The Spaniard's Love-Child (4 page)

As if I'm likely to forget!
‘You're suggesting?' Nell swallowed and shook her head, feeling the anger building steadily inside her.

‘My brother obviously had a fondness for you,
I don't
,' he spelt out coldly. ‘If these children come to any harm because of you, you will answer to me. Oh…' he smiled grimly into her pale face ‘…in case you were wondering, that
was
a threat.'

‘You're suggesting that I encouraged them to run away?' Her voice rose to a shrill pitch, which made him wince. ‘I'd really like to be around when you realise just how much you've underestimated Katerina.' And if he was half as patronising to the teenager as he was with her he wouldn't have to wait long, she thought grimly.

‘Do not try and deflect the blame,' he recommended scornfully.

‘I'm not!' Nell exclaimed angrily. ‘I just meant that you don't begin to appreciate just how resourceful and bright Katerina is.'
Or how much she needs someone to love her,
she thought sadly.

‘I am aware that Katerina is an intelligent child; however,' he added disapprovingly, ‘she lacks focus.'

‘She didn't lack focus when she knocked out your security.' Nell watched a look of genuine shock chase across his dark, devastating features.

‘Katerina?'
Raul, scepticism etched on his lean, dark features, shook his head. ‘It is not possible.'

Nell smiled and Raul's jaw tightened.

‘I blame myself for not putting a stop to the phone calls and e-mails.' He placed a hand on the doorjamb above her head.

Hot with hating, Nell lifted her shimmering eyes to his and without warning was submerged by a wave of enervating lust so intense she couldn't breathe. It hurt; it physically hurt. Nell, unable to tear her eyes from Raul's face, couldn't have said whether she was standing, sitting or lying down. Praying for things to return to normal, she fought to control her rising panic.

It was the cringe-inducing possibility that he was not unaware of the effect his physical closeness had on her that enabled Nell to assume an attitude of defiance even when his voice dropped to a soft, threatening murmur that made the hairs on her nape stand on end.

‘But I intend to rectify that error.'

‘By allowing me no contact with them? You wouldn't be that cruel?' The sweat that had broken out on the surface of her skin was cooling; it wasn't a nice feeling.

She watched one dark brow lift to a satiric angle.

‘Your confidence in my essential kindness is flattering, but misplaced.'

‘That's nothing to boast about,' she remonstrated tartly.

There was a fulminating silence punctuated by the sound of his inhalation.

‘It is clear to me,' Raul added in an icy voice, ‘that without your influence they would have settled down into their new life by now.'

Nell regarded him with open incredulity. ‘Not even
you
can believe that.'

‘Certainly I believe that,' he rebutted from between clenched teeth.

Was it her imagination or was that a defensive note she was hearing in his voice?

‘How can they recover when you are constantly raking up the past?' he said harshly.

‘You mean I talk about their father? They need to talk about him.
I
need to talk about him,' she added huskily. She turned her head away, blinking furiously as she felt her eyes flood with sudden tears. When she felt she had regained enough control to meet his gaze she discovered he was looking at her with a bewildering, angry intensity.

‘They can talk about Javier to me.'

‘You didn't know him.' Nell heard his harsh intake of breath and gave a penitent grimace. ‘Not that that was really your fault.'

‘Save your empathy; I'm not about to change my mind. It's obvious that you exert a considerable and undesirable influence on the children.'

‘You're calling me undesirable?'

‘Undesirable…?'

Something in his voice, something she couldn't quite pin down, made her study his face with extra attention. She watched his long jet lashes lift from his incredible eyes and for a split second their eyes locked. The white heat in his eyes made Nell recoil. She was totally unconscious of the tiny gasp that escaped her parted lips.

‘Just take me to the children,' he rasped.

Nell barely registered him brush past her as she continued to stare blankly at the space he had occupied moments earlier. Despite the core of heat low in her belly, she shivered. Primitive and explicitly sexual—the look in his incredible eyes had been both, and it had been directed at her! They said hate and love were closely related; perhaps the same could be said for hate and lust?

I
T WAS
a little while before the suffocating excitement had receded enough for Nell to regain control of herself. She walked into the flat and found all but one of the doors leading off the sitting room open; Raul had his hand on the handle of the one that still remained closed.

‘What do you think you're—? You can't go in there!' She caught him by the arm but wasn't quick enough to stop him pushing open the door into her bedroom. His impetuous stride stilled as he saw the two children asleep on the bed, Antonio under the covers and Katerina lying on top with Nell's dressing gown and a fleece throw arranged over her sleeping figure.

Raul froze; Nell saw his chest rise as he inhaled sharply. His head turned towards her and as their eyes met her own hand fell self-consciously from his arm. His expression was unreadable as he turned and stared at the sleeping children. How, she wondered, did you take the measure of a man who hid his feelings so well? Well, not
always
, she thought, recalling with a shudder the raw hunger she had glimpsed in his eyes.

She held her breath as he reached down, imagining he was going to rouse the sleeping children, but instead he pulled the quilt Antonio had half kicked off up to the sleeping boy's chin; his hand hovered above the child's flushed cheek but he didn't touch him. The tenderness in the unexpected action caught Nell totally unawares. She turned abruptly and left the room alarmed by the swell of emotion that made her chest tight.

She closed her eyes and leaned against the wall. One thing was obvious—he did care about the children, he just didn't have the faintest idea how to show it. When she opened them she found he had joined her.

‘Why didn't you simply tell me they were asleep?' he demanded, raking her with an accusing glare.

Nell released an incredulous gasp. ‘What do you think I was trying to do? I had assumed,' she continued sarcastically, ‘that by the time you'd got here you'd have realised it was totally impractical, not to mention cruel, to drag them across London at this time of night.'

His expression did not alter as their combative glances locked, but there were faint dark bands of colour across the slashing contours of his cheekbones that suggested her words had found their mark.

‘Almost as cruel as to encourage them to stage this dangerous stunt in the first case, perhaps?'

‘Not that again!' she exclaimed with an exasperated groan.

The muscles in his jaw clenched. ‘Did they tell you they couldn't talk to me?'

Nell guessed the question had cost him a lot in the pride department. This was probably as close to humble as he got. It really was the height of foolishness to start feeling sorry for him, she remonstrated with herself angrily. ‘You could try listening to what they say once in a while.'

He visibly bit back an indignant response. Lean features rigid, he turned his back on her. Nell watched from under the sweep of her lashes as he rolled his head, flexing the powerful muscles of his neck and shoulders to relieve the tension there. Her stomach muscles quivered. When her knees showed an alarming tendency to shake she perched on the edge of the sofa arm.

‘They were unhappy enough to run away.' It wasn't
a question; it was a statement of fact. ‘Did they tell you why?'

‘I don't think Antonio is unhappy.'

He responded to her attempt to be tactful by slinging her a look of simmering impatience over his shoulder before presenting her once more with his broad back. ‘But Katerina is?'

‘She's worried that you're going to send Antonio away to school,' Nell admitted. ‘She feels responsible for him.'

Raul turned back to face her, his hand still massaging the back of his neck. ‘She's too young to feel responsible for anyone.'

Nell sighed and shook her head in agreement. ‘Do you
have
to separate them?'

‘Everything is arranged; it is a very good school. I went there myself.' There was an ironic twist to his lips as his dark eyes scanned her face. ‘I realise that that might not be much of a recommendation as far as you're concerned…as it helped make me the man I am today.'

An unwilling laugh was drawn from Nell. ‘I doubt you were ever that malleable.'

Despite her words an image of small, solitary figure packed off to boarding-school in a foreign country entered her head. It was hard to visualise this strong, confident man ever suffering the traumas of growing up. Raul was one of those people you couldn't imagine ever being a child—despite this, the image of the lonely boy lingered in her head.

‘I'm sure you had an excellent education and it made you self-sufficient and all that stuff, but were you happy? Did you actually enjoy your time there?'

‘Their father went there also, though by the time I arrived he had left. However,' Raul added drily, ‘his reputation remained.'

Javier had been a legend: a popular head boy and a talented sportsman whose captaincy of the school teams had filled the trophy cabinets. It had been made clear to Raul within minutes of his arrival at the prestigious school that great things had been expected of him.

Raul had been a great disappointment to those who had been hoping for him to step into his brother's shoes.

Ironically, considering that it had been Javier who had later opted out of the path people had expected him to follow, it had been the younger brother who had been unable to accept authority while at school. His dangerously seditious tendencies had been noted and deplored. He had been quickly labelled a loner, and, even worse in the British public school system, not a team player! His total indifference to the approval of his peers or authority had quickly set him apart. If it had not been for his undisputed academic brilliance Raul would have been considered a failure by the system.

Head on one side, Nell regarded the tall, enigmatic figure with narrow-eyed speculation. He had avoided answering her question—was that significant? She decided there was nothing to be lost from pressing the point.

‘You pulled strings to get Antonio into this school?' Almost imperceptibly, he nodded. ‘Couldn't you pull some more and
unarrange
it? Or at least delay making any final decisions just yet?' she suggested tentatively.

He exhaled noisily and folded his rangy frame into her overstuffed chintz-covered armchair. The action bore the same hallmarks of unstudied elegance that typified even his simplest action. Nell, whose feet were drawn to stray banana skins, watched enviously. He couldn't have been clumsy even if he tried, she thought.

‘You think that I should give in to a stunt like this?' He leaned forward, extracted a cushion from behind his back
and dropped it on the floor with an expression of masculine distaste before settling himself back again. ‘What sort of message will that send out?' he demanded.

Nell responded to this reasonable question with a shake of her head.

Raul pressed his point. ‘If I cave in this time, the next time I make a decision that Katerina doesn't like she'll think all she has to do is run off. I'm not going to be held to ransom by a teenager.'

‘That's the point, isn't it? She is a teenager. This isn't a terrorist gang you're dealing with, it's children. Confused, frightened children. Saying this family doesn't negotiate isn't a solution.'

Raul ran a hand over the stubble along his jaw-line and fixed her with an unfriendly stare. ‘Then what is the solution?' he demanded in a clipped tone.

‘Why are you asking me?'

‘Well, you're the one with all the answers. The
sweet
voice of reason.'

His sardonic tone brought a flush of angry colour to her cheeks.

‘Well,
someone
has to be,' she bit back. ‘And to tell you the truth I'm just about sick of it. You're as bad as Katerina!' she condemned angrily. ‘But at least
she
has got the excuse of being fifteen and the victim of rioting hormones. I warn you, if
you
lock yourself in the bathroom and start bawling I shan't be offering you a shoulder to cry on. I didn't ask to be piggy-in-the-middle, you know,' she finished on a note of breathless indignation.

Raul's glance dropped from her stormy, flushed face to her heaving bosom, then back. Holding her eyes, he stretched his long, long legs in front of him and dug his hands into his pockets. Nothing could have been more languid than his body language, but Nell wasn't fooled; Raul
wasn't the sort of man who would tolerate anyone berating him lying down.

The silence between them stretched, punctuated only by her audible respiration as she fought to catch her breath.

‘I have hormones…' His voice had a seductively abrasive quality.

‘Congratulations.'

His dark lashes swept upwards from the high curve of his sculpted cheeks. ‘But none of them are urging me to lock myself in your bathroom.'

Her heart skipped several beats. Nell definitely didn't want him to tell her what his hormones were urging him to do.

‘Shall we leave your hormones out of this?' she suggested with a grimace of distaste. The problem was that the distaste was feigned. Actually she was excited—deeply,
disastrously
excited.

‘Certainly. If they make you uncomfortable?'

She longed to wipe that complacent smirk off his face. ‘Wasn't that the idea?' she challenged. ‘Listen, I'm perfectly prepared to admit you're a very attractive man, but you're simply not my type.'

As he angled a look at her flushed face his disbelief was palpable and predictable; Raul Carreras had probably never been knocked back in his life.

‘Then what is your type?'

‘My type?'
she parroted vaguely. His dark eyes had a dangerously hypnotic quality; looking into those silver-shot depths she felt a little light-headed and hot—
very hot
. Nell's response was inspired by a combination of desperation and instinct.

‘Javier.'

It worked.

In the blink of an eye all expression was wiped clear of
Raul's face. ‘How could I have forgotten?' he drawled icily.

‘Compromise isn't a dirty word, you know,' she rushed on huskily. ‘There are no easy solutions, but it might help if you actually asked the children what they want. What's so funny?' she demanded as his white teeth were revealed in a cynical grin.

‘I was trying to imagine my father asking me what I wanted.'

‘The idea is to learn from our parents' mistakes, not emulate them.'

Raul was on his feet in one lithe, fluid motion. ‘And you feel qualified to comment on my parents because…?' He sounded deceptively soft, but his true feelings were revealed by the expression of hard disdain etched on his lean features as he glared down at her from his full, threatening height.

Nell coloured, but remained composed beneath his crushing contempt. It wasn't easy. ‘Your father never met his grandchildren.'

Her perceptive observation made him freeze. The smile that thinned his sensual lips was ironic.
‘Touché.'

Nell lowered her gaze. There was something addictive about watching him, the way he moved, his facial expressions, even the angle of his head. They all held an unhealthy fascination for her.

‘However, I am
not
my father.' His lean body quivered with an invisible tension.

Oh, God! She'd only just resolved to keep her involvement with Raul Carreras to the bare minimum. She'd offer advice in an objective and unemotional way. There would be no more emotional outbursts, personal comments or waves of uncontrollable burning lust—especially no lust!
Despite this resolution she couldn't keep her curiosity in check as she looked at the tall figure glaring at her.

So things hadn't been easy between Raul and his father.

‘I wish you'd sit down; you're very intimidating towering over me like that.'

To her relief the hauteur faded from Raul's face as he glared down at her. He released a short, bitter laugh. ‘You're not intimidated by me,' he accused.

Nell, who was more than happy for him to carry on thinking that way, smiled. ‘Do you want me to be?'

He ground his teeth audibly in frustration. ‘I want—! I want you to…'
I want you. ‘Dios mío!'

‘There's no need to raise your voice.' There was something alarming about his rigid posture. ‘Are you all right?'

Raul dragged a hand through his dark glossy hair before turning his head. His expression was cloaked as their eyes met. He gave a tight smile.

‘It would seem you have won. I will allow the children to sleep.'

‘It wasn't a contest.'

‘No?' He shrugged. ‘Either way I think I should be going.' He consulted the metal-banded watch on his wrist and his brows rose when he saw the hour. ‘What time shall I pick up the children?'

Despite the cold formality of his question, Nell felt irrationally protective as he dragged his hair back from his face with his hand—the gesture was so incredibly weary.

Feeling protective of Raul Carreras? Well, I can't blame that on my frustrated maternal instincts, she thought as her greedy glance made a surreptitious survey of his lean, powerfully developed body. It was probably the air of vigour that was an intrinsic part of him that had made her miss the tell-tale signs of exhaustion in his face earlier.

Faint shadows beneath his deep-set eyes, a pallor under
lying the natural healthy glow of his dark-toned skin and lines of tension bracketing his mouth all suggested it had been some time since he'd seen his bed—
his own, anyway
.

Don't go there, Nell,
she silently warned herself.

Well, even if his debauched lifestyle was responsible for his fatigue it didn't alter the fact it would be foolish to let him needlessly drive across the city.