Page 91 of His Innocent for One Spanish Night

‘I don’t want to tell you...’

‘You have to.’

‘Mariana. I went over to thetaberna, to work out what to do, and she came and took a seat at my table and told me a few home-truths.’

‘Mariana truths, you mean.’

‘Perhaps... She said that it was getting embarrassing, me following you around like a puppy. That you needed someone strong. That you were incapable of being faithful.’

‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘I am always faithful. It is long-term commitment I am incapable of—or thought I was.’

He took a breath, and as they had been on the night they had met his lips were pale, his eyes more serious than she had ever known them.

‘Emily...’ He looked right into her eyes. ‘I told Mariana we were over in December, and since then they’ve all been worried. Usually we get back together, but I was serious when I ended it this time. I didn’t know what I wanted, but I did know that it wasn’t a convenient marriage. I wasn’t just hiding you to keep Mariana happy. I was trying to hide how happy you made me...’

Emily frowned.

‘The second Carmen saw us together she must have known this was something different.’

‘How?’

‘I was always a miserable bastard. Not depressed, or anything, but I don’t strut and play models, as Carmen saw me doing.’

Emily smiled at the memory, and could see how it had been then that everything had started to go wrong.

‘She must have called Sebastián straight away,’ Alejandro explained. ‘That’s why I was suddenly needed in NYC. It had nothing to do with him being worried about my father, and everything to do with keeping us apart.’

‘Why?’ she asked. ‘What could that possibly achieve?’

‘Nothing.’ He shook his head. ‘Of course Sebastián thought that in a few days I’d be over you, because that’s how his mind works, but I would have come to England, or...’ He looked at her. ‘Or you’d have gone to our hotel in Seville.’

‘I couldn’t afford a night in that hotel—let alone to stay there and wait things out.’

‘Then I’d have called Sophia for your number. Nothing he could have done would have kept us apart.’

He sounded so sure—a little like she’d felt as she’d brushed past Security and demanded an audience with Sebastián.

It was her secret that might ruin things, though.

They were too new to this, surely?

Too fragile for such news so soon in their relationship.

But his mouth was on hers and, rather then tell him, she sank into his kiss. Allowing his mouth to smother the pain of the past few hours and his tongue to chase away any doubts as to their future.

And even if shewasavoiding the truth, at least she got to feel his shorter hair beneath her fingers, and feel the anger she had witnessed with his brother turn into passion.

They were, for the most part, still dressed. It was naked passion that pushed up her gorgeous dress and unzipped him. Desperate, necessary sex. And he moaned as if he needed it every bit as much as she.

He made her frantic, yet as he thrust into her he made this moment the only one that mattered. And Emily knew she was a liar, because she closed her eyes as she was taken on the sofa, just allowing herself the bliss of being made love to by Alejandro before she told him.

‘Alejandro!’

She wasn’t trying to tell him her truth. She just said his name as she orgasmed with alarming haste, and then closed her eyes as he followed.

They were breathless.

Joined.

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