The Spaniard's Love-Child

by Kim Lawrence

  “I suppose you consider yourself some sort of expert on kissing?”

  The glint in his eyes spelled danger. “Is that a challenge…?”

  She pressed a hand to her throat; she could feel the vibration of her pulse through her fingertips. “Most definitely n-not.” Her attempt to sound firm and faintly amused by his response failed abysmally. “I’m quite willing to accept you are the world’s best kisser without a demonstration.” Her laughter faded away in the face of his unblinking expressionless stare. “You didn’t come here to kiss me,” she protested.

  A strange expression flickered in his dark eyes. “Didn’t I?” He gave a twisted smile that changed into a look of deadly intent. “Then if I didn’t, I should have…”

  VIVA LA VIDA DE AMOR!

  They speak the language of passion.

  In Harlequin Presents®, you’ll find a special kind of lover—full of Latin charm. Whether he’s relaxing in denims or dressed for dinner, giving you diamonds or simply sweet dreams, he’s got spirit, style and sex appeal!

  Watch for more Latin Lovers—you can never have enough spice in your life!

  Available only from Harlequin Presents®

  Kim Lawrence

  THE SPANIARD’S LOVE-CHILD

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER ONE

  ‘MOTHER, you must rest.’ Raul Carreras gently pushed his mother back onto the pile of pillows, his eyes anxiously scanning her pale face.

  She looked close to collapse, which was hardly surprising: ill health, losing a husband and son so recently had already taken its toll. He feared this was one blow too many.

  ‘I do not want to rest, Raul!’ Aria Carreras cried fretfully, pushing aside the blanket he had pulled across her legs. ‘Do not treat me like a child. My grandchildren have been kidnapped. They are God knows where. Perhaps not even alive…’ Her voice rose to a shrill crescendo before her eyes filled with tears.

  As he watched her press her shaking hand to her mouth to stifle the whimper of distress that emerged from her trembling lips the skin drawn across Raul’s chiselled features tautened. Right now he might have to accept that he was helpless to ease her pain, but one day, he vowed silently, someone would pay!

  Aria Carreras succeeded in fighting back the tears. ‘And you ask me to rest…?’

  ‘Firstly, we don’t know for certain that the children have been kidnapped…’

  ‘But you think they have been?’ his mother accused shrilly. ‘If only your father was here he would know what to do. If he’d been here it wouldn’t have happened. He wouldn’t have let it.’

  She looked up and caught the spasm of pain momentarily disturb the composure of her son’s face. An expression of contrition spread across her own fine-boned features; Raul so rarely allowed those around him to see his feelings that everyone, including to her shame herself, tended to overlook the fact he had any.

  She reached up and took her son’s hand.

  ‘I’m sorry, that was unfair. You have improved our security beyond recognition.’

  Raul returned the pressure of her fingers and smiled, but kept to himself the grim reflection that his improved security had not stopped people entering their home and taking away two children without anyone raising the alarm.

  So much for modern technology!

  ‘And if your father had been alive by now he would have shouted at everyone, alienated the police and caused a diplomatic incident.’

  ‘At the very least,’ Raul agreed with the faintest glimmer of a smile in his dark eyes. His expression grew grave as he sat down on the edge of the bed. ‘Now what you must do is trust me to do what should be done. I will get Katerina and Antonio back, you know that?’

  If anyone else had made that claim she would have automatically considered it an attempt to assuage her anxieties, but Raul was one of those rare individuals who never promised anything he couldn’t deliver. Aria lifted her hand to her son’s lean face. There was an expression on his dark features that she was not familiar with; his business rivals would have been.

  ‘I know that,’ she agreed, despite everything relaxing slightly.

  ‘Then will you take the sedation the doctor has prescribed?’

  Aria sighed and gave a rueful smile. ‘If I must.’

  Her son kissed her on both cheeks and promised that he would speak to her as soon as he knew more. On the way out he had a quiet word with the maid who had been hovering discreetly in the background and then, with a last smile for his mother, he left the room.

  The senior detective who had been assigned to the case turned from his female colleague as the tall figure of Raul Carreras quietly re-entered the room. Unlike the other members of the besieged household, the head of the family was not wearing night clothes, but a dark well-cut business suit and shirt; the loosening of the knot of his silk tie was the only concession he had made to the hour and the circumstances.

  ‘How is Mrs Carreras?’ the detective enquired solicitously.

  ‘The doctor has sedated my mother.’

  Their eyes clashed and the comforting hand the detective had been about to place on the younger man’s shoulder was hastily thrust back into his pocket. He waited silently as the tall dark-haired figure shrugged off his jacket and draped it around the back of a gilded Louis XIV chair, feeling a flicker of nostalgia tinged with envy as his observant eyes noted the suggestion of tight, well-developed muscles shift underneath the fine fabric.

  Chief Superintendent Pritchard had dealt with a number of kidnapping cases during his career and he was accustomed to seeing the families involved fall apart. He knew all the right things to say in such circumstances, but it was clear this was not an instance where sympathy was either required or desired.

  Not everyone reacted the same way, of course, he privately conceded, though nobody he’d come across had displayed quite so much monumental control as this man. It was impossible to tell from his demeanour what Raul Carreras was feeling—or if he was feeling anything at all.

  Maybe the guy would fall apart at some point but, he thought, flicking a covert glance at the strong profile of a man who had enough clout to make the Commissioner ring him personally to remind him how important this case was, he rather doubted it.

  ‘So where do we go from here?’ Raul asked.

  ‘There are set procedures, sir.’

  For the first time some of Raul’s frustration threatened to slip past the careful guard he had erected. Impotence building inside him made him feel as though he were in danger of imploding, or at the very least smashing something. But, he reminded himself, the things, the people, he wanted to smash were not here. Taking a deep breath, he forced his hands, clenched into tight, white-knuckled fists, to loosen.

  Focus!

  Losing it was an indulgence he couldn’t afford, and as for thinking about what might be happening to the children, he knew he couldn’t go there. He couldn’t afford to give into the gut-wrenching fear or his anger. He needed to stay in control not just of the situation, but of himself.

  ‘You are the professional, and I will listen to your advice…’

  The detective’s expression remained wary as the sculpted lips lifted fractionally at the corners, forming a cold smile that did not touch the tall Spaniard’s eye
s.

  ‘So long as I consider what you suggest is in the best interests of getting my nephew and niece back safely,’ he qualified simply.

  ‘It was you who discovered they were missing, is that right?’

  A slight inclination of Raul’s dark head confirmed this. ‘It is my habit to look in on them before I retire for the night.’ Raul swallowed convulsively and his eyes darkened.

  The detective was sympathetic. ‘A shock?’

  ‘Yes.’ Raul’s dark lashes came down like a shield. ‘How many of them were there, Superintendent? What does the security footage show?’

  The permanent indentation above Raul’s aquiline nose deepened as he observed the air of forced optimism on the older man’s face falter. One dark-winged brow rose.

  ‘There is a problem?’ he queried harshly.

  The older man struggled to maintain eye contact—pretty crazy when you considered all the hard men he had faced down over the years—and nodded. ‘There’s nothing on the security tapes, I’m afraid.’

  At the policeman’s rueful admission a muscle clenched in Raul’s lean cheek. ‘Nothing?’

  A nod.

  ‘Por Dios!’ The breath whistled silently from Raul’s lungs through his clenched teeth.

  ‘In cases like this we have to consider the possibility of an insider involvement.’

  ‘I imagine you must. You may question the staff, but they have my total confidence,’ Raul stated firmly. ‘All are loyal to our family.’

  The detective, who was too diplomatic to say he found such trust naïve in this day and age, changed the subject. ‘Your security system is computerised…’

  ‘Isn’t everything?’

  ‘I’m afraid it’s been tampered with.’

  ‘This system is meant to be foolproof,’ Raul spat out.

  ‘In my experience there is no such thing, sir,’ came the blunt reply to this harsh observation. ‘I’m afraid this wasn’t any opportunist crime; these people aren’t amateurs,’ he admitted with a sigh. ‘We’re dealing with people who knew exactly what they were doing.’

  There were thirty seconds of complete silence during which the police officer found himself subjected once more to the penetrating scrutiny of silver-shot midnight eyes.

  ‘And do you know what you’re doing, Superintendent?’

  Clearly if he gave the wrong answer to this deceptively soft question he could say goodbye to co-operation, and the last thing he needed at this stage was the tycoon importing some sort of private army. ‘Well, I’m…’

  A hand was held up. ‘Modesty does not interest me,’ Raul explained tersely. ‘Competence does.’

  ‘I’m good at what I do.’

  Raul nodded. ‘Fine, then what happens next?’

  ‘We wait to hear from the kidnappers. We have traces on the line, of course, but…’ He shrugged.

  ‘These people know what they are doing,’ Raul inserted.

  ‘People make mistakes, Mr Carreras.’ The officer cleared his throat. ‘I take it you will have no problem…financially speaking, of responding to any ransom demand?’

  ‘I will do whatever it takes—within the law, naturally.’

  The ironic little rider worried the seasoned detective. ‘I just have to check. Mr Carreras, you really mustn’t lose hope or do anything rash.’ A good judge of character, Alan had decided within seconds of being introduced to this man that Raul Carreras was quite capable of taking the law into his own hands. ‘There’s a really excellent chance at this stage of us getting the children back unharmed.’

  ‘And the people responsible for their abduction suitably punished.’

  The policeman looked away from those hard eyes and astonishingly felt a flicker of pity for the perpetrators. Oh, my God, did they pick on the wrong guy to mess with. Without a word being said he knew that Raul Carreras would hunt down the men or women who had harmed members of his family—even if it took him the rest of his life.

  Antonio had been easy; the exhausted little boy had tumbled into her own still-warm bed and fallen asleep almost immediately. It had taken Nell a good hour to calm Katerina to a degree where she could pick up the phone without the hysterical teenager calling her a traitor and threatening to run away—again!

  Nell, afraid that she would carry out her threat, had listened as the young girl unburdened herself. Not far into the emotional tirade it became clear to Nell that, even allowing for exaggeration on Katerina’s part, Raul Carreras, the uncle who had become the children’s guardian since their father’s death the previous month, had handled the entire matter with the sensitivity of a ten-ton truck.

  God, what an idiot the man is, she thought scornfully as Katerina described an incident that had occurred the previous weekend. To turn up at a party and drag her back home in front of all her friends had been bad enough, but Raul Carreras, it transpired, had made things infinitely worse by first telling his niece to wash the paint off her face because she looked ridiculous!

  His autocratic and insensitive behaviour, Nell reflected, might have been deliberately calculated to evoke rebellion in a teenager who had been used to a much more relaxed form of discipline.

  All the while Nell had listened to Katerina’s list of grievances she had been increasingly aware of the anxiety their disappearance must be causing back at the Carreras household; it didn’t seem likely that they wouldn’t have been missed by now. In fact, considering the sort of intrusive security that Katerina was complaining about, it seemed incredible that the children could simply have walked out of the house.

  ‘If there are so many cameras everywhere surely someone must have noticed you leaving?’

  ‘I fixed them,’ Katerina explained with a contemptuous little shrug. ‘It was kid’s stuff,’ she elaborated.

  A computer illiterate Nell tried not to look intimidated by this casual disclosure.

  ‘Don’t worry, the system was only down long enough for us to get out, the family silver will be safe.’

  ‘I’m sure they care more about you than the family silver.’

  ‘You think?’ the teenager drawled cynically.

  ‘They’re probably worried sick.’

  ‘I don’t care!’

  ‘I don’t believe that, Kate,’ Nell inserted gently.

  ‘All right, but they’re not my family!’ Katerina snarled defiantly before scribbling down a number on the jotter beside the phone and handing it to Nell and adding angrily, ‘You’re more my family than they are. They never had any time for Dad because he wouldn’t marry who they wanted. Not once, not even when Mum was ill, did they contact him.’

  ‘Well, there’s no good being bitter about it, Kate, because your dad wasn’t, was he?’

  Katerina responded to Nell’s gentle challenge with a watery grin. ‘Dad was never mad with anyone for very long.’

  And especially his daughter, whom he had indulged outrageously, Nell reflected, passing the tearful girl a tissue. A girl less sweet-natured and sensible than Katerina might have been spoilt by such indulgent parenting, Nell thought fondly as she enfolded the girl in a quick hug.

  ‘And he wouldn’t want you to be either.’ Both sets of eyes, one brown and one cornflower-blue, held tears as they drew apart.

  ‘Your uncle Raul was pretty young when your dad fought with his family, so he can’t have been involved with what went on back then…’ Nell reasoned, firmly ignoring her own personal and possibly irrational prejudices on the subject. ‘Maybe you should give him a chance?’ she suggested tentatively. ‘This is a learning experience for you all.’

  ‘Maybe…but maybe he shouldn’t try to make me learn Spanish.’

  The childish complaint made Nell burst out laughing. ‘That doesn’t seem unreasonable, Kate, considering you are half Spanish and you know your dad always regretted not having brought you up bilingually.’

  ‘Well, what about sending Antonio to some posh boarding-school? Do you think that’s reasonable?’ Katerina gave a tiny crow of triumph as she saw th
e expression of disapproval chase across the older girl’s fair-skinned and expressive features. Her soft mouth firmed. ‘Antonio needs me!’ Abruptly her pretty face crumpled. ‘When you call, tell them we’re not coming back!’ On this throbbing note she ran into the bathroom and locked the door behind her.

  Feeling totally helpless as she listened to the noisy sound of sobbing, Nell sadly dialled the number Katerina had given her. If there was anything in her power she could do to make this easier for Javier’s children, she would, she resolved, squaring her slender shoulders.

  ‘Hello, I’m sorry to disturb you at this hour, but would it be possible for me to speak to Mrs Carreras?’ Nell decided at the last second that Katerina’s case might find a more sympathetic ear with her grandmother than her uncle—and it’s got nothing whatever to do with the fact just thinking about the man spooks you?

  Katerina, who had emerged from the bathroom, took up a cross-legged posture on the sofa. ‘It’s no good, she’ll do whatever he says. Everyone does!’

  At this resentful observation an image of a dark fallen angel face rose up before Nell’s eyes and she recalled the last and only time she had seen Raul Carreras.

  He had made quite an impression! But then Raul Carreras wasn’t the sort of man you forgot in a hurry. A shiver traced a shaky pathway down her spine as she recalled the extent to which the clinical touch of those hooded midnight eyes had disturbed her.

  The family had been swept away from the funeral in a fleet of shiny black limos and the last of Javier’s own colourful art-world friends had drifted away, but one figure had remained. The image of the tall, broad-shouldered, black-clad figure, head bowed slightly against the first flurries of snow, standing alone beside the grave had indelibly imprinted in Nell’s brain, as were the words they had exchanged afterwards.

  She had thought her own presence amongst the trees at the edge of the cemetery had gone unnoticed until he had lifted his head and looked directly at her.

  Nell had immediately been able to see the resemblance between the Carreras brothers, both golden-skinned, and black-haired; facially too there were similarities, though these were not strong. Javier’s warm smile and natural exuberance for life had made people overlook the fact his features were neither symmetrical nor in proportion, but his brother possessed bone structure that was achingly perfect.