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‘What has that to do with anything? They were students together. They’re old friends.’
‘No, they are much more than that to each other.’ Jemima shook her head slowly, her pale cloud of hair shifting round her strained face as she voiced that confident assurance. ‘They’re a couple, Alejandro. And pretty much inseparable. Didn’t you think it strange that Dario went to New York as well?’
Alejandro parted his lips as if he was going to speak again to argue with her, and then suddenly he frowned and slowly closed his mouth again. She could literally see him thinking over what she had told him, making the connections, and while the uneasy silence stretched she watched him travel gradually from a state of incomprehension and angry disbelief to one of troubled and stunned acceptance.
‘I can hardly believe it,’ Alejandro muttered. ‘Dario, now, he is less of a surprise. But their continuing friendship does stretch credulity too far.’
Jemima studied Alejandro fixedly, recognising that he was still fighting his astonishment.
‘Evidently my brother has been leading a double life for years,’ he intoned between compressed lips. ‘Dios mio. Why couldn’t he just tell me? Did he believe I would think less of him? It doesn’t matter a damn to me—he is still my brother. But why the hell did Marco allow me to go on believing that you and he had had an affair?’
Jemima brushed her hair off her damp brow with an impatient hand. ‘He’s jealous of you, well, very jealous of everything you’ve achieved in life,’ she divulged reluctantly.
‘It is true that he has always been very competitive with me,’ Alejandro acknowledged.
‘I don’t know how he could let you go on believing there had been an affair, but that’s something you need to discuss with him rather than me.’
‘Right now, what I need is a strong drink,’ Alejandro admitted in a raw undertone, striding over to the drinks cabinet and asking her what she would like.
She closed a damp palm round the moisture-beaded tumbler he handed to her and pressed the glass against the overheated skin below her collarbone, all the while watching Alejandro, noticing how pale he was beneath his bronzed complexion and how prominent his hard bone structure seemed. His hands weren’t quite steady either: he was really uptight.
Are you all right?’ she whispered worriedly.
‘No,’ he admitted flatly. ‘I’m shattered, absolutely bloody shattered. My brother is gay and I never even suspected the fact.’
‘That was how Marco wanted it. He didn’t want his family to know.’
‘My stepmother will throw a fit.’ Alejandro scored long brown fingers through his luxuriant black hair, tousling it into disorder and turning his handsome head to study Jemima again with intense dark eyes. ‘But, right at this moment, it is more important that I concentrate on what I’ve done to you and our marriage. I condemned you, misjudged you, refused to accept your word.’
Jemima gave an awkward shrug. ‘I’m just grateful that you finally know and accept the truth. I can understand that when Marco didn’t deny the affair you found it hard to believe that nothing had ever happened between us.’
‘He used you to get at me. I should have had more faith in you.’ Alejandro drained his glass and set it down in a hasty movement. ‘Let’s go out to eat.’
The abrupt change of mood and focus took her aback but it was very much Alejandro’s way to reclaim his space and self-discipline. She had broken through his reserve with her revelation and he wanted the breathing space to put all those messy emotions back again where she couldn’t see them. He continually frustrated her with his refusal to share what he thought and felt, she thought ruefully. She wanted to throw herself in his arms and tell him that she loved him enough to forgive him, but she sensed that that would not be a comfort. Alejandro was very proud. He had such high standards and, unhappily for him, he had just failed those standards. He had to come to terms with that and deal with it in his own way.
They dined only a few streets away in a tiny restaurant where the food melted in her mouth to be washed down by the finest wine. Alejandro had reinstated his iron self-control, for not a single reference to his brother passed his lips. In the candlelight she reached for his hand once and he gripped her fingers so tightly he almost crushed them.
‘Don’t say anything,’ he urged in a roughened growl that was as much a plea as a command. ‘I would rather have your anger than your pity, tesora mia.’
Sensing that a change of subject would be timely Jemima asked him when he had had the apartment redecorated.
‘Soon after you left Spain, I still imagined you were waiting for me every time I walked through the door. I didn’t like it,’ he confessed, his dark, deep accented drawl as clipped as if he were talking business.
‘And when you went into our bedroom at the castle?’
‘The same.’ He shrugged a broad shoulder in dismissal, subject closed.
He was more sensitive than she had ever appreciated, she conceded, and it was a discovery that troubled her more than it pleased her, for it made her think about the trauma he must have suffered when he’d believed she had betrayed him in his brother’s arms. He hadn’t needed to love her to be hurt. Marco had struck at the very roots of his sibling’s pride and possessiveness, and his strong and protective family instincts, and it had been a devastating blow on all fronts.
Later, she slid naked and alone between the white linen sheets of the king-sized bed in the master bedroom. Alejandro had said he had work to catch up on before morning when they were to fly back home. Work, or a preference for his own company? She tossed and turned, wanting to be with him, refusing out of pride to make that move. He wasn’t weak; why should she be? Giving into love was a weakness when it was for a man who did not love her back and who would despise any attempt to offer him reassurance. Eventually she fell into an uneasy doze, waking again with a jerk. She put on the light to check her watch and the empty bed. It was three in the morning and her resistance to natural promptings was at its lowest ebb. She thrust back the sheet and padded off in search of her missing husband.
And when she did, she discovered that Alejandro still had the power to surprise her…
Chapter Ten
JEMIMA knew drunk when she saw it. An awareness of the signs was etched deep in her psyche after a childhood in which a man’s stumbling steps or a mother’s shrill slurred complaints could make her turn cold with fear or insecurity. And with them went an out-of-control sensation that Jemima herself did not like, which was why she never, ever drank and why she had been happy to marry a man of abstemious habits.
But undeniably and disturbingly, Alejandro was the worse for wear because of alcohol. He was in the lounge, bathed only in moonlight as the curtains were still open wide. He was barefoot, his jeans unbuttoned at his narrow waist and his white shirt hung open on his bronzed muscular chest. But as he lurched upright to acknowledge her entrance he swayed and almost lost his footing. He steadied himself with a timely hand on a carved lamp table. His ebony hair was dishevelled, his stubborn jaw line rough with stubble and his midnight-dark eyes had a wild glitter unfamiliar to her.
Alejandro??
? Her violet eyes were full of concern; it was a question as much as a greeting.
She watched him struggle to focus and regroup. ‘I can’t talk to you right now—’
‘You’re going to talk to me whether you want to or not. Anything is better than you sitting drinking alone!’ Jemima pronounced, a small hand pouncing on the bottle of spirits on the coffee table before he could reach for it again.
For a split second, outrage flashed over his lean dark features because he had been prevented from doing what he wanted to do. Then he froze as if he was registering that he had been caught in a less than presentable state and wasn’t quite sure how to handle that exposure.
‘You’ve been drinking and I want to know why,’ Jemima spelt out.
With a visible effort, Alejandro squared his broad shoulders, muscles rippling across his flat, hard stomach as he sucked in a shuddering breath. ‘Not now…’
Her violet eyes softened. ‘I need to understand why,’ she rephrased gently.
‘Isn’t that obvious? I got everything in our marriage wrong!’ he launched at her with an explosive wrath that had finally escaped his containment. ‘Everything!’
Jemima sighed. ‘It happens. You just have to live with it.’
‘No sympathy?’ A black brow lifted.
‘You put me through hell. You don’t deserve it,’ she told him bluntly.
‘You have the power to drive me mad with jealousy—you always did,’ he confided harshly, his lean bronzed profile bleak. ‘I saw you with another man once and I never forgot the way it made me feel’
Jemima’s brow had pleated. ‘When?’ she cut in.
