The Gold Collection: Bedded By A Billionaire: Santiago's Command / The Thorn in His Side / Stranded, Seduced...Pregnant

‘Not illegal last time I researched the subject.’ He gave a nasty smile. ‘Unlike horse stealing.’

‘I wasn’t stealing your horse, I was just … riding him.’

‘Why?’

She blinked, struggling after the fact to explain even to herself the impulse that had made her take the horse out. ‘Why not?’ She shrugged.

‘So this is a case of anything Lucy sees and wants Lucy has to have even if it belongs to someone else?’ Didn’t she understand that a person could not have anything they wanted? There were rules, like the unwritten one that said a man did not muscle in on his brother’s girlfriend—did it count when you’d be saving your brother from a terrible fate? Did the unwritten rule stand when the brother in question didn’t possess your own ability to keep your sexual appetites and your emotions separate from a terrible fate?

Lucy saw where he was going with this. ‘Ramon doesn’t belong to anyone else, even though you went out of your way to make it seem like he does.’

Santiago’s scowl deepened. He had thrown Carmella, with her crush on Ramon, into the mix hoping she would offer a distraction with her youth and innocence. He was ready to admit that his plan had failed miserably and he felt guilty for using the kid.

‘But Denis Mulville did.’ What chance would any wife have if Lucy Fitzgerald decided she wanted a man?

At the name Lucy’s face lost any colour it had regained. The condemnation on his face was nothing new. She had seen similar expressions on the faces of virtually everyone she met four years ago, and some of those faces had belonged to people she had considered friends.

At the centre of a storm of ill will Lucy had felt every cruel word and jeer until she had taught herself not to care about the opinion of others. People could and would think what they liked, but so long as she knew the truth that was all that mattered … at least in theory.

Reality meant that there had still been nights when she had cried herself to sleep and days when she had longed to put her side of the story, but she had maintained her dignified silence even after the gagging order was lifted.

Not once had she yelled at one of her accusers—’I never slept with the man. He was a creep!’

As she did now, ironically to someone whose good opinion meant nothing to her, someone who dismissed her words with a contemptuous shrug.

There was a chance, Santiago thought, that she told the literal truth—a man who got her in bed would not be likely to fall asleep!

‘How did you justify breaking up a family?’ A hissing sound of disgust issued from between his clenched teeth as he dragged a hand through his ebony hair. ‘Do you tell yourself that he wouldn’t look at you if he had a happy marriage? That there wouldn’t have been an affair if the marriage hadn’t been in trouble to begin with—isn’t that what the other woman always says?’

‘You tell me! You seem the expert on the subject.’

She broke off, wincing as she experienced a stomach cramp a lot sharper than any of the previous ones. She closed her eyes and gritted her teeth. If she threw up in front of this man the humiliation factor would be off the scale.

Lucy lifted her head, breathing through the pain.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘Nothing!’ she snapped.

The beads of perspiration that had broken out over the pale skin of her brow suggested otherwise.

‘I know I shouldn’t have taken the horse, but I was waiting for Ramon and Santana obviously needed exercise and you hadn’t bothered to exercise him …’

‘So this is my fault?’

The note of fake comprehension caused the spots of dark colour on her pale cheeks to deepen. ‘No, but—’

‘But you,’ he cut back in a hard voice, ‘saw an opportunity of scoring points because I warned you off—’

‘No!’

‘Then I can only assume you wanted my attention. You didn’t have to steal my valuable horse in order to get that—if you wanted to be kissed all you had to do was ask.’

She looked at him with simmering dislike. ‘Not in this life!’ she pronounced with an emphatic shake of her head. She swallowed and pressed a hand to her mouth.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘I’m feeling a bit nauseous,’ she admitted, thinking about Ramon’s abrupt departure and wondering if the two could be connected … They had shared that smoked salmon sandwich …?

‘Let me look in your eyes,’ he said, taking her chin in his fingers.

‘I don’t have a head injury.’

His fingers fell away. ‘Do you remember what happened?’

‘Of course I remember what happened—I came off.’

‘Got thrown.’

‘All right, got thrown,’ she gritted, thinking, Go on, rub it in why don’t you? ‘That’s why I lost control when he got spooked by that little pig.’ Actually it had been quite a large pig.

To hear one of the dangerous wild boar that lived in the woods dismissed with a disgusted grimace made him blink.

‘I’m a good rider. I’ve been riding all my life.’

‘And have you been falling off all your life?’

Struggling to combat the rising nausea, Lucy wiped the rash of damp off her forehead, managing to lift her head and fix him with a glare. ‘I suppose you have never fallen off.’ She pressed her hand to her mouth and thought, Please do not let me throw up in front of him.

The annoyance died from Santiago’s face as he studied her pale features. ‘You look terrible.’

And she felt terrible.

‘Do you feel faint?’

At that moment she would have accepted a graceful, aesthetically pleasing swoon, but it wasn’t an option. ‘No, I don’t feel faint, I feel …’ She clapped a hand to her mouth, jumped to her feet and sprinted across the clearing. A few yards away she fell to her knees.

‘You all right?’

She shrugged off the hand on her shoulder and got to her feet, unable to meet his eyes. ‘Obviously I’m not all right.’ The nausea was much easier to cope with than the humiliation of the situation … God, she wanted to die; he had actually held her hair away from her face!

Santiago was the very last person in the world she would have expected a display of such thoughtfulness from, or, for that matter, expected to possess such a strong stomach.

‘Did you hit your head … lose consciousness?’ Her creamy complexion was tinged with a greenish hue and she was visibly swaying like a young sapling in a breeze … Sheer bloody-minded stubbornness, he suspected, was the only thing keeping her upright.

‘No, I … I was already …’ Losing track of her rebuttal, her voice faded to a whisper as her eyes half closed.

Convinced now he was dealing with a concussion at the very least, Santiago was moving in to catch her when she opened her eyes, directing her wide-eyed cerulean stare directly at his face.