Maid for Montero

by Kim Lawrence

  ‘This isn’t working.’

  He would appreciate brevity, she decided, stifling an irrational stab of guilt. It wasn’t as if Isandro had invested any emotions in this relationship. It would be a mistake to imagine that he would feel as though he’d lost a limb if she vanished from his life.

  The highly charged silence stretched and pulsed, then he laughed and broke the spell.

  She cleared her throat. Either he was more all right with this than she had imagined or he was not taking her seriously. ‘I’m not joking. I think we should agree to call it a day.’

  He stopped laughing. ‘You do?’

  She nodded, then cleared her throat. She had seen granite walls more revealing than his expression. The only things moving were the muscles in his brown throat as they rippled under the surface of his bronzed skin. ‘Yes.’

  Isandro closed his eyes, fighting the urge to yell. The children were upstairs sleeping and he could not yell; he had to appear invisible.

  Her insistence on maintaining the unrealistic illusion they were nothing but passing acquaintances had not seemed a big ask at the time. It had even seemed like a good idea. However, it had ceased to feel like a good idea some time ago.

  There was a certain dark irony to the situation. He had always avoided having his name linked with a woman, and now he was with a woman who seemed ashamed to acknowledge they were sleeping together.

  It should have been the ideal situation, but it wasn’t.

  The previous week he had driven past the school when she was picking up the twins. They had waved and Zoe had pretended not to see him. He had been contemplating leaping out of the car and hauling her into his arms and kissing her in front of the entire damned gossipy village whose opinion seemed to matter so much to her. It wasn’t as if they didn’t all know they were sleeping together anyway.

  But he hadn’t, because he wasn’t a Neanderthal. Though lately he had seen there were certain advantages in following your baser instincts.

  Obviously he did not want to set up house, but neither did he want to be treated like a dirty secret…It was demeaning for any man.

  ‘You need a drink.’

  Zoe felt panic as she watched him shrug off his jacket before walking across to the cupboard where she had put the half-drunk bottle of wine he had opened the previous evening.

  ‘I don’t drink, remember?’ She took a deep breath, lowered her voice from the shrill, unattractive level it had risen to and reminded him, ‘We agreed that when this didn’t work we would simply call it a day. Look, I know it must be strange because you assumed—actually so did I—that it would be you who ended things.’ She gave a sad smile. ‘It’s nothing personal,’ she added earnestly.

  He studied her face for any sign of irony but there was none. ‘Well, I do want a drink,’ he said, pouring the remnants of the bottle into a glass and swallowing the contents without tasting.

  ‘So nothing personal, which of course makes all the difference,’ he drawled, setting aside the glass with elaborate care while in his head he saw it smashing to a million pieces as he threw it into the fireplace.

  ‘Please don’t be like that,’ she begged. ‘This is hard.’ She bit her trembling lip. She could not afford to lose her focus now, she could not afford to allow him to touch her…

  ‘This is bloody ridiculous,’ he contended, thrusting his balled fists into the pockets of his well-cut trousers and glaring at her.

  Zoe recognised the cause of his belligerence but she was not in the mood to show much understanding for injured male pride. So maybe he had just been dumped for the first time in his life. There were any number of nubile women who would be gagging to massage his ego.

  She, on the other hand, might never fall in love again. This man was her soulmate, and all he could do was sulk while her heart was damned well breaking.

  Well, at least he should remember her, though for all the wrong reasons—as the woman who dared to dump him!

  ‘I know you said we could stay on here,’ she said formally, ‘but that wouldn’t be right. I have made alternative arrangements.’

  ‘You have what?’ he roared as his smouldering temper sparked into full-blown conflagration. ‘Since when is this not working?’

  She kept her chin up, not easy when a man who appeared to be ten feet tall was towering over her like some sort of damned volcano. ‘Since Harry came home with a black eye and a split lip after brawling with a boy who called me a cheap tart, among other things.’

  Isandro took a step back, the air leaving his lungs in one audible, sizzling hiss.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  ‘IS HE ALL RIGHT?’

  Mingled with the protective outrage Isandro felt was a surge of pride that the boy had stood up for his aunt; he had protected her honour.

  Which was more than he had done. The guilty knowledge that this situation was one of his making scratched away at Isandro’s conscience like a nail on a blackboard.

  No complications? He had known that was a total impossibility from day one. He had tried extremely hard to tell himself otherwise but he had known that this thing could get very complicated. He had taken refuge in technicalities—Zoe no longer worked for him; he never spent the entire night. He should have seen this coming. But he had wanted her…needed her with a hunger that was totally outside his experience. And in order to satisfy that hunger he had been prepared to break any and all rules.

  She nodded, the concern now in his dark eyes making her tear up. ‘He will be.’

  She rubbed a stray tear with the back of her hand, and the gesture made Isandro’s throat tighten.

  ‘This is a small village and people gossip. It was unrealistic of me not to expect this, and selfish of me not to consider the effect this sort of affair would have on the twins.’

  ‘So you think that nobody in this village has sex outside marriage?’

  The sarcasm in his voice brought a flush to her pale cheeks. ‘That’s not the point.’

  ‘What are you going to do—take a vow of chastity until the twins leave home? No boyfriends? That is your idea of preparing them for the real world?’

  ‘You’re not my boyfriend. We don’t have a relationship—we have sex.’

  ‘Or do you need a ring on your finger? Is that what this is about?’

  ‘Of course not. It’s not sex outside marriage, it’s sex with you!’ she yelled before she remembered the sleeping children.

  He did not respond to her announcement at all, though his feet-apart stance and stony, tight-lipped silence did not exactly convey happiness.

  ‘I don’t want to argue.’ She gave a weary sigh and looked at him through her lashes, head tilted a little to one side. Seeing the familiar attitude, he felt his anger levels decrease.

  ‘But it’s true—you’re not my boyfriend. And I didn’t mean it to sound the way it did about sex with you, but it is true as well…How can I tell the children that sex within a loving, caring relationship can be a beautiful thing, when I’m having sex with you?’ While it might be beautiful for her, she knew that for Isandro it was simply an act of physical release.

  If ever she had come close to reading more into his exquisite tenderness and mind-blowing passion, she reminded herself of this: it was just sex for Isandro, for all that he did ‘just sex’ very well indeed.

  He arched a sardonic brow. ‘So you are only sleeping with me to pay for the rent.’

  The suggestion brought a rosy tinge of anger to her pale cheeks. How dared he act like the injured party?

  ‘Of course I’m not! I’d sleep with you if I had to crawl across a desert to get into your bed.’ Her blue eyes held his, shining with passionate fervour, before she dropped her gaze, remembering a few crucial seconds late that she was ending a relationship, not declaring he was her drug of choice…legal but, oh, so addictive.

  ‘But this isn’t about what I want.’ She inhaled and struggled to clear the haze of desire in her brain. The memory of Harry’s bruised little face did the trick
better than a bucket of cold water. She squared her slender shoulders and lifted her chin. ‘It’s what I need to do for the twins. I have to send out the right message and I know full well that even—’

  His eyes held a complacent gleam as he added helpfully, ‘You would crawl across a desert to sleep with me?’

  As if he didn’t already know that! Zoe slung him a cross look and sniffed. He wasn’t making this any easier.

  ‘A figure of speech,’ she muttered, knowing it had been much more than that and hoping he didn’t. ‘We’re really not discussing how great you are in bed.’

  ‘Sex with you is worth the odd desert crossing, too.’

  Even above the presence of his painful arousal, Isandro was conscious of a strange heaviness in his chest as he made a conscious effort to capture Zoe’s eyes. She seemed determined to look anywhere but at him. The moment of success when he welded his sloe-black eyes on her bright burning blue…The heaviness in his chest bordered unbearable…Yet he felt strangely exhilarated. Was he having a heart attack?

  Zoe licked her dry lips and struggled to think past the static buzz of electricity in the room.

  ‘Thanks…’ she said, not knowing what else to say, and not hearing the huskiness in her voice above the deafening clamour of her pounding pulses. ‘Children can be very cruel.’ She gave a loud sniff. ‘So you see that I can’t continue to live here to be your…mistress.’

  ‘You are not my mistress.’

  His offended hauteur in his attitude struck her as weird. ‘I live here, and you own the place.’

  ‘You pay rent.’

  ‘A token amount. And the fact is you wouldn’t have offered me this place if we hadn’t been having sex.’

  ‘I have never paid for sex.’

  ‘We can play table tennis semantics all night, but it won’t stop other people seeing me as a kept woman.’

  ‘I don’t give a damn what people think.’

  ‘That’s not a luxury I can afford, Isandro,’ she said sadly. ‘It stopped being the day I took on the twins. It’s my job to be a good role model for them. Even if they didn’t have to contend with the sort of teasing that happened today, what sort message am I sending?’

  ‘Parents do have sex. That is the reality, and you cannot protect them from every hurt along the way. I will have a word with the headmaster.’

  She stared at him. ‘I can’t believe you just said that!’ she yelped, dropping into a chair.

  ‘Neither can I,’ he admitted honestly.

  ‘You will not have any words with the headmaster. You will not go near the school…I want the children to know about adult relationships, know that sex should happen within the confines of a loving relationship. Not like…I may have…’ Her eyes filled as she trawled her vocabulary for a word that would cover what she had.

  ‘You’re overreacting,’ he accused.

  She thought of Harry’s face and shook her head. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m not.’

  ‘You want the children to go to school here. Where will you live? I know Polly well enough to know she’s probably paying you a pittance.’ Polly would have squeezed a stone dry if it put up her profit margins, and Zoe was too self-deprecating to know her own value.

  ‘I’m learning. She’s paying me a fair wage and I’ve already been looking for suitable accom—’

  ‘Looking!’ He pounced on the word like a circling tiger looking for a weakness. ‘So this thing with the twins is just an excuse? It’s not spontaneous. You were already planning—’

  She bit her lip. ‘I wasn’t planning—preparing.’

  Sally at the shop had some holiday lets by the canal—a row of terraced cottages that were empty now the season was over. She was willing to let Zoe have one until she sorted herself something more permanent.

  ‘You can’t. I won’t let you.’

  ‘You can’t stop me. It’s my choice.’

  ‘And you think it will be so easy, do you, to spend your nights alone in your solitary single bed?’

  She reacted to this deliberate cruelty with a display of stubborn defiance. ‘The cottage runs to a double. And who says I’ll be alone?’

  He was out of his chair and beside her, hauling her to her feet, before she had even finished speaking. His warm breath brushed her cheek as he bent in close. ‘Have you been preparing for that, too? Have you met someone?’

  She closed her eyes, feeling faint, smelling the citrusy scent of the soap he used. Every instinct she possessed was telling her to sink into all his male hardness, but Zoe fought and from somewhere dredged up the strength to put her hands against his chest and push away.

  ‘I thought your speciality was painless break-ups,’ she panted as she drew her hair back from her face with a shaky hand. ‘Or is that only when you’re dictating the timing?’

  He didn’t respond to the accusation. He was watching her rub her arm where he caught hold of her. He swore and touched her hand lightly; her fingers immediately curled around his. ‘Let me see…?’

  Zoe shook her head and didn’t let go of his finger. The thought of letting go permanently left a great aching hole in her chest.

  Would it ever go away?

  ‘It’s nothing.’

  ‘The thought of you with another man makes me…’ Their eyes connected.

  ‘How could you think there’s another man, Isandro?’

  ‘I didn’t…I don’t. I’m just…’ He stopped, let go of her hand and raked his fingers through his hair. ‘You can’t go, Zoe.’

  ‘Why can’t I go?’

  ‘I need you…I love you.’ He blinked and looked like a man waking up from a dream. ‘Dios, of course I do. I love you!’ he yelled.

  She hitched a startled breath and stared up at him. ‘Is this your idea of a joke?’ she asked him shakily.

  ‘Anything but, querida,’ he retorted throatily.

  ‘Are you saying this to get me into bed?’

  His head reared back as though she had struck him. ‘I suppose I deserve that for being so bloody stupid,’ he admitted quietly. ‘I have been a fool. I was so busy not being a loser like my father that I almost became a loser like me…the biggest loser in the world if I let you walk away from me.’

  ‘You love me?’ It still didn’t seem real.

  ‘Is that so hard to believe? I can barely stand to have you out of my sight for two seconds. The thought of losing you sent me into a blind panic. I just couldn’t admit it, couldn’t admit that my fate was no longer in my hands, but that I had put it in yours.’ It had taken the prospect of losing her to make him wake up to himself and see what he strongly suspected everyone else already had.

  Everyone but Zoe.

  He captured her small hands and lifted them to his lips, looking deep into her eyes with an expression that brought tears of joy to them.

  ‘I love you, Isandro.’

  ‘I sort of guessed that.’

  She gave a laugh. ‘And I thought I was being so subtle.’ He pulled her to him and kissed her, a hard, passionate kiss full of promise and love.

  ‘Say it again, Isandro?’ she begged huskily.

  ‘I love you, querida.’ The words that he had been afraid of now came easily; the problem now might be not saying them every second of the day.

  ‘Shall we get married at the hall? Or would you prefer—?’

  She drew back her eyes wide. ‘Married?’

  ‘Well, how else can I face this headmaster and sort things out for Harry? A boyfriend is not going to have the same pull as a fiancé.’

  She blinked, unable to believe this was commitment-phobic Isandro talking. ‘You’d do that? Take on the twins?’

  ‘I think the question is more whether they will take me on.’

  ‘Oh, I think they might be OK with it.’

  ‘And you, my love—are you OK with it?’

  She smiled and flew into his arms. ‘So OK with it, Isandro, so very OK.’

  Two months later they attended the wedding of Isandro’s father, R
aul, in Seville.

  It was a lovely wedding, though not, to Zoe’s way of thinking, a patch on her own the previous month.

  It really pleased her to see Isandro and his father on such good terms. Their little family was growing and soon it would be even bigger.

  She had kept the secret to herself two whole days and as the organist struck up the ‘Wedding March’ she could hold it in no longer. She leaned across and whispered in Isandro’s ear.

  He frowned at her and mouthed, ‘What?’

  She whispered again with the same result. Rolling her eyes, she leaned in and yelled, ‘I’m pregnant!’

  Of course, it coincided with the music stopping and her announcement echoed off the rafters of the church.

  ‘Why do these things keep happening to me? What is wrong with my timing?’

  Isandro, his eyes gleaming, bent towards her. ‘Your timing is perfect and as far as I’m concerned you can shout it from the rafters every day…I want the world to know I’m the luckiest man alive.’

  Zoe, who had never cried at a wedding before, cried at the second one in two months…tears of pure joy.

  All the characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author, and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all the incidents are pure invention.

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