by Lucy Ellis
His gaze dropped to her pelvis, where she had settled her hands, as if trying to repel any imaginary seeding in her womb.
He frowned. It wasn’t as if he’d been trying to impregnate her. But she was glaring at him as if he’d wilfully and wantonly planted a baby inside her. And now he was seeing other things: Lulu’s slender curvy shape distended, a little person growing inside her until she was a soft, round, fecund woman, with his baby…somewhere in Paris.
This sudden and to his mind bizarre detour of his imagination had him doing a double-take.
He focused on the more important question. Paris was a big city. He didn’t even have her address.
Dios.
How the hell had he missed all this?
Logically, he knew he could get it from Khaled. But right now this was about the two of them. He had no intention of involving other people who would by necessity come between them.
She spun away from him.
‘Where the hell are you going?’ he growled.
She didn’t even look around as she flung over her shoulder, ‘Away from you.’
‘Oh, no, you don’t, querida.’
He seized her by the wrist and Lulu jerked her head round, and for a moment all he saw was the true panic in her eyes. He was so puzzled by it that when she rounded on him with a raised elbow he wasn’t quick enough to deflect the blow and it connected with his jaw. His head jerked back and he let her go.
‘Damn!’
Pain radiated from his face and around the back of his neck, and when his vision cleared Lulu was nowhere to be seen… And then he saw her knee. Narrow and pointy and shaking. She was crouched behind the desk.
‘Lulu?’ he said quietly, stepping carefully around the corner so as not to frighten her.
She was huddled there, looking as shocked as he was.
‘Mon Dieu!’ She pressed her hands to her mouth. ‘I’m sorry—I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean it.’
He just offered her his hand and after a hesitation she took it.
‘I hit you!’ she said jerkily, shaking her head as if she needed to clear it of something. Her whole body was trembling.
‘You struck out at me—there’s a difference.’ He wanted to comfort her but was careful not to embrace her. Something had spooked her, and he didn’t like the picture it was painting.
She lifted her hand to his chin and tentatively stroked him where a red mark was already appearing. ‘You’ll have a bruise.’
‘It’s all right, Lulu.’ He covered her hand and she let him.
‘No, it’s not. What sort of a maniac hits people?’
But she knew. Out of the past came a memory of her father catching hold of her mother, of the way he would shake her. Never a punch, never a slap, never anything that would leave a mark.
Only fingerprints, standing out on her wrist long after he had let her go.
Her mother had always pretended they didn’t matter. Would rub her skin. Would hide it.
‘Lulu…’ She became aware that he was saying her name. Had possibly said it several times.
She looked up at him blindly.
‘Lulu, what happened to you?’ he asked, with a quiet intensity she’d only seen in him when they were intimate. It focused her.
‘I—’ She shook her head. ‘I can’t talk about it.’
She just couldn’t, but her hands had curved over his forearms and she realised she was holding tightly on to him.
Why was she seeking comfort from the very man who’d thrown her life into such disarray?
Because…because he made her feel like a bigger person—stronger, normal. He made her feel like the Lulu she might one day be.
This man who’d brought another woman to the wedding.
Lulu stepped back, wiping at her eyes and her nose with the back of her wrist. It wasn’t very ladylike, but it was all she had.
‘Why don’t you go and dance with your girlfriend and leave me alone? I’ll let you know if there are…consequences.’
‘Madeline is not my girlfriend,’ he said decisively. ‘She’s my plus one.’
‘Plus what?’ Lulu’s voice quavered.
‘Madeline’s an old friend. We’ve never been romantically involved. I promise you, Lulu. The invitation was for two, it’s a high-profile wedding, and she asked if she could come with me.’
Lulu felt like a balloon that just had the air let out of it. She knew in a minute that she would feel relieved, but right now all she could do was stare at him.
‘I was going to tell you last night, but you rushed off. Lulu—’ He stepped towards her.
‘Non!’ She glared at him unhappily. ‘Don’t come any closer. It’s never good when you come closer.’
He stopped. Then he ran a hand through his hair and seemed suddenly younger, less the cold stranger he’d been at the reception—the man who had brought another woman to Gigi’s wedding and not told her. He was suddenly Alejandro again, but an Alejandro toting a great deal of baggage she hadn’t known about—like the fame, and the women who apparently pursued him in droves.
‘Dios,’ he said. ‘This is a mess.’
Lulu couldn’t agree more. At least in that they were on the same page.
‘We need to get you onto contraception.’
Or not!
‘Excuse me? That has nothing to do with you.’
‘The hell it doesn’t. You could be pregnant, Lulu. If you have unprotected sex this is what happens.’
‘As I never intend to have sex again in my entire life, it’s no longer a problem,’ said Lulu, her chin trembling, ‘I was perfectly happy keeping myself to myself, and then you wrecked everything.’
He was frowning at her. He seemed to be struggling to follow her words and she wondered for a moment if her English had clotted up, as it had a habit of doing when she was overwrought.
‘What do you mean, keeping yourself to yourself?’
He suddenly seem to loom over her.
‘I don’t want to talk about it.’ Lulu pursed her lips, folded her arms and faced the other direction.
‘Dios,’ he said, almost under his breath. ‘I knew you were a virgin.’
It was the last straw.
‘Did you?’ she snapped. ‘How clever you are. Give the man a medal.’
‘Lulu—’
‘I was not a virgin,’ she stated, staring at an old tapestry on the wall, in which a man in armour appeared to be poking a dragon viciously with a three-pronged weapon. She wished above all things she could be doing that to Alejandro du Crozier right now. ‘I lost my virginity when I was eighteen—how many times do I have to explain this to people? I just never followed up with anyone else.’
She heard him sigh.
‘Not that it’s any business of yours,’ she added. ‘Any more.’
‘Then why the hell did you decide to follow up with me?’ He sounded angry again, but in a different way. He sounded as if he cared.
Lulu discovered she disliked that even more. It was just a trick. She whirled around, wishing he would ignore all her ravings and put his arms around her. But he wasn’t going to do that.
‘And that’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it?’ she shouted—she never shouted, but this was a weekend of firsts. ‘Why don’t you call me if you ever work it out?’
*
He’d handled that well.
Alejandro nursed a whisky as he stood at the window of his guest room. The place was draughty, but that probably went with it being several hundred years old, and yet in shirtsleeves he wasn’t feeling much except the adrenalin his brain was pumping through his body.
He couldn’t put together a coherent picture of her. At every turn Lulu confounded him. She threw up walls, drew lines in the sand for him to step over, made him jump through hoops. She was his worst nightmare.
The kind of woman he’d avoided all his adult life.
A woman who needed drama.
Only she wasn’t quite that either… He was missing a piece in thi
s puzzle, and when he had it everything would fall into place.
He couldn’t blot out the image of her huddling behind the desk. Hiding. He thought of the story she’d told him of being attacked and wondered if this was the fallout from that. He wanted to take that fear away, and yet he’d given up taking responsibility for other people’s happiness years ago, when he knew he couldn’t fit the bill.
More to the point, how the hell was he going to handle a baby?
Not that there was a baby. Even if Lulu was pregnant she might very well not want to go through with it, which just opened up all kinds of conflicting feelings inside him. He’d always supported a woman’s right to choose, but he discovered he had strong feelings when it came to his own potential child.
Was this how his father had felt about the various children he’d fathered on the women who had become a big part of the decline of the estancia? Six kids who’d had to be fed, clothed and educated—along with himself and his two sisters—and the alimony for his mother had been its own drain.
But this wasn’t the same at all.
He wasn’t his father, following every twitching skirt.
True, he didn’t ignore his healthy sex drive and live like a monk, tied to the estancia. Women were part of his life on the circuit. But they didn’t interfere with his passion, which was for horses and winning and seeing his patrimony stand strong, as it had for several generations before his father had almost scuppered it with his extra-marital affairs and illegitimate children.
Illegitimate children. He wasn’t having that either.
Alejandro steeled his resolve.
He knew deep down that he wasn’t cut out to be a protector of anyone. Every time he’d tried to help his mother as a child she’d pushed him away. His brief marriage when he was barely out of his teens had hit a wall as soon as it had begun. As a grown man he’d erected a barrier to protect himself and push others away.
But he couldn’t push a baby away. He couldn’t ignore his own child.
He’d been raised by people who did that, and he knew how heavy a burden it was to carry the knowledge that your own parents didn’t love you through life.
But at least it clarified what he had to do now. He’d solve all this by taking Lulu with him to Buenos Aires for the next few weeks. He’d put her up in a nice hotel, look after her with the best money could buy, do the test with her at the scheduled start of her period and if she was pregnant they’d work it out from there.
But he knew one thing. If Lulu was pregnant, he’d marry her and take the consequences.
CHAPTER TWELVE
MOST OF THE guests had departed last night, after the newly married couple had left for the Seychelles, but the rest of the wedding party was still there and he found Lulu among the other bridesmaids and some late-leaving guests in the room off the main hall, saying their farewells and organising their transport back to where they’d come from.
Madeline was long gone, with one of the groomsmen she’d been entwined with the last time he’d seen her, having a very nice time. She’d waved him off when he’d gone over to apologise for his long absence and mouthed, I’ll find my own way home, which had freed him to focus entirely on the issue at hand: Lulu.
While everyone else was in jeans, country casual, Lulu was dressed to the nines, wearing another vintage outfit—a raspberry-red fitted dress this time, with long sleeves—and she had a bow around her neck to modestly cover the scooped bodice that made her look as if she should be in a nineteen-forties film.
It was Lulu’s little waist and neatly rounded hips, rising at the back to her nicely constructed behind, that made her so damn sexy. On her feet she had clumpy black high heels from the same era, and they made her legs look ridiculously slender and long.
Her hair had been teased into a sleek up-do that had his fingers itching to muss it up. Clips glittered like fireflies in the shiny dark mass.
But when she turned around he could see she was wearing sunglasses. Indoors. In Scotland. Now there was a statement.
Alejandro knew he was currently standing in a trench called bastard, and that he’d dug it for himself.
He couldn’t go any deeper, and was tempted just to haul her over his shoulder and carry her out. It did have a precedent. But drawing attention to their situation was hardly the optimum solution at the moment.
He took her aside.
‘I’ve been doing some research. You can take a reliable test on the first day your period’s due—which, according to you, puts us three weeks from today.’
He couldn’t see her eyes—those bloody glasses—but the tightening of her rosebud mouth said everything.
‘I want you to come to Buenos Aires with me. When the time comes we’ll take the test and settle the question. Together.’
Her lips parted.
‘We’ll take the test, will we? I think it will be me peeing on a stick.’
Alejandro recognised that Lulu had clearly done some self-defence training overnight and knew this wasn’t going to be easy.
‘If it makes you feel better, hermosa, I’ll pee in sympathy.’
She glared at him. He might not be able to see her eyes, but her mobile little mouth was doing the expressions for her.
‘I’ll make it good for you,’ he coaxed. ‘Put you up in a nice hotel…you can do some shopping. Buenos Aires is big on fashion—right up your alley.’ He indicated her pretty frock.
Lulu stared at him in disbelief. She had cried on and off all night. Hence the sunglasses she wouldn’t be removing. But, seeing him again this morning, she had felt her blasted heart jump up and down and she’d really hoped he might say something that would make this a little better. Then she would apologise for going off like a firecracker yesterday, and they could talk like grown-ups about how best to handle this.
Only now she’d been pulled into a corner and dictated to. No mention of them—it was all about this non-existent pregnancy. Because, really, how unlucky could he be?
Stuck with some girl he’d got lucky with on his drive in to Dunlosie?
He couldn’t make it any clearer.
Instead of going out of his way to visit her in Paris, he wanted her to upend her life and go to Buenos Aires and not inconvenience him!
Did he really think she was so shallow that shopping for clothes was all she thought about?
Lulu wondered how on earth he’d got her so wrong.
Because he barely knows you. He’s not even interested in getting to know you, whispered a caustic voice. You’re just the next girl in a line of girls and he can’t move on from you because of a condom malfunction.
It really wasn’t making her feel special.
It was making her angry.
‘Why on earth would I come to Buenos Aires?’
‘Because I have to work and we have a problem.’
‘You may have to work, but so do I.’
‘The cabaret season’s ended.’ At her surprised look he added, ‘Your little blonde friend was full of information last night. You’re a lady of leisure for the next month.’
This provoked a choking noise.
He glanced at his watch. ‘Let’s get out of here.’
‘No!’ She folded her arms. ‘I’m not going anywhere with you. I will take a test, and I’ll let you know if there’s anything that concerns you.’
He glowered down at her. ‘What the hell’s that supposed to mean?’
‘Just what I say. I don’t need you standing in the bathroom with me.’
Lulu tipped up her chin. It was certainly easier staring him down from behind the shades, and she wished she’d had them yesterday.
‘I won’t be bullied,’ she added, ‘and I won’t be made to feel I don’t have a choice.’
‘In what way am I bullying you?’
‘Going behind my back, finding out about my schedule. We don’t have a relationship, Alejandro, we just have a problem. And I can deal with it.’
He gave her a long, unsettling look. All the m
ore unsettling because, unlike her, he could hide what he was thinking. Then he seemed to make up his mind about something. His mouth curled into a tight smile that somehow held no humour and his eyes searched her face.
‘You’re right, Lulu, we don’t have a relationship.’
To Lulu’s astonishment her stomach dropped.
‘Give me a call if we’ve got a problem.’
He strode away and Lulu watched him go, unable to credit the disappointment that was dropping through her at a rate of knots.
What was wrong with her? This was what she wanted, wasn’t it? He was a control freak. She couldn’t believe he’d been scoping out her schedule when she’d thought he was flirting with Susie!
How could he have put her through that?
Lulu blinked. Wait a moment—two nights ago there had been no reason for him to be interested in her schedule. She bit her lip. Unless he was interested in her.
‘Chérie?’
Her mother had approached and was looking at her with that half-agonised expression Lulu discovered she could barely look at nowadays.
‘I’m flying home today,’ she heard herself say, sidling over to the window, which gave her an excellent view of anyone coming and going from this wing of the castle. ‘You should stay on with Jean-Luc for the golf.’
‘I rather thought you and I could fly down to London for a West End show and some shopping and then shoot home at the end of the week with Jean-Luc—that way I’ll be with you if something goes awry.’
Lulu was watching Alejandro cross the courtyard. His long, easy strides were in direct contrast to her own jerking heartbeat. How could he just walk off like that? Although she guessed he had tried, hadn’t he?
She closed her eyes momentarily, trying to block out her mother’s voice telling her how well she’d done this weekend, asking why she’d make it any more difficult for herself by facing another plane journey alone.
Lulu had a sudden image of herself hiding in a hotel bathroom in London, with her mother in the next room, and her peeing on a stick.
