Her reward was another of those charming, warm smiles that twisted in her heart with the memories they revived. Memories of the days when she had first met Luis. When his smile had been so swift and so delightful, so easily won.
‘If you wouldn’t mind, my dear. I would appreciate it.’
‘Why are you sitting here in the dark?’
Luis’s voice coincided with the snapping on of the light, startling Isabelle so that she jumped nervously, wide green eyes turning to where he stood in the doorway.
‘I—I was thinking.’
She looked distant, Luis thought, as if her mind was somewhere else. And there was something in the way she sat, a lack of colour in her cheeks, the unsmiling mouth, that made him tense instinctively. He could almost scent trouble in the air but he had no idea where it came from.
‘Thinking about what?’
‘The wedding.’
It was the easy answer because she wasn’t yet ready to tell him the truth. What she had thought would simply be a social chat with Catalina had turned into something that had rocked her whole world. Something she didn’t yet know how to handle. For one thing, she needed to be sure, to know that it was actually fact. And to do that, she had to test the water first.
‘Oh, that.’
He had thought it would be more. The realisation that that was all it was should have relaxed him, but there was still something about the atmosphere in the room that did nothing to ease his unsettled frame of mind.
‘So, what’s been on your busy schedule today?’
Luis strolled into the room and settled himself in the chair opposite Isabelle, leaning back tiredly.
‘Did you have another fitting for the wedding dress of the year? Or perhaps an important meeting to decide about the colour of flowers?’
‘Actually, today I didn’t have anything planned. Most things are just about in hand.’
Isabelle was frankly surprised by the bite in Luis’s voice. Anyone would have thought that he was—jealous was the word that sprang to mind. But that couldn’t possibly be true.
‘Good. Then perhaps in that case you might like to consider having lunch with me tomorrow? Maybe even spending the day together?’
‘Well—yes—if that’s what you want.’
If his mood had surprised her, then this invitation rocked her even more. It broke into the routine they had established. The routine that she had thought worked well. The routine that she believed was the way Luis wanted to run things.
After lying awake late into the long, lonely hours before dawn on her first night in the castle, after Luis had walked out on her, she had finally come to a decision. There was only one way that she could handle this situation. One way that she could behave so that she could get th
rough the days being the wife Luis wanted and still keep any sort of hold on her sanity and her feelings.
She was going to have to pretend. She was going to have to put on the act of her life and draw on every last ounce of her dramatic ability and training if she was to be in the least bit convincing.
She would have to play the newly engaged fiancée, still starry-eyed in the first throes of love. The prospective bride who had every happiness to look forward to and who was planning the wedding of her dreams with heartfelt delight, while all the time she knew that the man she loved felt nothing for her but the dark physical passion that had ensnared both of them on the night he had come to find her in York.
And she had thought that she might just manage that. Or at least she had done, until today.
Until Catalina had appeared and let her in on a couple of bitterly painful truths.
‘It isn’t a matter of what I want,’ Luis growled. ‘More that my parents are hardly going to believe we’re hopelessly in love with each other if we rarely spend as much as half an hour in each other’s company except at mealtimes.’
‘You’re the one who’s always out—“on business”,’ Isabelle pointed out. ‘And there’s a lot to do to plan a wedding—especially the sort of wedding your mother has in mind.’
‘It has seemed to be the only thing you think about.’
It had been impossible to get near her, in fact, Luis thought. Looking back over the past three weeks, it seemed she had been almost constantly occupied, dashing here to choose table decorations, or there to look at flowers.
She had been perfectly polite and pleasant, but somehow ethereal. Being with her had been like trying to grab hold of a soap bubble. Just when he thought he had it in his hands it would burst and disintegrate into nothing.