The Spaniard's Surprise Love-Child / A Bride Fit For A Prince?

KIM LAWRENCE lives on a farm in Anglesey with her university lecturer husband, assorted pets who arrived as strays and never left, and sometimes one or both of her boomerang sons. When she’s not writing she loves to be outdoors gardening, or walking on one of the beaches for which the island is famous—along with being the place where Prince William and Catherine made their first home!

SUSAN STEPHENS was a professional singer before meeting her husband on the Mediterranean island of Malta. In true Mills & Boon style, they met on Monday, became engaged on Friday and married three months later. Susan enjoys entertaining, travel and going to the theatre. To relax she reads, cooks and plays the piano, and when she’s had enough of relaxing she throws herself off mountains on skis or gallops through the countryside singing loudly.

Also by Kim Lawrence

One Night with Morelli

Her Nine Month Confession

One Night to Wedding Vows

Surrendering to the Italian’s Command

A Ring to Secure His Crown

The Greek’s Ultimate Conquest

A Cinderella for the Desert King

A Wedding at the Italian’s Demand

A Passionate Night with the Greek

Also by Susan Stephens

A Diamond for Del Rio’s Housekeeper

The Sicilian’s Defiant Virgin

The Secret Kept from the Greek

A Night of Royal Consequences

The Sheikh’s Shock Child

Pregnant by the Desert King

The Greek’s Virgin Temptation

Snowbound with His Forbidden Innocent

Passion in Paradise collection

A Scandalous Midnight in Madrid

Discover more at millsandboon.co.uk.

The Spaniard’s Surprise Love-Child & A Bride Fit for a Prince?

Kim Lawrence and Susan Stephens

www.millsandboon.co.uk

ISBN: 978-0-008-90018-2

THE SPANIARD’S SURPRISE LOVE-CHILD & A BRIDE FIT FOR A PRINCE?

The Spaniard’s Surprise Love-Child © 2020 Kim Lawrence A Bride Fit for a Prince? © 2020 Susan Stephens

Published in Great Britain 2020

by Mills & Boon, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street, London, SE1 9GF

All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. This edition is published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, locations and incidents are purely fictional and bear no relationship to any real life individuals, living or dead, or to any actual places, business establishments, locations, events or incidents. Any resemblance is entirely coincidental.

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Table of Contents

Cover

About the Authors

Booklist

Title Page

Copyright

Note to Readers

The Spaniard’s Surprise Love-Child

Back Cover Text

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

A Bride Fit for a Prince?

Back Cover Text

Dedication

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

About the Publisher

The Spaniard’s Surprise Love-Child

Kim Lawrence

“The child…she is mine.”

A revelation under the Spanish sun!

Softhearted Gwen had always dreamed of the day tycoon Rio would discover their child. Yet the reality is astounding! Because when the brooding Spaniard sweeps back into her life, he demands their daughter—and her!

Rio will not walk away from his daughter. Even if he has to defy his number one rule, honed after years of bitter experience, and let Gwen into his billion-dollar world. Yet a place in his bed is all Rio can offer—no matter how much Gwen tempts him to offer more…

CHAPTER ONE

THE CLASSICAL MUSIC playing through the sound system—gifted by a famous old girl after her first platinum album—was almost drowned out by the combined din of young voices, the shuffle of feet and the scraping of chairs on the ancient wood floor as uniformed pupils filed into the school auditorium.

Though several of her colleagues were frowning at the noise levels, Gwen barely noticed the racket that echoed off the high rafters of the school’s Tudor hall. Her thoughts were wandering, though not far. The crèche—which had been the deal clincher when she was offered the job at Mere Grange—was not five hundred yards from where she was sitting beside the rest of the staff on the stage.

Despite a disturbed night that had made Gwen fear the worst, Ellie had seemed fine this morning. True, she had been a bit clingy when Gwen had dropped her off in the crèche earlier but her temperature had been normal. Gwen had checked it twice, but still the vague anxiety lingered. Was it maternal instincts or just guilt?

The former she’d always assumed to be an urban myth but she was now certain really did exist, and the latter, though she knew it was irrational, she had come to appreciate as a fact of life. Was it just her or perhaps single mums or maybe all mums? She couldn’t be the only mum who felt that guilty tug every time she left her child in the crèche. For some reason even knowing that Ellie was well cared for and happy there didn’t lessen the feeling.

‘She’ll be fine. Stop fretting.’

Ellie turned to her friend Cassie, the head of English, with a rueful smile. ‘How did you know I was worrying about Ellie?’

‘Love, you’re always worrying about Ellie. You make parenting look easy but it must be tough doing it all alone.’

Gwen brought her lashes down in a protective sweep that shadowed her blue eyes. She had opened up more to Cassie than anyone else, but the other woman still only knew the bare minimum—just that Ellie’s father was not English and he was not in the picture.

Her slender shoulders lifted in a shrug as she pushed away the image of Ellie’s father that had slipped through the mental barriers she had erected, though, as she thought of him every single time she looked into her daughter’s beautiful eyes, it hardly seemed worth the effort.

Before she could be drawn into an internal debate on her past mistakes and awful taste in men—or at least one man—a shout emanating from just below the stage made her turn her head.

The same noise had caught Cassie’s attention.

‘I’ll have to go and help,’ Gwen said after a moment. Her classroom assistant, Ruth, was struggling to contain the energy and boredom of a class of twenty five-year-olds who, thanks to someone who hadn’t considered their lack of attention span, had been seated first in the auditorium.

‘Good luck,’ Cassie breathed, tacking on a low-voiced warning. ‘The head will notice you’re not sitting here with the rest of us and he won’t be pleased. He said “all staff”,’ she quoted, adopting the man’s distinctive clipped delivery.

‘I doubt if one less bowed head is going to stop Lady Moneybags donating the money for the library extension. Anyway, he’d notice a lot more if one of my lot escapes—now that would make a bad headline.’

Gwen reached the front row just in time to cut off an adventurous member of her class before he slipped through a fire exit.

‘This way, Max,’ she said, touching the top of his curly red hair before she firmly took his hand and led him back to his seat. ‘Oh, you’re sitting next to William…not such a good idea.’ A fact that Gwen had learnt the hard way, and in class she now had them sitting on opposite sides of the classroom. ‘Move over, Sophie. Max can sit next to you. Excellent, now don’t move,’ she admonished, before moving down the row to where Ruth was sitting. ‘You almost lost one there.’

‘Sorry, Miss Meredith,’ Ruth said, smiling her gratitude.

Gwen smiled back, though it never made her feel anything but ancient to be called Miss by the young woman who was actually a year older than her. The prestigious fee-paying school was very keen on defined roles and did not encourage use of Christian names in the professional setting or, for that matter, romantic relationships between staff, although blind eyes were turned so long as people were discreet.

Gwen wasn’t interested in being discreet; she was simply not interested at all. In the odd quiet moment she wondered if her libido was dead, but not for long. Those moments were rare and the rest of the ninety-nine per cent of the time she was too exhausted to even think about it.

Even had she trusted her own judgment with men after her experience with Ellie’s father, romance was a pretty low priority for her these days. Now sleep, and maybe finding a few more hours in a day to sit down and read a book or do her nails—these were the things she lusted after. Gwen had well and truly left physical lust behind and she didn’t miss it one bit.

‘No harm done, Ruth.’

‘Max is pulling faces at me, Miss,’ Sophie complained.

‘Max!’

Gwen’s glance moved over the red head of the culprit, who was now looking angelically innocent as she scanned the faces of her charges occupying the first two rows, waiting until she had their attention before she widened her eyes and raised a finger to her lips. The result was nothing approaching calm, but the imminent possibility of someone swinging from a chandelier or making an escape bid receded.

‘It’s a miracle!’ she heard Ruth breathe. ‘How do you do it?’

Gwen rewarded her charges with a nod of approval and, more importantly, promised them a nature walk because they were being so good. She usually found the carrot a lot more effective than the stick. But before she could make her way back to the stage, the sudden lowering of the hum of youthful voices in the room indicated that she was too late to slip unobtrusively back to her seat, so instead she sat down on the bench next to Ruth as the head walked on the stage with their VIP guest speaker.

The head had a voice that filled the auditorium without effort and silence immediately fell. Barely listening to the introduction, Gwen kept her attention on her pupils, while hoping the guest speaker didn’t turn out to be as fond of the sound of their own voice as the head. A five-year-old’s attention span was limited, especially when they were bored, but hopefully they would fall asleep rather than run amok.

‘And now I give you Mr Bardales.’

Bardales… No, surely it was the Cavendish Prize that was being given by the benefactor that the new science block was named after? Bardales was a very different name with very different connotations for Gwen.

On the surface nothing changed. Outside she was a serene swan, with only the fluttering of the long curling lashes that framed her sapphire-blue eyes and the faintest quiver of the fine muscles beneath the skin around her wide mouth betraying that under the surface she was frantically duck paddling to stay afloat, a heartbeat away from…who knew? Total panic? She’d never gone there and she never intended to—it was all a matter of control.

Breathe, Gwen, she told herself. The breath left her parted lips in a slow, uneven, near-silent hiss as, like someone who had jumped in the deep end of the pool by accident, she kicked for the surface, leaving panic behind.

She brushed her forearms hard with her hands, rubbing the rash of goosebumps that had broken out over her skin. She despised her stupid overreaction, the first in a while. It had to have been a couple of months ago the last time she had experienced the dry-throated, heart-racing sensation of stepping off a cliff in the pit of her stomach. On that occasion it had been triggered when she’d seen a dark head standing out from the crowd in the middle of the busy shopping centre, but a moment later she had realised there was no definitive arrogant angle to his jaw, no big-cat fluidity to his stride. The sensation hadn’t lasted longer than a moment before her common sense reasserted itself and was followed by the sigh of relief that left her feeling foolish and annoyed with herself for allowing her overactive imagination to take control, even for a second.

The annoyance with herself was already kicking in hard as she tipped her head back to see the cause of her flashback. She had to tip it back some more as the guest was tall, the cut of his dark suit not disguising the power of his lean muscle-packed frame.

No, it hadn’t been a flashback; this was a flashback! And pulling free of it was not an option. Nearly three years suddenly slipped away and she was back in New York.

The bar was as cool and sophisticated as its clientele and Gwen, sitting perched on a tall stool, fitted right in; she was cool, she was sleek and she belonged…or at least she looked as though she did and that was what counted, she’d discovered. She imagined there would be a time when it didn’t feel as though she were playing a part. It would come; she’d only been in New York three months and she knew it couldn’t happen overnight. She focused instead on the positives, the most positive aspect being that her five-year plan was already off to a flying start.

The first month at work she’d been finding her feet, so anxious to make a good impression that she had been unable to hide it. She did what she’d done all through university, when she had known that if her plan was to succeed she needed a good degree—some people could party and still get good results, but Gwen knew she couldn’t do that; she had to focus solely on work. So she kept her head down, sacrificing a social life to achieve what she needed. It had taken her a few weeks before she’d realised that the same method was not going to work here. Simply putting in extra hours at the office was not enough; you needed to network outside office hours too.

The first time she had accepted an invite she had stood out like a sore thumb in her office gear, but now she’d become something of an expert at making a seamless transition from day to evening and had it down to an impressive five minutes in the ladies’ room to make the necessary adjustments.

Like anything in life, it was about organisation: first make-up refreshed, lips highlighted for the evening by a bold red lipstick, then her hair, released from the sleek ponytail secured at the nape of her neck; one quick shake and it fell in glossy waves down her narrow back. All achieved while she was exchanging the discreet studs in her ears for a pair of art deco jet chandelier drops.

The tailored jacket that had seen her through the day’s meetings was removed and the stark simplicity of the little black dress it had covered was jazzed up with an oversized art deco pendant tonight. The jacket, neatly folded, was inside her capacious designer bag along with the moderate heels she had swapped for a pair of spiky ankle boots; that part took two minutes, tops.

It was amazing what you could do when you were organised and Gwen was incredibly focused. That was how she had made it this far. She didn’t allow herself to be distracted; she knew what she wanted and then figured out the quickest way to achieve her goal. People had quickly started to notice. She’d overheard a conversation in the ladies’ room once, and she had wondered, curiously, who this ruthless person was that they were discussing.

Then she’d found out it was her.

‘You’re just jealous, Trish, that Gwen has got the face and body to sleep her way to the top,’ had been one of the cruel comments she’d overheard.

Crossing one slim, shapely ankle over the other, she turned her head and laughed because everyone else was. The anger she had felt that day in the Ladies was spent now, but the memory still had the power to make the tension climb into her shoulders. She put her hand on the back of her neck and rotated her head from side to side to ease it.

In one aspect they had been right—she was determined to succeed—but the totally unfair implication that she ever would demean herself by sleeping her way to the top… It had hurt and made her want to rush out and challenge the women cattily bitching about her, but just as well the tears streaming down her face had made her reject this impulse, because it was far better to make them eat their words by simply being better than them, and proving herself.

Blurting out that actually she was a virgin would not have improved the situation; it was almost easier all round to be considered an ambitious slut with no morals.

‘You look fierce!’ Louise, who had been the new girl in the corporate finance department before Gwen had arrived, looked at her with raised eyebrows. ‘Do you want another drink?’

Gwen shook her head and smiled as she held her hand over her full glass. She turned and caught sight of herself in the mirror that lined the wall behind the bar. Her loose hair had a mirror gloss, but the cost, which had initially seemed enormous, of having her thick chestnut waves tamed by the hand of someone who was a superstar in the world of hairdressing had proved to be a good investment, she decided, taking a sip of her wine. She intended to make it last all evening—the buzz of being here in this city was all the stimulation she needed.

Gwen leaned in to catch what the woman beside Louise was saying.

‘Your Scots accent is just so cute, everyone thinks so.’

When they’re not thinking I’m sleeping my way to the top, Gwen thought, hiding her flash of bitterness behind a smile. As she had to virtually yell to make herself heard above the competing conversations, Gwen decided it required less effort to smile and nod rather than correct the woman’s mistake over her nationality, even though it felt as though she was betraying her Welsh roots.

Not that anyone back home would have recognised her—the once awkward, intense swot with the glasses—in this place, she thought wryly, leaning in again to catch what Louise was saying.

‘Don’t look now but he hasn’t taken his eyes off you since he came in.’ Louise’s eyes widened as she tipped her head towards the smoky glass wall that screened the bar from the street. ‘I said don’t look!’

‘I wasn’t going to.’ Gwen was not averse to the idea of romance, at the right time, but it wasn’t scheduled at this point in her life. Right now it came under the heading of a distraction she didn’t need. Still it was always good if someone appreciated the effort she had made with her appearance.

Louise took a sip of her cocktail and sighed, leaning sideways to look over Gwen’s shoulder. ‘He really is totally…oh, my God!’ she yelped, before hissing, ‘He’s coming over, don’t panic.’

Gwen heard his voice before she saw him, deep, with a light gravel underlying the velvet and an intriguing hint of an accent. It made the half-smile she was wearing in response to her friend’s antics quiver and fade as for some inexplicable reason a deep shiver that made her toes curl passed through her body.

It was that same voice that dragged Gwen away now from the New York bar and the exact moment when her five-year plan—My God, was I really that arrogant, or was I just incredibly young and naive?—had started falling apart. She was back to sitting in the school’s assembly hall where for some inexplicable reason Rio Bardales, billionaire heir to the Bardales empire, was holding his audience in the palm of his strong brown elegant hand. Gwen had a sudden unwelcome image of that hand, those tapering fingers sliding over pale skin…her skin… She gulped and blinked to clear the unwanted images dancing in her head.

Everyone was clapping, except Gwen. She couldn’t have, even if she had wanted to. What she actually wanted, what every cell in her body was screaming at her to do, was to run as far away as she could.

Her head turned fractionally from side to side in mute denial—this cannot be happening!

‘He looks like a film star.’ Ruth’s awed whisper brought the past back with a rush she had no defence against. She remembered thinking exactly the same thing that night in the stylish New York bar where they’d met. He’d been wearing a suit then too but it had looked as though he might have slept in it, yet he’d still looked absolutely gorgeous—how could he not? Even if you discounted his physical attributes—several inches over six feet tall; long-limbed without being in any way lanky; lean and muscular with broad shoulders and a natural athletic elegance—Rio’s strong-boned symmetrical features were arresting enough to be a conversation-stopper. His eyes, dark and almond-shaped, were almost black, framed by dense long lashes and set beneath strongly defined flyaway brows, his carved cheekbones sharp enough to cut, and his square chin had the hint of a cleft, but it was his beautifully cut, overtly sensual mouth that did the most damage to her nervous system.