Page 5 of His Innocent for One Spanish Night

Most of the photos on the walls by the stairs she had taken herself.

Willow’s christening...her first birthday...

One tiny picture had the Jacobs and Douglas families together.

It had been taken at a fete in the next village, during the Christmas break of their final year at university... Anna’s father had been the busy vicar, her mother the loyal vicar’s wife.

Anna had told Emily that very day that she was pregnant and was terrified as to her parents’ reaction.

Rightly so, as it had turned out.

Emily looked at her own father, so frail in a wheelchair, smiling for the camera without really knowing what was going on. Emily looked more carefully and could see the exhaustion in her mum’s eyes. Just a month later she’d died.

‘“Now is the winter of our discontent...”’Anna had said, given she’d been studyingRichard IIIat the time.

Worse than a winter of discontent, though, Emily knew she had almost settled for a life ofalmostcontent.

There had been no contentment to be found in her lonely bed.

There was no contentment when you were in your twenties and being kissed by your fiancé as if you were some visiting great-aunt.

Emily didn’t care that Gordon was undoubtedly gay. She just wished she’d known from the start, rather than waste five years wondering what was wrong with her.

Hell, they could have been honest friends, instead of faking a relationship.

You stayed because it suited you!

The thought she had been suppressing popped unwelcome into her head and Emily tensed as she faced it. Usually she’d stuff that thought right back down rather than admit to herself the truth—she hid from life. And always had.

As a child she’d been painfully shy, and having over-protective parents had felt like a blessing rather than a curse. She’d had the perfect excuse—that she couldn’t take risks for fear of upsetting them. But, more honestly, she’d chosen not to take risks because they terrified her shy self.

It wasn’t just in the big things that Emily held back. To this day she dressed conservatively and cut her own hair rather than sit in a salon chair and face scrutiny.

She checked her phone, her heart sinking when she saw it was Sophia, her rushed writing a mixture of Spanish and English.

Big NYC contract negociaciones. Los hermanos want the website changed. Permiso por maternidad from Monday, so need you there tomorrow. Puedes? Sophia

Tomorrow?

Emily re-read the message, her rusty Spanish telling her that Sophia was taking her maternity leave early, which meant there would be no one familiar to show her the ropes—and that was terrifying enough.

And Sophia’s‘Puedes?’—‘Can you?’—was very direct.

She clearly wasn’t going to plead—if Emily didn’t want the work, then she’d have no trouble finding someone else.

Was she going to let another opportunity pass her by?

Emily wanted adventure and travel...

This was both.

And maybe, when the work was over, she might stay on in Spain for a little while longer and take care of another thing she’d long been neglecting.

Romance.

She wanted to find out how it felt to be kissed with passion.

As for sex?

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