Trish Morey – Back in the Spaniard's Bed (страница 1)
About Trish Morey
TRISH MOREY is an Australian who’s also spent time living and working in New Zealand and England. Now she’s settled with her husband and four young daughters in a special part of South Australia, surrounded by orchards and bushland, and visited by the occasional koala and kangaroo.
With a life-long love of reading, she penned her first book at age eleven, after which life, career and a growing family kept her busy until once again she could indulge her desire to create characters and stories, this time in romance. Having her work published is a dream come true.
Visit Trish at her website at www.trishmorey.com
Don’t miss Trish Morey’s exciting new novel,
Back in the
Spaniard’s Bed
Trish Morey
Dear Reader,
What is it about the Mediterranean male that makes him so hard to resist? Is it the olive-skinned good looks, the flashing eyes and thick dark hair? Is it the rich accent that curls its way into your senses? Both get a huge tick from me.
But what really sets the Mediterranean male apart is passion, a passion for life, a passion for family and a passionate nature that means he’ll meet any conflict head on. And if that conflict comes in the shape of a woman, then watch out, because the sparks will really fly!
Alejandro Rodriguez is one such passionate man. Nobody had ever walked out on this Spaniard before. Not until a certain blue-eyed bombshell, Leah Mitchell, who decided to cut her losses and walk away, before she ended up losing her pride as well as her heart to him. But Alejandro hadn’t finished with Leah, so there was no way he was going to let her get away with that!
I’m thrilled to be part of this
With love and best wishes,
x
With thanks to Bec, Kate, Karen, Alison and Robbie for a fabulous girls’ own weekend.
Here’s to row boats, abandoned beaches, chilled lime cordial on a hot summer’s day and fabulous Thai food.
But most of all, here’s to great friends!
May there be many more such adventures.
With love and fond hugs,
Trish
CHAPTER ONE
NOBODY walked out on Alejandro Rodriguez. Not business tycoons or CEOs or poker-faced politicians.
He watched her working through the window of her small dressmaking shop from his vantage point across the narrow street, her head down, totally focused on the task at hand, her fingers nimble and quick as they worked the fabric through the machine.
He remembered those fingers, long and slender like the woman herself, and he remembered how they’d once worked their skilful magic on him …
He growled, low in his throat, a familiar thumping demand building below.
All of a sudden those same fingers stilled and she looked up, her eyes alert, searching the streetscape outside, the passing pedestrians and traffic, almost as if she’d sensed his presence. He smiled as he flipped the collar of his coat up against the unseasonable November cold. So she wasn’t over him? He’d suspected as much.
And he’d enjoy proving it to her.
He’d make her wish she’d never left him, make her beg for more.
The peak hour Sydney traffic was bumper to bumper along the narrow one-way street, but somehow Alejandro forged a path through, parting the sea of cars as if he had a God-given right, the tails of his long black coat swirling in his wake like the wings of a manta ray.
He was oblivious to the sound of car horns, oblivious to the calls from irate drivers to get off the road. Because right now his focus was on one thing and one thing only—Leah Mitchell, and how he was going to get her back into his bed.
Leah rolled her head, trying to relax her neck and shoulders, trying to dispel the crazy feeling that someone was watching her. It was nerves, she told herself, crazy nerves following the panicked phone call from Jordan, informing him that the bank had given him a week to pay them back or they would foreclose. She’d hardly eaten in the two days since, desperately trying to work out how she could help him while surviving on nothing more than coffee and dry crackers. No wonder she was jumpy.
She’d barely turned her attention back to the garment she was altering when a movement outside caught her eye. Nothing more than a flash of black, but enough to set every hair on the back of her neck to prickling awareness. There was something about the way that dark shadow had moved—something that had rippled through her on a wave of dread and taken her right back to another time, another place.
But it couldn’t be him.
Not here.
And then the door opened, the ancient bell above tinkling. An incongruous sound, given the man who had just entered. A man, it occurred to her, who should more likely be accompanied by a thunder clap or heralded by a blast of trumpets, not the mere tinkle of a tiny bell.
He stood there across the small room like some kind of gunslinger ready to draw, looking simultaneously more dangerous and yet more handsome than any man had a right to.
‘Leah,’ he uttered, and heat infused her veins, his deep Mediterranean voice filling all the places in the room that his sheer presence didn’t already occupy. She rose behind her machine, refusing to dwell on the ripple of pleasure that had accompanied hearing her name spoken in that rich accent once again, desperately wishing she was wearing heels instead of her workaday flats, so she felt at less of a disadvantage.
Yet there had never been a time when she hadn’t felt at a distinct disadvantage where Alejandro Rodriguez was concerned, even wearing the highest heels or when done up to the nines. It wasn’t just his height, or the span of his shoulders. Only in bed had she ever felt anywhere near his equal, and even there just the force of his dark personality had always been enough to make her feel inconsequential.
Dark and fathomless under a dark slash of brow, and framed in lashes women would kill for, those eyes stared at her now, pinning her to where she stood. There was still traffic outside. She was vaguely aware of the bustle and movement of a city in motion. But all that shrank in her ears under the thump of her beating heart and the questions that framed themselves so jaggedly in her mind.
‘What do you want?’ Her voice sounded unnaturally tight in the tiny shop—but how could it sound anything else now that he was absorbing all the space, effectively shrink-wrapping the room? She’d heard not a word from Alejandro since she’d left his home in Spain two months ago, and the look in his eyes before she’d done so had been no less unforgiving than it was now. Clearly nothing had changed.
He paused. Or was it just that time slowed in the air that hung heavy and thick between them, in the dark laser glare he directed her way?
‘My dear Leah,’ he said at last, holding out his arms as he made a move closer. ‘Is this any way to greet an old friend?’
Her eyes narrowed, along with her thoughts. Alejandro wanted something. Friendship had been the last thing on his mind that fiery day two months ago, when she’d walked out of his villa and out of his life, his savage parting words still stinging in her ears.
And she’d known what he said was true. Hadn’t she lived with that fact hanging over her head every day of their six-month liaison? She’d known from the very beginning that she was only one more in a long line of mistresses. She’d been reminded of that fact every time she was out in public with him and women jostled to get close, flashing him white-toothed smiles and perfectly angled décolletages. Because they’d known it just as much as she had. Her position as mistress to Spain’s hottest property was tenuous. Short-term.
And after half a year her time must have been nearly up.
And that was why she’d fled. While she still had her pride, if not her heart. Before she’d crashed and burned like so many others before her.
‘Why are you here?’
He frowned and drew closer, until there was barely a metre and her ancient sewing machine between them, the look in his eyes almost wounded. ‘You sound so suspicious.’
She wasn’t taken in for a moment. She crossed her arms over her chest, needing to feel together—whole—when her world seemed to be unravelling by the minute. But he was too close for her to think. So close she could breathe in his exquisite cologne. So close she could have reached a finger out and touched the dark curls kissing his collar.
Distressed by her body’s betrayal, she edged away, moving deeper into the narrow shop, not stopping until she had the solid counter between them. She clutched onto the counter-top like a lifeline. ‘You haven’t answered my question.’