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‘I like the sound of being too good to be true,’ Ruy confided.
Suzy went pink. ‘We were talking about Liliana and your brother,’ she reminded him. ‘I think she married Rigo simply to get closer to you. She used him.’
‘Although it’s taken him years of therapy to get over her, he’s stronger now and Mercedes is, thankfully, a very different woman. Now I want to show you something...’ Ruy paused at the foot of the stairs and regarded her expectantly, a catch in his usually level dark drawl, almost a slight hint of nervousness. ‘Your portrait.’
‘You finished it?’ Suzy prompted eagerly, springing up to approach him.
‘It’s upstairs.’
He cast open the bedroom door and there it was, resting on an easel by the window in the far corner. Suzy slowly crossed the room to stand in front of the vivid image and study it with wondering eyes. Her hair and her skin seemed luminescent. She looked as though she were about to leap off the bench and walk right out of the painting. It was an extraordinary likeness. ‘You’ve made me look as though I’m beautiful, though,’ she whispered self-consciously. ‘And I’m not.’
Ruy smiled. ‘Sí, querida...you are. And you destroyed my artistic objectivity. You modelled for my very first romantic portrait.’
‘You don’t do romantic,’ she reminded him.
‘I do for you. I do a lot of things differently with you,’ Ruy murmured, reaching for her left hand and showing her the diamond ring he was holding as he dropped down very deliberately on one knee. ‘Will you do me the very great honour of becoming my wife?’
Thoroughly taken aback by that proposal of marriage, Suzy stared down into anxious dark golden eyes and she dropped down onto her knees as well, covering his lean, strong face with kisses and grabbing the ring in the midst of it. In fact it was a bit of a free-for-all between him trying to get the ring back on her finger at the same time as he claimed her mouth in a fierce ravaging kiss designed to prove to her that she was being claimed for all time as his.
‘Oh, my goodness, Ruy... I love you so much and I wasn’t expecting that...but we’ve only known each other a few weeks,’ she exclaimed in reluctant protest.
‘If I had known what love felt like I’d have proposed the first day but I hadn’t ever been in love before so I didn’t recognise what I was feeling,’ Ruy explained, appraising her dazed face with adoring intensity. ‘At first I assumed it was an overwhelming desire to paint you. But I needed to keep you close as well and prevent anyone and anything from ever hurting you. I wanted to kill Brenton...slowly. I wanted to wake up with you in the morning and go to sleep with you beside me every night. I didn’t just fall in love with you a little. I fell obsessively in love with you.’
‘That’s good...that’s good. Stop saying it as if it’s peculiar when it’s not. I thought I would break in two leaving you behind in Spain because it hurt so much.’ Suzy framed his lean dark face with unsteady hands. ‘And you didn’t try to stop me leaving!’
‘I was so angry that you could believe me capable of such sleazy behaviour, angry...and, sí—’ he sighed ‘—also hurt. I expected you to have more faith in me.’
Suzy flinched at that quiet admission. ‘I didn’t trust my own judgement enough after Percy,’ she confided heavily as she closed both arms round him with so much determination that she almost toppled him. ‘But I swear I’m getting over that now...and look at you, I can see that you haven’t been sleeping, you haven’t been looking after yourself properly...and you’ve lost weight!’ she condemned with ringing disapproval.
‘Our chef is grieving your absence. I’ve eaten Thai, Malaysian, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Indian and Mexican dishes every day you’ve been gone and not one British or Spanish meal. I need you at home with me so that I can eat again and regulate the menu. I need you round the clock.’
‘But marriage—’
‘And soon,’ Ruy urged as he lifted her up off the floor and brought her down on the welcome softness of the bed. ‘Like really, really soon, like possibly this week, and a casual, relaxed wedding that you would like here with your father and Cecile and her family attending. And then possibly a more traditional do for Spain and the rest of my family. You get to pick your own wedding dress too and it doesn’t have to have feathers.’
‘You are insane,’ Suzy told him lovingly as he came down over her. She speared her fingers happily into his tousled black hair. ‘I’m going to drive you nuts sometimes...you do know that? I’m untidy and impulsive and—’
‘You are the woman I love, and I can’t do without you in my life another day,’ Ruy swore vehemently.
‘I’ve got so used to you too. I thought I disliked so much about you, but you made me feel safe, protected, cared for even though I fought with you about your bossiness,’ Suzy told him, hauling him down to kiss her again, revelling in the weight of his body on hers. ‘I couldn’t believe how much I missed you. I fell like a ton of bricks for you and now you’re going to be stuck with me and my irritating habits for ever.’
‘You wouldn’t believe how good for ever sounds,’ Ruy admitted with a brilliant smile.
‘But you didn’t do serious relationships! How has this happened?’
‘Liliana scared me off. I saw how devastated Rigo was by her betrayal. And her death. I thought it was safer to keep my distance from deeper relationships with women and that then I could control things. But you broke through my defences, you made me want stuff I had never wanted before...and I wanted you more than anything I had ever wanted in my life and all of a sudden nothing else mattered. Not my pride and not all the anger and bitterness I had suppressed over Liliana. I suppose, a little like my brother, I was ready to make a fresh start and there you were in your tatty wedding dress, swinging those ridiculous boots over the edge of that tree-house platform and being very cheeky.’
Suzy grinned and traced a fingertip along his full lower lip. ‘And you like cheeky.’
‘I didn’t know that until you fell into my arms in the woods.’
‘That’s not how it happened!’ Suzy argued, her pride stung by that claim.
‘Technically it is and you smelled so good and felt so amazing in my arms, mi corazón,’ Ruy husked, running the very tip of his tongue along the finger she still had resting against his lips. ‘I started to fall for you that same moment, but when you did that handstand in the middle of a modelling session I knew I was definitely in trouble.’
‘How?’
Ruy dealt her a look of wicked amusement. ‘I would have strangled any other model who pulled a stunt like that but when you did it, I thought it was cute,’ he confessed with a chuckle. ‘Cute! Should’ve realised that I was in love with you then.’
