The Secret He Must Claim

An illicit encounter with the Spaniard...

Heiress Elin Saunderson is instantly seduced by mysterious stranger Cortez. But after their sinful night together she’s left alone...and pregnant! A year later, she learns that Cortez is the rightful successor to her adoptive father’s fortune, and penniless Elin finds herself at risk of losing everything—including her son!

Cortez Ramos is set on claiming the secret Elin kept from him—but Elin proves as protective a mother as she is a torturous temptation. His solution: demand a marriage of convenience, which will legitimize his heir and return Elin to his bed!

‘Ralph stated in his will that he wished for you to marry and provide your son with a father. Are you in contact with your child’s father, and do you intend to marry him in order to claim your inheritance?’

Cortez did not know why he had asked her when he really wasn’t interested in Elin’s private life. But he stared at her because he couldn’t help himself, and waited tensely for her answer.

He realised he was bracing himself for her to reply, but when she did he was unprepared for the shock wave that ripped through him.

‘You are my son’s father,’ she said, in the soft voice that had haunted him for the past year.

The Saunderson Legacy

Jarek and Elin Saunderson had nothing until they were adopted into the high society of the Saunderson family.

Now, following the death of the parents they adored, they soon discover a maze of secrets which threaten to destroy their legacy—and lead them each to uncover unforeseen passions…

Find out more in…

The Secret He Must Claim

A shocking revelation in her adoptive father’s will forces Elin into a marriage of convenience with the father of her secret baby!

The Throne He Must Take

Playboy Jarek needs help to uncover the secrets of the past—if he can only resist the temptation in front of him…Dr Holly Maitland!

The Secret He Must Claim

Chantelle Shaw

www.millsandboon.co.uk

CHANTELLE SHAW lives on the Kent coast and thinks up her stories while walking on the beach. She has been married for over thirty years and has six children. Her love affair with reading and writing Mills & Boon stories began as a teenager, and her first book was published in 2006. She likes strong-willed, slightly unusual characters. Chantelle also loves gardening, walking and wine!

Books by Chantelle Shaw

Mills & Boon Modern Romance

Acquired by Her Greek Boss

To Wear His Ring Again

A Night in the Prince’s Bed

Captive in His Castle

At Dante’s Service

The Greek’s Acquisition

Behind the Castello Doors

A Dangerous Infatuation

Wedlocked!

Trapped by Vialli’s Vows

Bought by the Brazilian

Mistress of His Revenge

Master of Her Innocence

The Howard Sisters

Sheikh’s Forbidden Conquest

A Bride Worth Millions

The Bond of Brothers

His Unexpected Legacy

Secrets of a Powerful Man

Visit the Author Profile page

at millsandboon.co.uk for more titles.

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For Arpita, who loves reading romance books as much as I enjoy writing them.

Thank you for being such a dedicated fan.

With love, Chantelle.

Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

Introduction

The Saunderson Legacy

Title Page

About the Author

Dedication

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Extract

Copyright

CHAPTER ONE

THE ROOM WAS SPINNING. Bright lights flashed in front of her eyes, forming colourful patterns as if she were looking through the lens of a kaleidoscope. Elin blinked and found she was staring up at the chandelier in the drawing room. She had never noticed before how the crystal prisms sparkled like diamonds.

‘Can I get you another drink?’ A voice sounded over the pounding beat of rock music. She felt disorientated and strangely disembodied, as if she were floating and looking down at herself. She tried to focus on the guy who had spoken to her, and vaguely recognised he was one of Virginia’s friends who had been at the nightclub earlier in the evening. Elin didn’t know half the people who had come back to her family’s London residence in Kensington to continue her birthday celebrations.

‘You can’t be on your own tonight,’ Virginia had insisted when the nightclub where they’d planned to spend the evening had closed early. ‘You’ll only feel miserable, remembering your mother. I’ll put the word around that the party is carrying on back at your place.’

Elin hadn’t argued because Virginia was right; she couldn’t bear to be alone with the memories of her adoptive mother’s shocking death six months ago. She’d told Ralph she was spending her birthday with friends in Scotland, but freezing fog had caused travel disruption at Gatwick and her flight had been cancelled. The person she most wanted to spend her birthday with was her brother, but Jarek was in Japan on business for Saunderson’s Bank. His trip was unavoidable he’d said, but Elin had a feeling that Jarek was avoiding her because he blamed himself for Mama’s death.

‘Elin?’

She jerked her mind back to the guy—Tom, she thought he’d said was his name. He was standing too close and looking at her in a way that made her wish she hadn’t worn the daringly low-cut dress Virginia had persuaded her to buy. The dress was little more than a wisp of scarlet silk and chiffon and the shoestring shoulder straps meant she couldn’t wear a bra.

Tom plucked her empty glass out of her hand. ‘Do you want the same again?’

‘I’d better not. I think I’ve had too much to drink.’ This strange feeling must be because she was drunk. It was odd because usually alcohol made her sleepy but she felt wildly energetic and euphoric. The exhausting grief of the past months seemed distant, as if she were detached from her emotions. Maybe the answer was to drink herself into oblivion, the way her brother had done too often lately, Elin thought bleakly. For a split second, misery ripped through her. But she couldn’t cope with it tonight. She was desperate to forget for a few hours the image of her mother collapsed on the floor and lying so still. Too still.

‘What was in the last cocktail you made me?’ she asked Tom. ‘It tasted different from a usual Manhattan.’

He gave her an odd look. ‘I might have added a dash too much Angostura bitters.’ He slid his arm around her waist and Elin repressed a shudder when she felt his hot breath on her cheek. He was good-looking and she guessed a lot of women would find him attractive, but there was something about him that repelled her and she stiffened when he murmured, ‘Let’s go somewhere where we can be alone, baby.’

‘Actually, I would like another drink,’ she said quickly. ‘I’m really thirsty.’ It wasn’t a lie. She had a raging thirst, and for some reason her heart was beating unnaturally fast. She watched Tom push his way across the crowded room to the sideboard which was being used as a drinks bar and hurried away before he returned.

In the lounge, someone had rolled up the Wilton rug so that people could dance. The music was even louder in here and the heavy bass throbbed through Elin’s body. Someone grabbed her hand and started dancing with her. The pounding beat was irresistible and she shook back her long hair and danced like she’d never danced before, wild and abandoned. Laughter bubbled up inside her. It was a long time since she’d laughed and it felt good.

Many times in the past months she’d tagged along to nightclubs with her brother so she could try to stop him drinking too much. She’d learned that the best way to distract the paparazzi’s attention away from Jarek was to grab the limelight herself, and so she’d thrown herself into partying and made sure it was her the press photographed falling out of a club in the early hours rather than her brother.

The tabloids had dubbed her an It Girl and said she was a spoiled socialite. She had been accused by some of the media of bringing shame to Lord Saunderson and to the memory of his wife.

What a way to repay the philanthropic couple who adopted Elin from an orphanage in war-torn Bosnia when she was four years old and gave her and her older brother a privileged upbringing!

That was what one journalist had written. Elin didn’t care what the tabloids said about her as long as Jarek’s name stayed out of the headlines and he did not earn even more of Ralph’s disapproval.

But tonight she wasn’t pretending to be having fun. Tonight she felt super-confident and carefree and if it was because she’d had too much alcohol, so what? It was her twenty-fifth birthday and she could do what she liked on her birthday. And so she carried on dancing and laughing because she was scared that if she stopped she would plunge back into that dark place of heartache and grief that had consumed her for six long months.

She had no shortage of dance partners. Men crowded around her and she flirted with them because for this one night she was a siren wearing a sexy red dress. At midnight Virginia brought out a cake covered with candles. ‘Don’t forget to make a wish,’ she reminded Elin.

A birthday wish was supposed to come true if you blew out all your candles with one breath. But a million wishes could not bring Mama back. Elin looked around at the party guests. Some were friends she’d known since her childhood after her adoptive parents had brought her to England. Others she’d never met before, but she guessed they belonged to Virginia’s wide circle of friends. Everyone was waiting for her to blow out her candles but she didn’t know what to wish for.

And then she saw him.

He was standing apart from the crowd. A lone wolf. The thought came into Elin’s mind and was immediately followed by the certainty that he was a dangerous predator. She stared across the room at him...and time simply stopped. The music and voices disappeared and there was nothing but him. The most beautiful man she had ever seen.

Taller than everyone else in the room and darkly handsome, there was something Byronic and brooding about him that made her think of Heathcliff from Emily Brontë’s classic novel Wuthering Heights. On one level her brain registered surprise that she hadn’t noticed him all evening until now, but her rational thought process was overtaken by a more primitive reaction to his raw maleness.

He was dressed in black jeans and a fine-knit black sweater that clung to his broad chest. Over it he wore a brown leather jacket which was scuffed in several places and furthered the impression that he lived life on his terms and didn’t give a damn what others thought of him. His black hair was thick and tousled, as if he had a habit of raking his fingers through it, and the black stubble on his jaw and above his top lip added to his smouldering sex appeal.

Something visceral knotted in the pit of Elin’s stomach. So this was what desire felt like. This fire in her blood. Her breasts felt heavy and there was a dragging ache between her legs. She wasn’t a freak, as she’d assumed when her friends had talked about their love lives and she’d had nothing to say.

‘Maybe you’re gay, but you can’t face up to the truth about your sexuality,’ Virginia had suggested when Elin had admitted that she was still a virgin.

‘The truth is I’m not interested in having sex with anyone. I’ve dated a few guys but I’ve never wanted to take things further.’ Elin suspected that a psychologist might blame the traumatic first four years of her life spent at an orphanage in the middle of a war zone for her trust issues. Or maybe she was frigid, as one ex-boyfriend had told her when he’d failed to persuade her to sleep with him.

Her friend had refused to write her off. ‘I reckon you just haven’t met the right man yet. One day you’ll meet a guy who will flick your switch.’

Was this what Virginia had meant? As Elin stared at this modern-day Heathcliff she felt light and heat and energy explode inside her and suddenly she knew what to wish for when she blew out the candles on her cake.

Someone turned up the volume on the stereo and music pounded in the room, echoing the pounding of Elin’s blood in her veins as the crowd around her dispersed and she discovered the man was watching her. He was leaning against the mantelpiece, one foot casually crossed over his other ankle. He gave the appearance of being relaxed but his stillness reminded Elin of a jungle cat preparing to pounce. He did not move his gaze from her when she walked towards him, and it was as if he had taken control of her mind and she could not turn away from him even if she’d wanted to.

His eyes were the colour of sable flecked with gold, she discovered when she halted in front of him. Set beneath heavy black brows that drew together in a faint frown when she smiled at him.

‘You’re supposed to wish me a happy birthday.’ She did not recognise the teasing, flirtatious voice as hers, but then she didn’t recognise anything about herself tonight, especially the heat that blazed inside her and made her yearn for something she could not even explain.

Something flickered in his dark eyes but his stern mouth did not soften. ‘Happy birthday, Blondie.’

‘That’s not my name.’ She hated the nickname the tabloids had given her, with its implication that because she was pretty and blonde she must also be a brainless bimbo. ‘My name is Elin.’

‘I know.’

She tilted her head and studied him. The dimmed lighting in the room cast shadows over the hard angles and planes of his face and emphasised his austere beauty, making Elin long to explore the chiselled perfection of his jaw with her fingertips. As for his mouth... Her heart thudded as she imagined his sensual mouth covering hers. The knot in her belly tightened and every nerve-ending in her body felt fiercely alive.

‘How do you know my name?’ She was certain they’d never met before. Dear God, she would have remembered him.

She wondered if she’d imagined that he hesitated infinitesimally before he shrugged his wide shoulders. ‘I’m here at your birthday party and of course I know your name. There can’t be many people who haven’t heard of Elin Saunderson. Photographs of you falling out of nightclubs are a regular feature in the British popular press.’

Inexplicably she felt hurt by his cynicism, and she was tempted to explain that she’d deliberately courted scandal to turn the media’s attention away from her brother. But it would mean betraying Jarek and she would never do that, especially to a stranger. Even if he was the most gorgeous man she’d ever set eyes on. Her gaze locked with his and she saw his gold-flecked eyes blaze with a heat that burned her.

Every one of her heightened senses quivered with the realisation that he desired her. He might not want to want her, but he had no more control over the electricity that crackled between them than she did. He clearly believed she was the goodtime girl portrayed by the press so why shouldn’t she live up to her reputation for one night? Elin asked herself.

Some part of her recognised that this wild, reckless feeling wasn’t her. She shouldn’t want a complete stranger to cover her mouth with his and kiss her with the savage passion that she sensed he was capable of. She shouldn’t want him, but she did.

‘It would be good manners to introduce yourself.’

His mouth quirked then, not exactly a smile but it was enough to send scalding heat flooding through her. ‘There’s nothing good about me,’ he warned her in his deep, dark voice with a faint undercurrent of a Mediterranean accent. Once again he hesitated before he drawled, ‘My name is Cortez.’

‘You’re Spanish?’ His dark olive complexion and that raven-black hair indicated that he spent a lot of time in the hot sun. His name—Cor-tez... She silently repeated it the way he had pronounced it, emphasising the second syllable. It reminded her of a history book she’d read about the Spanish conquistadors who had invaded the Aztec and Inca civilisations in the sixteenth century. The conquistadors were reputed to have been utterly ruthless and she would be happy to bet that he was a descendent of those infamous adventurers.

‘Half-Spanish,’ he said after another pause, as if he had been about to say something else but had changed his mind.

She deliberately trailed her eyes over his chest and continued lower, down to his flat abdomen and lean hips, hugged by his black jeans. ‘Which half?’ she asked innocently.

He looked startled for a few seconds and then laughed. The sound was warm and golden, like liquid honey, Elin thought. ‘You are wicked,’ he told her. The bright flecks in his eyes gleamed and something almost feral flickered across his hard features. ‘And very, very beautiful.’

He stretched out his hand and wound a lock of her pale gold hair around his fingers. Elin could feel the frantic thud of her heart, and her breath caught in her throat. He must have heard the faint sound, and although he did not appear to move she sensed a sudden tension in him, as if he truly was a predator stalking its prey. He exuded danger and she should run for the hills, but the reckless feeling that had swept over her tonight made her ignore the voice of caution in her head.

The heavy bass music pounding in the room stirred her blood with its sensual rhythm. ‘Will you dance with me? You can’t refuse,’ she said when his eyes narrowed, ‘because it’s my birthday and I can have whatever I want on my birthday.’

He did not laugh now and the liquid honey in his voice was replaced by a harsh tone that sounded like rusty metal dragged across gravel. ‘What do you want, Elin?’

‘You,’ she heard herself say in a husky voice she did not recognise as her own. Once again she felt a peculiar sensation that she was floating outside her body and none of this was real. Perhaps it wasn’t, perhaps it was a dream, but it was a much better dream than her usual nightmare about her mother’s death.

Cortez swore softly. The gold flecks in his eyes glittered and he seemed to be waging an internal battle with himself before he shrugged. ‘So be it then,’ he muttered as he moved towards her. He put his hands on her waist and pulled her against him so that they were hip to hip.

The effect on Elin was electrifying. The brush of his thighs against hers as they moved with the beat of the music turned the heat inside her into an inferno. Cortez danced with a fluid grace that was entirely sensual, and she gasped when he slid one hand down to the small of her back and exerted pressure to bring her pelvis into closer contact with his.

Her senses went into meltdown as he clamped her against his whipcord body. He smelled divine, a mixture of spicy cologne and the dry heat of his body that had its own unique scent. She wanted to press her face into his neck and breathe in the essence of him, lick his olive skin and taste him. Her hands were lying flat on his chest and she felt his heartbeat accelerate beneath her fingertips. Startled, she tilted her head to look at his face, and saw a stark hunger in his eyes that made her tremble.

She’d never felt like this before and she’d certainly never behaved so impetuously. She felt crazily out of control. For the first time in six months she felt alive instead of numb. Life, she’d learned, could be taken away in an instant, in the release of a trigger and a bullet fired from a gun.

She wanted to grab hold of life with both hands, and more than anything she wanted to be even closer to this dangerously beautiful man who made her feel like no other man ever had. And so she slid her hands up to his shoulders and stretched herself up against him, pressing her breasts with their pebble-hard nipples into his chest. She heard him mutter something in Spanish as he sank his hand into her hair and lowered his face towards hers. His mouth was tantalisingly close and with a low moan she closed the tiny gap between them and pressed her lips to his.

The world exploded in a firestorm of heat and colour. Cortez hesitated for a fraction of a second but then a shudder went through him and he took control of the kiss and plundered her mouth like a conquistador claiming the spoils of his conquest. It was hotter and wilder than anything Elin had ever experienced before. She felt consumed by his kiss, by him as he moved his hand to cup her jaw and angled her mouth to his satisfaction before he pushed his tongue between her lips and tasted her.

The kiss went on and on, becoming deeper and ever more erotic, a ravishment of her senses, and Elin hoped it would never end. When Cortez eventually tore his mouth from hers to allow them to snatch air into their starved lungs, he stared at her as if he was trying to figure her out.

‘This is madness,’ he grated. ‘I should tell you...’ He broke off when one of the other guests who was dancing wildly stumbled into them. ‘Dios!’ Cortez tightened his arms around Elin and his protective gesture made her melt even more. ‘Is there somewhere we can go to talk?’

Over Cortez’s shoulder, Elin saw Tom, the guy who had been plying her with drinks earlier, walk into the room. Keen to avoid him, she led Cortez through a different door to the narrow hallway and staircase at the back of the house, which had once been used by servants. Even here there were people sitting on the stairs playing a raucous drinking game, and so she continued up to the second floor and along the corridor to her bedroom.

‘We won’t be disturbed in here,’ she told him as she ushered him inside and closed the door. After the loud music downstairs the room was quiet, with just the distant thud of heavy bass audible through the floorboards. On some level Elin knew she must be crazy to have invited a stranger into her bedroom. Except that he wasn’t a complete stranger, she reassured herself. She knew his name and she assumed Virginia knew him. Why else would he have come to the party unless her friend had invited him?

Even so, a tiny, sane part of her realised she was acting a little bit crazy tonight. She couldn’t explain the buzz of exhilaration that felt as if she were riding on a big dipper at a theme park, but she didn’t want the feeling to end. She stared at Cortez and thought how unbelievably gorgeous he was. No wonder Virginia had kept quiet about him. But he had kissed her.

In the mirror she could see her mouth was swollen from when he had crushed her lips beneath his. She hardly recognised herself in a sexy scarlet dress, with her hair dishevelled and her mouth reddened...and inviting. She looked back at Cortez and watched his eyes narrow as she moistened her lips with the tip of her tongue.