Kitabı oku: «Don Joaquin's Pride», sayfa 3

‘Next week…?’ Lucy gasped incredulously, her head thumping so hard that she was beginning to feel slightly sick. ‘I assume that’s your idea of a joke—’

He swung back with innate grace. ‘Why would I be joking?’

‘You can’t possibly mean that you intend to leave me here until next week!’

‘Why not?’

‘Why not? Because I don’t want to be here and you’ve got no right to keep me here against my will…I could put the police on you for this!’ Lucy sliced back frantically as she forced herself upright again on wobbling knees.

‘And what crime would you then accuse me of committing, señora?’ Joaquin Del Castillo prompted with sardonic amusement. ‘You are not even on my land. You came here of your own volition and now you are taking up residence in your father-in-law’s home. What do either of those actions have to do with me?’

Aghast at that subtle and devious response, and the clear forethought and planning which must have preceded it, Lucy stared at him with increasing desperation. ‘I could never find my way back to San Angelita without your help!’

Joaquin shrugged without remorse. ‘And you won’t get it unless you sign that agreement. By the way,’ he murmured in casual aside as he paused in the open doorway, ‘don’t waste your time trying to suborn Mateo. He speaks no English, and in common with all Fidelio’s friends and well-wishers he is disgusted by what you have done!’

A cold sweat of panic breaking out on her skin, Lucy got up and hurtled dizzily through the door in his wake. ‘I can’t sign that agreement…I don’t have that kind of money.’ She stumbled clumsily over that driven admission as she gazed pleadingly up at him. ‘We need to talk about this. Surely there’s some other way of sorting this awful business out…’

Joaquin Del Castillo stared down at her, stunning eyes narrowed to a sliver of glinting light in his darkly handsome features. Her breath locked in her dry throat. Those spectacular eyes, scorching as the sun’s heat, beat down on her. All of a sudden she felt as if a hundred trapped butterflies were going crazy inside her. Her heart crashed against her breastbone, shock shrilling through her as she trembled, paralysed to the spot by the most extraordinary rising sense of excitement.

‘Some other way would naturally be the only way you know,’ Joaquin breathed huskily, a derisive slant to his hard, compelling mouth. ‘Sex is your currency and I can see that you would not find lying back under me a punishment.’

Lucy gave him an incredulous look, reeling under the onslaught of that insult.

He lowered his imperious dark head, sunlight gleaming over the glossy luxuriance of his blue-black hair. ‘That air of gauche uncertainty and fragile femininity is remarkably convincing…or at least it would be if I wasn’t aware that you have been the mistress of at least two wealthy married men!’

‘How…dare…you?’ Lucy gasped, cheeks aflame and incensed.

‘How very easy it must have been for you to fool Mario into believing that he had found the love of his life!’

Cindy had adored Mario Paez, and had been totally gutted by his death. Sheer outrage ripped through Lucy and she flew forward, swung her arm back like a champion golfer to gain momentum, and took a violent swing at another human being for the first time ever. Joaquin sidestepped her with such speed and dexterity that she almost lost her balance and fell flat on her face. A pair of large and very powerful hands snapped around her waist and the next minute she was airborne.

Out of her head with frustrated fury as Joaquin held her at extended arm’s length, with her feet dangling out of contact with solid ground, Lucy flailed her clenched fists about uselessly, because she couldn’t get close enough to hit him. ‘Put me down…put me down, you pig!’ she screeched at him full blast.

Savagely amused green eyes raked over her hectically flushed and outraged face. ‘There’s also a certain piquancy to your extreme lack of size. You look like a dainty doll but you have the temper of a shrew—’

‘Let go of me, you great hulking bully!’ Lucy spat at him.

‘Claro! I am seeing the real woman now,’ Joaquin Del Castillo purred as he surveyed her, lush inky black lashes low on smouldering eyes. Raw sexuality emanated from him in unashamed waves. ‘And what a tigress you must be between the sheets…all teeth and claws and hunger.’

About to launch another seething outburst at him, Lucy blinked in sheer bemusement, her soft full mouth falling open. Never before had any man addressed her in such terms. He wiped out her anger. She was more fascinated by that tantalising and false image of herself than insulted. Unwarily she clashed with those amazingly intense eyes of his and gulped. He looked like a mountain lion about to leap on a little fluffy lamb. ‘No…’

‘The word you use with me is sí…it means yes, and I like to hear it,’ Joaquin Del Castillo confided in a deep dark drawl that rasped down her spine like sandpaper on silk, and he drew her in to him and banded his arms round her narrow ribcage instead. ‘Say it for me…’

A strange all-pervasive ache stirred deep in Lucy’s pelvis, wiping out her ability to concentrate. ‘No—’

‘Sí…’ Joaquin instructed, slowly crushing her swelling breasts into the hard wall of his chest, one strong arm sliding down her back to curve round her hips and hold her fast as he studied her with flaming mesmeric intensity. ‘Dios…you will say it to please me.’

‘Please you…’ Lucy echoed, her entire body plastered to every vibrant masculine angle of his and assailed by a quivering seductive pliancy. Her heart was racing so fast it threatened cardiac arrest. Driven by a temptation stronger than she could resist, she raised her hand and traced the sculpted line of one slanting male cheekbone, smooth golden skin overlying a truly spectacular arrangement of bone.

His dark head lowered to capture her exploring forefinger between his lips. Lucy watched him in shaken fascination. A soft gasp was dragged from low in her convulsing throat. Every pulse in her treacherous body went crazy as he gently sucked, silken black lashes almost hitting his cheekbones. Like ice cream on a hot stove she could feel her flesh melting over her bones in a sweet, strong agony of need so new to her experience it overwhelmed her defences.

‘Sí…’ Joaquin prompted thickly as he lifted his arrogant dark head.

‘Sí…’ Lucy framed without even knowing what she was saying, utterly enthralled by the wash of agonising sensation pulsing up inside her.

He caught her parted lips with his and tasted her. Raw, burning excitement blazed up in a head-spinning tide that swept her away. Just one kiss… She had never dreamt but had often fantasised, never once expecting to experience such a response in reality. But the hard hot heat of Joaquin Del Castillo’s hungry mouth on hers was a passionate revelation to Lucy. The passion he summoned up inside her controlled her utterly. She couldn’t get enough of him even when the need to breathe sobbed in her deflated lungs.

‘The face of a sweet Botticelli angel, the brain of a calculator and the sexual appetite of a natural whore,’ Joaquin spelt out silkily, lifting his head and holding her back from him. ‘It would please me to throw you down and take you here…to use you as you once used poor Mario. But I believe I can withstand the temptation.’

Lucy was shell-shocked, gasping for air. Her every nerve jangled with a sense of deprivation so strong she almost cried out in protest and grabbed him back to her again. Stunned by a complete inability to work out how she had turned into a wanton stranger in Joaquin Del Castillo’s arms, and finally forced to support her own weight again, Lucy reeled dizzily. The sick pounding behind her temples made her weary mouth curl in a little moue of pain.

‘Looking pathetic doesn’t work with me either,’ Joaquin slung down at her with grim emphasis.

Lucy focused on him hazily and noticed, really could not have helped noticing when he wore such close-fitting pants, that he was in a very masculine state of arousal. And so shaken was she by the sight of a male in that condition she stared and abstractedly recalled that he had begun the assault on her senses by doing wildly indecent things to her finger. Suddenly she was undyingly grateful that matters hadn’t proceeded any further than that one breathtaking kiss, for she had no idea, absolutely no idea, just how… Her mother had warned her that what a woman often thought she wanted wasn’t much fun once she actually got it. She was now more than ready to be convinced.

‘I feel ill…’ Lucy confided helplessly, swaying without even realising it and wondering why her skin still felt as if it was on fire when he was no longer touching her.

‘You cannot fool me into removing you from here,’ Joaquin drawled with derisive cool, his lean dark face unimpressed. ‘I fully intend that you should endure the privations of what you would sentence Fidelio to endure when he is no longer fit to work.’

She wasn’t well; that was what the matter was with her. In fact, she felt just as she had felt when she had had the flu a month back, only worse, she conceded absently. Had she imagined Joaquin Del Castillo kissing her? Why would he have kissed her? What sense did that make?

‘Men don’t make sense…men are animals,’ Lucy announced with semi-delirious conviction, without even realising that she was talking out loud. ‘You are the prime example…you are the definitive proof. I should never have argued with Mum—’

‘Madre de Dios…’ He interrupted her rambling spiel with incredulity. ‘What—?’

Lucy groaned, pushing a shaking hand over her wet brow, no longer able to focus properly, just as her knees began to shake and crumple beneath her. ‘Awful…feel awful—’

Joaquin Del Castillo’s dusty black riding boots appeared in her vision. ‘I will not be taken in by this outrageous theatrical display, señora.’

Lucy slumped down on one elbow. And then with a faint moan, as the world swung tipsily and blackness folded in entirely, she passed out altogether.

CHAPTER THREE

LUCY stirred and shifted. An experimental movement of her head confirmed that the awful pounding there had mercifully subsided. But even before she opened her eyes, she was assailed by a bewildering surge of powerful images.

Joaquin looking down at her, fabulous eyes green as jade, his concern palpable. Joaquin murmuring in soothing Spanish as she tossed and turned in a fever. Joaquin laughing. Laughing? But only for a split second. His lean dark face had swiftly shuttered again, leaving her with a sharp sense of loss. So confusing were those pictures flashing through her reawakening brain she blanked them out.

Opening her eyes, she discovered that she had not dreamt up the incredible bedroom in which she had lain since she had succumbed to her second attack of flu. Afternoon sunlight illuminated the exquisite antique furniture and the wonderful watercolours on the walls. It was a huge room. Elegant and unbelievably luxurious, right down to the solid six inches of superb lace edging the sheet beneath her hand. Her fingers stroked the lace and then stilled uncertainly again as Joaquin came back into her thoughts at the speed of a shooting star. Was this his house? If it was, he was a seriously wealthy male. Who was he?

Twenty-two. In spite of all her efforts to the contrary, she had got to twenty-two years of age without meeting one moment of serious temptation, Lucy conceded ruefully. And then the biggest, bossiest creep in Guatemala, who unfortunately happened to enjoy devastatingly spectacular good looks and the kind of sensual technique she had doubted even existed, had made a sexual advance on her finger. She quivered just thinking about that moment and felt her foolish tummy churn and leap at the memory of the kiss which had followed.

A bemused indent forming on her brow as she realised that she was thinking about Joaquin Del Castillo yet again, Lucy sat up and sent her gaze winging round the room. She needed to phone Cindy, but there was no telephone. Sliding out of bed on wobbly legs, she went into the en suite bathroom. Weak though she was, she headed straight for the shower cubicle.

Afterwards, she studied her reflection in the vanity mirror and heaved a sigh over her pale face and the childishly curly torrent of caramel-blonde ringlets forming as her hair dried. She smoothed a hand over the mint-green nightdress she wore. It was beautiful, and, like everything else she had brought to Guatemala, it belonged to her sister. Light as silk and whisper-thin, the fabric moulded every female curve and was a far cry from the cotton jersey nightwear which Lucy usually favoured.

Freshening up had tired her out again. She walked slowly over to the bedroom windows. There she froze in her tracks, for the view beyond those windows made her head swim afresh. She clutched at the tassel-edged curtain to steady herself, shut her eyes and opened them again, but still that breathtaking vision of steep, lush forested green slopes and wildly colourful tropical vegetation confronted her stunned gaze. She could hear but only now recognise the cries of exotic birds which had become eerily familiar during her illness. Surely such a fantastic and exotic landscape could not exist close to Fidelio Paez’s little stucco retirement home? Where on earth was she?

‘Welcome to the most boring place on earth…’ A female voice murmured drily from behind her.

Startled, Lucy spun round so fast she staggered slightly. A tall stunning brunette with smooth black hair and a perfect oval face was studying her from the far side of the room. Her short strappy silver dress and her jewelled choker exuded designer chic and sophistication.

‘Hacienda de Oro…literally the House of Gold. The conservationist’s paradise, the archaeologist’s dream destination…but the It Girl’s living death,’ the self-possessed brunette completed, with a dissatisfied twist of her sultry mouth.

‘The It Girl’s living death…?’ Lucy repeated weakly, not quite sure she had heard her correctly.

‘I’m Yolanda Del Castillo, Joaquin’s sister. Surely you know what an It Girl is?’

Lucy nodded, but only slowly. She had read about the cult of the new It Girls in newspapers. Young, rich, high society British women, who were wildly popular with the media. They partied from dawn to dusk, wore fabulous clothes and dated only the most newsworthy men. Such an existence was so far removed from Lucy’s own that she just stared at Yolanda Del Castillo, who undeniably seemed to possess all the attributes it took to be an It Girl, continually photographed, pursued and envied. Even in daylight, it seemed, Yolanda dressed as if she was about to go to a party.

‘You speak wonderful English,’ Lucy remarked, awkward in the presence of such exoticism.

Yolanda uttered a rueful groan. ‘Where do you think I was educated?’

Most probably in a British school, Lucy gathered, feeling foolish.

‘Where is this house?’ Lucy pressed.

‘You’re still in the Petén, just a different part of it.’

‘So how did I get here?’ Lucy asked.

‘Joaquin had you airlifted in.’

‘Airlifted?’ Lucy interrupted helplessly. ‘Who are you people?’

‘You really don’t know, do you?’ Yolanda rolled her dark eyes in dramatic disbelief, momentarily looking much younger than the twenty-two or twenty-three which Lucy had estimated her to be. She threw the bedroom door wide again. ‘Hang on a minute—’

‘Yolanda…is there a phone I could use?’ Lucy hastened to ask, before Joaquin’s sister could disappear again.

Yolanda’s attention shifted to the vacant spot by the bed. She frowned in surprise. ‘Well, I don’t see why you shouldn’t have a phone!’ she remarked with instant sympathy. ‘You may be a con-artist, but for Joaquin to have the phone removed is total sensory deprivation! I couldn’t exist for five minutes without a phone!’

Lucy turned white as milk. ‘You know…I mean—?’

‘You thought I didn’t just ’cos I came in to chat?’ Yolanda shrugged a languid shoulder. ‘I’m bored out of my mind here without company. But I know what you did… Of course I know, and it was disgusting! Fidelio is the sweetest old man.’

Cut to the bone by that blunt condemnation from yet another source, and feeling as limp as a wrung-out dishrag, Lucy sank down on the edge of the bed. Within minutes Yolanda reappeared, to toss a glossy magazine down beside her.

‘Fidelio Paez started working for my family when he was fifteen, señora,’ Yolanda informed her with cool dignity. ‘We threw a big retirement party for him. Imagine how we felt when we later found out that Fidelio had gone to work for a neighbour because he was too embarrassed to ask Joaquin if he could continue working for us!’

‘And then Fidelio told your brother what had happened to his savings,’ Lucy assumed uncomfortably.

‘No! Fidelio has no idea that you cheated him out of his money,’ Yolanda contradicted instantly. ‘Joaquin had to do his own detective work.’

In considerable discomfiture, Lucy dropped her head.

‘And while we’re on the subject of my brother, stop embarrassing me by making a total ass of yourself around him!’

Her lips parting company in sheer shock, Lucy looked up.

‘The way you were carrying on when you were ill, I initially thought that Joaquin had brought his mistress home!’ Yolanda admitted in exasperation.

‘His…m-mistress?’ Lucy stammered with incredulity.

‘All Joaquin’s mistresses have been foreigners like you. Guatemalan women don’t sleep around. We know better,’ the brunette told her with unapologetic superiority.

‘What way was I…“carrying on”?’ Lucy tilted her chin, denying the charge.

‘OK, so you had a fever, but you were continually moaning on about how beautiful Joaquin’s eyes were and asking him to kiss you…talk about deeply uncool! Listening outside that door, I was just cringing for you!’

A tide of truly painful colour illuminating her face, Lucy turned her shaken gaze away from her visitor in self-protection. Suddenly her eyes were stinging with stupid tears.

Yolanda walked round the bed to get a better look at her victim and frowned in frank bewilderment. ‘You know, you just don’t add up…you are acting so wet!’

Lucy chewed at her wobbly lower lip. ‘I’m only feeling weepy because I’ve been ill—’

‘No…you fancy my brother something rotten,’ the brunette countered, unimpressed, and she shook her head in wondering pity. ‘I have problems, but you have got an even bigger problem, Lucy!’

The door snapped shut on Yolanda’s departure. Drawing in a deep shuddering breath, Lucy lifted the magazine she had left behind. Her hands were trembling and she felt as weak as a kitten. But, worst of all, she felt utterly humiliated. A con-artist who had made an ass of herself? Evidently while her temperature had been high she had rambled on like some dizzy teenager suffering from a severe crush.

The cover of the magazine bore a picture of Joaquin emerging from a limousine with a very beautiful blonde. Lucy leafed through and found the relevant page. It was a North American magazine dedicated to depicting the lives of the rich and famous. Correction, Lucy adjusted as she slowly scanned the pages of photos, the lives of the super-rich…

For Joaquin Del Castillo appeared to own a whole selection of homes around the globe. There were several shots of various enormous properties, sheltering behind high walls and huge gates. Her heart beating very fast, Lucy skimmed through the brief blurb for actual facts. Joaquin was variously described as a ‘billionaire industrialist’ and a ‘reformed playboy’, who now spent much of his time advising governments on conservation. He was thirty years old, single, and he changed women like he changed his shirts. His late father hadn’t married for the first time until he was sixty, and there was strong speculation that Joaquin was planning to do the same.

Lucy snapped shut the magazine again. So, a gorgeous billionaire had kissed her! Where had that naff thought come from? Mortified by her rebellious mind, which refused to focus on what was truly important, Lucy instead pondered the likely power at Joaquin’s fingertips. Her blood duly chilled. Cindy had made a very dangerous enemy who had the resources to cause a great deal of trouble.

Since she was now totally exhausted, and in no state to leave her room in search of a phone, Lucy crawled back into bed, sinking beneath the cool sheets to close her eyes in weary relief.

‘Lucy…?’

Even as Lucy surfaced from sleep again every fibre in her body knew that the speaker was Joaquin, for nobody else had ever managed to make her name sound that exciting. That wonderful sexy drawl, rich as honey with smoky overtones, haunted her dreams, so she kept her eyes shut, warding off temptation as best she could.

‘Go ’way,’ she mumbled in sleepy self-defence.

‘Wake up, Lucy…’

With drowsy reluctance, Lucy focused on the male poised at the foot of her bed. It was dusk. But, even in that duller light, his dark-as-midnight hair gleamed with vitality and his fabulous eyes glittered like jewels. That Joaquin should always look spectacular was no longer any surprise to Lucy, for other memories were stirring to endow him with a familiarity she accepted without question. Joaquin had been with her when the fever had been at its worst. Whenever she had become momentarily conscious of her surroundings again Joaquin had been there.

With a sigh, Lucy stretched to loosen her muscles. Belatedly conscious of the tension zapping through the air, she glanced up and connected with the direction of Joaquin’s intent gaze. As she dropped her own attention to the straining mounds of her breasts, now so clearly delineated beneath her nightdress, she froze in dismay. Mortified by the provocative display she had unintentionally made of herself, Lucy flushed a rosy red and grabbed at the sheet to tug it up over her scantily clad frame.

Joaquin tilted back his proud dark head and continued to look at her levelly. However, his handsome mouth had now taken on a distinctly cynical twist. ‘You’re obviously feeling much better.’

‘Would you mind telling me exactly where I am?’ Lucy was breathless and hugely self-conscious, and desperate just to fill the silence.

‘In one of my guestrooms,’ Joaquin imparted with formidable cool. ‘It is three days since you fell ill.’

‘You’re wearing a suit…’ Lucy noted inconsequentially, taking in the beautifully tailored cream linen sheathing his lithe powerful physique. The shade merely enhanced his dark and vibrant animal magnetism. Her brain refused to dwell on one thought for longer than two seconds. She watched his sleek and aggressive jawline clench. ‘And you seem so…so constrained…’ She noted this to herself in instinctive confusion, for she could not help but contrast his concern when she had been ill to his current frozen demeanour.

Volatile green eyes flashed down at her in flaring anger. ‘Let me tell you what I am repressing, señora,’ Joaquin Del Castillo spelt out, the deep-freeze act fracturing fast. ‘A near overpowering desire to drag your scrawny little body out of that comfortable bed and make you dig ditches and sweat in honest labour as you deserve!’

Sprung finally from all introspection, Lucy flinched and paled.

‘Indeed it is a great challenge for me to treat you with the consideration due to an invalid,’ Joaquin Del Castillo admitted in a driven undertone. ‘But I wish to impress on you that I never at any stage intended you to suffer harm or injury. The doctor believes that you were not very fit to begin with. Had I been aware that you were genuinely as physically frail and weak as you appeared, I would have ensured that the journey you underwent to Fidelio’s home was less taxing.’

He could use an awful lot of words without actually grasping the nettle and apologising, Lucy registered. For of course, she conceded with the sense of hindsight, that long arduous ride must have been completely unnecessary to a male with Joaquin Del Castillo’s financial resources. Even she knew that a four-wheel drive could have traversed so flat a terrain with ease.

‘Is it your wish that I contact your fiancé to inform him that you have been ill?’ Joaquin enquired icily.

A blank look flowered in Lucy’s eyes. ‘But I don’t have a fiancé…’

Joaquin stiffened, and then surveyed her with sudden intense derision. ‘So you have jilted Roger Harkness! I noticed that you wore no ring and I should have guessed. He was the one aspect of your lifestyle which failed to make sense. Why would a woman with your expensive tastes choose to marry a newly qualified accountant?’

Recalling too late that she was supposed to be pretending to be Cindy, and deeply shaken that he should be aware not only that her sister was engaged but also of the identity and occupation of her fiancé, Lucy gasped. ‘I…I—’

‘Dios…so you were only playing with Harkness? Amusing yourself while you waited for your next rich protector to come along?’ Joaquin Del Castillo assumed with contemptuous distaste. ‘You have deprived me of the pleasure of telling him exactly what you are, for no man should take such a bride without forewarning!’

An anxious burst of low-pitched Spanish interrupted him. A stout little woman with grey hair had come into the room. She wasted no time in sliding a thermometer between Lucy’s lips. Studying the younger woman’s drawn face and anxious eyes, she glanced at her employer in speaking reproach.

Lucy watched Joaquin’s powerful chest swell with the effort it took to bite back his temper. His expressive mouth compressed into a bloodless line of rock-steady restraint, but slight colour now delineated the hard jut of his high cheekbones. With an inclination of his imperious dark head, he squared his broad shoulders. ‘We will discuss this matter again when you are stronger,’ he informed her glacially.

Like a fish let off the hook at the very last moment, Lucy felt her tension evaporate, and she slumped back against the comfortable pillows. An hour later, as she dined from a tray set with exquisite porcelain, fine crystal and solid silver salt and pepper shakers, she perfectly understood Joaquin Del Castillo’s outrage at the situation in which he now found himself.

He had brought her to Guatemala to confront and punish her. He had intended to corner her into signing that repayment agreement by marooning her in Fidelio’s isolated home and making her rough it. Yet here she was, lying back against freshly laundered pillows being waited on hand and foot. Only the very rich could afford such a level of service. And the more Lucy pictured Joaquin’s lean dark aristocratic face, the more she marvelled that she had not instantly recognised that blazing aura of power and expectation for what it was.

She really had to get hold of a phone and warn Cindy. That had now become a matter of even greater urgency. ‘No man should take such a bride without forewarning’. The memory of that devastating assurance from Joaquin filled Lucy with fear on her sister’s behalf. Cindy’s wedding was only a few weeks away. Very probably Joaquin knew that date as well. His continuing belief that she was Cindy, but no longer a bride-to-be, was currently her sister’s only protection from such a vengeful act.

With decision, Lucy got out of bed. It was after ten in the evening. Hopefully most of the occupants of the house would be downstairs. The wrap that matched her nightdress lay across a chair. Donning it, she crept out of her room into a long well-lit corridor with a highly polished wooden floor adorned at intervals with superb woven rugs. She passed by closed doors with her nerves humming a tattoo that made the hair on her nape prickle with forboding.

It was an enormous house. From the mouth of the corridor she peered out on to an impressive gallery with a ceiling that soared high above, hearing first the distant echo of voices and then quick steps traversing the hall which she assumed lay below. Several feet from her, she noticed a door lying ajar. On tiptoe, she approached, listened, and, hearing nothing, gently pushed the door wider.

Seeing that the bedroom, which was even more grand than her own, was empty, she hurriedly checked that there was a telephone before quietly closing the door behind her again to ensure that she would not be overheard. Since sneaking about like a cat burglar did not come naturally to Lucy, her heart was now beating so fast that it was threatening to choke her. She switched on the massive lamp behind the phone.

At speed she punched out the number of her sister’s apartment, praying that her twin was at home. The instant Cindy heard her voice, she laughed, and said brightly, ‘I suppose you’ve been having too good a time to call before this!’

‘Don’t I wish!’ Lucy groaned, and sucked in a deep calming breath before she continued, ‘I’ve landed into a really serious situation here, Cindy.’

In as few words as possible, she then hurried to tell her twin what she had to be told about her father-in-law Fidelio Paez’s predicament.

However, it was a very difficult dialogue. Cindy kept on interrupting, first with ringing cries of disbelief and argument and finally with growing anger and resentment.

‘Mario showed me a photo of the most incredible big ranch house…and he was staying in a five-star hotel suite when we met. Was he lying to me…deliberately lying about his background? Explain that to me!’

‘Look, I know nothing about that end of it,’ Lucy admitted unhappily, and as once again she repeated the cold facts which Joaquin had laid before her, a thunderous silence began to build at the other end of the line in London.