A Spanish Affair: Naive Bride, Defiant Wife / Flora's Defiance. LYNNE GRAHAM

bit out an unamused laugh. ‘You know surprisingly little about men,’ he breathed roughly. ‘I’m much more interested in what you did in my bed with my brother and why you felt the need to do it.’

      In one comprehensive sentence, he tore down the deceptive veil of civility and confronted her with the reality of his convictions and she was shocked into silence by that direct attack. The experience also reminded her that she had never found Alejandro’s moods or actions easy to predict and had often failed to identify the whys and wherefores that drove that hot-blooded temperament of his.

      ‘Did you have him in our bed?’ Alejandro gritted, lean brown hands clenched so hard by his side that she could see the white of bone over his knuckles. Intimidated, she stepped away, which wasn’t easy to do in that small room and her calves pressed back against the door of the pale modern cupboard unit behind her.

      In the inflammable mood he was in she didn’t want to engage in another round of vehement denials, which he had already heard and summarily dismissed two years earlier. ‘Alejandro…’ she murmured as quietly as she could, trying to ratchet down the tension in the explosive atmosphere.

      He flung his dark head back, his brilliant gaze splintering over her so hard that she would not have been surprised to see a shower of sparks light up the air. For a timeless moment and without the smallest warning she was entrapped by his powerfully sexual charisma and it was like looking into the sun. She remembered the hum of arousal and anticipation that had once started on the rare nights he was home on time for dinner, when she knew he would join her in their bedroom and take her to a world of such joyous physical excitement that she would briefly forget her loneliness and unhappiness.

      ‘Is my need to know such sordid details too raw for you? Did you ever once stop to think of what it might be like for me to be forced to picture my wife in my brother’s arms?’ Alejandro ground out wrathfully.

      ‘No,’ she admitted, and it was the truth because she had never been intimate with Marco in that way and had wasted little time wondering how Alejandro’s offensive and unfounded suspicions might be making him feel. Angry with her? Disillusioned? She had already been much too familiar with the knowledge that he had to be experiencing such responses while she failed to live up to the steep challenge of behaving like a Spanish countess.

      ‘No, why should you have?’ Alejandro growled, his accent thick as treacle on that rhetorical question. ‘Marco was simply a sacrifice to your vanity and boredom, a destructive, trashy way of hitting back at me and my family—’

      ‘That’s absolute nonsense!’ Jemima flailed back at him furiously.

      ‘Then why did you ever let him touch you? Do you think I haven’t wondered how it was between you?’ Alejandro slung back bitterly. ‘Do you think it didn’t hurt to imagine you naked with him? Sobbing with gratification as he pleasured you? Crying out as you came?’

      ‘Stop it!’ Jemima launched at him pleadingly, her face hot with mortification at the pungent sexual images he was summoning up. ‘Stop talking like that right now!’

      ‘Does it strike too closely for you?’ Alejandro hissed fiercely. ‘You got off lightly for being a faithless, lying slut, so stop staring at me with those big shocked eyes. I won’t fall for the little-fragile-girl act this time around—I know you for what you are.’

      Disturbed by the implicit threat in those hard words, Jemima spun away and walked past him to the window, fighting to get a grip on the turmoil of her emotions. He had shocked her, he had shocked her very deeply, for it had not until that moment struck her that his belief in her infidelity could have inflicted that much damage. Two years back when he had confronted her about Marco, he had been cold, controlled, behaving almost as though he were indifferent to her. By then she had believed that Alejandro felt very little for her and might even be grateful for a good excuse to end their unhappy alliance. Only now did she recognise that she had been naïve to accept that surface show from a male as deep and emotional as he could be.

      ‘I’m not a slut because I didn’t have an affair with your brother,’ Jemima muttered heavily, slowly turning back round to face him. ‘And you should know now that my son, Alfie, is your son.’

      ‘Is that supposed to be a joke?’ Alejandro demanded with a look of angry bewilderment. ‘I’m well aware that you suffered a miscarriage before you left Spain.’

      ‘We assumed I had had a miscarriage,’ Jemima corrected with curt emphasis. ‘But when I finally went to see a doctor here in the UK, I discovered that I was still pregnant. He suggested that I might have initially been carrying twins and lost one of them, or that the bleeding I experienced was merely the threat of a miscarriage rather than an actual one. Whatever,’ she continued doggedly, her slender hands clenching tightly in on themselves beneath his incredulous appraisal, ‘I was still very much pregnant when I arrived in England and Alfie was born just five months later.’

      Alejandro dealt her a seething appraisal, his disbelief palpable. ‘That is not possible.’

      Jemima yanked open a drawer in the sideboard and leafed through several documents to find Alfie’s birth certificate. In one sense she could not credit what she was doing and yet in another she could not see how she could possibly do anything else. Her son was her husband’s child and that was not something she could lie about or leave in doubt because she had to take into account how Alfie would feel about his parentage in the future. It was a question of telling the truth whether she liked it or not. Emerging with the certificate, she extended it to Alejandro.

      ‘This has to be nonsense,’ Alejandro asserted, snatching the piece of paper from her fingers with something less than his usual engrained good manners.

      ‘Well, if you can find some other way of explaining how I managed to give birth to a living child by that date and it not be yours, I’d like to hear it,’ Jemima challenged without hesitation.

      Alejandro stared down at the certificate with fulminating force and then glanced up, golden eyes bright as blades and as dangerous. ‘All this proves is that you must still have been pregnant when you walked out on our marriage. It does not automatically follow that the child is mine.’

      Jemima shook her fair head and expelled her breath in a slow hiss. ‘I know it doesn’t suit you to hear this news now and I really didn’t want to tell you. Too much water has gone under the bridge since we split up and now we lead separate lives. But the point is, I can’t lie to you about it. Some day Alfie may want to look you up and get acquainted.’

      Alejandro studied her with brooding dark ferocity. ‘If what you have just told me is the truth, if that little boy does prove to be mine, it was vindictive and extremely selfish of you to leave me in ignorance!’

      Jemima had paled. ‘When I left you I had no idea that I was still pregnant,’ she protested.

      ‘Two years is a long period of time, yet you made no attempt to inform me that I might be a father,’ he fielded harshly. ‘I will want DNA tests to confirm your claim before I make any decision about what I want to do.’

      Jemima compressed her lips hard at the reference to the testing. Once again Alejandro was insulting her with the assumption that she had been an unfaithful wife and that, for that reason, there could be doubt over who had fathered her child. ‘Do as you like,’ she told him curtly. ‘I know who Alfie’s father is and there has never been any doubt of his identity.’

      ‘I will make arrangements for the tests to be carried out and I will see you again when the result is available,’ Alejandro drawled, with lashings of dark Spanish masculine reserve emanating from his forbidding demeanour and cool taut intonation.

      ‘I’ll contact a solicitor and start the divorce,’ Jemima proffered in turn, determined not to leave him with the impression that he was the only one of them who could act and make decisions.

      Alejandro frowned, dark eyes unlit by gold narrowing in a piercing scrutiny that made her uncomfortable. ‘It would be foolish to do anything before we have that DNA result.’