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‘Don’t I? The pre-Raphaelite hairstyle, the big dark blue eyes and the schoolgirl blushes must go down well with men who only see what they want to see…a cute little porcelain doll, the very image of fragile femininity!’ Joaquin specified with silken derision. ‘But I’m in a rather different league, querida.’
‘How dare you compare me to a doll?’ Lucy launched at him with angry incredulity at such a scornful image. ‘I came in here to have a perfectly sensible and serious conversation with you—’
Joaquin lounged back against his desk with fluid grace and continued to survey her. ‘Did you really? Is that why you’re all dressed up in that short skirt, those towering heels, and wearing only a jacket next to your beautiful bare skin?’
Lucy ran out of breath and speech simultaneously. She stared at him, totally thrown by that sudden attack of her appearance.
‘I’m enjoying the view. I’m a man…’ Joaquin trailed out the last word with sardonic cool. ‘Yet I’ve already warned you that I’ll accept the invitation but that I won’t pay for the privilege. I will not settle your debt to Fidelio Paez for you.’
Lucy was engaged in frantically unbuttoning her jacket to display the fine camisole she wore beneath, but then she remembered that she wasn’t wearing a bra and just as hurriedly began to button herself up again.
‘Oh, not another one of those sudden attacks of unconvincing modesty when you blush and lower your eyes and lock your knees together?’ the Guatemalan tycoon delivered with withering scorn. ‘You’re dealing with a true cynic, and let’s face it, there was nothing subtle about your visit to my bedroom last night. That was a pretty crude, up-front offer—’
‘If you don’t shut up, I’ll swing for you!’ Lucy suddenly exploded back at him, goaded beyond bearing into finally losing her temper. ‘You just don’t listen to one word that I say. You just won’t stop making inappropriate personal comments—’
‘On a scale of one to ten, lying on my bed under me is at least a nine in the personal stakes. Leaving me aching for the rest of the night made the chances of you attaining a sympathetic hearing this morning doubtful to say the least.’
Oh, how could he say that right to her face? How could he be so graphic? Lucy was startled to find herself actually looking wildly around herself for something to hit him with! Freezing to the spot then, she crammed shaking hands to her mouth, appalled by the promptings he roused in her. ‘You make me feel violent!’ she gasped accusingly.
‘I’m not a patient man. Your pathetic attempts to portray yourself as being as pure as driven snow are beginning to irritate me,’ Joaquin responded without remorse.
‘I-Irritate you?’ Lucy stammered, at what struck her as a grotesque understatement for his feelings when it was obvious to her that he utterly despised her. Her looks, her clothing, her character. And somehow accepting that reality emptied her of anger and fight and only pride kept her backbone straight.
‘So far I have been very reasonable—’
‘Reasonable?’ Lucy spluttered. She felt like someone who had been ground into the dust by a large unstoppable truck and then asked to apologise for getting in the way. ‘You won’t agree to any sort of compromise, even though I’m willing to repay the money in instalments and do whatever it takes to reassure you as to my reliability—’
‘Reliability?’ Crystalline green eyes widened and shimmered over her in rampant disbelief at her use of that particular word to describe herself. ‘Infierno! What sort of a fool do you think I am? At this moment you don’t even have employment on which to base such promises!’
Once again Lucy cursed her lack of foresight in appreciating just how much Joaquin knew about her sister. Cindy’s well paid but temporary contract to work as a television make-up artist had indeed ended, just a few weeks back. But her sister had been promised permanent employment as soon as a vacancy arose.
‘In fact over the past five years you have spent only eight months actually working for a salary,’ Joaquin Del Castillo informed her with considerable contempt. ‘I cherish serious doubts that you have any ambition to subject yourself to the rigours of daily employment. You’re lazy and you’re frivolous. If you can find a man to keep you, you don’t bother to work—’
Listening to that assessment, Lucy was outraged. ‘That’s rubbish. I’m a really hard worker, and if I had a job, I could make you eat every prejudiced word!’
A charged silence fell.
Her spine rigid with offended pride, Lucy tilted her chin.
Joaquin cast her a glittering glance from below lush black lashes. ‘When would you like to start?’
CHAPTER FIVE
‘START?’ Lucy questioned blankly. ‘Start what?’
‘Working for me,’ Joaquin Del Castillo drawled in challenge. ‘What talents do you have beyond the bedroom door?’
Lucy’s soft mouth opened and shut again.
‘I seem to vaguely recall that you once spent a few weeks toiling as a typist,’ Joaquin murmured reflectively, studying her transfixed expression with cynical amusement.
But he had misunderstood the reason for Lucy’s absolute paralysis. A typist? He knew more than she did about her twin! No such skill featured in Lucy’s repertoire. Nor could she get her mind round the enormous shock of him suggesting that she work for him in any capacity. ‘You’re…you’re offering me a job?’ she virtually whispered.
‘So that you can make me eat my prejudiced words and prove how reliable you can be,’ Joaquin supplied softly. ‘Although I’m afraid I couldn’t offer you the meteoric rise to promotion which you enjoyed the last time you worked in an office…’
Lucy frowned. ‘I don’t follow.’
‘What a selective memory you have, querida. After mere days in the typing pool, the managing director made you his secretary. By the following week you were out of the office and a married man’s mistress once more.’
In angry mortification Lucy parted her lips, thought about arguing, clashed with Joaquin’s shimmering jade-green gaze and thought better of it. What was the point of getting into another dispute? Right now, although it galled her to admit it, he had the whiphand. So she gave a jerky shrug, striving to look untouched and indifferent, just as she knew Cindy would have done under such fire.
Joaquin straightened slowly. ‘This is the moment where you tell me that you’re still feeling far too fragile to work.’
Meeting his expectant gaze and reacting to it, Lucy flung back her head and snapped defiantly, ‘I’m feeling terrific!’
Striding past her, Joaquin flung wide the door with an air of strong satisfaction. ‘Then I have the perfect position for you—’
‘Here?’ Lucy stressed with a frown of incomprehension.
Planting a lean hand on her shoulder, Joaquin Del Castillo guided her out into the corridor. Before she could even think, he had shown her through the door at the foot of the passage into a spacious office furnished with what looked to her like the latest in high-tech work stations. ‘I
maintain only a small staff at here. These ladies handle my personal correspondence and coordinate various projects in which I am involved.’
Three female heads lifted. Lucy froze.
Joaquin spoke in Spanish to the older woman who had come forward to greet him. ‘This is my secretary, Dominga…Dominga, this is Lucy Paez.’
Lucy received a frigid nod of acknowledgement from the stern Dominga. Like a schoolgirl dragged up in front of the headmistress for some wrongdoing, she quailed inside herself. One glance was sufficient to warn her that Joaquin’s secretary knew all about her supposed career as a heartless fraudster. Oh, dear heaven, what had her foolish attempt to defend herself plunged her into now? Joaquin was calling her bluff by offering her the chance to work for him.
‘Dominga will keep you occupied,’ Joaquin informed her with a slow smile that told her that he had already picked up on the level of her discomfiture.
What followed over the next few hours was one of the most mortifying experiences of Lucy’s life.
Cold the older woman might be, but Lucy could not have faulted her fairness. However, finding work to occupy Lucy was not easy. She could not answer the phone or organise documents because she could neither speak nor read Spanish. She had never had access to a computer before either. Asked to fill up the printers with paper, Lucy put the wrong paper in one and provoked a paper jam in the other. Not a woman to give up easily on a challenge, Dominga then went to the trouble of having a typewriter brought in and installed while Lucy hovered, pale as death, unable to muster sufficient courage to admit that she couldn’t type.
But the moment of awful revelation was not long in coming. Joaquin’s secretary stood like a stone image watching Lucy’s desperate two-fingered attempts to pass herself off as a rotten typist but nevertheless a typist. Then the older woman just left her to her foolish charade while the other two women laughed and whispered to each other until Lucy was the colour of a beetroot.
