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She dragged her eyes off his hard expression.
Only they weren’t the things he thought mattered to her.
How on earth had they been as intimate as they had been last night and yet they still seemed to know nothing but superficialities about one another?
Because you want it that way, Lulu. It’s more comfortable for you.
She pushed that voice away. She couldn’t help her condition.
Isn’t it convenient, though, that it’s there? You don’t have to delve a little deeper and look at what’s really going on here.
Lulu tensed, and that horribly familiar twisted feeling started up in her belly. By the time they landed the feeling was getting worse by the second.
It wasn’t helped when, as they disembarked, Lulu’s attention was caught by the woman who was coming towards the helipad across the lawn. The one person she really didn’t want to see right now.
In her distress she almost lost her balance, but Alejandro had her and for a moment didn’t seem about to let her go.
She looked up in alarm.
He had to let her go!
All she could see was the uninhibited things they’d done together last night.
And he was about to meet her mother!
Félicienne would make a fuss, and then Alejandro would know the truth about her, and she just couldn’t bear that.
‘Take your hands off me,’ she hissed, and after a long look he let her go. She turned away from the expression on his face because it made her feel like a horrible person.
She wasn’t horrible—she was just having a very bad day.
Pulling herself together, Lulu took off across the lawn, her attention fixed on her mother, who had that frantic look on her face—as if her only daughter had been off trekking down the Amazon, not taking a short flight from Paris to Edinburgh and staying overnight in a nearby village.
She could imagine Alejandro behind her, looking big and rugged and exactly the kind of man her mother would shrink from. She really, really didn’t want them to meet, and the faster she moved the better chance she had of keeping her two worlds from colliding in the worst possible way.
Only she was shaking so hard she thought she was going to fall down.
She stumbled.
‘Lulu?’ Alejandro was at her elbow to steady her, but she pulled away as if he’d touched her inappropriately.
‘I told you to leave me alone!’ she cried, her distress making her shrill. ‘What don’t you understand about that? I don’t want you!’
Alejandro’s big body tensed but he let her go. ‘Fine,’ he said simply.
Which was when she finally lost control of her legs, wobbled and collapsed headlong in a heap in the grass.
CHAPTER TEN
‘SHE’S FAKING IT,’ Khaled said dismissively, pouring them both a couple of fingers of whisky.
Alejandro had been telling himself exactly the same thing, but hearing it coming from another man pulled an aggressive response out of him.
‘You didn’t see her,’ he said grimly. ‘Something’s wrong.’
Khaled gave him a long look. ‘Good trip, then?’
Alejandro knew he should put it aside. He didn’t want to discuss Lulu and it had nothing to do with her plea for discretion. He felt protective of her, and he didn’t do protective. It left you open to manipulation, and the last time that had happened he’d almost lost the estancia.
