Santiago's Love-Child

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

EPILOGUE

COMING NEXT MONTH

CHAPTER ONE

AFTER trying to sell an idea for ten minutes straight most people would have given up. Dan Taylor wasn’t one of them. Some people said that what he lacked in flair he made up for in determination. They were essentially correct.

Santiago Morais, who was considered to have more than his fair share of flair, listened to the younger man explain again why it wasn’t just necessary for Santiago to make up the numbers this weekend, it was his duty.

‘No.’

The ‘No’ wasn’t the sort of no that could be confused with maybe, and it wasn’t encouraging that the enigmatic expression on Santiago’s lean features had given way to mild irritation.

Actually Dan was a little taken aback by Santiago’s lack of co-operation. He was showing the sort of stony indifference that Dan had expected five years earlier when he had turned up at the London offices of Morais International. The only thing he’d had going for him then had been a tenuous—very tenuous—family link with the Morais family.

He had expected to be thrown out on his ear. Getting to see the man himself had been just as hard as he had expected. When they had come face to face, his resolve had almost deserted him. Santiago was younger than he had expected and much, much tougher.

Faced with a dark, cynical and very chilly stare Dan had instinctively dumped his carefully prepared speech and said instead, ‘Look, there’s absolutely no reason you should give me a job just because some great-aunt of mine married some distant uncle of your mother’s. I’m not qualified—in fact I’ve never finished anything I started in my life—but if you gave me a chance you wouldn’t regret it. I’d give it all I had and then some. I have something to prove.’

‘You have something to prove?’ The voice, deep and barely accented, made Dan jump.

‘I’m not a loser.’

The figure behind the desk got to his feet and became correspondingly more intimidating; this man was seriously tall and was built like an Olympic rower. For a long uncomfortable moment Santiago just looked at Dan in silence, those spookily penetrating eyes not giving a clue to what he was thinking.

‘Right, sorry to have bothered you…’

‘Eight-thirty Monday.’

Dan’s jaw dropped as he swung back. ‘What did you say?’

One of Santiago’s dark brows lifted. ‘If you want a job, be here Monday morning at eight-thirty.’

Dan sank into the nearest chair. ‘You won’t regret this,’ he vowed.

Dan had come good on his promise. He had quickly proved his worth and, perhaps more surprisingly, a friendship had developed between the two men. A friendship that had survived Dan leaving the company and setting up on his own two years earlier.

Dan adopted an injured expression as he looked across at his Spanish distant cousin, who had put down a file he’d been reading to say something in his native tongue into a Dictaphone. Actually it could have been one of several languages; Santiago was fluent in five.

‘I must say I think you’re being pretty callous about this.’

‘If by callous you mean I will not spend a weekend amusing a fat, boring and mentally unstable woman—I’m quoting you here—so that you can have your Rebecca to yourself…I am indeed callous.’

‘Rachel, and the friend isn’t mentally unstable exactly. I think she’s just having a breakdown or something.’

‘You’re really tempting me now, but the answer is still no, Daniel.’

‘If you’d met Rachel you wouldn’t be so heartless.’

‘And is your Rachel beautiful?’

‘Very, and don’t look at me like that. This isn’t some casual affair. She’s the one; I just know she is.’ His expression grew indignant when Santiago responded to his emotional admission with a cynical smile that was only slightly less corrosive than neat nitric acid. ‘I’d have thought you’d have been more sympathetic considering…’ Dan continued falteringly.

Santiago abandoned his attempt to carry on working and pushed his thick sable hair back from his brow. ‘Considering what?’

‘Aren’t you getting married?’

‘At some point I imagine it will be necessary.’ The exquisite irony of him continuing the precious Morais family name was not lost on him.

‘You know what I mean. Aren’t you marrying that hot little singer who I keep seeing you photographed with.’

‘That hot little singer has an agent with a vivid imagination. Susie is not in love with me.’

Dan’s expression grew curious. ‘So it’s just…’

‘None of your business.’

‘Fair enough, but I still think you’re being totally unreasonable. I’m asking you to spend a weekend in a cute cottage, not donate bone marrow! Look…look,’ he said, reaching into his pocket and extracting a photo. ‘Isn’t she gorgeous? And, as for her being older, I like older women…’ he added defensively as he shoved the photo under Santiago’s nose.

With a sigh Santiago took the creased item from the younger man’s fingers and dutifully glanced at the slightly out-of-focus image of a tall blonde who looked to him like many other tall blondes.

‘Yes, she is very…’ He stopped, the colour seeping steadily from his olive-toned skin as he looked at the person half concealed by Dan’s girlfriend.

‘Are you feeling all right?’ Dan asked, thinking of Santiago’s father, who had dropped dead at fifty-five from a massive heart attack several years earlier.

Santiago hadn’t inherited his dad’s looks, generous girth or taste for copious amounts of brandy—the old man had by all accounts been a bit of a sleaze—but who knew what else he had inherited?

Like maybe a propensity to heart disease and dropping down dead!

Dan had started to try and remember if you bashed someone who stopped breathing on the chest, or gave them mouth to mouth, when Santiago’s eyes lifted. He looked bleak, but much to Dan’s relief not about to expire any time soon.

‘I’m fine, Daniel.’ Santiago wasn’t about to reveal that he’d recognized the woman in the photograph. ‘This woman here, she is the friend who will be there this weekend?’ he enquired casually as he indicated the figure in the background.

‘Yeah, that’s Lily,’ Dan admitted without enthusiasm. ‘Rachel’s had her staying at her place for the past three weeks. They go way back. I never see Rachel alone. Wherever she goes, there’s Lily. I don’t think she likes men…she definitely doesn’t like me. Must be the husband dumping her has made her all weird.’

‘Her husband left her…?’

Dan nodded. ‘Not too sure of the details, but presumably that’s what made her fall apart.’

Santiago’s eyes lifted. ‘Are they divorced?’

‘Like I said, I don’t know the details. I had a colleague lined up for this weekend to keep her out of our hair, but he got mumps, of all things!’

‘That was inconsiderate of him,’ Santiago murmured sarcastically, thinking fast and hard—something he was well equipped to do.

‘I’m not saying he did it on purpose, but, hell-fire, Santiago, I’ve been planning this weekend for weeks, ever since I bought the ring.’

‘You are going to propose?’ He watched as Dan looked self-conscious and thought, I hope she’s not a total bitch. Being Lily’s friend was not the best of recommendations.

‘Six years is a very small age gap.’

‘Insignificant,’ Santiago agreed obediently, amused that it was something as minor as an age difference that bothered his young friend. ‘This alters things,’ he mused out loud.

‘It does?’ Dan sounded cautious.

‘Being a romantic—’

‘Since when?’

‘I will come and keep this…Lily…company.’

Dan was so grateful that it took Santiago ten minutes to get rid of him.

When Dan finally left, Santiago took the photograph he had slipped surreptitiously into his pocket and laid it on the desk. Hands pressed on the polished rosewood surface, he leaned forward, his eyes trained on the barely distinguishable features of the woman in the background. A quiver of movement tightened the contours of his impossibly symmetrical features. When admirers attributed that symmetry to generations of aristocratic inbreeding, Santiago could barely repress his amusement.

Lily’s hair looked dark in the snapshot, but Santiago knew it was a medium brown, not a boring matt brown, but a fascinating intermingling of shades ranging from golden blonde to warm, rich russet.

That heart-shaped little face—thinner than he recalled—those big, kittenish blue eyes, and soft, seductive mouth didn’t look as though they belonged to a woman who had the morals of an alley cat.

She had made a fool of him.

But, as Santiago had told himself many times over the last months, he had the consolation of knowing that he had had a lucky escape. Lucky me!

He wasn’t married to this heartless little cheat—someone else was. Another man enjoyed the expertise of those soft lips. Someone else slept with his head cushioned on those soft, warm breasts at night. That man was entitled to touch pearly skin that smelt of roses and vanilla, and wake up with pale, smooth limbs wrapped around him.

Another man was listening to her lies and believing them.

Someone else, but not me.

Oddly enough, thoughts of his lucky escape did not make Santiago feel like breaking into spontaneous song.

Then he remembered Daniel’s words and realised that it was possible nobody was enjoying the carnal delights of her voluptuous body. Recalling what a sensual little thing she had been, he doubted this situation would last for long.

He looked at his hands clenched into white-knuckled fists and rotated his head to ease the tension that had crept into his shoulders and neck. He was over the woman; it was the memory of his own criminal gullibility that plagued him, that stopped him fully enjoying what life had to offer. The obvious way to restore equilibrium was to face his problem. He needed what the psychologists called closure, and what he, in the privacy of his own thoughts, called seeing Lily get what she deserved.

Now, thanks to Dan, he had the chance.

Staring out of the window, seeing none of the panoramic view over the city, he mulled over what he had learnt and wondered how it could be used to his advantage. Apparently Lily was going through a rough patch. The protective instincts that sprang into life at the thought of her vulnerability didn’t survive more than a split second before good sense reasserted itself.

He smiled grimly. Maybe it was Lily’s turn to reap some of what she had sown…? Or maybe her present breakdown was part of some elaborate scam, which, knowing her as he did, was entirely possible.

Though he had nothing to prove, it would be good to confirm what he already knew: that he was over Lily.

‘You’ve been crying.’

Lily, who had thought she was alone, jumped at the accusation and gave a surreptitious sniff before lifting her head. ‘No,’ she mumbled, pinning a determined smile on her blotchy face, ‘it’s this darned hay fever.’

Her friend sighed. ‘You don’t get hay fever, Lily,’ she retorted, dropping her designer handbag on the floor and easing one shoe off with a sigh.

Lily watched the second four-inch heel follow suit as Rachel shrank to a willowy five ten. Her cheeks began to ache as she continued to smile brightly to compensate for her blotchy appearance.

She blew her nose defiantly. ‘Well, I do now,’ she insisted.

Rachel lifted her artfully darkened brows and released a theatrical sigh, but didn’t press the point.

‘If you say so,’ she said, wincing as she rubbed first one aching foot and then the other against her slim calves. ‘Now, what shall we do tonight?’

‘I fancy an early night, actually.’

‘Early night! You’ve had early nights for the past week.’ She looked her friend up and down through narrowed eyes, mentally chucking the top Lily was wearing in the bin—no self-respecting charity shop would want it—and getting her into something, preferably low cut, in a pastel shade maybe…? A nice soft smoky blue would bring out the incredible shade of her eyes.

‘It’s definitely time you let your hair down, Lily. It’ll do us both good,’ she contended.

Lily guiltily noted for the first time the lines of fatigue around the older woman’s eyes. ‘Bad day?’

‘Sometimes I wonder why I ever became an accountant,’ she admitted.

‘The six-figure salary…?’

Rachel grinned. ‘I get that because I’m brilliant at what I do. And I won’t bother trying to explain to someone who can’t even add up with a calculator that numbers are sexy. Now, about tonight. Dan has this really sweet mate…single, solvent…admittedly he’s no Brad Pitt, but then—’

‘Beggars can’t be choosers…?’

Rachel adopted an expression of mock gravity. ‘Well, I was going to say, Who is? But now you mention it women who don’t exfoliate regularly, Lily, have to be realistic.’ She turned her frowning scrutiny on the younger woman’s fair-skinned face. ‘Actually, considering your skin-care regime consists of splashing a bit of soap and water on your face, you have the most disgustingly gorgeous skin,’ she observed enviously. ‘A bit of decent foundation would totally disguise those freckles,’ she prophesied, frowning at the bridge of Lily’s small, tip-tilted nose. ‘Still, some men like freckles. Shall I ring Dan and—’

Lily knew one man who had said he liked her freckles, though she suspected they, like everything else about her, would disgust him now.

‘No!’ Rachel’s eyebrows lifted and Lily added more moderately, ‘I appreciate what you’re trying to do, I really do, but, to be honest, a man is the last thing I need right now.’

It was easy to figure out what she didn’t need—blind dates featured pretty high on this list. What she did need was a much more difficult proposition!

‘Need and want are not always the same thing.’

‘This time they are,’ Lily insisted quietly.

Rachel looked exasperated and glanced absently at a message on her mobile phone before sliding it back into her bag. ‘What are you going to do? Take a vow of celibacy?’

Lily ignored Rachel’s question. ‘Actually, I was thinking it might be time for me to go home.’ Home…but for how much longer?

Lily deliberately pushed the subject of her uncertain future to the back of her mind.

It wasn’t easy. Her marital home was on the market, and according to the agents a couple were making interested noises, which, considering their viewing, was nothing short of a miracle.

Lily’s thoughts drifted back to the occasion three weeks earlier. Rachel had unexpectedly arrived when she had been halfway through showing the prospective purchasers around. Her friend had taken one look at her, and had calmly informed the startled pair that they would have to come back another day. She had then proceeded to escort them firmly off the property.

Rachel had then packed Lily a bag, arranged a sitter for the cat and asked a neighbour to water the plants. Lily had just sat there and watched her. She supposed her listless inertia had been a symptom of whatever Rachel had seen in her face.

The break had served its purpose, but now, despite the tears this afternoon, Lily was feeling less fragile. She no longer felt so…disconnected. She wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or not. Being grounded was painful, you had to think about things you’d prefer not to and make decisions…For months now, she realised, she’d just been drifting. She hadn’t even begun to look for somewhere to live. All she’d done was sign everything that Gordon’s solicitor had sent her.

Yes, it was definitely about time she stood on her own feet.

Rachel didn’t agree.

‘You can’t go home yet. I’ve got things planned.’

Lily, who didn’t like the sound of ‘things’ frowned suspiciously. She really wished that her friend hadn’t taken on the role of social secretary with such zeal. ‘Things…?’

Rachel acted as if she hadn’t heard. ‘God, but these shoes are murder,’ she complained, picking up the culprits, stilettos with black and pink bows.

‘Then don’t wear them.’ It seemed the obvious solution to Lily, who liked clothes but wasn’t as much of a slave to fashion as her friend.

‘Are you kidding? They make my legs look hot.’

Lily looked at the legs in question and observed honestly, ‘Your legs would look hot in wellingtons, Rachel.’ She glanced down at her own legs, currently concealed under denim. They were pretty good as legs went, but they weren’t in the same class as Rachel’s, which stopped traffic on a regular basis.

‘Yes, they would, wouldn’t they?’

Lily smiled. There was something oddly endearing about her friend’s complacent vanity.

‘But enough about my legs.’ With a little pat of one taut, tanned thigh through her short summer skirt, she turned her attention to Lily, who in turn looked wary, an expression her friend had observed always appeared when the conversation got even faintly personal.

Such tight-lipped reserve was something Rachel found hard to understand. If she had been through hell and back like Lily, she would have wanted to get it off her chest, but all her attempts to encourage Lily to let it out had failed miserably.

‘Don’t you think you’d feel a lot better if you talked about it?’

They both knew what ‘it’ was: Lily’s divorce—the ink was still wet on that—and her miscarriage earlier that year.

CHAPTER TWO

FOR a split second Lily was tempted to tell Rachel; the urge quickly passed.

Rachel didn’t know half the story and the truth was so shocking that she couldn’t predict how even her broad-minded friend would react to the unvarnished version.

Besides, the habits of a lifetime were hard to break and ‘sharing feelings’ had been encouraged during Lily’s childhood about as much as spontaneous hugging!

If she had let her feelings show, her grandmother’s impatient response had been, ‘Nobody likes a whiner, Lily.’ Lily had learnt not to whine. Her crying had always been done behind closed doors.

‘Nothing to talk about.’

‘Nobody does the stiff upper lip these days, you know, Lily. All that being reserved does is give you an ulcer.’

‘My stomach feels fine.’ Lily placed her hand against the curve of her belly and discovered with a sense of surprise that she had lost a lot of the soft, feminine roundness she had always hated.

The softness that Santiago had professed to find sexy and feminine.

She knew from experience that there were times when fighting the flashbacks did no good, that it was easier on those occasions just to go with the flow. Lily, dimly conscious of Rachel’s voice in the background, felt her eyelids grow heavy as she allowed the bitter-sweet memories to wash over her.

She had perfect, total, painful recall of the heat in his incredible eyes as he had tipped her face up to his and smiled a slow, sexy smile as he had drawn her against him, fitting his hard angles into her softer curves and murmuring throatily in her ear.

A woman should be soft and round, not hard and angular.

It was humiliating, but a full twelve months after that first scorching kiss and she still couldn’t think about it without getting palpitations.

‘Well?’

Rachel’s impatient voice acted like a lifeline back to the present. Lily grabbed it and held on. While she was fixated on the past the chances of her rebuilding her life were nil.

She dabbed her tongue to the beads of sweat along her upper lip and gave a strained smile as she rubbed her damp palms against her jeans.

‘Sorry, I…’ Am pathetic and living in the past? Can’t get it into my thick skull he never loved me? All of the above?

‘You weren’t listening. I could tell…’ Rachel considered her friend’s flushed face. ‘You look a bit…?’

‘I’m fine.’ Smile fixed, Lily pushed the intrusive images away without acknowledging them or his presence in her head.

‘What you need is a nice glass of wine,’ Rachel decided. ‘Just don’t move,’ she said, padding over to the big stainless-steel fridge in her bare feet. A moment later she returned with a bottle of Chardonnay and two glasses, which she filled.

‘A nice night in…yeah, I can live with that,’ she conceded, handing Lily her glass. She curled up comfortably on the sofa and reached for the newspaper. ‘I wonder what’s on the telly tonight?’ Turning over the pages, she suddenly stopped and lowered the broadsheet to the table. ‘Now there,’ she observed with a lascivious smile, ‘is something I wouldn’t mind finding in my Christmas stocking.’

‘I thought you were in love with your delicious Dan.’ Lily laughed, looking over her shoulder to see what hunk her friend was drooling over.

‘I’m in love, not blind. Now, there’s a man who doesn’t use a shoebox to file his returns. Look at that mouth and those eyes…’ she enthused.

‘You can tell about his filing system from his mouth?’ Lily teased.

‘No, that I can tell by the attention the financial pages give him on a regular basis. I wonder if he’s that sexy in real life?’ She slung a comical look of entreaty over her shoulder. ‘And please don’t spoil it by saying it’s just good lighting. You’re such a disgusting cynic.’

Lily went cold as she looked at the half-page photo showing an unsmiling, dark-eyed man. It was a standard moody black and white shot of an incredibly attractive man. Lily knew that the lighting couldn’t begin to do justice to just how sexy the man was in real life. It didn’t reveal the aura of raw sexuality he projected like a force field.

Aware that some sort of response was expected of her, and hyperventilating wasn’t it, Lily cleared her throat. ‘He does have something,’ she admitted, reading the headline above that pronounced MORAIS LEAVES THE OPPOSITION COUNTING THE COST AGAIN.

Me too, she thought.

‘Something!’ Rachel squealed. ‘He is off-the-scale gorgeous. That man,’ she said, poking the page with her finger, ‘not only looks like he could be quite deliciously bad in bed—’

Never again will I mock Rachel’s instinct, Lily decided. Of course, Rachel’s instinct only told part of the story—as well as being deliciously bad he could also be breathtakingly tender and passionately unrestrained. Lily pressed her hands to her stomach as the muscles deep inside tightened.

‘He’s also a genuine financial genius. His name is Santiago Morais.’ Rachel’s smooth brow furrowed. ‘He’s Italian or—’

‘Spanish,’ Lily inserted in a flat little voice. ‘He’s Spanish.’ And I am so over him, she thought, pressing her hand against her sternum to ease the tight feeling in her chest.

‘Yeah, you’re right. Since when did you start reading the financial pages, Lily?’

‘He makes the gossip columns too,’ she said, struggling to keep the bitterness from her voice as an image of the pop star Susie Sebastian, her pouting lips aimed like heat-seeking missiles at a willing male mouth, flashed into her mind.

‘That figures. You know, I think I’ll spend my next holiday in Spain. You never know, I might bump into Mr Gorgeous. He would carry me off to bed and make mad, passionate love to me.’