‘Which is why you’re terrified of going near that wine fridge?’
‘Drinking isn’t appropriate when you’re looking after children.’
‘And, as you’ve said, you’re on call twenty-four hours a day, every day of the week...’ He strolled towards the huge double-fronted steel grey fridge and stared at drawings that had been attached by magnets to the front, oddly out of place in the vast, modern, clinically pristine surroundings. He un-tacked a photo and peered at it, then he looked at her.
‘This the family?’ He tilted his head to one side and Sofia knew that she was reddening. Her skin felt hot and prickly and there was a throbbing in her temples. Those dark, dark eyes of his were so intense, so penetrating.
‘Yes,’ she replied shortly.
‘Attractive couple. Attractive kids.’
‘Yes. They are.’
‘Younger than I’d imagined, if I’m honest.’
‘Why would you have imagined anything about them?’
‘Unlike you, I don’t pretend to be incurious. It’s natural to wonder about the sort of people you might be stuck with for a couple of weeks.’
‘You act as though you’re doing them a favour!’
‘The man...is very good-looking, wouldn’t you agree?’ Rafael murmured, glancing towards her, keeping his keen gaze pinned to her face.
Sofia tensed, her face tight, and just like that he replaced the photo from where it had been taken, seemingly losing all interest in the conversation.
In her.
Disappointment warred with relief. She looked at the glass of wine in her hand and wondered how she’d ended up straying from the straight and narrow.
‘So what’s keeping you here?’ he asked. ‘Aside from two kids and a pay packet at the end of the month.’
The question temporarily threw her and she looked at him with sudden bewilderment.
‘Isn’t that enough? We all have to earn a living. You’re here, earning a living.’ She cleared her throat, finished her wine and stood up, hot, bothered and so, so conscious of his eyes trained on her face. ‘Anyway, you should...be thinking about heading back to your lodge. You’ll be busy tomorrow.’ She stood up while he remained sitting where he was, long legs stretched out in front of him, lightly holding his glass of wine and idly twirling it before taking a sip.
‘Sit, why don’t you?’ He motioned to the chair and drawled with a ghost of a wry smile, ‘I promise that I’ll leave you in peace when this glass of wine is finished.’
Sofia thought of the empty evening stretching ahead of her and was ashamed to find herself wanting him to hang around. She’d always enjoyed her own company, especially since she’d been working here, because her time was so seldom her own. However, he’d sparked a curious restlessness inside her and the prospect of studying, which had been top of the agenda, seemed dull and boring.
Disobedient eyes slid across to him, to the lazy, ‘Lord of the Manor’ way he sat there, sprawled in the kitchen chair, dominating the space around him.
Fearless. What sort of gardener was he anyway?
She tried to picture him weeding, scrutinising bottles of fertiliser, mowing the lawn and talking to the plants but she couldn’t.
‘Is there someone significant lurking in the background, making all this drudgery worthwhile? He must be very understanding to put up with you being on call twenty-four-seven.’
‘Drudgery? Drudgery? Who do you think you are?’
‘Figure of speech,’ Rafael said unapologetically.
‘I resent that figure of speech!’
‘You’re very attractive but I don’t suppose I’m telling you anything you don’t already know.’
‘That doesn’t mean...it doesn’t mean...’ She was breathless and had to breathe in deeply to stop herself from shaking. ‘That there’s a significant anyone lurking in the background, and even if there was I fail to see what business it might be of yours!’
Rafael didn’t say anything for a few seconds and she found the silence oppressive, like a dense weight pushing down on her, making her want to justify herself.
She thought of her experiences with the opposite sex, the hungry eyes and groping hands that she had always had to bat away. She thought of being the object of a bet, mortified and humiliated at a time when she had been so open to handing over her heart to someone.
Was it any wonder that she felt safest when she was buried behind books, studying and dreaming about an uncomplicated future?
Other girls her age dreamt of guys, dating, engagements and getting married.
She dreamt of being able to take care of herself. When she thought about men, she vaguely had in her head someone unthreatening—dull, even. Someone who would be able to see past the sexy image that was so unlike the girl she was inside and appreciate her for the qualities that weren’t on show.
‘So no boyfriend?’
‘No,’ she said sharply. ‘Not that it’s any of your business.’ She abruptly got to her feet and made a beeline for the folder she had been given with all the detailed instructions for the gardener whom had been foisted upon the Walters.
‘And what about the master of the house?’ Rafael quizzed softly, feeling her out.
Sofia stiffened. It was barely noticeable but he noticed it.
‘What,’ Sofia asked coldly, ‘are you implying?’
‘Sometimes masters of the house can have expectations beyond the call of duty. Sometimes those expectations are met...’
Sofia clenched her fists and took a deep, steadying breath, which didn’t do the trick. He was being provocative. She had no idea why but it wasn’t going to get her anywhere if she allowed her temper to get the better of her. Letting your emotions get the better of you never paid off. Her mother had let her emotions get the better of her. First when she had fallen for a guy who had dumped her, and afterwards when she had let her heart rule her head, always looking for salvation in someone else, always thinking that she could escape disappointment by throwing herself headlong into relationships that had never gone anywhere.
Sofia had adored her fallible mother but had seen the failings and had determined never to be afflicted in the same way.
Letting this complete stranger get to her wasn’t going to work.
‘Not in this case,’ she said through gritted teeth.
‘I didn’t think so,’ Rafael murmured honestly. ‘But there’s something there, isn’t there? What?’
‘Let’s get something straight.’ Sofia was holding on to her temper with difficulty and he wasn’t making it any easier by that all-knowing look on his face, a look which implied that he could read her mind, which of course he couldn’t.
‘What’s that?’
‘You’re here to do a job. I have stuff to do and I won’t be fraternising with you.’
‘Because I ask too many questions?’
‘My personal life is none of your business. Now, I’ll show you to the door. Take the instructions. You might want to read them over before you go to bed. There will be a lot to busy yourself with until James and Elizabeth get back. They’ll expect you to have done everything laid out, right down to pulling up the very last weed in the flower beds.’ She thrust the paper into his hand, and he glanced at it as though only really mildly curious as to the content.
‘Later.’
‘Later? Later?’
Rafael rose to his feet unhurriedly. ‘I’ll be settling in before I start doing any work in someone’s garden.’
‘Settling in?’ she parroted, staggered and still seething at his outrageous implications. For all that, though, she was furiously aware of the keen beating of her heart and the way, for the first time in living memory, she felt alive to someone else, all her senses heightened, her pulses racing, her skin tingling.
Rafael burst out laughing. ‘Oh yes,’ he said in a low,
velvety undertone, moving towards the door and dumping the unopened pages of instructions on the kitchen counter en route. ‘I intend to familiarise myself with the place before I go anywhere near a bottle of weed killer or a lawn mower.’
‘You can’t do that.’
‘Will you be trying to stop me?’
‘James... Mr Walters...he can be very short-tempered.’
‘Really?’
Sofia nodded, but she was mesmerised by the arrogant lack of interest in Rafael’s dark gaze.
‘Interesting.’
‘What is?’ she breathed, hovering, unable to keep still.
‘Interesting how incredibly unadventurous you are for someone of your age. Why is that? No, I can guess why. Your mother dragged you from pillar to post and your response was to batten down the hatches and pray for a time when the storm would pass.’
‘Stop,’ Sofia hissed, shaken. ‘Stop making assumptions about my personal life!’
Rafael didn’t say anything for a few seconds but he looked at her, a long, leisurely look that made her breath hitch in her throat.
‘A little adventure can go a long way,’ Rafael murmured.
‘Maybe for you,’ she was stung into responding, ‘but not for me. So maybe you’re right—maybe a life of never quite staying anywhere long enough to put down real roots has made me a bit wary when it comes to all that nonsense about adventure. But I don’t need a complete stranger to start lecturing to me on my life choices.’
‘Who better than a complete stranger to lecture on life choices? Isn’t that how therapy works?’
‘You’re a gardener, not a therapist, so I’m not seeing the relevance.’
Rafael adroitly swerved around the interruption. ‘Life is meant to be lived,’ he mused, eyes pinned to her face, noting every change of expression, every fleeting shadow, the flare of her nostrils, the dilation of her pupils, the way her breathing was shallow and breathless. ‘Sometimes, things happen that can’t be predicted...’ He shrugged and grinned. ‘All I’m saying is that I won’t be spending every hour of the day obeying what’s on those pieces of paper el señor de la casa has thoughtfully printed for me.’
Adventure...
Never before had one word dangled before her eyes, beckoning with the seductive allure of a banquet spread before a starving person.
She had made all the right noises about adventure being the last thing she wanted in her life. She’d meant every word of it! It was an ideology long ingrained inside her.
And yet...he stood there and the urge to be swept away by that low, sexy voice was overwhelming. She physically had to take a step back but her heart was beating like a sledgehammer inside her.
‘I intend to see a bit of this beautiful place, Sofia, and you’re going to be my guide,’ he murmured. ‘While the cat’s away the mouse, I’m suggesting, should definitely play...’
CHAPTER THREE
SOFIA EYED THE crystal-clear swimming pool with a mixture of headiness and apprehension.
Under a dazzlingly bright-blue sky, the flat turquoise water glittered and shimmered and beckoned on a day of soaring temperatures.
Of course, she’d used the pool before, but only when the children had been around, splashing and yelling, with the little one clinging to her while she did her best to make sure Josh wasn’t going to do himself permanent damage by flinging himself into the water from the side of the pool while helping his younger sister to keep afloat without arm bands.
This time round...
Sofia closed her eyes and took a few steadying breaths while she mentally confronted the position she now found herself in.
‘Out of her comfort zone’ summed it up.
More than out, she thought giddily. More like teetering on the edge of a precipice with the comfort zone no longer in sight.
Amazing what a week could do!
First of all, she had let herself be talked into a sightseeing tour of Buenos Aires.
‘Live a little,’ he had whispered in a dangerously soft voice and even more dangerous glint in his dark eyes.
Then, in quick succession, there had followed various little jaunts in and around the city, while she had relaxed more and more and found herself dropping her guard and laughing, her curiosity about the stranger who had landed on the Walters’ doorstep growing with each passing second.
A stranger who had not bothered to go near the long list of must-dos that her employer had meticulously and maliciously printed off.
A stranger who had not, in fact, been near the tool shed, the ride-on mower, the green house or any implement connected to gardening.
His audacity thrilled her.
She wasn’t going to lose her head, because he wasn’t ‘settling down’ material, and he would be gone in the blink of an eye. But where was the harm in having a bit of fun, as he had cleverly suggested to her?
And she was having fun. Lots of it.
Even her aunt had noticed.
The evening before, she had gone to visit Misa, who lived on the other side of the city where the tall, shiny towers of the city and the exclusive retreats of the wealthy were as out of reach as the moon—even though, from the bedroom window of the derelict house in which she lived, Misa could spy them in the distance.
‘You’re glowing,’ her aunt had announced, pleased. ‘It’s the first time you’ve actually looked like a young girl since you returned to Buenos Aires. There must be a man in your life. Someone special, Sofia?’
‘I’m not glowing,’ Sofia had protested, but she knew that she was somehow different.
She had hardly been able to focus on Miguel, her cousin, who as always was in his room, immobile and frustrated, facing certain physical disabilities after a motorcycle accident at the age of sixteen.
For once, instead of sitting back and listening to his despair, Sofia had talked about the stranger who had landed on the doorstep like a breath of fresh air.
She’d been full of it.
Her head had been giddy with thoughts of Rafael when she’d left, whereas normally she would be in her usual funk, thinking about her aunt and Miguel stuck in one of the poorer barrios where block upon block of unsightly apartments jostled against one another like little card houses, unsubstantial and ready to topple over into the chaotic, cluttered little streets below. Thinking, as she always did, of how much Misa had been there for her much younger sister when Maria had returned ill and with time no longer on her side. Thinking of how vital was the money she earned as a nanny when it came to helping them both.
Now, with her towel in one hand, clad in the only swimsuit she possessed—an extremely unadventurous black one-piece—Sofia waited with shameful eagerness for Rafael to appear.
He had gone to the city ‘to see what was going on’ as though, somehow, people in high places might be clamouring for his involvement.
‘But meet me at the pool,’ he’d said in that way he had of voicing the daringly unacceptable as though she would be an idiot not to concede. ‘I’ll bring lunch.’
‘You don’t have to do that,’ Sofia had laughed, captivated by the intensity of his gaze. ‘Save what money you have! James and Elizabeth have left sufficient food in the larder for me to rustle something up.’
But he would have none of it and now here she was, waiting for him to appear with food, generous to a fault even though he was no higher up the pecking order than was she.
Her head was filled with dangerous, exciting possibilities.
He’d been the perfect gentleman so far, although his manner was amused, flirtatious, sexy, and his dark eyes lazily, thrillingly speculative. She wasn’t sure whether he fancied her or not and that was a first.
Lust was only something she’d read about in magazine articles but now...
Now it was something that called to her, the ultimate adventure waiting to happen. When she thou
ght about being the one to make the first move, her whole body burned and tingled, but more and more in the space of a handful of days she had been contemplating just that.
She wasn’t entirely sure about the technicalities of such an event, but she was willing to give it a go, and that was such alien territory for her that her nervous system went into meltdown when she thought about it.
Her head was in the clouds when she became aware of Rafael, who had paused just by the pool, face shadowed by the overhang of the tree he was standing beneath.
Her eyes roamed appreciatively over him. So tall, so powerfully built, so commanding. He was in a pair of low-slung, khaki shorts, a T-shirt that originally would have been black but was now an off-grey, and a pair of loafers that looked as though they cost the earth but which, Sofia knew, would have been as cheap as chips.
Something about the way he was put together made everything he wore look stupidly expensive.
She began walking towards him and her heart beat just a little faster, the closer she got.
He didn’t move a muscle.
It was curious but there was something about him that was as wary as she was, even though he was crazily sexy and extremely forthcoming with conversation, able to reduce her to hysterics in just a few witty sentences, or have her hanging on his every word with anecdotes that beggared belief.
She was vaguely aware that there was a part of him that was very contained, so automatically she had responded like for like, confiding but only just so much, never letting him get too close.
He knew a lot about her experiences of travelling around with her mother but nothing at all about her life here, when she had finally returned to her home town.
He had guessed, shrewdly, at her experiences of being a nanny and working for James, but she had wisely held back from saying anything that could jeopardise the job which she badly needed, at least for the time being.
She had become close enough to want him in a very, very physical way, but had remained distant enough to protect herself, conscious of the temporary nature of his visit and the unsuitability of his personality.
Shock Marriage for the Powerful Spaniard Page 4
