Page 2 of His Innocent for One Spanish Night

Emily hadn’t corrected Sophia and told her it was actually a bed and breakfast where she lived.

‘He was impressed. And with the restaurant too...’

Since the break-up, Emily had been trying to get her website design business off the ground. Sophia’s offer shot every ball out of the park. It was huge and utterly unexpected and, for the incredibly shy Emily, simply daunting.

This was not a simple job. Her potential clients wanted perfection and they were certainly willing to pay for it.

‘Six weeks, with accommodation and transport,’ Sophia had said. ‘And there’ll be a generous bonus if the website is up and running on time.’

The bonus was indeed generous—the whole package was.

Worryingly so!

Emily only had two clients. Her business was supposed to be building slowly—not exploding with offers such as this. She felt underqualified and far too inexperienced and had fought not to say as much.

‘Think about it,’ Sophia had said. ‘I’ll need an answer by Monday.’

With such a big decision to make, Emily had taken an extremely rare day and night off to spend time with Anna, her most trusted friend. They had grown up together in a tiny English village and were sometimes mistaken as sisters. Not so much in looks—Anna’s hair was paler than Emily’s dark blonde, while Emily was curvy, Anna was slender, and where Emily was timid, Anna was bold—but there was such a bond between them that at times it would be easy to assume they were sisters.

Anna and Willow were all the family that Emily had.

Was that why she’d been so accepting of the inadequacies in her and Gordon’s relationship? Had she wanted a family so much that she’d chosen to settle for crumbs?

‘Look at you!’ Emily smiled at her goddaughter. She was wearing a coat and boots, a hat and gloves and huge ear muffs, due to some problems with her ears, but her teeth were chattering even as she pulled on her mum’s hand to break free. ‘You’re freezing.’

‘I don’t care,’ Willow said. ‘I want to go and skate on the ice.’

‘No!’ her mother and her godmother said in unison.

‘Those other children are...’ Willow pouted as she was dragged reluctantly away. But she soon cheered up as they walked out of the park towards the village.

‘She’s too fearless...’ Anna sighed.

‘Like her mother!’ Emily smiled. ‘You used to go on the ice when we were little.’

‘Yet you never did,’ Anna said, turning her head. Emily could feel her eyes on her. ‘You were always...’

‘Chickening out?’

‘I was going to say you were always sensible.’

‘I wanted to go on it,’ Emily admitted. ‘I was just...’

‘Scared?’

‘Not so much of the ice cracking...’ Emily sighed. ‘I think I was scared of disappointing them.’

She thought of her mum and dad, they had been older than most of her friends’ parents, and they had worried incessantly. Wrapping her up not in cotton wool, but in awful homemade cardigans, homemade scarves, homemade hats. Standing at the end of the drive wearing tense expressions if she was five minutes late home... While she’d been a little embarrassed at times, she’d felt so loved—but also so responsible for their happiness.

If ever there was a time to be brave and make changes Emily knew it was now, but despite being just out of a relationship and soon out of a home, she did have some commitments.

‘There’s the business sale...’ Emily reminded Anna.

‘Emily, you’re not even going to get a share of the proceeds of the sale. You’ll be left with nothing while Gordon will be off living his best life.’

Anna stopped talking then, clearly trying not to rub salt into her wounds.

Actually, there were no wounds.

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