A Spanish Christmas

Christian was shrugging. ‘As my late uncle’s representative, it is my duty to ensure that the orphanage he founded in Buenos Aires is properly administered and if, whilst I am there, I can represent the views of our country on certain matters, then it is also my duty to do that as well.’

Unable to stop herself, Meg murmured sardonically under her breath, ‘Noblesse oblige.’

But to her dismay she recognised that Christian had overheard her. ‘You think it a matter for mockery that a person should acknowledge a sense of obligation and duty?’ he asked her coldly. ‘You surprise me, given your choice of career—but then, perhaps I should not be surprised since you obviously choose to sell your services to the highest bidder rather than work in the public services, as so many other nurses do.’

The arrogance and sheer unfairness of his comment took Meg’s breath away, but she knew that her hot face and angry eyes betrayed her feelings, even if his comment had been said too softly to reach Elena’s ears. Let him think what he liked, Meg decided furiously. There was no way she had any need to justify herself to him, or to explain just why she could only now work as a private nurse.

At her side Elena was saying wistfully, ‘I envy your mother so much, Christian. It has always been a deep sadness to me that I never had children, and I especially feel the lack of them at times such as Christmas. You will all be going to the castillo, of course. Christian owns a most beautiful estate,’ she informed Meg. ‘It was given to his family by King Felipe in the sixteenth century, but Christian can trace his ancestry right back to the Moors.’

‘I am sure your nurse does not wish to be bored with the history of my family,’ Christian chided Elena, though the smile he gave her and the warmth in his voice robbed his words of any unkindness and instead made Meg feel as though somehow she was the one who was not worthy to receive such information. But Elena was totally oblivious to the underlying note of antipathy and sarcasm in his voice, and was already assuring him innocently, ‘Oh, no, Christian, you are wrong. Meg is very much interested in our history and culture, and very knowledgeable about them,’ she added, giving Meg an approving smile before continuing fretfully, ‘I would have liked to have shown her something of our city whilst she is here, but of course with my knee the way it is that is out of the question.’ Her face brightened as she suddenly exclaimed, ‘But you are an expert on our local heritage, Christian. Perhaps you—?’

‘No.’

Meg’s face reddened when both Elena and Christian turned to look at her as she voiced her sharp denial.

‘I … I’m here to work,’ she pointed out, trying to alleviate the emotional intensity of her exclamation as she saw the bewilderment in Elena’s eyes.

Quite what she might see in Christian’s eyes if she could bring herself to meet them, she suspected she already knew. It was so unlike her to let a man get so immediately and so dangerously under her skin, but then Christian was no ordinary man. Meg’s heart gave a small frantic jump as she recognised the dangerous allure of her thoughts.

Sexy, high-born Spanish aristocrats were not her type, she reminded herself firmly. She liked her men good-humoured, tolerant, compassionate and down to earth, not the embodiment of a female sexual fantasy.

‘Ah, here we are.’

Meg jumped guiltily as she realised how little attention she had been paying to her patient whilst she wrestled with her rebellious thoughts. The limousine was pulling up outside an impressive building which Elena had already explained to her had been a grandee’s private home prior to its conversion into several large apartments.

‘Elena, if you will give me your keys, my chauffeur will go ahead and open the doors for us whilst I escort you inside.’

As Christian handed the keys the older woman gave him over to his chauffeur, he began to frown, his voice taking on its now familiar harshness as he addressed Meg.

‘Elena’s apartment is on the top floor. There is, of course, a lift, but it is not large. I trust you have checked that it will accommodate her wheelchair.’

‘Of course.’ Meg was pleased to be able to answer him with crisp efficiency. ‘I took the precaution of telephoning the concierge before we left London, to give him the precise measurements of the chair, and he assured me that the lift could accommodate it.’

‘I trust you also took the precaution of ensuring that it would accommodate you as well,’ was his dulcet response. ‘Otherwise my poor godmother will be travelling up and down in the lift, waiting for you to either ascend or descend the stairs.’

Meg took a deep breath, but for once her training deserted her. ‘I am not exactly unfamiliar with the necessity of travelling in a lift with my patient, Don Christian,’ she informed him with formal hauteur. ‘As a theatre sister I once worked in a hospital which had its operating rooms several floors below its wards; I am used not merely to standing in a lift with a patient but also to ensuring that his or her various drips and drains are not dislodged.’

‘A theatre sister?’

She could see him starting to frown, but Meg was not interested in whatever it was he was going to say. She had her patient to attend to.

As she had guessed, it was a far more painful process for Elena to get out of the car than it had been for her to get in, and Meg was particularly careful to make the transition to her waiting wheelchair as easy as she could for her.

‘It’s all right,’ she quietly reassured her at one point as the older woman winced and cried out in pain. ‘Your leg will have stiffened up during the flight and that’s why it’s hurting so much now. Once we’ve got you in your apartment, I’ll massage it for you.’

Instinctively Meg touched her own hand. The damaged tendons still caused her a good deal of pain at times, although she was far too professional to say so whilst she was working. She had forgotten, though, just how much those steely obsidian eyes saw, and suddenly Christian was at her side demanding, ‘Is something wrong?’

‘No, nothing,’ Meg fibbed, and to prove it she reached into the boot of the car to remove her medical bag. To her consternation, as she did so it slid from her grasp when her stiff tendons refused to react as quickly as she had wanted.

Christian caught the bag before it reached the ground but it was Elena’s sharp exclamation of concern that caused her cheeks to redden as much as her own clumsiness as her patient sympathised,

‘Oh dear, is it your hand?’ and then, before Meg could say anything, she was telling Christian emotionally, ‘Poor Meg has been so brave, Christian. She was attacked in the hospital where she worked by a man with a knife, when she was trying to protect his girlfriend …’

‘I was just doing my job,’ Meg started to protest. The look Christian was giving her was making her heart bump heavily along the bottom of her ribcage and she fought to regulate her betrayingly unsteady breathing.

‘Leave the luggage. I shall see to it,’ she heard Christian instructing her sharply as she returned to the boot of the car whilst he manoeuvred the wheelchair.

‘I can manage,’ Meg insisted, and then gave a gasp of shock as he left Elena to stride towards her, lean brown fingers manacling her wrist as he lifted her hand away from the case she had been reaching for. Turning it over, he studied her palm, his eyebrows snapping together as his gaze absorbed the extent of her scars. But the shock she had felt when she had seen him bearing down on her was nothing compared to what she felt now as his thumb brushed slowly along the length of the scar that disfigured her wrist.

Totally unable to bring herself to meet his eyes, and equally unwilling to suffer the humiliation of an undignified struggle to remove her wrist from his imprisoning grip, she fixed her gaze straight ahead which, unfortunately, meant she was staring at the shirt-covered expanse of a male chest which she could see all too plainly possessed the kind of muscular physique normally only found on a sportsman. Wretched man. Surely there must be something about him which she, as a woman, could disdain?

‘He must have virtually severed your wrist.’

The quiet words, uttered in a tone of voice that seemed to rumble towards her from the depths of the chest she had just been unwillingly studying, shocked her into lifting her unguarded gaze to meet his.

‘No … Well, not … I was lucky in that our hospital had the country’s top microsurgical team. They—the surgeon …’ She stopped and bit her lip, remembering how shocked she had been when Michael Lord had told her compassionately that he had done everything that he, as a surgeon, could do for her and that the degree of movement she would recover was down to her own determination and, as he had put it, ‘the goodwill of the angels’.

She had been lucky, very lucky—due in the main, she was convinced, to his skilled repair work. So far as most things went, she was perfectly able to operate normally, but theatre work was not ‘most’ things, and the risk that she might be too slow to hand an instrument over to a surgeon or, even worse, might not be able to react at all to instructions, had closed the door on theatre work to her for ever.

‘Oh, darling, I’m so very, very sorry,’ her mother had tried to comfort her, adding, ‘Look, why don’t you come and stay with Daddy and me for a while?’

But Meg had refused, signing on instead with the private nursing agency for whom she now worked.

She felt Christian’s grip on her wrist slacken and immediately she bent back towards the boot of the car, stubbornly determined to remove her own luggage. But Christian moved in the same direction at the same time, so that their heads were close together and he was still holding her wrist.

A sensation of intense awareness and sensitivity to his proximity filled her, making it impossible for her to breathe or think properly. Every protective urge she possessed screamed at her to move away from him, but something deeper, stronger and far more elemental, was refusing to let her do so.

Christian was looking at her mouth and she … she was letting him, feeling her lips moisten and part, feeling too her eyes growing heavy and her breathing becoming unsteady.

What was the matter with her? Just because he was totally and undeniably male … just because … just because her head felt dizzy and her legs felt weak and her heart was pounding—bounding helplessly from one beat to another like a newborn foal finding its legs—that didn’t mean … that didn’t …

‘Christian, is Meg all right?’

Elena’s voice seemed to reach her from a long way away. Like a drowning man, Meg clung to it, forcing herself to remember where she was and why.

If this was a film, right now its audience would be in no doubt at all about what would happen next. But it wasn’t a film, she reminded herself fiercely as she realised that Christian had released her wrist and she was free to escape from him and the dangerous sorcery of the spell his proximity had woven around her.

Get a grip, for goodness’ sake, she berated herself mentally as she hurried towards Elena’s wheelchair. It was totally unlike her to react like this and she couldn’t understand why she was behaving so idiotically.

CHAPTER TWO

‘THERE, how do you feel now?’

‘Much better.’ Elena thanked Meg gratefully as she finished massaging her patient and smiled at her.

It was less than two hours since their arrival at the apartment, which had proved to be even more luxurious and elegant than Meg had expected.

The bedroom she had been shown to by Elena’s elderly housekeeper was more of a small suite than a mere room, complete with its own luxurious marble bathroom and a small sitting room as well, but Meg had been more concerned about her patient than the luxury of her new surroundings, insisting on making Elena comfortable before settling herself in.