Kept By The Spanish Billionaire

‘You haven’t answered my question and, considering you’ve put me through a lot of unnecessary hassle, I think I’m owed an explanation. What the hell did you think you were doing?’

Amy gave him her best look of defiance and folded her arms, but he wasn’t buying it and eventually she shrugged and looked away. ‘Oh, the usual.’

‘Which would be…?’

‘Girl meets boy, girl likes boy, girl…’ she glanced down at her now dirty, creased skirt ‘…dons new outfit to impress boy only to find that boy has scuttled off to the woods so that he can be with another girl.’

‘And in frustration you decided to climb a tree…’

Amy remembered just how obnoxious the man was. She glared at him and told him, sounding to even her own ears like a broken record, to point her in the right direction. At this rate, the infernal man would start thinking that she was stalking him.

‘The house is a stiff walk away, at least if you take the direct route, and I certainly won’t be sending you back through the deep, dark woods. God knows where you might end up.’

He turned on his heel and started walking away and, with a mixture of frustration and resentment, Amy half ran behind him, struggling to keep up with his long strides.

‘I think I can manage!’

Was it possible to read someone’s expression from the inclination of their fast-disappearing back? She thought so!

‘Please wait!’ she yelled. ‘These sandals weren’t designed for sprinting!’

Rafael stopped and turned around, waiting for her to catch up with him. The woman was truly off her rocker. How many sane human beings climbed trees at midnight in an attempt to deal with a broken heart? In fact, how many sane adults climbed trees? He hadn’t climbed a tree since he was a kid!

‘You should have thought of that before you decided to hike your way across the estate,’ Rafael pointed out in the sort of calm voice that someone might use when dealing with the village idiot.

‘I wasn’t “hiking” my way across the estate,’ Amy said icily, ‘I was…’

‘I’m all ears.’ He carried on walking, thankfully at a less ridiculous pace, and she reluctantly fell into step with him.

‘Taking a bit of time out to get a breath of fresh air.’

‘You seem to do quite a bit of that, don’t you? Breathing in the fresh air and covering great distances in the process?’

‘Yes, I like walking!’

They had reached his house. Actually just a few more minutes of running would have seen her safely to his front door instead of up a tree, not that that option was particularly appealing either, but at least her expensive skirt would still have been intact. Now it was fit only to join the beaded silver shoes in that great wardrobe in the sky.

‘You’ll have to get out of those things. You’re filthy.’

‘I want to go back to the house. I have to go back there. My clothes are all there.’

‘I’m not taking you. You’ve put me out already.’

‘I know it’s quite a walk, but you can drive me there, can’t you? I mean, you must have a car tucked away somewhere.’ Amy suddenly felt close to breaking-point. She wrapped her arms tightly around her body and kept herself very still so that she didn’t burst into tears.

‘I’ll run you a bath.’

‘Please take me back to the house. Please.’

‘You’re in no fit state,’ Rafael told her without preamble. ‘Never mind the state of your clothes, you look as though you’re about to collapse. You need to get yourself together. Now sit down. I’ll run you a bath and, while it’s running, I’ll make you something hot to drink.’

The woman was a nuisance but Rafael felt a twinge of concern if only because the same tiring feistiness that got on his nerves was so obviously missing in action.

Before she could launch into another round of pleading to be taken back to the house, he was heading up the stairs so that he could run her a bath. Then he fetched a clean towel from the cupboard and one of his shirts, which she would have to wear whether she liked it or not. He would stick her clothes in the wash and they would be clean in time for her in the morning. After that, he would send her on her way so that she could, presumably, continue to ruin her life by falling in love with inappropriate men.

He returned to find her slumped on the ground in the sitting room.

‘I didn’t want to get your nice clean furniture dirty,’ she said, meeting his questioning eyes. ‘I’m disgusting.’ She stood up. ‘I give you yet another pair of ruined shoes. Two in one day. A record even for me,’ she told him gloomily, dangling her sorry sandals in one hand.

‘What happened to pair one?’ Rafael found himself asking.

‘Waterlogged in a kayaking incident this morning.’

‘Right. What else? The bathroom is upstairs. Leave your clothes outside the door and I’ll stick them in the wash. They’ll be ready by morning.’

‘I can’t spend the night here.’ She hovered, tapping one bare foot behind her.

‘Have a bath. We’ll discuss it when you come out. I’ve left one of my shirts for you to put on.’

Well, there was nothing to discuss. Amy emerged twenty minutes later, feeling refreshed and wearing only her underwear and his white shirt, which reached a respectable mid-thigh level. It might seem odd to whoever happened to still be up that she was returning to the house in a man’s shirt and not much else, but with any luck the place would be dead. Probably aside from James, who would still be gambolling somewhere in the woods with his lady friend. She felt another attack of self-pity threaten and willed it away.

Rafael, looking disgustingly bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, was waiting for her in the sitting room with a cup of hot chocolate on the table, which he pointed at as soon as he saw her.

His shirt drowned her and she was slight enough to begin with. She had scrubbed off all the warpaint and her skin was satin-smooth with a faint golden tan that must have accumulated over the summer. Her eyebrows, in contrast to the vanilla-coloured, unruly hair, were dark. He wondered whether it was this unlikely contrast that lent her face such animation, even when she wasn’t speaking. Such as now.

‘Feel better?’

‘Not much. Thanks for asking.’ Amy curled her legs under her and reached forward for the mug, enjoying the creaminess of the drink. She hadn’t had hot chocolate for ages. It reminded her of her childhood.

Rafael frowned, a little disconcerted by the bluntness of the reply to a perfectly polite question.

‘Your clothes are in the wash,’ he informed her, skirting around his reluctant curiosity. ‘So, I suppose I could drive you back but the car is parked a walk away.’

‘Why?’

‘Why what?’

‘Why is your car parked a walk away? Don’t your employers think that you might want to go out now and again? You might be a very diligent gardener, but don’t they think that you might want a bit of time out now occasionally?’

‘Easier to park it behind the copse on the lane out of the grounds. The alternative would be to drive over the lawns or, of course, through the trees. The grounds were designed with aesthetics in mind and, believe it or not, a strip of tarmac winding across the manicured gardens wasn’t considered particularly fetching.’

‘Do you ever stop being sarcastic?’ She sniffed, aware that her composure was very fragile and the gardener was not the sort to make a sympathetic listener.

Amy looked at him. He was leaning forwards, elbows on knees, his hands dangling lightly between his legs. For someone who had been unexpectedly dragged out of a deep sleep, he seemed very well dressed, in a pair of khaki shorts and a short-sleeved shirt, with some worn tan loafers.

‘You weren’t sleeping, were you?’ she asked, to distract herself from thinking about her reasons for being in his house. ‘I didn’t drag you out of bed with my yelling, did I? You don’t look like someone who’s been interrupted in the middle of a deep sleep.’

‘I was…working, as a matter of fact…’

‘You were working?’ She grinned, forgetting the trauma of her evening for a few minutes. She noticed the sprinkling of dark hair visible just where his collar was open and hurriedly averted her eyes. She wasn’t sure why exactly she was aware of the man, but she was. She put it down to his barefaced arrogance, which would get under anyone’s skin. ‘Working on what?’ she asked, still grinning. ‘No, don’t tell me…that plot of yours to get rid of the bugs in the rose bushes! Why did you tell me that I’d woken you up? Did you want to make me feel even more guilty than I already felt?’

‘There are two bedrooms but one’s not made up. I’ll take that one and you can have my bed.’

‘No way. I’m not sleeping in your bed!’

‘Why not?’ Rafael asked wearily. ‘Come on. Drink that up and go upstairs.’

Amy flushed. He had used that tone of voice with her before. In fact, he seemed to have made a habit of using it since she had made his unfortunate acquaintance. It was the tone of voice of an adult addressing a child. Was that, she wondered, what he thought of her? A kid who got into scrapes?

More to the point, was that, she wondered miserably, what James had thought of her? No more than a kid he could have a joke with?

She quietly placed the mug on the table and stood up, not looking at him, waiting for him to lead her up the stairs, acutely aware that she talked too much, asked too many questions, laughed too loudly. This man might be arrogant and standoffish, but she was in his territory and if he wanted her to shut up, then she would shut up.

Had James wanted her to shut up now and again as well? She had thought he was interested in her but had he been or had he really only been responding to her chattiness, rolling his eyes to the ceiling the minute her back had been turned?

‘Okay. Spit it out.’

Amy, staring down as she followed him to the bedroom, almost collided into his huge, immovable frame where he had stopped outside the bedroom door.

‘Spit what out?’

‘Whatever’s eating you up. We might as well forget about getting any sleep tonight.’

Rafael leaned against the doorframe and stared down at her. And this, he thought, was precisely why he didn’t go for the emotional types. They poured their hearts out, they sobbed, they lacked restraint.

Amy’s blue eyes tangled with his deep, deep, almost black ones and she felt momentarily giddy.

‘I need to sit down,’ she said shakily.

Rafael stood aside and made a sweeping gesture in the direction of his bed, which, to Amy, looked unbelievably tempting. To hell with prudish, maidenly qualms. She was suddenly exhausted.

His bed smelt of him, a clean, masculine smell that made her want to close her eyes and inhale deeply because it was a weirdly comforting smell. And why pretend? She had grown up bunking down and sharing beds. Her mother had sworn that it did the immune system a world of good. She slipped under the luxurious, silky soft quilt and yawned.

‘I just can’t believe it,’ Amy said, just as Rafael was about to leave the room and head back downstairs so that he could resume the conference call to Australia that had been so rudely interrupted. He turned around and narrowed his eyes on the small figure now propped up against the pillows. She looked ridiculously fragile, he thought, which seemed incongruous considering the size of her mouth.

‘Can’t believe what?’ Rafael was not a man who was accustomed to the emotional complexities of women. He had always listened to James’s tales of woe with a certain amount of amusement and privately congratulated himself on his wisdom in going for women who didn’t play games or have moods or weren’t, in short, a mess. He didn’t sleep around and his breakups had never been messy. At thirty-four, which didn’t exactly qualify him as The Old Man of the Sea, he nevertheless considered himself pretty much together emotionally. A man who knew what he wanted in life, and that included women.

‘Can’t believe how I could ever have been so stupid. I mean…’ Amy’s voice wobbled as she considered the depth of her stupidity ‘…just because he looked at me once or twice and chatted now and again…how could I have got it into my head? I mean…has that ever happened to you? Has it? You just completely misread someone else’s signals and then fabricate a whole fairy tale in your head that’s just way, way off target?’ ‘No.’

‘What…never?’ Amy asked, temporarily disconcerted.

‘Never.’

‘Oh. So I guess you wouldn’t really know what it’s like to be…to be…’ ‘No. I wouldn’t.’ He was fairly sure he was about to find out, unless, of course, he put a stop to this nonsense, shut the bedroom door firmly and only resurfaced when she was about to leave in the morning. ‘But I can tell you that he’s not worth it.’

Amy tried to focus on James, his charming, boyish face, his blond hair that always managed to look ever so slightly tousled, though out of the corner of her eye she couldn’t help but notice Rafael’s brooding presence by the door. He was probably sick to death of her, she couldn’t help thinking, but for some reason she didn’t want to be on her own. She felt too vulnerable.

‘You can’t say that. You don’t know him.’

‘I know that no one is worth shedding tears over.’

‘Oh!’ Reluctantly she abandoned the temptation to wallow and frowned at Rafael curiously. ‘I guess you’ve never been in love…’

Rafael was fast regretting his impulse to listen to the woman because he had momentarily felt sorry for her.

‘I’m not entirely sure I believe in the concept,’ he told her abruptly. ‘Romantics hang onto the idea for dear life because they think it makes sense of life, but for me…no. I think I’ll avoid it like the plague if the net result is what I’m looking at right now.’

Amy got up the energy to glare but it didn’t last long. ‘At least we Romantics have fun!’

‘If fun is lying on a stranger’s bed at one-thirty in the morning blubbing…’ Rafael said dryly and Amy was forced to concede defeat.

‘Okay. You win. I’m a fool. Maybe next time lucky.’ She gave him a watery grin and it was such a brave pretence of a smile that Rafael found himself reluctantly smiling back. ‘Maybe,’ she mused, ‘next time I won’t fall for the boss…’

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