Latin Lovers: Passionate Spaniards: The Spaniard's Marriage Demand / Kept by the Spanish Billionaire / The Spanish Doctor's Convenient Bride

‘I’ve still got quite a way to go. I just haven’t really been able to find the time …I do intend to finish it, though. I think about it often.’

It was true. Isabella also thought about the momentous few weeks she’d walked the Camino trail and what it had meant to her personally. As well as the physical challenge and the profound personal transformation, her senses had been confounded with secret delight by all the sights and sounds she’d been greeted by in that part of Spain. The architecture, the history, the wild landscapes and the amazing people she’d met would be with her for ever. And those people—her fellow peregrinos—had all bar none accepted her just for herself. There had been no judgement and no expectation involved, just simple, uncomplicated companionship and friendship, and it had been such a relief. Coming from the family she did, where conformity to their wishes and expectations was an ever-present challenge, walking the Camino had helped give Isabella back her sense of herself.

Since her return she’d vowed not to relinquish that sense of self to anyone else’s desires ever again. But most of all …most of all she remembered that never-to-be-forgotten meeting with Leandro and the magical evening they had shared that had started out in Señor Varez’s little bar and ended up in a hotel room that was the height of luxury. The still air had bathed them in sultry heat and their only accompaniment had been the music of the rain that had hypnotically glanced against the windows. Together they had turned that night into a spellbinding dream …Meeting Leandro had changed everything for Isabella. Apart from her knowing that she could never give her heart to any other man but him, he had given her her beautiful baby son. Now no one would ever convince her that there was no such thing as divine intervention …

‘Then you must finish it when you come to Spain, no?’ His warm fingers glancing against the underside of her chin came as the most exhilarating thrill and Isabella found herself catching her breath as heat flooded through her in an intoxicating rush. ‘Never underestimate the importance of art,’ he asserted huskily. ‘It is the secret to saving our sanity in this world. But it will be easier for you to think about this when there is no longer the need to go out to work.’

Although his encouraging words about art—in her case writing her book—were music to Isabella’s ears, the tacit implication in Leandro’s words told her that he already believed he had her full agreement to go to Spain and live with him, and that was not a decision that she had definitely reached at all. It made her panic a little. Especially when she believed that he was only asking her because of his deep sense of responsibility towards Raphael. What if the profound connection she had sensed between them had been one sided? She did not know as yet what Leandro really felt about her at all. And she still couldn’t help wondering if he had only looked her up because he was in London and saw an opportunity for another hot little encounter with her. Now, because of their son, he was saddled with a woman for whom the only feelings he entertained might be purely sexual. Hurt and disappointment welling up inside her, Isabella knew she could not remotely consider marriage with this man if he didn’t love her.

‘I’m sorry, Leandro, but I’m overwhelmed by what you expect me to do! First you insist that we move to Spain with you practically immediately, then you tell me that we must get married! You say that it’s in Raphael’s best interests that we make a life together, but can you really be so sure that that’s what’s best? What if him being here with me and seeing you whenever you can make it to England would be the best thing for him? He’s happy at his nursery. It’s run by a very close friend of mine and I know that she ensures he has the best care. As for us …’ The skin between Isabella’s dark brows puckered a little as she contemplated the thing that was disturbing her the most. ‘We slept together once and we made a baby. That doesn’t mean that we could make a marriage between us work or that we’d be better parents if we were together. What I think is that we both need more time to really work this out …to come up with the best solution. Don’t you agree?’

Her plea for understanding did not elicit the positive response she might have hoped for. To her shock and surprise Leandro abruptly turned and walked away from her, but not before Isabella registered the volatile spark of fury and impatience in his eyes with a nervous somersault in her stomach.

‘I cannot give you more time!’ he declared, turning to face her again. ‘Have you not been listening? I already told you that I needed to be back in Madrid in three days’ time. I do not have the kind of job where I can get someone to stand in for me when I take time out …I have an expensive cast and crew waiting for me when I get back that expect me to be there on schedule to start shooting this film, not to mention the financial backers who expect one-hundred-and-ten-per-cent commitment for the money they are investing. So you see, Isabella, I cannot wait for you to make up your mind to come to Spain with me. Raphael is my son too and I want full custody of him alongside his mother! To lose nine months of my child’s life is bad enough—to lose even one more day of that life is inconceivable to me now that I have seen him and held him in my arms. Can you not comprehend that?’

As well as being furious at her seeming obstruction of his desires, simmering deep inside Leandro was absolute rage that he had not received any of Isabella’s messages about her pregnancy. When he got back to Madrid, one of the first tasks he would be undertaking was to call on the film offices concerned, make a proper investigation about what had happened and then make his fury known to the people responsible. Their over-zealous protection had denied him knowledge of his son as well as the once-in-a-lifetime chance to witness the miracle of his birth, and to his mind that was not an action that would be eliciting his unconditional forgiveness any time soon …

‘Of course I can comprehend that you want to be with your son, Leandro, but sometimes it’s just not possible to have our desires instantly gratified. Sometimes a little planning and forbearance is required.’

‘Dios mio! You test my forbearance, Isabella!’

His white-hot anger cut Isabella to the quick. This was definitely not the kind of reunion she would have envisaged for them both, given the choice. Now she felt utterly miserable.

‘You have no idea what it means to me to discover I have a son …no idea at all.’ His lean jaw visibly clenched, Leandro focused his agitated gaze firmly on Isabella’s unhappy face. ‘It is punishment enough that I did not know of his existence until yesterday. Do not punish me further by keeping him from me another day.’

As she heard the anguish in his voice Isabella’s heart ached for his distress. Now she knew an instinctive need to hold him, to tell him she understood his great need to be around his child …but, fearing that he might reject such advances when the atmosphere between them was fraught with such tension, she stayed where she was, her arms down by her sides.

‘My father died.’

‘What?’ Isabella held her breath in surprise and shock. She saw Leandro lift up his hand to push it through his hair, but he stopped halfway and shook his head, as if it pained him beyond measure to even say the words. ‘When?’ she asked him. ‘When did this happen?’

‘Not long after we said goodbye in Vigo. He was mowed down by a drunken driver …It is also why I need to be with my son.’

Sensing that he did not want to go into detail, Isabella felt her heart swell with compassion. Now she understood why he was so vociferous about his demands that they go to Spain. If he had recently lost his father …and in such a brutal, shocking way …it must be even more important for him to have a close bond with his son.

‘I’m so sorry, Leandro.’ She moved towards him to touch him, to show him how moved she was by his confession, but he stepped away from her, as if he almost regretted having to share this information with her. His gaze glittered fiercely.

‘I do not need your sympathies, Isabella!’ he said savagely, and a muscle ticked at the side of his lean jaw. ‘All I need is for you to come to Spain with Raphael!’

Leandro had not wanted to tell Isabella about what had happened to his father, but the emotion of their situation had prised the information from him. He only hoped that he could trust her not to share it with anybody else. He was fiercely protective of his especially close relationship with his father, even more so since he had gone. His reasons for wanting Isabella to move to Spain with him were imperative and he was not playing games here. He wanted Raphael with him …he wanted his son. He could not go home without him now that he had seen him. He owed it to Vincente to be a good father to his grandson—the way Vincente had been a good father to Leandro. What he could not afford to do was let Isabella’s doubts cloud the issue in any way.

‘Leandro? Raphael’s happiness and well-being means everything to me and I don’t want to do anything to jeopardise that. If I come to Spain with you, I need to feel that I’m doing the best thing for my son …that I won’t regret it.’

He stared at her as though it pained him to look at her. ‘Put yourself in my position—a father who did not know he was a father until yesterday, nine months after my son was born—and then you will know about regret, querida …’

And without another word he left her there alone in the kitchen, his expression an amalgam of sorrow and anger as he furiously brushed past her, leaving Isabella feeling as if she’d done him the most dreadful wrong that she might never be able to put right ….

Leandro ended the conversation with his mother and placed the receiver back on its rest. His hand shook slightly as he did so. After getting over the initial shock, Constanza Reyes had been ecstatic to learn that he had a son and that he was bringing him home with him tomorrow. She had laughed and cried for joy, as well as pledging to offer prayers to the saints, and the terrible depression that had descended upon her since his father’s death had seemed to miraculously recede. For such a blessing, Leandro knew only the most unimaginable gratitude. But strangely enough the conversation had left him a little morose instead of completely happy. He had lost a father and gained a son, but relations with the woman who was the mother of his child were under a most regrettable strain. Isabella had been on his mind almost constantly since he had left her last night—as indeed she had been on it over the past eighteen months—and he longed to know how to make relations between them more conducive.

Was he so wrong to expect her to leave her life in England and make a new life with him and Raphael in Spain? After the time they had spent together in the Port of Vigo last spring, Leandro did not think that he had imagined the powerful connection that had radiated so compellingly between them. When he had let Isabella go without even giving her his cell phone number, he had had much cause to regret his overly cautious action. And all that time after she had left she had been pregnant with his child and he had not known it …Regret and pain locked his throat when he considered how she had managed on her own and how betrayed she must have felt when the film company would not even pass on her messages to him. He should not be surprised that any vestiges of past affection had probably been obliterated under the circumstances.

Yet he could not help craving her attention like a drug he could not give up. Last night he had slept little. How could a man sleep when he was plagued by daydreams and fantasies of a woman who fulfilled every criteria of feminine perfection that Leandro could imagine? The softly provocative kisses he had received from her delectable lips in that hotel room eighteen months ago—as well as the memory of the arousing little sounds she had made in the throes of making love—were a seductive torment to him even now in the cold light of morning.

Impatiently he pushed to his feet, driving his hands into the slim pockets of his jeans as once again the hot, drugging heat that flooded his body at the thought of Isabella made it impossible to sit or relax at all. As his edgy, preoccupied gaze swept the newly tidy room that his friend’s housekeeper had restored in the early hours whilst Leandro had been working he had to console himself with the fact that at least tomorrow he would have the chance to be alone with Isabella and Raphael in his own house. And once his baby son was fed and settled for the night, then he would waste no more time in making relations between himself and his beautiful amante far sweeter and more agreeable than they were at present. And living with him and sharing some of the material and cultural advantages of his world and seeing how much that environment must benefit their son, Isabella would soon forget her worries that she might be jeopardising Raphael’s happiness and quickly agree to becoming Leandro’s wife …

CHAPTER EIGHT

THEY arrived at Leandro’s house in Madrid some time in the early evening when dusk was approaching. Not knowing his personal tastes at all, Isabella was struck by the quiet, unpretentious beauty of the stone-built farmhouse—known as a finca in Spanish, as Leandro had informed her—situated far away from the hub of the main town in rural splendour. Its edifice glowed cloud-white in the fading light of day and as they drove up in the car Leandro had left at the airport for his return the external lighting automatically came on, illuminating their way. Almost immediately there was something about the place that touched a chord deep inside Isabella. An inexplicable sense of coming home even though she told herself she was just being ridiculous and foolishly, unrealistically hopeful. Deliberately, she put the feeling aside.

She shivered slightly in the cool night air as she stepped out of the car, her senses immediately captivated by the richly resinous scent of the earth, and her blood was irrevocably stirred. She loved this land, she realised. She had grown up loving it because of her wonderful grandfather who had told her so many stories about his homeland that it had almost made Isabella homesick. That was why she had always longed to walk the Camino. Somehow, undertaking such a pilgrimage had brought her even closer to the spirit of her grandfather as well as to the land, and it had also set her on the way to discovering what was her own heart’s desire. Flicking a quick covetous glance at Leandro as he walked round to the boot of the car to see to their luggage—his long-legged stride and broad shoulders in his stylish sports jacket and jeans making her heart race suddenly—Isabella reflected that perhaps it hadn’t been so difficult for her to make the decision to come back to Spain after all.

‘He is asleep?’

‘Yes …he hardly even put up a fight. I think the plane journey and the travelling wore him out.’

‘Sí …I think you are right.’

Immediately detecting the apprehension in her expression that she could not hide, Leandro wondered how Isabella had viewed the fact that he had moved her immediately into the master bedroom—her cases down by his next to the big brass and iron bed that he usually slept in alone. They were going to be man and wife …and he saw no point in delaying the inevitable and making her doubt his intention by giving her a room of her own. Especially not when he had already waited eighteen months to experience the rapturous feeling of her body next to his again.

Raphael’s travelling cot, Leandro had placed next to Isabella’s side of the bed until Constanza—his mother—brought the beautifully carved cradle that he had slept in himself as a baby from her home tomorrow. It had been all he could do to dissuade her from visiting them tonight, such was her eagerness to see her grandson—but thankfully Leandro had been able to convince her that a visit was better left to the following day when Isabella and Raphael were more rested after their journey from London.

‘You look a little tired. Why don’t you come and make yourself at home?’ he suggested, his deceptively cool gaze hiding the clamour of aroused senses inside him that were inevitably charged by the sight of Isabella’s too-provoking beauty. Wearing a simple white linen shirt with light blue denim jeans and a black silver-buckled belt, her long ebony hair left unbounded and her feet fetchingly bare, she would have set the most impervious of male hearts to racing. If he were to point a film camera her way, Leandro had no doubt that that same captivating appeal would absolutely transfix an audience were she to appear on the screen. He knew his trade well enough to know that his instincts were right.

Studying her in silence as she moved across the room to seat herself on a couch draped with a vivid ochre-coloured Andalucian shawl, he could see why most people would naturally assume she was a true native of Spain—a bewitching señorita with eyes as black as treacle and a slow, sweet smile as sinful as ‘Diablo’ himself.

‘This is a great room,’ she commented, her gaze contemplating her surroundings with seeming pleasure.

***

Where should she look first? Isabella’s senses were confounded and captivated by the almost shockingly vivid colours that filled the room—colours that had no business complimenting each other but did. From the truly surprising candyfloss-pink-painted walls, to the mismatched rainbow hues on the chairs and couches and the breathlessly lovely interwoven Indian rugs that covered the generously proportioned stone-flagged floor. It was the unrestrained creation of an artist. Even if she never stepped outside the door and saw where they were, Isabella would instinctively know that she was under the spell of someone whose very soul was steeped in the culture and wilder landscapes of this arresting land. Even the books that crowded Leandro’s bookcases had bright, unrestrained, eye-catching spines that made her long to go over and examine them more closely, to see what treasures the well-thumbed pages were hiding. The result of all this dramatic use of colour and material was a passionate, seductive sensibility that seemed to spill over into everything. It agitated Isabella’s blood as well, making her acutely responsive to almost every single detail about this remarkable man at whose instigation she was here and whose steady commanding gaze drew her attention helplessly back to his as though magnetised.

‘I am glad that you like it, Isabella. This is my favourite home and it is here that we will spend the majority of the time together.’

‘Your favourite?’ she queried.

‘I have other homes in Pontevedra and in Paris where we will sometimes stay. But Madrid is my main base because I endeavour to arrange for most of my work to be here. I think it is important to help the economy by utilising local talent and locations whenever I can. Can I get you something to drink? Some wine, some juice, perhaps? We will eat later. In Madrid we are used to having dinner late …sometimes as late as eleven o’clock at night. Does that bother you?’

‘Not at all. I ate on the plane and I’m not hungry anyway. I don’t need a drink right now either, thanks.’

Mention of his work was enough to almost make Isabella beg him to tell her more. How she longed to have him talk freely to her about what inspired him, or moved him …what kind of scripts compelled him to direct them and what were his personal favourite films? Then, unwittingly catching the almost suggestive little smile curving his too disturbing mouth, she nervously recalled the fact that tonight she was expected to share a bed with this most enigmatic of men that the rest of the world seemed to hunger to know about. But as much as Isabella longed to know Leandro’s loving again and had been craving his presence even more since giving birth to Raphael, she did not know if she was ready to be intimate with him. She was so confused. It still stung to remember that disparaging comment the woman at his offices had made about there always being some woman hanging onto his coat tails. Could she trust a man who seemed to treat relationships with women so lightly? He might be a good father to Raphael, but was he capable of being the kind of devoted husband that Isabella secretly dreamed of?

As if intuiting her thoughts, Leandro moved across the room to stand before her. His gaze was quietly reflective as he stared down at her. ‘You know that we are sharing a room together tonight?’ he commented.

All the hairs stood up on the back of Isabella’s neck. ‘I saw,’ she replied quietly, her dark eyes widening. She knew he wouldn’t like what she had to say, but she had to say it. ‘To be honest …I don’t really think that’s such a good idea.’

‘Why not?’ His eyes immediately blazed back his irritation.

‘Because a lot of time has passed since we were together and I don’t think I’m ready to jump straight back into a physical relationship.’

‘So what are you telling me, Isabella? That you intend to live like a nun while we are together under the same roof?’ The twist of his lips was scornful.

‘I need more time to …to think about that side of things.’

‘Dios! Why are you being so deliberately difficult?’ he flared.

Isabella flinched. ‘I’m not being deliberately difficult!’ she retaliated angrily. ‘I did as you asked, Leandro …I came to live here in Spain with you and our baby! Isn’t that enough change to be going on with for the moment? My feelings are all churned up here! I need time to deal with how I feel without you pressurising me to sleep with you!’

‘No!’

‘What do you mean no?’ Her heart was pounding in her ears as Leandro reached out and locked his hand round her wrist. His grip was like a tight iron band and, before she could think what to do, he roughly pulled her to her feet, his warm breath on her face. ‘I have been aching to do this for ever and will not deny myself any longer,’ he breathed huskily before bringing his lips down almost violently ardently upon Isabella’s.

Yes, yes! Isabella cried silently as a jolt of pure lust streaked through her veins. It’s been too long …too long. His at first coaxing, then demanding kiss was full of the vivacity and passion that sparked the creation of this boldly decorated room, and it was so hard to resist its rapture when she needed it more than she needed to take her next breath. Yet the possibility stole into her mind that Leandro might only be using her to gratify his own baser needs and the unwanted thought was like a snake in paradise. It kept pricking her consciousness like the sharpest pin and in the end she had to take action. Twisting her mouth away from his, Isabella leaned her elbows against his hard chest and broke free from his embrace. Her breath was ragged.

‘I told you I needed time! Why won’t you listen?’

Her dark eyes were full of tears and Leandro reeled from the wave of emotion and lust that swept through his body like a violent storm cloud and slowly drew the back of his hand across his mouth where her taste lingered like sensual sugar tempting and frustrating him. He knew from the way her body had trembled against his and the way she had moaned into his mouth that she welcomed his kisses, yet he could not understand why she held back from their ultimate union. He had already told her that he intended to marry her, so why was she so reticent? He wished she would be more honest with him because it immediately set up a feeling of mistrust inside him that she might have some other ulterior motive for keeping him out of her bed. Having experienced the manipulation and duplicity of women before, Leandro baulked at the idea of experiencing it again.

‘I am listening, Isabella, but unfortunately you are not making any sense!’ he said now. ‘You have not been with anyone else since we were together, you tell me, and you have had my baby! It is clear that we have a strong connection between us, so what is the problem?’