Page 27 of His Innocent for One Spanish Night

She didn’t answer straight away, but pulled the sun visor down and looked at her pale, pinched reflection in the mirror. ‘This is what I look like most of the time.’ It was an honest answer, and she closed the shade and went back to looking out of the window. But then she did tell him how she was feeling. ‘I would never have kissed you if I’d known you were engaged to someone else.’

‘No, you wouldn’t have, would you?’ he said, glancing over and getting a view of the back of her head.

They drove through rolling hills filled with bare vines and instead of telling her about the different grapes, and pointing out the Romero territories, for once Alejandro was unsure what to say.

‘Emily...’ he began.

‘Yes?’ she responded, without looking at him, and after a couple more moments of silence he pulled over.

‘Emily,’ he said again, and now she looked at him.

He looked at her blue eyes and saw the sparkle of tears in them. They were not unexpected, he thought, when perhaps they should be?

It moved him in an unexpected way. It moved him that this nice, shy, funny, awkward woman did not want to have kissed a man who was engaged to someone else, and he could not fault that.

He could tease her, though.

‘It was just a kiss.’

‘That should never have taken place.’

She made it sound as if they’d spent a month locked away having torrid sex, rather than sharing a slow morning kiss.

Yet her reaction endeared her to him, and as she went to open the car door Alejandro realised he’d better stop teasing, and caught her arm.

‘I was joking.’

She put her bottom back on the seat and he leant over and closed the car door.

‘I don’t often joke,’ he said. ‘Perhaps because I’m not very good at it.’ He looked at her burning cheeks. ‘It was a lovely kiss and you have nothing to feel guilty about.’

He paused for a second.

‘If I tell you something, can I ask that it goes no further?’

Emily’s eyes darted. Should she say no? It was surely too soon for secrets? She was only just emerging from layers of lies. But then she looked back to his gaze and could see that this very suave man was undecided, almost tentative, possibly as confused as she.

And so she nodded.

‘It’s complicated,’ he said.

‘Please—just be honest.’

‘Mariana and I broke up at Christmas.’

‘No...’ She was so sick of being lied to that she was braver than she thought she could be. She put a hand up to his clean-shaven jaw and with her finger brushed the exact spot where the lipstick had been last night. ‘So it wasn’t Mariana’s lipstick you were wearing last night?’

‘It was.’ He nodded. ‘For the last six weeks I’ve tried to keep up the pretence—because just after Christmas we found out that my father is very ill. He wants our marriage to take place before he dies. But I just can’t keep up the pretence any longer.’

‘Why start it in the first place?’

‘I didn’t start it—I was practically born into it. It’s all about old legacies and promises. The land belonging to Mariana’s family is relatively small, but it is rich and productive and has long been fought over. If another buyer came in, or another bodega merged with it...’ He shrugged. ‘My family have long since wanted that land. Mariana’s father and mine came to an agreement, and it’s something we’ve grown up with. The golden couple in the golden sherry triangle. But I just came to realise that it wasn’t for me. I don’t want marriage. I’m not even a man to date long-term...’

‘I had already worked that out,’ Emily said. ‘But don’t lie, please.’

‘I won’t. If you’re looking for a relationship, don’t look to me.’

She realised he was actually being breathtakingly honest.

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