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There was a loud noise as the door burst open and then an outburst of strident Spanish. An instant later, Alejandro was lifting Jemima bodily up off the floor, settling her down with care on a sofa and demanding to know how she had got hurt.
‘He’s my father and he’s threatening me,’ Jemima whispered dizzily, way beyond trying to cover up the sordid scene and present it other than how it was. ‘He has one of the portrait miniatures in his pocket and he hit me when I tried to get it back off him.’
‘Now you listen ‘ere,’ her parent began loudly.
‘The portrait first,’ Alejandro murmured flatly, extending an authoritative hand.
Scowling, the older man dug the item out and passed it over. Blinking, her head pounding less from the blow she had sustained than from the thud of the unbearable tension, Jemima watched her husband return it to the wall. She saw her father lean close and say something to Alejandro and a split second later, and to her intense shock, Alejandro swung round and punched her father hard. The older man reeled back with a gasp of pain while Alejandro flung open the door and told him to get out before he brought the police in. Two vineyard workers were waiting outside and, at a word from Alejandro, they marched in and propelled Stephen Grey, struggling and vociferously complaining, out of the room.
‘How on earth did you know what was happening in here?’ Jemima demanded shakily.
‘He frightened Maria by forcing his way in to see you. She didn’t like the look of him or the way he spoke to her. I was at the vineyard and she phoned me immediately to warn me that there might be trouble.’
‘I suppose you’ll never forgive me now for not telling you the truth,’ Jemima mumbled shakily as Alejandro sank down beside her to turn her head and gently examine the slight swelling at the back of her head. ‘But when we first met I no longer had any contact with my father and I pretended he was dead rather than tell you about his history.’
Alejandro released his breath on a slow hiss. T think I can understand why.’
‘He has a criminal record as long as your arm,’ Jemima confided. And then she stopped trying to pick her words and the whole sorry story of her childhood came tumbling out: her father’s violence and long stays in prison, her mother’s alcoholism and the toxic atmosphere in their home.
‘That you had found a decent job for yourself and were fully independent when we first met says much more about your character than the accident of birth that gave you your parents,’ Alejandro told her with quiet confidence. ‘I’m not stupid. I always knew that there were things you were choosing not to talk about and I wish I had dug deeper but it never seemed important enough to me. I wanted you as my wife whoever you were and regardless of what background you came from…’
Jemima looked at him through tear-filled eyes, her emotions swelling and overflowing in the aftermath of that nasty, distressing confrontation with her father. ‘Honestly?’
‘Walking away was never an option for me. I met you and that was that—it was a done deal. Do you remember the weekends we spent together at the house I rented near the hotel where you worked?’ Alejandro queried, dark eyes intent on her troubled face as she nodded uncertainly. ‘Those weekends were some of the happiest of my life and I could never have let you go after that.’
‘But when we were first seeing each other you kept on breaking dates or not phoning when you said you would.’
Alejandro groaned. ‘I regret the way I behaved but, right from the start, I was fighting what I felt for you. It was unnerving to want you so much. I wasn’t ready to settle down. After what I’d suffered through my father’s obsession with his second wife, I was determined not to fall in love either.’
‘The differences between us bothered you.’
‘Until I began to see that those differences meant that we complemented each other. After that month when we were broken up, when we were first dating, I knew just how necessary you were to my peace of mind,’ Alejandro admitted tautly, his lean, strong face grave. ‘You were like no other woman I had ever met and I was fascinated.’
‘I thought…’ Jemima breathed in deep and went ahead and said it anyway. ‘I thought that for you it was just sex.’
‘Just sex would have been easier to deal with,’ Alejandro quipped. ‘I didn’t know at the time that you were my soul mate, I only knew that I wanted you in my life every day and not just on the weekends I could travel to England. When I was away from you I missed you so much that the only option left was to make you my wife.’
‘It didn’t seem like that then. You never mentioned needing me that much.’
‘Of course, I didn’t, preciosa mia. I was trying to play it cool and I never will be into sharing my every waking thought,’ he pointed out wryly. ‘But the point is that I stopped seeing other women so that I could have you all to myself, and the more I saw of you, the more I wanted you to be mine. It’s my fault that you didn’t feel you could tell me about your background—obviously I didn’t make you feel secure enough.’
‘Even before I met you I was telling people when they asked that both my parents were dead—it was easier than telling the truth,’ she admitted. ‘That’s where some of the money I ran through went two years ago. Dad was threatening to go to the newspapers and tell all to embarrass you.’
‘It won’t embarrass me. Let him do his worst if he must,’ Alejandro responded with immense assurance. And don’t be upset if he carries out his threats. Most people will only have a passing interest in the fact that your father is a jailbird. So, you allowed him to blackmail you when we were first married?’
‘Yes. I thought you’d be ashamed of me if you found out the truth of the kind of home I was from. You’d have to go back a generation to find any respectable relatives.’
Alejandro closed two hands over hers and held her fast. ‘I just wish that you’d told me that you were being threatened and that you’d given me the chance to sort him out for you. Your father is like most bullies—once he saw that I wasn’t afraid of him or what he might do, he was weak.’
‘You must hate me, though, for giving all that money to him and wasting it,’ Jemima reasoned, pale with shame and discomfiture.
‘You were foolish. You could have trusted me even then.’ Alejandro gazed down at her with dark eyes filled with regret. ‘But I do appreciate that I wasn’t a good enough husband in those days to inspire you with that trust. Without it, you were lost and your father got a stranglehold on you instead.’
‘He’s the other reason why I walked out then,’ Jemima confided abruptly. ‘It wasn’t just your suspicions about my relationship with Marco, it was the fact that I also couldn’t see an end to my father’s demands for money. I just felt our marriage was cursed and that the best thing I could do was walk away from it.’
‘The best thing you could have done was confide in me. I wouldn’t let anyone harm you ever again,’ Alejandro swore with conviction. ‘But I made too much of a habit of feeling and thinking things that I didn’t then share with you and that’s one very good reason why our marriage broke down.’
Jemima looked up into his somber, darkly handsome face and stretched up to kiss him. For an instant he stiffened and then he kissed her back with such passionate fervour that she gasped beneath the onslaught. Her heart thumping like a piston, she pressed her hot face against his shoulder and struggled to catch her breath again. ‘I was starting to think that you were never going to kiss me again.’
‘I was playing safe by making no demands.’
Jemima looked blank. ‘What on earth are you talking about?’
‘Our agreement that we give our marriage a three-month trial,’ Alejandro reminded her grimly. ‘The three months were up this week and there you were acting strangely. Naturally, I thought that you were on edge because you were thinking of leaving me again and were worrying about how to go about it and retain custody of Alfie.’
Jemima was frowning. ‘My word, I totally forgot about the three-month thing!’
?
?You forgot?’ Alejandro exclaimed with incredulous emphasis. ‘How could you forget an agreement like that? It’s been haunting me ever since I was stupid enough to say yes to it.’
‘Oh, so that’s why you took me dancing,’ Jemima guessed with a sudden giggle of appreciation.
‘I got so much wrong in my relationship with you I had to make an effort to get some things right,’ Alejandro pointed out darkly, his dignity clearly under threat from her growing amusement. ‘I was scared that you had decided to return to England.’
Jemima rested a hand on his shirtfront, spreading her fingers to feel the solid pound of his heart and the heat of his muscular torso through the fine cotton. ‘I want you for ever,’ she told him without hesitation.
His hand covered hers. ‘For ever?’ he questioned with a frown.
‘Like the castle in the fairy tale. For ever and ever…I’m greedy, I want it all.’
‘All I want is you,’ Alejandro confided in a roughened undertone. ‘All I’ve ever wanted is you. I love you very much.’
Her heart leapt but so did her eyebrows. ‘Since when?’ she asked, initially suspicious of the claim.
