‘Say what you have to say, Luis…’
‘I said not here! I do not want the whole world knowing my business.’
He couldn’t just blurt this out cold, here in the street. If he did, he was sure she would just laugh in his face and walk away.
‘My car is parked just here. We will go back to your house.’
‘We will do no such thing!’
Each minute she spent with him was only making things so much worse. Making it harder to let him go a second time. After those long, lonely years without him, just the sight of him was like a banquet to someone dying of starvation. She couldn’t look at him enough, couldn’t take enough of him in to appease her hungry senses.
And if she ever let him into her home, then it would be much worse. She would never be able to forget that he had been there; never erase the shadow of his presence from her flat.
‘Isabella…’
The low growl was a warning not to try his patience further.
‘It is late and I have no wish to make a public spectacle of myself by discussing what should be a very private matter between a husband and wife in the street like this. You will get into my car and I will drive you to your house—’
‘I will…you will,’ Isabelle tossed in, imitating the autocratic tone of his command with bitter satire. ‘Whatever happened to please and thank you, Luis? Or does your lordship not use such courtesies with the peasants?’
His breath hissed in between his teeth, warning her that he was very close to losing his grip on his barely reined-in temper.
‘Please,’ he said with a sarcasm that matched her own. ‘Isabelle, I just want to talk.’
‘But it’s what you want to talk about that worries me. You’ll have to tell me more than that, Luis, or I’m not going anywhere with you.’
‘Muy bien!’
His hands flew up in a gesture that was a perfect blend of exasperation and resignation.
‘All right! We will do it your way if that’s what you prefer! The reason I am here, Isabella, is because…’
‘Because you want to end our marriage,’ Isabelle supplied unhappily when he paused, seeming uncharacteristically at a loss for words. ‘You don’t have to spell it out, Luis. I sent you that letter, after all. I guessed from the start that you were here to arrange for our divorce.’
‘Then you guessed wrong, querida. Totally wrong. I have not come here looking for a divorce. On the contrary, I am here because I want you to come back to me.’
CHAPTER TWO
‘I WANT you to come back to me.’
When she had been expecting something so totally different, the words made no sense at all to her.
‘Come—back?’ she managed through shock-stiffened lips. ‘I don’t…’
‘Come back, as in return to me.’
Luis sighed his exasperation.
‘You are, after all, my wife.’
But when she still stared at him, blank-faced, her eyes looking bruised, he elaborated further.
‘I want you to come to Spain with me as my wife. Madre de Dios, I did not think that my English was so—’
‘It’s not that!’ Isabelle protested sharply, still unable to believe what she had heard. ‘Your English is perfect and you know it. It’s just that I can’t see what you want with me.’
‘I need you.’