Don Joaquin's Pride. Lynne Graham

thump of her own heartbeat, the shortness of her breath, that lingering sense of being dislocated from time. She frowned at the space where she had left her case earlier and muttered unevenly, ‘Where’s my case?’

      Without the slightest warning, Joaquin strode forward and dropped a rough wool poncho over her shoulders, engulfing her in yards of scratchy malodorous fabric. ‘What on earth are you doing?’ she cried, pulling at the garment with distaste.

      Impervious to her reaction, Joaquin Del Castillo planted a battered straw hat on her head. ‘Treat the sun with respect or you will burn your skin to a withered crisp!’

      ‘Where’s my case?’ Lucy demanded afresh.

      ‘I packed for you. Come on. We have no more time to waste.’

      ‘You went through my personal things?’ Lucy was aghast at the idea of a man rustling through her panties and her bras.

      ‘Let’s go,’ he grated impatiently.

      For some reason there was a general exodus from the bar at the same moment. The cowboy horde poured out through the door to watch Joaquin prod a deeply reluctant Lucy round to the side of the sleek brown mare tethered to the rail.

      ‘You grasp the rein, place your left foot in the stirrup and then you swing yourself up into the saddle,’ he instructed smoothly.

      Lucy’s teeth gritted. She could hear suppressed male laughter behind her. Planting a canvas-shod foot into the stirrup cup, she hauled herself up by dint of sheer determination, but she didn’t raise her other leg quite high enough and simultaneously the mare changed position. Unbalanced, Lucy fell back hard on her bottom and snaked her flailing legs back in fright as the mare’s hooves skittered too close for comfort.

      A powerful hand closed over hers and hauled her upright again with stunning ease. ‘Would you like some help, señora?’

      Sardonic amusement was audible in that honeyed dark drawl. A tide of unfamiliar rage drew Lucy’s every muscle taut. She snatched her fingers free of his patronising hold. ‘I’d have managed if the blasted horse hadn’t moved!’ she told him with furious resentment. ‘And I’ll do it without your help if it kills me…so stand back and snigger with your friends, because it’s obvious that that’s all that you’re good for!’

      A line of dark colour highlighted his amazing cheekbones. Then that expressive mouth set like moulded steel. ‘As you wish…but I would not like to see you injured.’

      ‘Get out of my way!’ Lucy snarled, a tiny proportion of her brain standing back in disbelief at her own fiery behaviour.

      Grasping the rein afresh, Lucy was now powered by so much temper she could have swung up high enough to touch the sun. Seconds later, she found herself surveying the ground from an elevated position. Squaring her slight shoulders, she tried to ease her right foot into the other stirrup. But it was done for her. Long cool fingers clasped her ankle and provided guidance. Lucy was in no way mollified by that belated piece of assistance, but she said thank you in a cold little voice just to show that she had been better brought up than he had been.

      ‘I will attach a leading rein to the mare. You will not be in any danger,’ Joaquin Del Castillo asserted with a chilling lack of expression.

      Briefly her forehead indented. He sounded for all the world like a drawling, icily self-contained aristocrat depressing the rude pretensions of a member of the lower orders. She shook her head at that foolish false impression.

      Obviously her outburst had offended him. Good, she told herself. He had been asking for it. Boy, had he been asking for a metaphoric slap in the face in front of their now silent audience! Nobody was smirking or sniggering now; she might feel somewhat shaken by the experience of having shouted at someone for the first time in her life, but in the aftermath she was proud of herself. And then the living, breathing animal beneath her rigid hips shifted with alarming effect.

      ‘Joaquin…?’ Lucy whispered with sick but definite emphasis. ‘The horse is m-moving again.’

      ‘Try not to stiffen up. It will make Chica nervous,’ he responded in a curiously constrained tone as he bent his head.

      ‘Do you think I’m not nervous, stuck up here ten feet off the ground?’ Lucy gasped before she could snatch the words back.

      He spread fluid hands very slowly and stepped back. ‘I assure you that you will come to no harm.’

      In strained silence, she watched him attach what he had called a leading rein to the huge black stallion twitching its hooves like a threatening volcano several feet away. ‘I hope you can control that monster…I hope it’s not going to run away with you—’

      ‘No horse has ever run away with me, señora,’ Joaquin Del Castillo gritted, half under his breath.

      And if any had he certainly wouldn’t admit it, Lucy decided. Joaquin Del Castillo was of a breed of male utterly unknown to her. All sizzling, musclebound temperament and just bursting with pride over the fact. Any form of weakness, she sensed, would be anathema to him. And he despised her…well, he despised Cindy, and, as she was pretending to be Cindy, she was stuck with being despised.

      But why was Joaquin Del Castillo being so hostile and rude? After all, she had dutifully come to visit Fidelio, as he had demanded. And, whether he knew it or not, he could thank his lucky stars that she wasn’t Cindy. Her twin would have been halfway back to the airport by now! Cindy had a very quick temper, not to mention a love and expectation of comfort. Furthermore, accustomed as she was to male admiration, Cindy would never have withstood the attacks and indignities meted out to the sister eleven minutes her junior.

      Ironically, Cindy had forecast that Lucy would be treated like a princess from the moment she arrived in Guatemala. Apparently Fidelio Paez’s letters had shown him to be an old-fashioned gentleman with an instinctive need to be protective towards any member of the female sex. But Fidelio was generations older than his neighbour, Joaquin Del Castillo, Lucy conceded wryly. There was no intrinsic old-world Latin gallantry to be had from her companion. Why? Evidently he saw Cindy as a scarlet woman just because she had slept with Mario on their first date. What did he think a whirlwind romance entailed? So Cindy had got carried away by love and passion. How dared he sneer?

      ‘How is Fidelio?’ Lucy suddenly asked.

      Joaquin shot her a grim glance. ‘You finally remembered him?’

      Lucy flushed.

      ‘He is as well as can be expected in the circumstances.’ With that scathing and uninformative assurance, he leapt up into the saddle and made further enquiry impossible.

      As the horses plodded at a snail’s pace out of the tiny settlement, Lucy focused on his wide-shouldered back view. Joaquin Del Castillo moved as if he was part of the stallion. Lucy endeavoured to unknot her own tense muscles, but she was so terrified of falling off that no sooner did she contrive to loosen one muscle than two others tightened in compensation.

      ‘Slow down!’ she called frantically within minutes, when the pace speeded up and her hips started to rise and fall bruisingly on the hard saddle beneath her.

      He reined in and swung round. ‘What’s wrong?’

      ‘If I fall off and break a leg, I won’t be much use to Fidelio!’ Lucy warned, with a strained attempt at an apologetic smile.

      ‘Soon it will be dark—’

      ‘So you keep on promising,’ Lucy muttered limply, convinced she was boiling alive beneath her poncho. ‘I can hardly wait for that sun to sink.’

      ‘I am so sorry that this means of travel is not to your taste, señora.’

      ‘Oh, call me Lucy, for goodness’ sake. That formal address is a nonsense when you match it with your appalling manners!’

      Before her eyes Joaquin Del Castillo froze, hard jawline squaring, nostrils flaring.

      ‘I do realise that you neither like nor approve of me,