Latin Lovers: Passionate Spaniards: The Spaniard's Marriage Demand / Kept by the Spanish Billionaire / The Spanish Doctor's Convenient Bride

‘Hello,’ she greeted him softly, holding the collar of her coat tightly together with one pale slim hand—her protective action and pinked cheeks reminding Leandro just how severely the temperatures had dropped since the morning.

‘Isabella …Come in.’

Moving aside, he suddenly detected something different about her that he hadn’t noticed before. What it was he did not know, because she was, in his eyes, lovelier than ever. As she passed him Leandro was aware of so many things about her that aroused him all at once. From the scent of the sharp cold air that clung to her clothing, to the deep sexy sheen of her blue-black hair beneath the hall light and her delicate, yet almost defiant jaw. A jaw that declared the señorita had claws beneath that deceptively sweet demeanour and should not be underestimated. Had he not had a glimpse of her temper in the library earlier?

Idly wondering how soon it would take him to turn that ignited passion to his own advantage should it arise again, Leandro could not help smiling in secret delectation at the libidinous nature of his thoughts. In the past eighteen months he had been around several lovely feminine creatures—mostly in the arena of his work—and none of them had had such a startling effect on his libido as this woman. In fact as Isabella brushed by him in the small compact hallway the heady pleasure that had mesmerised Leandro on immediate sight returned twice as vehemently. He cleared his throat as he shut the door behind them both, silently advising himself to rein in the trail of lust she unwittingly left in her wake.

‘Turn to your left,’ he instructed a little hoarsely. ‘There is a fire in there to warm you.’

Surveying her with almost jealous possession as she went and stood near the fireplace and stretched out her hands towards the bright dancing flames, Leandro realised it was a supreme test of strength to tear his hungry gaze away for even a moment. It would have been entirely natural to perhaps assume that the time they had been apart had diluted the fierce attraction that Leandro had experienced towards Isabella practically on sight—but he was discovering to his immense satisfaction, that the reverse was true.

‘You have no need of your coat now that you are inside. Here, let me take it.’

Before Isabella could properly compose her nerves, he was at her side, distracting her intensely with his disturbing presence. Her senses were immediately enraptured by the alluring warmth from his body and the disarming masculinity that electrified the air and seemed to be able to make her thoughts focus on not much else but sex. Her knees trembled as he dutifully waited for her to unbutton her coat and pass it to him. When she did, his returning, distinctly flirtatious glance kept her feet rooted to the floor. It was a wonder that smoke hadn’t appeared! Now as she stood before him in the outfit she had so carefully selected to wear this evening to tell him her momentous news she worried that the plain black long-sleeved dress that skimmed her narrow waist and fell in fluid, easy lines to her knees was a little too severe. A little too staid and ‘old maid-ish.’ Well, it was too late now to do anything about it. All Isabella had been mindful of was dressing appropriately in deference to the gravity of what she had to reveal to Leandro.

When he returned from the hallway where he had briefly disappeared to take care of her coat, Isabella glanced quickly away from those ‘heat-inducing’ eyes of his with a jolt. The truth was, it was hard to rest her gaze for long on Leandro Reyes without feeling herself coming apart. He was so ruggedly handsome with his disreputably mussed dark hair and disturbing quicksilver gaze that a girl would have to have zero sex-drive and be deprived of all her senses not to be turned on by just the sight of him. The things an ordinary pair of softly faded denim jeans and a loose white shirt could do to that mouth-wateringly fit body of his, Isabella could wax lyrical about from here until the next millennium, given the opportunity! It was easy to see why she had succumbed so easily to his seduction last spring. Being in Northern Spain and experiencing the magic and allure of all that ancient land had to offer on the Santiago de Compostela trail had definitely helped. But, if she was entirely honest with herself, Isabella knew that Leandro Reyes would have been pretty much impossible to resist wherever she had met him. It was why she had fallen for him so hard and so fast …

‘Why don’t you sit and make yourself at home? What can I get you to drink?’ There was an element of disconcerting amusement in his steady, intense regard and Isabella felt her cheeks shade helplessly scarlet in embarrassment. With his hands on his hips, he drew her very interested attention to that enviably easy way he carried himself and in the next moment she bypassed her self-consciousness to just simply gaze back at all that reined-in muscle and honest-to-God masculine beauty, with unconstrained appreciation. Then, guiltily tearing her gaze away, she glanced quickly round at the high-backed armchair beside the fire with its matching footstool. Her brows knit slightly as Leandro reached ahead of her and swiftly retrieved the sheaf of paper that was lying on the seat so that she could sit down.

‘I have been working,’ he explained, his expression serious as he laid the papers down on a cherrywood sideboard instead.

‘I haven’t disturbed you?’ Isabella responded with concern.

‘Of course not.’ He shrugged those wide shoulders of his with dismissive ease. ‘I have been waiting impatiently for you to arrive.’

‘And you are in London because of your work?’

‘Not just because of my work,’ he replied, ‘although I have taken advantage of being here to meet with some people in my industry.’ There was another conversation going on besides the one that traded actual words back and forth, Leandro considered as heat tightened his groin. They could hardly take their eyes away from each other. His skin felt hot …as though it were burning, and all he could really think about, focus on, was the arrestingly beautiful body beneath that funereal black dress she wore and how soon he might divest her of it to make love to her.

‘But I do not want to discuss my work with you tonight, Isabella,’ he told her out loud, his tone almost grave. ‘As I already told you, that was not the main reason I came to the UK.’

‘It wasn’t?’ In the armchair, Isabella carefully folded her pale hands together in her lap, like a young girl about to solemnly take her first Holy Communion.

‘I wanted to see you again. I should have contacted you before but there has been so much going on in my life in the past few months …’ He shrugged, lifting his hands in a gesture to denote both inevitability and futility. ‘I live a crazy life sometimes.’

‘I realise that you must be a very busy man. But if you want to know the truth, it’s a bit of a shock to have you make contact after this long.’ Why had he come to find her at the library? Isabella fretted not for the first time. Was he hoping for a repeat performance perhaps of what they had shared in Spain? Her heart sank. As much as she cared for Leandro, she did not want to be used like that.

‘But not an unpleasant shock, I hope?’

Was that doubt she saw briefly reflected in his hypnotic grey eyes? How could seeing him again be remotely unpleasant when she had dreamed of such a wonderful occurrence too many times to recall? Especially when their night together had produced her son? Which brought Isabella quite terrifyingly to the thing she most needed to discuss …the thing that was making her feel as if she were about to face a firing squad.

‘No. Leandro …there’s something that I must—’

‘It was remiss of me not to give you my phone number,’ he asserted firmly, ‘but in my position it is not always easy to trust that people will have integrity and not abuse my trust. Do you understand?’

Isabella did. One could say that they had very similar ‘issues’ regarding trust and protecting their own privacy. ‘Yes …’ her gaze locked with his for terrifyingly long seconds ‘ …I understand.’

‘Now …before we go any further, naturally I want to know if you have been seeing anybody else since we last met? If not, then you must also tell me how it is that a beautiful, desirable woman like you has managed to stay unattached for so long?’

Her heart ached with gratitude that Leandro still thought her beautiful and desirable, but almost instantly Isabella returned to the most important part of his question, knowing she couldn’t put off the answer for ever and wondering if his complimentary opinion of her might change when he heard the truth.

‘No, I haven’t been seeing anybody else. And there is a very good reason.’

Silence deepened the tension that was already holding Isabella’s heart in a vice.

‘And that reason is, Isabella?’ Leandro prompted when she seemed not to be going to answer him at all.

‘It’s …’ For goodness’ sake, Isabella, just say it! ‘It’s complicated.’

‘Then enlighten me, por favor?’

‘All right …it’s because I have a child to take care of.’

There …she’d said it and everything in the room looked just the same—even though everything had changed. Undoubtedly shocked, Leandro swept her with a blunt accusatory stare.

‘You did not tell me when we met in Spain that you were a mother.’

Withdrawing his hand from his jeans pocket, he reached out to lean it on the marble mantelpiece instead. He was more than a little stunned by Isabella’s admission. He had of course known that she had previously been engaged because she had told him that she had cancelled her wedding—but he had not suspected for one moment that she might have had a child from that union! He wondered who had taken care of her or him whilst she had gone to Spain to walk the Santiago de Compostela. Was it the child’s father? Five weeks was a long time for a child to be without its mother, in his considered opinion …

Her dark eyes troubled, Isabella released a long slow breath before getting to her feet. ‘I wasn’t a mother then,’ she explained, folding her arms protectively across her chest. Absently she fingered the delicate gold crucifix that was attached to the slim chain she wore around her neck. She raised her chin a little at his frankly puzzled frown and pressed determinedly on. ‘I had my baby nine months ago, Leandro …a little boy. His name is Raphael.’

‘So you did meet someone else after we parted?’ Barely registering that she had given her son a Spanish name, Leandro could not quell the sudden disturbing rush of fury inside his chest. Since that night he had spent with Isabella in her hotel, he had not slept with another woman. For a man with such a passionate nature, abstinence had been pure torture at times, but when opportunities had come his way he had rejected them—pure and simple—still too aroused by the memory of Isabella to do anything else. And yet, she had returned home to not only be with another man, but to have his baby as well!

‘I …well, I—’

‘So you and the child’s father are no longer together?’ he demanded, his throat dry as dust as he saw to his disappointment that she was finding it almost impossible to meet his eyes, an action that suggested that she was not being entirely honest. ‘I distinctly recall you just telling me that you have not been seeing anybody else?’

‘Leandro …’ He saw her reach up and nervously smooth down her hair. He noticed her long ringless fingers and the indisputable elegance of her slim, pale hands. The same soft hands that had touched him and aroused his senses to a veritable inferno that long, hot, sultry Mediterranean night eighteen months ago …’I told you the truth. I’m not seeing anyone else and I haven’t been with anybody else since we were last together in Vigo! There’s no other way I can put this to make it any less shocking but …the baby is yours, Leandro …You’re his father.’

Hearing the words, Leandro had the strangest sensation that they were snatched up and thrown away by a great sandstorm that had suddenly appeared out of nowhere and had muffled his senses in the ensuing uproar. There was a lengthy stunned ellipsis in his thinking processes before he was able to assimilate their meaning fully into his consciousness. So preposterous was the mere suggestion that he could be the father of Isabella’s baby that he sensed a mantle of ice engulf him, regarding her coldly as though she were suddenly an insignificant stranger to him. It might have been eighteen months ago since they had slept together, but Leandro knew without a doubt that he had used protection. He felt quite ill at the idea she was maybe using the opportunity of seeing him again to extract money or support from him for another man’s child—particularly because he was wealthy.

‘Impossible!’ His dangerous grey eyes surveyed her with daggers so sharp that Isabella’s heart was immediately pierced by his disbelief. Automatically her arms went back across her chest as if to fend off the rage that he directed her way. ‘Do you take me for some ill-educated idiot? I could not possibly have made you pregnant, Isabella! You cannot be so forgetful as to remember that I used protection. What are you trying to do? Blackmail me in some way?’

‘No!’ Her dark eyes swam with vivid sparkling tears and inside Leandro felt as if he’d just been viciously winded by a hard punch. His hand was shaking as he tunnelled his fingers through his hair in justified frustration, refusing to be swayed by consideration of her hurt feelings when she clearly did not give a damn about his.

‘I’m not lying to you, Leandro,’ she insisted, rubbing at the moisture that glistened on her cheeks. ‘I’ll take any test you want me to take, but you are definitely the father of my child! And as for blackmail …well, that’s a pretty hurtful accusation under the circumstances. I didn’t have to come here …I could have stayed away and you would have been none the wiser about the baby. But when you turned up at the library like that and demanded that we talk, I had to tell you the truth, that’s all. I naturally thought that you would want to know.’

‘And how did we make a baby together when I used contraception, Isabella? Or was it an immaculate conception?’

‘Please, Leandro,’ she pleaded through her tears. ‘I’m telling you the truth, I swear it! It happened during the night …you—you reached out to me and I thought I was dreaming.’ She dipped her head as a soft crimson stain crept into her cheeks. ‘You obviously thought you were dreaming too. That’s when it happened.’

An astounding, almost unbelievable memory flooded into Leandro’s brain. For a moment it was hard to breathe. Isabella was not lying. Now that he’d been forced to remember the event in detail, he did recall reaching out to her at one point during that deliciously erotic night after they had both drifted into sleep. He even remembered thinking what an unbelievably realistic dream it was he was having because it was so real …He’d felt everything …her soft, full breasts, her smooth, flat stomach and, most of all, the searing hot wetness between her thighs as he’d so urgently plunged inside her …Now she was telling him that he’d fathered a child during that amazing night together …a boy …a boy called Raphael. All the moisture seemed to absent itself from Leandro’s mouth at once.

‘Why did you not try to get in touch with me when you found out that you were pregnant?’ he asked hoarsely, his expression a vivid depiction of shock and pain.

‘I did.’ She met his gaze steadily for the first time in a couple of minutes without glancing away again. ‘If you only knew how hard I tried! I tried every avenue I could think of …but the people who work for your film company clearly thought I was some kind of obsessive fan or something because they wouldn’t even take a message, let alone give me a number to ring so that I could speak to you! I’m sorry, Leandro …I never wanted you to find out like this …to come face to face with the truth when I’d already had the baby and he was nine months old.’

‘Why Raphael?’ He moved across to the other side of the room and back, the tension in him reaching out to Isabella like icy tentacles wrapping themselves around her heart. ‘Why did you call him that?’