CHAPTER ONE
‘NO!’
The Madrigal Hotel’s assistant manager was a consummate professional accustomed to the idiosyncrasies of the rich and famous so his practised smile stayed painted in place, despite the sudden outburst from the woman in front of him. He was rarely surprised, but at that moment, as he braced himself for a diva meltdown, he was.
He prided himself on being able to tell at first glance which of their VIP guests were going to be hard work, but he hadn’t had this beautiful guest down as one of the awkward ones.
First impressions had certainly not given him any clues, as up to this point she had lived up to her public image. Her arrival had been low-key, as befitting the rarity she was said to be, someone not in the business of promoting herself, just good causes. People spoke about how freely she gave of her time and energy and her dedication in continuing to support the charities that she said were her late husband’s legacy.
The rare unfriendly pieces that appeared in the media he had always attributed to the hack’s frustration in not being able to find a story. You could see it from their point of view—they were used to being invited into the homes of the rich and famous, and Marisa Rayner never even gave them a glimpse behind closed doors.
There was still no meltdown forthcoming, but what was happening was even more alarming than a hissy fit. She hadn’t moved a muscle; she was just standing there like a pale frozen statue. What if she was ill?
He experienced a sudden flurry of panic as the question entered his thoughts, realising that would also explain the other-worldly, almost unfocused expression in her wide amber eyes when she’d removed her fashionable shades earlier, as he’d walked beside her through the hotel’s famous art deco doors. At the time he had put her pallor down to the lights from the glittering chandeliers overhead.
An ill guest was never good, but then he reasoned nobody who felt really ill would make such an effort to smile at all the staff she had encountered. At least, she had up until now.
The friendly, genuinely warm smile that charmed everyone it was aimed at was now totally absent as she stood on the threshold of one of their premiere suites looking as if she had seen a ghost.
He gave a philosophical shrug and waited. The Madrigal’s reputation had been built in part on the hotel’s ability to satisfy the most difficult of guests, especially when they had the money to pay the exorbitant prices the Madrigal charged for their premier luxury suites, and the lovely Marisa Rayner was one guest who could certainly afford it.
The fact she had been the sole beneficiary of her husband’s considerable estate after his death made her a natural target of envy. The story of the rich older man married to a very much younger woman was a magnet for the scandal-loving red tops. She could have gone through her life with a ‘gold-digger’ label attached to her, but the forensic dirt-digging exercises had come up empty-handed and she was considered a scandal-free zone—aside from a little guilt by association. But even her dead father, with his colourful history of affairs and a taste for high-stakes gambling, was nothing in this day and age.
No young lovers pre-or post-marriage—just a few malicious suggestions, which was par for the course, but they had faded away too after she had not morphed as predicted into a ‘merry widow’, but had remained a dedicated, hard-working one devoted to charitable works.
The adjective mostly attached to her name was classy and for once, he decided, the press had it right.
If she had any skeletons in her closet they were deeply hidden.
‘Do you have another room?’ Marisa heard the quiver in her voice that stopped just the right side of hysteria, and bit down on her full lower lip while buying time to regain her composure by making a meal of smoothing back non-existent loose strands of shiny silver-blonde hair that was safely secured in a smooth simple knot on the nape of her swanlike neck.
She knew she had to pull herself together, but unfortunately knowing that was no help right now.
‘Another room? This is one of our—’
‘Sorry, yes, this is marvellous,’ she gushed. ‘But...something...on a lower floor, perhaps? I... I don’t have a very good head for heights.’
‘Of course, if you’ll just bear with me for a moment.’ The man pulled out a slim tablet and began to scroll through it.
Get a grip, Marisa, she told herself fiercely, if for no other reason than this poor man who was only doing his job looked as if he wanted to run for the hills—and who could blame him? Scared of heights? She was beyond feeling embarrassed, no doubt that would come later when she revisited this moment—in her nightmares!
The gut-freezing panic had hit her the moment the taxi drew up outside the hotel. The signage on the well-known art deco frontage was ultra-discreet—it didn’t need to be flashy; everyone knew the iconic façade of the Madrigal—but to Marisa those letters had seemed to be written in neon and came accompanied by a loud soundtrack of guilt and shame.…She still couldn’t remember how she had got out of the taxi, as the sheer horror of the moment had blanked her brain completely.
Of course it ought not to have been a shock, wouldn’t have if she’d been paying attention. Her delicate dark blonde brows drew together in a straight line above her heavily lashed amber eyes. Even distracted, she had managed to hide her disappointment when her assistant, Jennie, had triumphantly announced that she’d managed the impossible and secured an alternative last-minute venue after their original booking at a country-house hotel had fallen through.
She could remember Jennie mentioning the prestige of the alternative venue, she had to have mentioned the name, but Marisa’s mind had been elsewhere and she hadn’t registered it. No, because she’d been too busy torturing herself with every possible, and highly improbable, disaster that could occur in her absence.
Her glance darted around the room, reached the slightly open bedroom door and retracted hastily, focusing instead on her feet clad in leg-elongating nude court shoes that added four inches to her willowy five feet ten inches.
She brought her lashes down in a protective sweep over eyes that continued to be drawn to that open door, her mouth twisted in frustration as she acknowledged all the missed opportunities that would have at least given her time, if not to avoid this moment, then to at the very least prepare herself for it.
Even as late as getting in the taxi would have been something, she thought, considering another missed opportunity. Jennie had waited until she was in the cab before they’d parted company, her PA heading towards the Tube to spend some well-deserved time off with her family. Jennie had to have given the driver the address of the hotel, but again Marisa’s thoughts had been elsewhere.
Where was a convenient icy shiver of premonition when a girl needed one?
Up to the point the taxi had pulled in, she hadn’t even glanced out of the window. Instead, she had spent the journey from the station scrolling through some emails and checking in with Jamie’s nanny, Ashley, who had responded to her anxious questions with cheery positivity and a series of soothing photos of Marisa’s four-and-a-half-year-old clearly having the time of his life at junior soccer practice.
It wasn’t that she doubted Ashley’s competence, but this was the first time she had left Jamie since he’d been given the all-clear by the doctors.
Up to this point, any trip away from home had deliberately not included an overnight stay, or if it had, she had taken Jamie with her. This was a big step for her, though less so, it seemed, for Jamie, who had been too busy playing with a new computer game to do more than give her a casual wave before he got back to his screen.
On one level she knew that he was fine, he was safe, and she knew her fear had no basis in logic but, as she had already discovered, it wasn’t always about logic. When you had lived with fear this long it was something that was hard to let go of. For so long she had been afraid of losing her precious son and—She took a deep breath and deliberately dampened the panic she could feel rising. No, she told herself, repeating the phrase like a mantra, she was not going to lose him, because he was healthy now.
Her son was a survivor, one of the lucky ones, and he had made a complete recovery. Despite the fact he was noticeably smaller and more delicate-looking than his contemporaries, Jamie was, so the medics told her, as fit and robust as any other four-year-old and would soon catch up developmentally.
The assistant manager cleared his throat and lowered his tablet. ‘We do have an alternative room although it is not as—’
‘That’s tremendous, thank you so much. I’ll take it.’
Reaching for her sunglasses, she slid them on her small straight nose, hiding behind the tinted glass as she dredged deep to produce a faint smile.
‘Right then, if you can give me a few moments I will make the necessary arrangements. The room is on the second floor—will that do?’
‘That’s fine. It’s just the balcony up here that bothers me.’ She stopped, well aware that the balcony she spoke of was not actually visible from where they stood.
‘I understand totally.’
Luckily for her he didn’t.
‘I will be back momentarily.’ He held out a straight-backed chair situated by a small table and after a pause she took it.
‘Can I get you anything?’
She made an inarticulate sound in her throat and vaguely registered the sound of the door closing, the images floating in her head exerting a tug she couldn’t resist.
She was standing on the balcony that she knew existed behind the heavy curtains in the bedroom. It was night, as dark outside as a city ever got, and she was staring down at the shining lights, the glistening moisture on the rain-soaked pavements, when she felt the quivering downy hair rise on her skin a second before the back of her neck started to tingle—she was no longer alone.
Her breath left her lungs as his big strong hands came to rest on her shoulders. As if connected by an invisible thread to his body, she leaned back against his chest, drawn to the hard warmth of his maleness, breathing in the clean unique fragrance of him. For a few moments they stayed that way, her heart beating heavy and slow in anticipation for a long while before he twisted her around to face him, and, like a parched flower turning to the sun, her face had tilted as she had strained upwards to meet his cool, firm lips with her own.
The languid heat that had spread through her body like a flash fire had made her bones dissolve and she would have slid to the floor had a muscular arm not banded her narrow ribcage before he’d picked her up and...!
Behind the smoky lenses of her sunglasses her pupils dilated as she swallowed hard, pushing the memory kicking and screaming back into its box. She glanced at the bedroom door again and felt her insides tighten.
With a cry she shot to her feet, opened the suite door a crack and positioned herself within reaching distance of the door handle for a quick escape should she need it, before pressing her rigid shoulder blades against the wall and closing her eyes...
What were the odds of finding herself in the exact same suite?
Fighting to keep her thoughts in the here and now, which, no matter how uncomfortable, was infinitely preferable to obsessing about the past, she took another deep mind-clearing breath.
She was winning and then she just had to sabotage her own progress and peek through the open bedroom door and see that bed. With no warning the past collided painfully with the present again with a concussive impact.
‘No!’ Teeth clenched, she ran across the room and closed the door with a decisive click before leaning her back against it, even though she knew a couple of inches of wood was no defence against the memories that had been playing in a loop ever since she’d got out of the taxi and found herself standing in the exact spot where it had all begun more than five years earlier.
Suddenly, she was feeling the rain from that day over five years ago beating down from a leaden sky, plastering her water-darkened hair to her head, much longer then than the shoulder-blade length she favoured now.
The soaked strands kept getting in her eyes, though with her head down against the driving force of the cloudburst all she could see were people’s feet and the standing water on the pavement increasing in depth with each passing moment.
It had taken seconds for the thin linen jacket she was wearing to become totally saturated, her bare legs below the denim skirt she was wearing were slick with rain and her feet in wedge sandals squelched as she avoided another lethal umbrella that was being wielded like a shield. Any trace of make-up was a mere memory, and she gave up brushing away the droplets trembling on the ends of her long curling eyelashes before falling into her eyes.
It had seemed like such a good idea when she’d been sitting waiting for Rupert to come out of his weekly appointment with his oncologist, less so now. But when the page of the glossy magazine she had picked up had opened on an advert for the opening of the new London branch of the famous Parisian chocolatier that Rupert, with his sweet tooth, adored, it had seemed like something nice to do for the man to whom she owed so much.
Rupert, the man who legally at least she was married to, had called their arrangement symbiotic when he had offered her an escape route from the seemingly endless nightmare she had fallen into after her father’s death, but to her it often seemed more like a one-sided deal.
She wasn’t even sure that this mysterious debt Rupert had claimed he owed her father existed, though the men’s friendship certainly had. Her father had been a man with a lot of friends; he’d been funny, articulate, generous to a fault and he’d thrown legendary parties—of course he’d had friends. Only for the most part, they’d turned out to be the variety that had disappeared when it had become public knowledge after his death that, despite his lifestyle, there had been no money left, just debts.
His death was the only thing that had kept the bailiffs temporarily away from the door of the lovely home she was living in that was mortgaged up to the hilt. The staff had not been paid for two months, though selling her jewellery had dealt with that issue, and everything else would have to be sold too: the fleet of cars in the garage; her father’s share in the racehorse that never won anything but cost a bomb in trainers, stables and veterinary bills.
She’d been poor before, that was not a problem for Marisa, but what had been a nightmare was the money that the lawyers said her father owed, and not all the debts, she’d soon learnt, were owed to legitimate sources. Some, the ones whose sinister representatives Marisa had come home from the funeral to find sitting uninvited in her living room, were not inclined to stand in line to be paid a fraction of what they were owed.
They’d wanted their money right then, all of it, and the dark consequences they’d hinted at should she not come up with the goods had been chilling enough, though not as much as the stomach-curdling suggestion that she could reduce the debt by being nice to important friends of their clients.
She had still been shaking with reaction to the crude suggestion when Rupert had arrived. He’d sat her down, poured her a stiff brandy and had teased the story out of her. It was then that he’d shared his own shocking news, explaining not just his medical diagnosis, but that his disease was terminal. He considered it a private matter, he didn’t want her sympathy, and wasn’t afraid to die—he was ready.
What he didn’t want, he’d told her, was to die alone, and he’d been alone ever since the death of the love of his life, a man whose funeral Rupert hadn’t even been able to attend because his long-time lover had had a wife and family who didn’t know, or didn’t want to know, that he had been gay.
Marriage to Marisa, he’d said, would make everything so much easier legally after he died—she’d actually be helping him. And, for some reason he’d refused to disclose, he’d owed it to her father to ensure she was safe. Marisa, ignoring the voice of conscience in the back of her mind, had let herself believe him. Grief-stricken, desperate and so very alone, she’d agreed.
They had married in a civil ceremony a week later. There had been no honeymoon but they’d shared a bottle of champagne, and that had been the first time Rupert had told her upfront, to her acute embarrassment, that it would be fine with him if she wanted a life outside their marriage. If she had friends, male friends, he’d added, in case she hadn’t got his drift.
She had got it, but, as she had informed him there and then, that wouldn’t be an issue for her and she had meant it. She had never been a particularly physical person and she had always avoided intimacy of that nature. What she’d been looking for in a relationship was what she had always craved: safety and stability.
School friends had always envied Marisa her adventurous lifestyle, not knowing about the unpaid bills that her father had cheerfully binned whenever the drawer he’d shoved them into had got full, never dreaming that their friend, who got to mingle with famous people and order her dinner from room service in five-star hotels, instead longed for the security of their boring lives.
Ironically she now had the dreamt-of security, although this had never been the way she had visualised it coming about, and up to a point it had worked. But to her, at least, it was becoming more obvious with each passing day that there was nothing equal about her and Rupert’s deal, and there was a certain irony in the fact that her attempt to assuage her guilt in a small way had set in motion a sequence of events that would lead to her act of betrayal. And no matter that Rupert had virtually given his blessing to her taking lovers, for Marisa, what she had done remained a betrayal.
Waiting until Rupert was taking his afternoon nap she had set off to purchase his surprise treat, taking the shortcut through the park because it was such a lovely afternoon—or at least it had been, until the heavens opened and the rain came pelting down!
She was just wondering whether there was any point getting a taxi when she sidestepped a puddle and walked full pelt into a person—or it could have been a steel wall; the amount of give was about the same—the impact driving the air from her lungs in a sharp gasp as she bounced off him, very nearly losing her balance.
Grappling with the distracting sensation of hardness and warmth left by the moment of contact while trying to keep her balance, she was saved the embarrassment and pain of landing on her bottom in a puddle by a pair of large hands that shot out, spanning her waist and quite literally putting her back on her feet.
‘I’m so, so sorry...’ She began tilting her chin to look up...a long way, as it turned out, but as she finally made it to the face of the man who still had his hands on her waist she promptly forgot what she was going to say, the clutching sensation in the pit of her stomach giving way to a shallow gasp of shock.
She now knew why it had felt as though she were walking into a wall. Everything about the stranger was hard. He was lean, broad-shouldered and several inches over six feet; the long drovers raincoat he wore open over a suit and tie did not disguise the muscular athleticism of his body.
If the physical impact had snatched her breath away, the impact as her gaze collided with the dark heavy-lidded eyes of the stranger made her heart almost stop beating, the raw masculinity he projected like nothing she had ever encountered before in her twenty-one years. Strange, scary sensations were zigzagging through her body, as though her nervous system had just received a million-volt hit.
It was the weirdest sensation. The noise of other people, the busy traffic, the storm raging overhead were all still there but they receded into the background. Instead, her world had contracted into the space, the air molecules between her and this man... There was just this extraordinary man, and he really was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen in her life!
She knew she was staring at him but she couldn’t stop. His strong-jawed oval face was all sculpted cheekbones, carved planes and intriguing angles, and the skin stretched over bones of perfect striking symmetry was a deep vibrant bronzed gold. Looking at his firm, sensually moulded mouth sent her core temperature up several painful degrees—it was a sinful miracle.
The thick brows above his eyes lifted and she couldn’t help noticing that they were as black as the curling lashes that framed his deep-set dark, quizzical eyes.
‘Are you all right?’
He had an almost accent—it was there somewhere in the perfect diction and the deep, smooth drawl. There was a smile and something else in his eyes that was as lushly velvet as his voice.
It was the something else that intensified the violent quivering in the pit of her stomach.
She lifted a hand to push the hair from her cheek, the rain-soaked strands tangling in her slim fingers while beneath the film of moisture her face felt hot.
‘Fine, fine... I’m fine.’ And surprisingly she was, for someone who had quite clearly lost her mind and couldn’t stop shaking.
She just hoped the internal tremors did not show on the outside, but she realised that on the plus side she would no longer need to pretend to have a clue what people were talking about when they mentioned lust at first sight.
On the minus side, she knew in a distant corner of her mind that she was making a total fool of herself because she didn’t have the skill or the experience to hide what she was feeling.
His incredible cynical eyes said he knew exactly what was happening between them.
‘You’re wet,’ he said, dragging a hand across his own hair, removing the excess moisture from the jet-black strands, then he reversed the gesture, causing his hair to stand up in sexy damp spikes. As he stood there just staring at her, Marisa had the oddest feeling he could see the thoughts swirling in her head, so maybe that was why he suddenly said abruptly, ‘Would you like to come inside?’
‘Inside...?’ she echoed stupidly.
Without taking his eyes from her face, he gestured with a tip of his head towards the entrance of the Madrigal Hotel.
She paused long enough so that he had to know she’d considered it before she began to babble, hating the breathy sound of her own panicked voice as she took refuge in good manners.
‘No, no, I’m fine. I’m sorry I got you wet and thank you for...’ She stopped short, figuring she had already made herself look as ridiculous as it was humanly possible to. She shook her head but didn’t move, her soggy feet feeling as glued to the ground as her eyes were to the face of this tall, imposing stranger.
He arched a dark brow. ‘Well, if you change your mind I’m here all week.’
His offer, if that was what it was, broke her free of the paralysis that had gripped her, and with another shake of her head, this time with her eyes safely on the pavement in front of her, she turned around and in seconds was lost amongst the body of people surging along the wet pavement. Her heart was pounding so loudly it felt like a sonar locator as she rushed on, welcoming the cooling caress of the rain as it hit her hot face.
After the initial surge of relief that she’d escaped—from exactly what was not a question she wanted to explore—she found herself wondering what would have happened if she had accepted the stranger’s invitation.
Really, Marisa, you’re not that naïve, are you? mocked the voice in her head as she squelched along, the rain numbing the heat of embarrassment in her cheeks. Or was that excitement?
That would have been the end of it, and should have been the end of it had fate and her school friend Cressy’s domestic emergency not intervened.
‘It would be good,’ Cressy had said when they’d bumped into one another the previous week, ‘to catch up.’
It was the sort of vague, socially polite thing that people said without actually meaning it and Marisa had responded in the same vein, never for a second expecting to be asked to follow through.
But Cressy had invited her out for a meal, and in the end it had been Rupert, so cheered at the prospect of her getting out, who had made her agree.
That evening she left him with his chocolates and a video of his favourite film and went out, and it was actually quite nice to dress up and get out of her comfortable clothes for once.
That was the funny thing about clothes—especially when you added some bold red lipstick—and she left the house looking everything she knew she wasn’t: sexy and confident.
Cressy, who was still struggling, she said, with her post-baby body, pronounced herself envious, but when Marisa watched her face as she scrolled proudly through the photos of her husband and baby twin boys on her phone Marisa knew her old friend was lying. Cressy wouldn’t swap what she had for a size-eight figure and a few glamorous outfits!
They had not even selected their food when Cressy received the phone call from home.
‘Yes, give him one spoonful if his temperature is up. It’s in the bathroom cabinet in the boys’ room, top shelf. Yes, I know you’ll be fine and I will have fun... Love you...’ Cressy slid the phone back in her clutch bag but she gave Marisa a rueful look and sighed. ‘Sorry, Marisa, but...’
‘Rain check. Don’t worry, I get it. You go home...make sure your boys are all right.’
Cressy’s relief was obvious.
Marisa finished her own cocktail and the one Cressy had not touched, and it was still only nine p.m. She was left all dressed up with nowhere to go but home again, where Rupert, who always retired early, would already be in bed, helped by the live-in nurse who had been with them for a few weeks now. Marisa decided to walk back as it was a lovely evening, and somehow she found herself standing outside the Madrigal, which was almost on her way home.
The stranger wouldn’t be there, she reasoned, shivering as she thought of him. It was still so early...why not go in for a nightcap? She’d always wanted to see what the Madrigal was like inside and she was certainly dressed for it.
A combination of self-delusion and the cocktails that were not as innocuous as they’d looked got her through the doors and into the expensive-smelling wood-panelled foyer when the reality of what she was doing hit her, shame and mind-clearing horror following close behind.
She turned and would have headed back through the door had a voice not suddenly nailed her feet to the Aubusson carpet.
‘Would you like a drink?’
Shocked recognition and stomach-tightening excitement grabbed her as, her breath coming faster, she spun back slowly on her heels.
With her heart trying to batter its way through her ribcage, her eyes travelled in an upward sweep over the long, lean length of his body, clad this evening in a beautifully cut dark grey suit, underneath which was a pale blue shirt open at the neck to reveal the tanned brown skin of his throat, and fine enough to suggest the musculature of his chest and torso. The expensive tailoring didn’t do anything to lessen the aura of raw, head-spinning masculinity he projected.
‘No, I didn’t come here for—’ She blinked and stopped. What had she come here for?
Exactly what he thinks you did, the voice in her head responded.
He took a step forward and held out his hand. ‘I’m Roman Bardales.’
After the faintest hesitation she reached out, a shock of electricity of a lethal voltage running through her body as his warm brown fingers closed around her hand and didn’t move, and she saw his polished brown eyes widen as though he too had felt the same stinging shock.
‘Marisa Rayner.’ She pulled her hand away.
‘I’m glad you came.’
‘I... I didn’t...’ One darkly delineated brow lifted to a sardonic angle and she rushed on. ‘Well, I am here.’
‘So I see.’ The comprehensive sweep of his brown eyes as they slid over her body made her shiver. ‘And now?’
‘Now?’ She had to force the word past the ache in her dry throat.
‘Are you coming up?’ The slight jerk of his head was directed at the lift behind him.
He didn’t say for a coffee, or a nightcap, because they both knew that wasn’t why she was there.
‘I... I don’t do things like this.’
‘OK,’ he said slowly in acknowledgment, and then he did nothing else to influence her decision besides standing there looking gorgeous enough to melt her bones.
Marisa had known deep down that she was just going through the motions pretending to delay. The decision had already been made as soon as she had made her way to the hotel this evening. Her struggle now was for appearances—her own, not his.
His impressive shoulders lifted in the faintest of shrugs. ‘We could go for a walk instead?’
She shook her head. ‘No, I’ll...’ She expelled a deep breath and started to move towards the lifts.
Copyright © 2020 by Kim Lawrence