Don Joaquin's Pride (Presents, 2127)

by Lynne Graham

  ‘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 mmoving 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, señ
ora,’ 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.