Don Joaquin's Pride

‘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, and I can’t stand hypocrisy,’ Lucy admitted uncomfortably, her voice dying away in the stillness of his complete silence.

‘Your name is Cindy. Why would I call you Lucy?’

In horror at her accidental slip, Lucy bent her head, suddenly belatedly grateful that her late parents had seen fit to name their twin daughters Lucinda and Lucille. ‘Most people call me Lucy now. Cindy was for the teen years,’ she lied breathlessly.

‘Lucinda,’ he sounded out with syllabic thoroughness, and pressed his knees into the stallion’s flanks.

Lucy struggled to stay on board the mare as they wended their way out across the bleached grass plain. The emptiness was eerie. Sky and grass, and all around the heat, like a hard physical entity beating down on her without remorse. There were no buildings, no people, not even the cattle she had dimly expected to see. The eventual sight of a gnarled set of palm trees on a very slight incline should have been enough for her to throw her hat high in celebration. But she didn’t have enough energy left. Indeed, by that stage she had already lost all track of time. Even to shrug back the poncho, lift one wrist and glance at her watch felt like too much effort.

‘I need a drink,’ she finally croaked, her mouth dry as a bone.

‘There is a water bottle attached to your saddle,’ Joaquin informed her drily over his shoulder. ‘But don’t drink too much. You’ll make yourself sick.’

‘You’ll have to get the bottle,’ Lucy told him in a small voice, because really she was beginning to feel like the biggest whiniest drag in the whole of Guatemala. ‘I don’t like looking down. It makes me feel dizzy.’

Joaquin Del Castillo rode the stallion round in a circle, leant out across the divide between their respective mounts with acrobatic confidence and detached the water bottle, the fluid movement simplistic in its highly deceptive air of effortless ease. Indeed, the whole operation took Lucy’s breath away.

‘I saw a Cossack rider do something like that at a circus once,’ Lucy confided shyly.

‘I did not learn to ride in a circus, señora,’ Joaquin Del Castillo responded with icy hauteur.

‘It was meant to be a compliment, actually.’ Turning her discomfited face away, Lucy let the water drift down into her parched mouth.

‘That’s enough,’ Joaquin Del Castillo told her within seconds.

Lucy handed the bottle back, wiped her mouth with an unsteady hand and drooped like a dying swan over Chica’s silky mane. With a groaned imprecation in Spanish, Joaquin Del Castillo sprang out of the saddle and planted his hands on her waist. ‘Let go of the reins.’

In surprise, Lucy unclenched her stiff fingers and found herself swept down from the mare into a pair of frighteningly powerful arms. ‘What on earth—?’

‘You will ride with me on El Lobo,’ Joaquin announced as he swung her up on to the huge stallion’s back, following her up so fast into the saddle she didn’t even have the chance to argue.

As Lucy curved uneasily away from the hard heat of his lean, muscular thighs, a strong arm settled round her abdomen and forced her inexorably back. ‘Stay still…I will not allow you to fall,’ he said impatiently.

Shaken by the sudden intimate contact of their bodies, Lucy dragged in a deep, shivering breath. The disturbingly insidious scent of warm male assailed her. Her dry mouth ran even dryer. He smelt of hot skin and horse. Something twisted low in her tummy, increasing her nervous unease, but at least she felt safe in his hold. As her tension ebbed, slow, pervasive warmth blossomed in its stead, making her feel strangely limp and yielding. The soft peaks of her breasts tightened into hard little points, filling her with a heat that had nothing to do with the relentless sun above. She jerked taut on the shattering acknowledgement that her body was responding without her volition to the sexually charged sizzle of Joaquin Del Castillo’s raw masculinity.

‘Relax,’ he murmured softly, long brown fingers splaying across her midriff to ease her back into position again.

When he talked, soft and low, he had the most beautiful dark honeyed accent, she thought abstractedly, and never had she been as outrageously aware of anything as she was of that lean hand pressing just below her breasts. Her heart was pounding like a hammer inside her ribcage.

‘You’re holding me too tightly,’ she complained uneasily, horrified and embarrassed by the effect he was having on her.

‘You are not in any danger,’ Joaquin Del Castillo drawled silkily above her head. ‘I am not attracted by stunted women with bleached hair and streaky fake tans.’

A lump ballooned in Lucy’s convulsed throat. Mortified pink chased away her strained pallor. ‘You really are the most loathsome man,’ she gasped. ‘And I can’t wait to see the back of you! When will we reach Fidelio’s ranch?’

‘Tomorrow—’

‘Tomorrow?’ Lucy croaked in stunned disbelief.

‘In an hour, we will make camp for the night.’

Camp…camp? Aghast at the prospect of spending the night outdoors, Lucy swallowed back a self-pitying moan with the greatest of difficulty. ‘I thought we would be arriving soon—’

‘We have not made good time, señora.’

‘I had no idea that the ranch was so far away,’ she confided miserably.

They rode on in silence, and slowly the sun became a fiery orb in its sliding path towards the horizon. Lucy was by then dazed with exhaustion and half asleep. She was plucked from the stallion’s back and set down on solid earth again, but her legs had all the strength of bending twigs. She staggered, aching in bone and muscle from neck to toe. Dimly she focused on a trio of gnarled palm trees silhouetted against the darkening night sky and experienced a vague sense of déjà vu. But they couldn’t possibly be the same trees she had noticed hours back! No doubt one set of palm trees looked much like another, Lucy conceded wearily, and she definitely couldn’t recall the slender ribbon of river she could now see running nearby.

With every step she cursed her own bodily weakness. She had lost a lot of weight while her mother had been ill, and only the previous month had come down with a nasty bout of flu. After two solid days of travelling she had no energy left, and was indeed feeling far from well. It had not occurred to either her or Cindy that Fidelio’s ranch might lie in such a remote and inaccessible location.

The Guatemalan lowlands had looked infinitely less vast and daunting on the map than they were in reality, and, torn from the familiarity of city life and her own careful routine, Lucy felt horrendously vulnerable. Her twin might have travelled the globe but this was Lucy’s first trip abroad. Freedom had been the one thing her adoring but possessive mother had refused to give her.

Joaquin was seeing to the horses by the river when Lucy returned. She saw him through a haze of utter exhaustion. Her legs were trembling beneath her. She sank down on the grass. He dropped a blanket beside her.

‘You must be hungry,’ he murmured.

Lucy shook her head, too sick with fatigue to feel hunger. Slowly, like a toy running out of battery power, she slumped down full length. ‘Sleepy,’ she mumbled thickly.

Surprising her once again, he spread the blanket for her. Then, bending down, he shook her even more by sweeping her up in one easy motion and laying her down on the blanket. ‘Rest, then,’ he drawled flatly.

Joaquin Del Castillo was a male of innate and fascinating contradictions, Lucy acknowledged sleepily. Fiercely proud and icily self-contained in his hostility towards her, yet too honourable, it seemed, to make her suffer unnecessary discomfort.

Against the backdrop of the flaming sunset, he stood over her like a huge black intimidating shadow. ‘You look like the devil,’ she whispered, with a drowsy attempt at humour.

‘I will not take your soul, señora…but I have every intention of stripping you of everything else you possess.’

Stray words fluttered in the blankness of Lucy’s brain. They did not connect. They did not make sense. With a soundless sigh of relief, Lucy sank into the deep, dreamless sleep of exhaustion.

CHAPTER TWO

LUCY opened her eyes slowly.

A small fire was crackling, sending out shooting sparks. No wonder she had awakened, she thought in astonishment. The night was warm and humid, yet Joaquin Del Castillo was subjecting her to the heat of a fire. She scrambled back from it, her eyes adjusting only gradually to his big dark silhouette on the other side of the leaping flames.

Pushing a self-conscious hand through her tangled curls, Lucy sat up just as a hair-raising cry sounded from somewhere out in the darkness. Lucy flinched, her head jerking as she glanced fearfully over her shoulder.

‘What was that?’

‘Jaguar…they hunt at night.’

Lucy inched back closer to the fire and her companion and shivered. He extended a tin cup of coffee and she curved her unsteady hands round the cup and sipped gratefully, even though the pungent bitter brew contained neither sugar nor milk. ‘How soon tomorrow will we get to Fidelio’s ranch?’ she pressed.