again.’

‘Try not to stiffen up. It will make Chica nervous,’ he responded in a curiously constrained tone as he bent his head.

‘Do you think I’m not nervous, stuck up here ten feet off the ground?’ Lucy gasped before she could snatch the words back.

He spread fluid hands very slowly and stepped back. ‘I assure you that you will come to no harm.’

In strained silence, she watched him attach what he had called a leading rein to the huge black stallion twitching its hooves like a threatening volcano several feet away. ‘I hope you can control that monster…I hope it’s not going to run away with you—’

‘No horse has ever run away with me, señora,’ Joaquin Del Castillo gritted, half under his breath.

And if any had he certainly wouldn’t admit it, Lucy decided. Joaquin Del Castillo was of a breed of male utterly unknown to her. All sizzling, musclebound temperament and just bursting with pride over the fact. Any form of weakness, she sensed, would be anathema to him. And he despised her…well, he despised Cindy, and, as she was pretending to be Cindy, she was stuck with being despised.

But why was Joaquin Del Castillo being so hostile and rude? After all, she had dutifully come to visit Fidelio, as he had demanded. And, whether he knew it or not, he could thank his lucky stars that she wasn’t Cindy. Her twin would have been halfway back to the airport by now! Cindy had a very quick temper, not to mention a love and expectation of comfort. Furthermore, accustomed as she was to male admiration, Cindy would never have withstood the attacks and indignities meted out to the sister eleven minutes her junior.

Ironically, Cindy had forecast that Lucy would be treated like a princess from the moment she arrived in Guatemala. Apparently Fidelio Paez’s letters had shown him to be an old-fashioned gentleman with an instinctive need to be protective towards any member of the female sex. But Fidelio was generations older than his neighbour, Joaquin Del Castillo, Lucy conceded wryly. There was no intrinsic old-world Latin gallantry to be had from her companion. Why? Evidently he saw Cindy as a scarlet woman just because she had slept with Mario on their first date. What did he think a whirlwind romance entailed? So Cindy had got carried away by love and passion. How dared he sneer?

‘How is Fidelio?’ Lucy suddenly asked.

Joaquin shot her a grim glance. ‘You finally remembered him?’

Lucy flushed.

‘He is as well as can be expected in the circumstances.’ With that scathing and uninformative assurance, he leapt up into the saddle and made further enquiry impossible.

As the horses plodded at a snail’s pace out of the tiny settlement, Lucy focused on his wide-shouldered back view. Joaquin Del Castillo moved as if he was part of the stallion. Lucy endeavoured to unknot her own tense muscles, but she was so terrified of falling off that no sooner did she contrive to loosen one muscle than two others tightened in compensation.

‘Slow down!’ she called frantically within minutes, when the pace speeded up and her hips started to rise and fall bruisingly on the hard saddle beneath her.

He reined in and swung round. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘If I fall off and break a leg, I won’t be much use to Fidelio!’ Lucy warned, with a strained attempt at an apologetic smile.

‘Soon it will be dark—’

‘So you keep on promising,’ Lucy muttered limply, convinced she was boiling alive beneath her poncho. ‘I can hardly wait for that sun to sink.’

‘I am so sorry that this means of travel is not to your taste, señora.’

‘Oh, call me Lucy, for goodness’ sake. That formal address is a nonsense when you match it with your appalling manners!’

Before her eyes Joaquin Del Castillo froze, hard jawline squaring, nostrils flaring.

‘I do realise that you neither like nor approve of me, and I can’t stand hypocrisy,’ Lucy admitted uncomfortably, her voice dying away in the stillness of his complete silence.

‘Your name is Cindy. Why would I call you Lucy?’

In horror at her accidental slip, Lucy bent her head, suddenly belatedly grateful that her late parents had seen fit to name their twin daughters Lucinda and Lucille. ‘Most people call me Lucy now. Cindy was for the teen years,’ she lied breathlessly.

‘Lucinda,’ he sounded out with syllabic thoroughness, and pressed his knees into the stallion’s flanks.

Lucy struggled to stay on board the mare as they wended their way out across the bleached grass plain. The emptiness was eerie. Sky and grass, and all around the heat, like a hard physical entity beating down on her without remorse. There were no buildings, no people, not even the cattle she had dimly expected to see. The eventual sight of a gnarled set of palm trees on a very slight incline should have been enough for her to throw her hat high in celebration. But she didn’t have enough energy left. Indeed, by that stage she had already lost all track of time. Even to shrug back the poncho, lift one wrist and glance at her watch felt like too much effort.

‘I need a drink,’ she finally croaked, her mouth dry as a bone.

‘There is a water bottle attached to your saddle,’ Joaquin informed her drily over his shoulder. ‘But don’t drink too much. You’ll make yourself sick.’

‘You’ll have to get the bottle,’ Lucy told him in a small voice, because really she was beginning to feel like the biggest whiniest drag in the whole of Guatemala. ‘I don’t like looking down. It makes me feel dizzy.’

Joaquin Del Castillo rode the stallion round in a circle, leant out across the divide between their respective mounts with acrobatic confidence and detached the water bottle, the fluid movement simplistic in its highly deceptive air of effortless ease. Indeed, the whole operation took Lucy’s breath away.

‘I saw a Cossack rider do something like that at a circus once,’ Lucy confided shyly.

‘I did not learn to ride in a circus, señora,’ Joaquin Del Castillo responded with icy hauteur.

‘It was meant to be a compliment, actually.’ Turning her discomfited face away, Lucy let the water drift down into her parched mouth.

‘That’s enough,’ Joaquin Del Castillo told her within seconds.

Lucy handed the bottle back, wiped her mouth with an unsteady hand and drooped like a dying swan over Chica’s silky mane. With a groaned imprecation in Spanish, Joaquin Del Castillo sprang out of the saddle and planted his hands on her waist. ‘Let go of the reins.’

In surprise, Lucy unclenched her stiff fingers and found herself swept down from the mare into a pair of frighteningly powerful arms. ‘What on earth—?’

‘You will ride with me on El Lobo,’ Joaquin announced as he swung her up on to the huge stallion’s back, following her up so fast into the saddle she didn’t even have the chance to argue.

As Lucy curved uneasily away from the hard heat of his lean, muscular thighs, a strong arm settled round her abdomen and forced her inexorably back. ‘Stay still…I will not allow you to fall,’ he said impatiently.

Shaken by the sudden intimate contact of their bodies, Lucy dragged in a deep, shivering breath. The disturbingly insidious scent of warm male assailed her. Her dry mouth ran even dryer. He smelt of hot skin and horse. Something twisted low in her tummy, increasing her nervous unease, but at least she felt safe in his hold. As her tension ebbed, slow, pervasive warmth blossomed in its stead, making her feel strangely limp and yielding. The soft peaks of her breasts tightened into hard little points, filling her with a heat that had nothing to do with the relentless sun above. She jerked taut on the shattering acknowledgement that her body was responding without her volition to the sexually charged sizzle of Joaquin Del Castillo’s raw masculinity.

‘Relax,’ he murmured softly, long brown fingers splaying across her midriff to ease her back into position again.

When he talked, soft and low, he had the most beautiful dark honeyed accent, she thought abstractedly, and never had she been as outrageously aware of anything as she was of that lean hand pressing just below her breasts. Her heart was pounding like a hammer inside her ribcage.

‘You’re holding me too tightly,’ she complained uneasily, horrified and embarrassed by the effect he was having on her.

‘You are not in any danger,’ Joaquin Del Castillo drawled silkily above her head. ‘I am not attracted by stunted women with bleached hair and streaky fake tans.’

A lump ballooned in Lucy’s convulsed throat. Mortified pink chased away her strained pallor. ‘You really are the most loathsome man,’ she gasped. ‘And I can’t wait to see the back of you! When will we reach Fidelio’s ranch?’

‘Tomorrow—’

‘Tomorrow?’ Lucy croaked in stunned disbelief.

‘In an hour, we will make camp for the night.’

Camp…camp? Aghast at the prospect of spending the night outdoors, Lucy swallowed back a self-pitying moan with the greatest of difficulty. ‘I thought we would be arriving soon—’

‘We have not made good time, señora.’

‘I had no idea that the ranch was so far away,’ she confided miserably.

They rode on in silence, and slowly the sun became a fiery orb in its sliding path towards the horizon. Lucy was by then dazed with exhaustion and half asleep. She was plucked from the stallion’s back and set down on solid earth again, but her legs had all the strength of bending twigs. She staggered, aching in bone and muscle from neck to toe. Dimly she focused on a trio of gnarled palm trees silhouetted against the darkening night sky and experienced a vague sense of déjà vu. But they couldn’t possibly be the same trees she had noticed hours back! No doubt one set of palm trees looked much like another, Lucy conceded wearily, and she definitely couldn’t recall the slender ribbon of river she could now see running nearby.

With every step she cursed her own bodily weakness. She had lost a lot of weight while her mother had been ill, and only the previous month had come down with a nasty bout of flu. After two solid days of travelling she had no energy left, and was indeed feeling far from well. It had not occurred to either her or Cindy that Fidelio’s ranch might lie in such a remote and inaccessible location.

The Guatemalan lowlands had looked infinitely less vast and daunting on the map than they were in reality, and, torn from the familiarity of city life and her own careful routine, Lucy felt horrendously vulnerable. Her twin might have travelled the globe but this was Lucy’s first trip abroad. Freedom had been the one thing her adoring but possessive mother had refused to give her.

Joaquin was seeing to the horses by the river when Lucy returned. She saw him through a haze of utter exhaustion. Her legs were trembling beneath her. She sank down on the grass. He dropped a blanket beside her.

‘You must be hungry,’ he murmured.

Lucy shook her head, too sick with fatigue to feel hunger. Slowly, like a toy running out of battery power, she slumped down full length. ‘Sleepy,’ she mumbled thickly.

Surprising her once again, he spread the blanket for her. Then, bending down, he shook her even more by sweeping her up in one easy motion and laying her down on the blanket. ‘Rest, then,’ he drawled flatly.

Joaquin Del Castillo was a male of innate and fascinating contradictions, Lucy acknowledged sleepily. Fiercely proud and icily self-contained in his hostility towards her, yet too honourable, it seemed, to make her suffer unnecessary discomfort.

Against the backdrop of the flaming sunset, he stood over her like a huge black intimidating shadow. ‘You look like the devil,’ she whispered, with a drowsy attempt at humour.

‘I will not take your soul, señora…but I have every intention of stripping you of everything else you possess.’

Stray words fluttered in the blankness of Lucy’s brain. They did not connect. They did not make sense. With a soundless sigh of relief, Lucy sank into the deep, dreamless sleep of exhaustion.