asked, not fooled by the little pantomime but playing dumb and for time.
His thoughts raced.
He needed to warn Angelina and give her the opportunity to tell Alfonso. He owed her that much, as he was the one who had encouraged her in her lie of omission to her husband in the first place.
That one had really come back to bite him, he reflected grimly. The next time he got asked for advice he would politely refuse.
This girl might, for all he knew, be an expert liar, but there were some things that you couldn’t control and she was genuinely shaken. Whatever the cause it seemed logical to take advantage of it before she fully recovered her wits.
All he had to do was figure out in the next thirty seconds how to get her some place that wasn’t here without breaking any laws…If it involved kissing that would be a plus, he reflected as his heated glance shifted to the full sexy curve.
‘Not really…I just missed them.’
‘Your many friends.’
Fascinated, he watched the colour rush over her cheeks.
She nodded, not meeting his eyes, but lifted her chin defiantly. ‘We’re meeting up back at the hotel,’ she told him creatively before glancing at her watch and exclaiming, ‘It’s that time already!’
To her dismay the tall Spaniard did not take the hint; he just carried on looking at her. Looking hard. She lowered her own gaze. The unblinking regard was unsettling on more levels than she wanted to admit, let alone examine.
Maybe the novelty of a man noticing she existed had spooked her. Wincing at the self-pitying direction of her thoughts, she shook her head and laughed.
Rafael raised an enquiring brow. ‘Something is funny?’
‘Not funny—sad,’ she admitted, hoping the enigmatic response would shut him up.
As he watched her soft lips curve into a determinedly cheerful smile that did nothing to banish the despondent shadow from her luminous eyes he felt feelings stir. Refusing to recognise them as concern—definitely not empathy—he reminded himself that his concern belonged with the mother and her threatened marriage, not the daughter.
He was attracted to the daughter—inconvenient, but not a problem. He had never had a problem keeping his libido on a leash. He couldn’t allow himself to look at her and think of her as a beautiful woman because she was business and sex and business did not mix.
He had to look at her and think, Disaster waiting to happen.
While he could not stop the disaster unfolding, he could control the timing to minimise the impact and give Angelina time to tell her husband that she had a past and that that past had come calling.
There was a problem. Just one? mocked the voice in his skull. Every time he tried to focus on his strategy his train of thought got hijacked and he found himself thinking about her mouth.
He puzzled over this growing obsession.
It wasn’t even as if she were as beautiful as Angelina. The resemblance was startling, but she was not, as he had first thought, a duplicate copy. Her face was heart-shaped and her nose, though delicate, was tip-tilted, her mouth was…
His thoughts slowed as his eyes drifted to that full, generous curve.
Her mouth, he admitted, was a problem.
He wanted to kiss her. The weakness angered him.
‘Sad?’
Maggie shook her head. ‘Just a private joke.’ It was joke when she realised that she had allowed Simon to systematically undermine her confidence and make her feel that her wants and needs were always secondary to his.
It took a total stranger noticing her and being kind to bring home the extent to which she was hungry for attention and how invisible she had felt.
For Simon she had come just above…maybe above…his appointment with his hair stylist, because whether he liked it or not, as he was fond of telling her, the sad fact was that appearances counted in politics…The first time he had said this he had felt compelled to advise her that the amount of cleavage she was showing in her favourite red dress might give the wrong idea.
Her blue dress, he had added, made her look wholesome.
And she had been so eager to be the woman he wanted her to be that she had gone and changed, the same way she had stopped wearing her hair loose and had abandoned her killer heels.
Part of the problem was that she had been so young and impressionable when she met Simon, a first-year student on her first ward allocation, and the handsome son of a rather demanding patient had seemed very sophisticated.
And, yes, she had been flattered that he noticed her. For years boys had not noticed her, not really until the last year at school when she had finally said goodbye to the ubiquitous braces. The event had coincided with her skin clearing up, and, once revealed as smooth and flawless, her golden-toned complexion made her stand out among her fair-skinned class-mates.
Her excess inches had also melted away almost overnight. She had needed a belt to keep her school skirt from falling down—she had a waist.
The boys at school had noticed her then, but their admiration had taken the form of crude comments and clumsy passes and Maggie, to hide her shyness, had responded to them with an icy disdain that had earned the not very inventive nickname of Ice Queen.
To Maggie at eighteen—and in her head still the dumpy teenager—Simon, a nearly-thirty-year-old lawyer with political ambitions, had seemed very sophisticated, and he had been interested in her!
He hadn’t been clumsy, he’d been charming, and he had never made her feel awkward or uncomfortable. He had even been sympathetic when she confided how self-conscious her overgenerous breasts and curvy hips made her feel, patting her hand and assuring her comfortingly that nobody was perfect. With very limited experience of men and dating, Maggie had been relieved when he had put no pressure on her to go farther than kissing. Though the circumstances of her childhood had made her mature in many ways in other ways, she had led quite a sheltered life.
When he had asked her to marry him a dazzled Maggie had really believed herself in love and fully expected the relationship to move on to another level; her feelings about this had been mixed.
When Simon had said he respected her and he wanted to wait until they were married she was pretty sure that relief should not have figured even fleetingly in her reaction, but it had.
Her fists curled as she reflected angrily on how submissive she had been, how she had let Simon mould her into the person he wanted her to be.
‘You wish to share this joke?’
Maggie shook her head. The last thing she wanted was to tell this man above all others that she was not used to male attention. She tried to frame a suitable excuse to make good her escape.
She could always just open her mouth and say, ‘Go away,’ but, having had good manners instilled in her from the cradle, it was hard for Maggie to tell anyone to get lost, especially when that someone had just sort of saved her life.
‘Allow me to walk you back.’
Maggie shook her head and smiled to rob her refusal of offence. ‘I couldn’t possibly put you to the trouble.’
She thought of cliff edges and pretty views and sighed. No, she would definitely opt for the safe route even if the view was not so thrilling, although for a split second she had been tempted.
The same way you opted for the, oh, so safe Simon and that worked out so well.
Ignoring the contribution of the critic in her head, she folded her phone and held out her hand.
‘Thank you very much for saving me, but I won’t impose on you any longer.’
The stilted dismissal