His Unknown Heir. Chantelle Shaw

dedication to her job and her refusal to cut down on the long hours she worked had been the only source of friction between them during their affair. Ramon had made it clear that he expected her to be at his beck and call, while she had been infuriated by his chauvinistic attitude and had not held back from telling him so.

      He had never understood that her single-minded focus on her career stemmed from an almost obsessive need for financial independence, and a determination never to be reliant on anyone—as her mother had been on her father. But how could he have understood, when she had never told him about her parents’ bitter divorce, or that her father had abandoned his family for his mistress and left his wife and daughter virtually penniless?

      ‘The move to PGH has certainly given me an opportunity to further my career,’ she agreed. ‘And I work hard at my job.’

      He could not know that she felt pressurised to work harder than her contemporaries. Discovering that she was pregnant a month after she had started at PGH had meant that her career had no longer been a choice but a necessity as she faced life as a single mother.

      Anxious to prove her worth to Alistair Gambrill and the other senior partners, she had continued to work long hours. Fortunately Mateo’s birth had been straightforward, and three months later she had returned to work full-time, afraid that lengthy maternity leave would be detrimental to her chances of promotion in the male-dominated, highly competitive world of corporate law.

      She took a sip of water, fiddled restlessly with her napkin, and then said abruptly, ‘I’m sorry about your father.’ Ramon had always been reluctant to discuss his personal life, and she knew little about his family, but Esteban Velaquez had been a prominent politician in the Spanish government and his death had been reported worldwide.

      She did not expect him to comment, and was surprised when, after a long pause, he admitted, ‘It was a shock. Cancer had been diagnosed six months earlier, but after surgery his prognosis was good. Unfortunately the disease returned in a more aggressive form and there was nothing more the doctors could do. My mother has taken his death badly,’ he continued heavily. ‘My parents had been married for over forty years and she is heartbroken.’

      His mother’s grief had been as much a shock as the loss of his father, Ramon conceded silently. He had assumed that his parents’ marriage had been a union between two influential Spanish families—an arrangement that had developed into a contented relationship based on mutual friendship and respect. But after witnessing Marisol Velaquez’s raw despair as she wept for her husband he had realised that it had been love that had bound his parents together for almost half a century—the kind of profound and everlasting love that poets wrote sonnets about and which he had cynically doubted existed in real life.

      Lauren stared at Ramon’s handsome face and felt her stomach dip. He was impossibly gorgeous, but she was not the first woman to be blown away by his sexy good-looks and she certainly would not be the last. Since Esteban Velaquez’s death, the press had frequently reported on the playboy lifestyle of his only son and heir. Ramon had been photographed with a number of women—in particular a well-known catwalk model, Pilar Fernandez, who was the daughter of a Spanish aristocrat and whose impeccable pedigree was reflected in her exquisite features. The pictures of Ramon and beautiful Pilar had reinforced Lauren’s belief that he would not be interested in his illegitimate child.