Postcards From Madrid: Married by Arrangement / Valdez's Bartered Bride / The Spanish Duke's Virgin Bride

Sophie peeped in on Lydia, who was blissfully asleep in a large cot. Her niece was being watched over by what appeared to be a good half of the female staff. A little while later, her concern laid to rest, Sophie sank into the warm, scented water of the sunken bath that had so captured her interest. She rested her head back against the built-in pillow and surveyed the other luxurious fittings with impressed-to-death eyes. She could see that the misery of being married to Antonio was going to be alleviated by certain small consolations. So, she couldn’t have him and other women were going to have him…but, she rushed to remind herself, she had Lydia, a bath to die for and at least the promise of food. On the downside this was her wedding night and she was alone? So what was new about being alone, she asked herself, struggling not to give way to self-pity. Unhappily she was all too well aware that Antonio would never have left a princess alone…

Thoroughly refreshed, Sophie emerged from the bathroom with a white towel knotted round her and a riot of tousled curls falling round her shoulders. Her nose twitched at the faint enticing aroma in the air and she followed it.

Antonio was standing by the balcony doors in the sitting room.

‘Oh!’ Sophie jerked to a disconcerted halt a few feet from the table that was now set with sparkling glasses and cutlery and the catering trolley standing by. ‘Did you bring the food?’

Antonio was immediately aware that he was staring. With her blonde hair in damp disarray, her fair skin pink and only a towel screening her slim curves between breast and knee, she looked incredibly appealing. ‘No…I’m here to dine with you.’

Sophie stared back at him in surprise.

‘If we’re hoping to pretend that this is a normal relationship, we can’t spend our wedding night in different rooms,’ Antonio pointed out.

‘Oh, right…yeah,’ Sophie mumbled, appreciating that he was only joining her because he had no choice in the matter. That meant that his presence was nothing to get thrilled about. ‘I’d better get dressed, then.’

Antonio resisted a schoolboyish urge to tell her that he thought she looked great just as she was and countered with studied casualness, ‘A robe will do.’

‘I don’t have one and it’s too warm for my jeans. I don’t have much else yet—’

‘Just stay as you are,’ Antonio suggested huskily.

The simmering tension in the air danced along her nerve endings. He had changed as well, into black chinos, which accentuated his long, powerful legs, and a casual but very elegant blue open-necked shirt. He managed to look impossibly sophisticated and gorgeous.

‘You don’t look as stuffy as you usually do!’ Sophie exclaimed before she could think better of such frankness.

Faint colour demarcated the spectacular cheekbones that gave his lean bronzed face such intense power and beauty of line. Stuffy? His keen intellect threw up every possible meaning and none was complimentary. It was a word he associated with some of his more stodgy relatives, the ones boringly trapped in convention and habit. Was that how he seemed to her? Stuffy? She was seven years younger than he was. Was it such a gap?

‘We should eat,’ Antonio murmured flatly, determined not to react to what he knew had been a thoughtless remark.

Sophie knew she had offended. ‘It’s just the way you talk and the suits… I’m not used to businessmen and I guess all of them wear suits—’

‘What way do I talk?’ Antonio discovered that he could not silence that question as he spun out a chair for her to sit down.

‘I really didn’t mean to suggest anything critical,’ Sophie muttered anxiously, sitting down on the very edge of the upholstered antique dining chair. ‘You’ve got fantastic manners and of course you can’t help being formal… I mean you’re a marquis—’

‘And stuffy,’ Antonio breathed and shrugged, the ultimate gesture of Mediterranean cool, but that word she had used had been etched like acid into his soul. ‘Let’s eat.’

Sophie leapt up to examine the contents of the trolley and exclaimed in delight at the sight of the barbecued ribs, pizza and French fries. A multitude of other options was also available. ‘You have an in-house take-away?’

‘I wanted you to have food you felt comfortable with.’

‘I eat loads of more healthy things too, but Norah wouldn’t have had a clue about that. To be honest, Norah and Matt eat stuff like this most of the time. I only like it occasionally.’ As she spoke Sophie was scooping up cushions and throws and piling them on the carpet in an untidy heap. Then she flung open the balcony doors on the cooling night air.

In a trice the superbly elegant room became disorganised and yet more full of life. It dawned on Antonio that sitting at a table when the hard wooden floor was available might be deemed stuffy. While Sophie emptied the trolley and knelt down among the cushions to arrange containers and plates in the style of an impromptu indoor picnic, he uncorked the champagne and filled the flutes. She ate without cutlery, licking her fingertips clean like a delicate cat. She tore a strip off the pizza, tipped her head back and bit off tiny pieces. Never until that moment had it occurred to him that watching a woman eat could be a sensual experience. He was absolutely fascinated.

‘What would you like to talk about?’ she asked cheerfully, flopping back against the piled-up pillows to finish her champagne.

‘My stuffy good manners prevented me from asking how you and your sister came to have different fathers,’ Antonio admitted.

Sophie tensed, but tried to laugh off her discomfiture. ‘Oh, that’s no big deal. Belinda’s father was married to our mother, Isabel. He was an oil executive and he wasn’t home much. Isabel met my father when he was painting their house—’

‘He was an artist?’

‘He painted walls, not pictures,’ Sophie told him thinly. ‘Well, he got her pregnant with me and she left her husband for him…’

‘And?’ Antonio prompted as the silence dragged.

‘My father was no great catch and Isabel soon realised her mistake. When I was a month old, she went back to her husband and left me behind with Dad.’

‘That must have been hard for your father—’

‘Dad would do just about anything for money and Isabel sent him money every month until I was sixteen. She never visited me. Apart from the handouts, she just blanked out the whole affair like it and I never happened.’ Sophie tipped up her chin, a defiant glint in her expressive green eyes.

‘She was probably ashamed of what she had done,’ Antonio murmured gently, seeing the pain that she was struggling to hide. Reaching over, he linked his fingers with hers in a comforting gesture that was as instinctive as it was unusual for him. ‘You did very well without her, querida.’

‘You really think so?’ Antonio was so close that Sophie could hardly catch her breath.

‘You bend but you don’t break,’ Antonio breathed a little thickly, leaning over her to let a soothing fingertip score the soft pink fullness of her lower lip in a touch as light as silk.

The faintest suspicion of a breeze was ruffling the curls against her shoulder. She was very still, heart pumping like crazy below the towel. Her breasts felt tight and confined and a restive energy was filtering through her. Her whole focus was on him. If he didn’t kiss her she thought she might die from the cruel disappointment of it.

A masculine thumb brushed against a springy blonde loop of hair in a movement so subtle she wasn’t quite sure it had happened. His scorching golden eyes collided with hers and the knot of tension deep down inside her tightened. ‘I love your hair…it has a life of its own.’

‘Antonio…’ she whispered, stretching back against the pillows, letting her head fall back, bright corkscrew curls spilling out and catching the light of the sinking sun. She felt shameless but she was being driven by a craving much stronger than she was.

His breath fanned her cheek. He took his time and let his mouth toy with hers. Longing snaked through her in a fierce, almost frightening surge. Without even knowing what she was about to do she pulled him down to her. He resisted and laughed huskily, gazed down at her with shimmering dark golden eyes full of satisfaction.

‘I don’t respond well to the whip and chair approach,’ he mocked.

She felt foolish and exposed and temper leapt into the chasm. In a split second she had rolled away and sat up. ‘I’m not a joke!’

Stunned by the immediacy of her rejection, Antonio sprang up in concert. ‘Por dios, I was teasing—’

‘No, you weren’t…you were crowing!’ Sophie accused tempestuously. ‘Well, before you get carried away with the idea that I’m too enthusiastic—’

Antonio reached out and tugged her straight back into his arms. ‘You firebrand…you could never be too enthusiastic for me. You turn me on so hard and so fast that I can’t think this close to you,’ he admitted in a roughened undertone.

On the brink of fighting loose again, Sophie paused and fixed huge anxious green eyes on his lean, strong face. ‘Truthfully?’

He spread long brown fingers to frame her cheekbones and his hands were not quite steady. ‘I’m burning for you, querida.’

She felt the truth of it in his raw urgency and she trembled. ‘Then stop playing games—’

‘I’m not playing.’ Antonio claimed a long, hard, potent kiss that made her grip his arms for support and left her head swimming. ‘Believe me, I didn’t bargain on this—’

‘You can’t plan everything—’

‘But I do,’ he growled in frustration, coming back for another fierce and hungry taste of her. ‘This shouldn’t be happening—’

Her small fingers delved into his luxuriant black hair to pull his head back. ‘Then…stop!’

His smouldering golden gaze struck sparks from hers. ‘I can’t…I wanted you the first time I saw you nearly three years ago. Now I want you even more.’

At that admission, her troubled eyes shone like stars and she screened them. But she still wanted to shout her joy from the rooftops. What he felt wasn’t love, but then she had never hoped for love from Antonio. His desire was enough to satisfy her deep, desperate need for some kind of response from him. It wouldn’t last, naturally it wouldn’t, she thought feverishly. But a desire to match her own was there for the taking now and she was not too proud to seize the moment.

He crushed her lush lips beneath his again. The sweet, stabbing invasion of his tongue in the tender reaches of her mouth made her gasp out loud. He lifted her effortlessly up in his arms and carried her into the bedroom. His strength left her breathless. Resting her down on the bed, he undid the towel. Unprepared for that instant unveiling, she crossed her arms over her nakedness in an instinctive movement.

Antonio surveyed her startled eyes and hot cheeks in surprise. ‘You can’t be shy with me…’

‘I’m not shy,’ Sophie denied to the best of her ability, taking advantage of his momentary stasis to shimmy away. Pulling back the bedding, she slid speedily under it with more than a suggestion of a crab scuttling below a rock for cover. ‘Not the slightest bit shy,’ she added with determined emphasis, and she sat up to embark on the buttons on his shirt in an effort to distract him.

‘Let me look at you, then.’ Antonio closed long fingers into the sheet she had wrapped below her arms and tugged it down before she could even guess his intent. The tantalising jut of her pert breasts provoked a ragged groan of appreciation from him. He caught her to him with one powerful arm, bent her back against him and explored the firm creamy swells with unashamed expertise. His slightest touch set her tender flesh on fire. Her teeth clenched, her hips shifting on the sheet beneath her. When he toyed with the rosy crests that were swollen and sensitised by his attention, she was unable to suppress the moan rising in her throat.

‘You’re even more beautiful than I thought you would be, querida,’ Antonio breathed thickly, hungry dark golden eyes welded with all-male admiration to the ripe, rounded curves he had revealed. ‘And a hundred times more responsive.’

Straightening up to his full height, he finished unbuttoning his shirt and peeled it off. As he shifted position sleek, strong muscles flexed in his strong brown torso and accentuated the powerful breadth of his chest and the rock-hard flatness of his abdomen. Ebony curls liberally shaded his pectorals. She pulled in a sudden gulp of air to her starved lungs. Her heartbeat had quickened to a pulsing thump behind her breastbone: he was spectacularly male. She couldn’t drag her mesmerised attention from him until he unzipped his trousers and embarrassment claimed her, forcing her to drop her gaze.

‘Come here,’ Antonio urged softly.

She scrambled up on her knees, glancing up at him from below her curling lashes, her face burning from the awareness of her nudity. With a husky groan, he just reached for her as though she were a doll. With his hands spread across the feminine swell of her hips, he raised her higher and clamped her hard up against his lean muscular frame. Warm and silky smooth and interestingly rough, his body was an electrifying mix of different textures against her softer skin. She was insanely aware of the hot, hard thrust of his erection and of her own feverish yearning for his touch. She felt programmed, enslaved by the wanton promise of the pleasure he had already given her.

‘Touch me,’ she mumbled shakily.

‘Until you beg me to stop.’ He tumbled her back across the bed and came down to her, strong and bronzed and pagan in his sexual intensity. He lowered his proud dark head to the prominent pink buds of her breasts and let his tongue lash the straining tips. She arched her spine and cried out when he intensified that sensation with the graze of his teeth and his knowing mouth. Heat burned low in her pelvis.

‘Don’t stop,’ she whispered urgently, shifting her hips in a restive movement against the sheet, wildly, wickedly conscious of the growing ache at the very heart of her.

Golden eyes molten with desire, Antonio parted her thighs. With sure skill he parted the cluster of curls crowning her womanhood and touched her where she had never been touched before. That intimacy smashed her tenuous control to pieces. He found the most sensitive spot in her entire body and a burning, drowning sweetness of sensation took hold of her and blanked out all other awareness. As the twisting spiral of pleasure tightened to the edge of near pain inside her, she writhed.

‘Antonio…’ His name was like a prayer on her lips. She could no longer contain the wildness sweeping over her in potent waves. Her hips squirmed up in a sinuous rhythm as old as time, tiny whimpers breaking low in her throat.

‘Enamorada…you intoxicate me,’ he confessed fiercely as he came over her. ‘I intend to give you more pleasure than anyone has ever given you.’

When he drove into the slick, wet depths of her, excitement roared through her every skin cell with the ferocity of a forest fire. The sudden sharp pain induced by that bold invasion took her entirely by surprise. Her eyes widened in shock and she muffled her involuntary cry against his shoulder.

Antonio stilled and looked down at her. ‘Did I hurt you?’

‘No…’

He stared down at the luminous clarity of her beautiful eyes. ‘I know I hurt you,’ he breathed huskily. ‘Was I too rough?’

Hot pink washed her hairline, for she was mortified but far too proud and cautious to admit that he was her first lover. ‘Of course not—’

‘You excite me beyond all control,’ Antonio confessed thickly, sinking by slow, skilled degrees into her now more receptive body. ‘I forgot how small you are, how fragile.’

His every subtle movement engulfed her in hot, sweet pleasure. The tempo stepped up. Passion gripped her in a flashing surge of high-voltage sensation. He sank his hands below her hips and tipped her up to him, plunging back into her with raw, demanding urgency. Her heart hammered and she fought to breathe in short little spurts. Need and excitement had combined and the ache for fulfilment was a torment. Her hunger peaked in a shattering release. Losing herself in the voluptuous shock waves of convulsive pleasure, she cried out in joy and amazement.

In the aftermath, Antonio curved her round him, kissed the top of her head and studied the ornate ceiling with brilliant golden eyes. He had both arms wrapped round her in a possessive hold. He had never had such fantastic sex. And she was his, signed, sealed, delivered, even ringed. He wanted to punch the air and shout. Indeed he felt hugely satisfied with life in general. He had ditched a mistress who had been downright boring and, if truth be told, a whiner, only to discover that his bride had a magnificent gift for passion. And unless he was very much mistaken his bride had brought him a very special gift that he had never dreamt he might receive on his wedding night: she had been a virgin. He thought that was absolutely amazing. He thought it was fate that she had miraculously conserved her perfect body for him. He did indeed owe her a humble apology for assuming the worst that night he had seen her coming off the beach. At about that point he remembered their agreement and he was stunned that he could have forgotten it…

Sophie was happy. In fact she could never recall feeling quite so happy except of course in those dreams she sometimes recalled when she first wakened. Wonderful dreams in which she wandered hand in hand through sunlit places with Antonio. Antonio had had a starring role in her best dreams for so long that he was almost a fixture there. And now she had learned that he lived up to every secret fantasy she had ever had about what he might be like in bed. His future in her dreams was now assured for a lifetime, she conceded buoyantly and snuggled closer.

For the first time in almost three years she was letting herself recall the fact that she loved Antonio. Although he was destined never to know it, he had stolen her heart at their first meeting. She had yet to decide what she found most attractive about him. His cleverness, his looks, his wonderful manners, his fabulous smile? Whatever, even though she had known even then that loving him was stupid, no rival had managed to supplant him. That was why she was so oversensitive and prone to losing her temper around Antonio, she acknowledged ruefully. He could hurt her so easily and when it came to him she lost all common sense. Did that explain why she had just given her virginity to a male who had announced up front that he wanted to be a womaniser at the same time as he pretended to be a husband? So what was he pretending to be now? Her happy feelings dive-bombed faster than the speed of the light.

Antonio decided that he was doing far too much thinking. Why complicate things? Why look for trouble that wasn’t there? He rolled Sophie off his chest, confined her beneath one powerful arm and kissed her breathless. ‘You should have warned me that you were a virgin, querida,’ he told her softly. ‘I could have made it less painful.’

Emerging from a kiss that made her head swim and her toes curl, Sophie was aghast at that comment, for it meant that he had noticed what she had assumed he would not. ‘What gives you the idea that I was a virgin?’ She forced a laugh, for she was convinced that there was no way he could know for sure. ‘I mean, how likely is that at my age?’

‘Very unlikely,’ Antonio agreed silkily, pinning her against the pillows and rearranging her into a rather more intimate position. ‘But please don’t get the idea that I’m complaining about your lack of form in the bedroom—’

‘No?’ Sophie’s interruption was a little jerky because her teeth were gritted. That reference to ‘form’ which was normally applied to a horse and its racing performance, struck her as the ultimate in humiliation. Any minute now he’d be slapping her on the rump and offering her extra oats.

In fact Antonio seemed delighted that she had proved to be a complete novice in the sex stakes. But Sophie was unnerved and mortified by the speed with which he had deduced that reality. If she didn’t watch out he would soon be questioning the significance of why she had yielded her precious virginity to him. He would guess that she was a lot keener on him than appearances might suggest. And if that happened, she knew she would die a thousand deaths from shame and never look him in the face again.

‘Not at all, enamorada,’ Antonio confirmed with lazy cool, running a confident and appreciative hand along the quivering line of one slender thigh. ‘I suspect we’re going to have a huge amount of fun filling in the blanks in your education.’

Employing all the self-control she could muster, Sophie pulled back from him. ‘You’ve got me so wrong. I may have acted the innocent to amuse myself, but there is just no way I was a virgin and I can’t believe you should think that I was.’

‘Why are you trying to deny the obvious? Why should you be embarrassed about the fact that you didn’t sleep around? Why would you want to persuade me otherwise?’ Brilliant golden eyes full of incomprehension rested on her. ‘I think that you being a virgin on our wedding night is an amazing achievement. You should be proud.’

Her small hands coiled into fierce fists. He knew what he knew and her secret was a secret no more. Her clumsy attempt to blow dust over her tracks had failed. His awareness that he had been her first lover made her feel horribly exposed and vulnerable. Gripped by the growing suspicion that she had behaved very stupidly with him, she scrambled out of the bed.

Snatching up the towel on the floor, she dragged it round herself again as though it were her only cover in a life-threatening storm. ‘Look, stop going on about it!’

‘Come back to bed,’ Antonio murmured as gently as if he were dealing with a wild creature.

‘No, been there, done that,’ Sophie slung with jewel bright green eyes full of angry defiance, dull coins of pink burning over her cheekbones. ‘You were great and you did me a favour, but let’s leave it at that!’

‘A favour?’ At that contemptuous dismissal, Antonio went rigid and any desire to humour and soothe left him.

CHAPTER SEVEN

‘YOU said I did you a favour. Explain what you mean by that,’ Antonio instructed with lethal cool.

Playing for time, Sophie dragged in a ragged breath. ‘Can’t you guess?’

Hard dark golden eyes rested on her with uncompromising force. ‘Answer my question, por favor.’

‘OK.’ Sophie lifted and dropped her slim shoulders, attempting to strike a casual note while she frantically plumbed her imagination for a suitable explanation. She was totally terrified that Antonio would guess why he had found it so easy to get her into bed. ‘I set you up,’ she claimed daringly.

Unimpressed, Antonio elevated an aristocratic black brow. ‘No me diga…you don’t say!’

His apparent calm only made her more desperate than ever to save face. ‘I’m nearly twenty-three years old and I thought it was way past time I stopped being a virgin,’ she spelt out, ‘so I picked you to do the deed.’

That brazen claim hit home and outrage powered through Antonio. ‘You did…what?’ he raked at her in raw disbelief.

The atmosphere could have been cut with a knife and Sophie was so nervous she was trembling. Forced to defend her story, she paled. ‘You’ve been around,’ she muttered in haste. ‘So I reckoned you’d make the experience reasonably pleasant…and you did. Can we drop the subject now?’

Antonio might have dismissed that fantastic claim had he not remembered her walking in to join him clad only in a towel and then virtually luring him down into the cushions. Scorching golden eyes lit on her like lightning bolts. ‘You selected me like some kind of stud to have sex with you?’

‘Look, least said, soonest mended,’ Sophie mumbled, hot-cheeked, while wishing that she had come up with a less inflammatory story.

In a towering rage, Antonio sprang out of bed and began to get dressed at speed.

The intense claustrophobic silence intimidated and frightened Sophie.