The Alcolar Family. Kate Walker

lifted the brandy bottle again, waving it in Cassie’s direction, lifting one eyebrow questioningly.

      ‘Join me in a drink?’

      ‘No—and do you think you should?’

      ‘Think I should?’ Joaquin echoed cynically. ‘Why not? After all, if my brother can steal my woman from me then surely I am entitled to help myself to some of his brandy in return.’

      ‘Steal your woman?’ Cassie repeated, actually managing to look convincingly bemused. ‘What are you talking about?’

      “‘I’ve moved in with Ramón”,’ Joaquin quoted at her, considering the brandy bottle, then abruptly setting it down again. ‘You’re living with my brother.’

      ‘You knew that already! I told you…’

      The shocking sense of realisation was like a blow to her face, stunning her into silence, shrivelling the words on her tongue.

      Too late she realised how he was interpreting her reply. How he was putting far too much into it.

      Not ‘you’re living with my brother’, as in you share this apartment with Ramón, but you’re living with Ramón. As she had once lived with Joaquin himself.

      ‘No,’ she tried but Joaquin wasn’t listening.

      ‘You said you were fine with what we had—that you didn’t want anything more.’

      He slammed his half-empty glass down on the table, heedless of the way that the rich amber brandy slopped over the side.

      ‘Then Ramón—my brother—crooks his little finger and you’re gone! Without a second thought—leaving me a note!’

      ‘I-I didn’t have any time to say any more!’ Cassie stammered clumsily. ‘I—’

      ‘No time?’ Joaquin practically spat the words into her pale face. ‘And why was that, querida? Was your new lover waiting impatiently for you? Are you so insatiable that you’ve gone from my bed to my brother’s in less than a week? Couldn’t you wait to get to him—to Ramón? To my brother?’

      ‘No! You’ve got it all wrong! I didn’t—’

      ‘Didn’t what, my darling? Didn’t leave me and come straight here to be with Ramón? Didn’t move in with him without a backward glance—’

      ‘Yes! I moved in with him!’ she tried again. ‘But not like that! We’re not lovers!’

      Blazing black eyes seared over her from head to foot, taking in the short, clinging robe, her bare legs and toes.

      ‘We’re not! When I said he gives me something you never did, I meant…’

      Her voice deserted her just when she needed it most. What could she say that Ramón gave her? The mood that Joaquin was in, he would never believe her if she simply used the word friendship. And really, what Joaquin’s brother had offered was more than that. It was an unquestioning, peaceful, brotherly sort of…

      But no, she couldn’t use the word love.

      ‘What did you mean, Cassie?’ Joaquin questioned harshly, eyes cold and hard and sharp as lasers as they fixed on her face, watching the emotions that flew across it, one after the other, none of them actually settling. ‘What does my brother give you? What did he offer to entice you away from me?’

      ‘He didn’t—I…’

      But she couldn’t finish because some change in Joaquin’s own expression alerted her to the fact that he had suddenly had a revelation. She could see in his eyes that he had been turning things over in his mind and had come to a conclusion—and something about the way those polished jet eyes suddenly narrowed warned her that the assumption he had made was not one she was going to like.

      ‘Gives you more…’ he muttered roughly. ‘Something I never did. Don’t tell me the fool offered marriage!’

      Cassie knew that she had lost colour. She could almost feel the blood drain from her face so fast that it made her already scrambled brain spin weakly.

      ‘No—’

      She tried for force but it came out as a pathetic croak, one that she could barely hear herself, and which Joaquin, clearly absorbed in his own thoughts, didn’t even register as he came towards her suddenly.

      The look on his face frightened her. It was as if the man she had known, her lover, the man she had lived with for the past year, had disappeared and someone else had taken his place. Someone she didn’t know at all.

      His face was hard and set, totally ruthless. There was no longer any light in his eyes, so that they were deep, opaque, and totally black.

      Nerves dried her mouth and she took a couple of hasty steps backwards, then had to stop as her back came up against the wall. But Joaquin kept coming. Not fast, but his movements measured and determined, his unyielding eyes never even seeming to flicker or blink.

      ‘Okay,’ he said so casually that it shocked her. ‘I’ll bite.’

      ‘Bite?’

      She had no idea at all what he meant.

      ‘What are you talking about?’

      ‘Marriage.’

      ‘M-marriage?’

      She really had to be going mad. She was so stressed that she was starting to hear things. Things that were totally impossible. She could have sworn that Joaquin had said…

      ‘Yeah, marriage.’

      He pushed a hand through his hair, flexing his shoulders as if he was trying to ease some ache there, and then looked her straight in the eye.

      ‘If marriage is what does it for you, then okay, I’ll marry you.’

      I’ll marry you.

      How many times had she dreamed of just this scenario? How many nights, tired and too weak to fight against the foolish need inside her heart, had she let herself think, let herself imagine for just the tiniest, brief moment, that one day Joaquin might ask her to marry him?

      And in those dreams she had always, happily, joyfully, rushed in and said yes—yes—yes!—even before he had actually finished speaking.

      But this time, no matter how she tried, she couldn’t find the strength to speak. Three times she opened her mouth, and on each occasion her voice failed her completely. She couldn’t force her tongue to form any words, felt as if her vocal cords had shrivelled into nothing, and her throat had closed up so tight that it was almost impossible to breathe.

      If marriage is what does it for you, then okay, I’ll marry you. He had given her the world with one hand then snatched it back roughly with the other, reducing the gesture to less than nothing, to a lie, a mockery of any sort of real proposal. It was more like a slap in the face than any gesture of feeling.

      ‘Well?’

      ‘Is—is this meant to be a proposal?’

      ‘If that’s what you want it to be. What’s the matter, querida? Not romantic enough for you?’ Joaquin’s tone was harder, crueller than ever—and this was the man who was suggesting marriage?

      Or at least that was what it seemed.

      ‘Would you prefer it if I went down on one knee? Sorry but I don’t do that sort of romantic gesture.’

      ‘You don’t do any sort of romantic gesture!’

      ‘Oh, please, belleza!’

      Joaquin dismissed her protest with an arrogant toss of his head.

      ‘Don’t try to accuse me of short-changing you on the gestures! I gave you—what…?’

      He appeared to consider, to calculate,