Page 82 of His Innocent for One Spanish Night

Alejandro was right—the flamenco doll was a little bit creepy, and she seemed to stare at Emily as she crossed the room.

‘You’ll give Willow nightmares,’ Emily said aloud, turning her around to face the wall and sitting on the couch.

Above all else, she was missing him. Wishing he was somehow here, to tell her to get on with it, to just get up off the couch and do what she had to and find out.

Even though she’d braced herself for it, the two pink strips on the indicator still came as a shock:Positivia.

So she used the second test and checked again, but of course the answer hadn’t changed:Positivia.

Oh, why hadn’t she been more careful?

Her heart felt as if it were racing.

Alejandro could not have made it any clearer that he wanted short term, and she’d gone into this hoping for nothing more than a holiday romance...

No. Emily had to be a little more honest.

She might have arrived in Spain hoping for a holiday romance, but she’d been kidding herself that she could achieve that with Alejandro.

Her feelings for him had exceeded anything she could have anticipated right from the very start.

God, she’d made such a mess of things.

She could imagine Mariana’s scorn, or the rolling of his sister’s eyes, and Sebastián... But it wasn’t their reaction that daunted her.

It was Alejandro’s.

Alejandro was usually brilliant at switching off all feelings. But he’d arrived in New York to unexpected snow and a dinner to host, when all he wanted to do was close his eyes and think.

There really wasn’t time.

With six hours tagged unexpectedly onto his day, by the time he fell into bed all he knew was that it might be better to leave calling Emily to when his head was clearer, tomorrow.

It was no clearer, even after he called.

‘Hey,’ he said. ‘How are things?’

‘Fine,’ Emily said, in a voice that told him someone else was present. ‘I’m just doing some last-minute updates.’

He waited while she excused herself from whoever she was with and felt a pang of guilt for keeping things so discreet that she hadn’t even acknowledged his name when she’d answered the phone call.

‘Sorry about that,’ Emily said. ‘Carmen’s here.’

‘Carmen?’

‘She brought in some photos,’ Emily explained. ‘I’m just going through her bio and things.’

‘She’s changed her tune,’ Alejandro said.

‘Yes,’ Emily agreed. ‘She’s being really helpful. Although...’

‘Although...?’ Alejandro pushed, and wished she felt able to state the obvious—that it was a bit too close to the deadline for Carmen to dump work on Emily, or for her sudden involvement. ‘Although...?’ he repeated, more gently.

‘I’m just busy,’ Emily said, clearly refusing to bitch about his family, and he adored her for that. ‘How’s New York?’

‘Cold,’ he said, and looked at the snow swirling outside the window of his penthouse suite, wondering how at the age of thirty-one for the first time he felt homesick.

Hersick?

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