Page 23 of Claiming His Baby At The Altar

‘I was in a swimsuit and he’s not another man. He’s Mateo. And I think it’s hilarious that you think a fit eighteen-year-old lad is going to flirt with a frumpy nearly twenty-five-year-old woman with a post-baby belly.’

‘I don’t know the meaning of the word frumpy but by your tone I assume it is not complimentary, so let me assure you: you are not frumpy. Post-baby belly or not, you are an attractive young woman. An attractive,richyoung woman.’

Flora gritted her teeth to hide the spear of pain that shot through her chest at his qualifying her attractiveness.

She wished so hard her senses didn’t bound with delight to be so close to him. Even with all the tension and anger simmering between them, her skin was buzzing and her heart thumping painfully.

‘Mateo has been helping me learn Spanish,’ she informed him icily. ‘I’ve got no friends in this country, and Benjamin’s too young for me to leave and visit my brother...’

The tightness of his features at this only enraged her more.

Justin, who’d been living in her London house since his return to England, was a subject Flora and Ramos never spoke of. Not that they spoke much about anything other than their son.

‘I have already given you my word I won’t let Benjamin have anything to do with him,’ she said, trying hard to keep her tone moderate. It had been a promise that had broken her heart to make. ‘I’m not going to take him with me to England, but there’s no way Justin’s stepping foot in Spain—he’s convinced you’ll set a hitman on him or something—so I’m basically alone here. Mateo’s the only member of your staff willing to have a conversation with me. The rest treat me like a houseguest. They don’t consult me aboutanything. Even my bodyguards answer me with grunts. You know damn well I’m not having an affair because they all watch me and report back to you, and how you have the nerve to get all macho and possessive about the possibility of me having one, even though the idea is preposterous, is pathetic.’

Ramos’s sensuous lips pulled into a taut line before he smiled tightly. ‘Why is the idea preposterous?’ he asked silkily.

Flora rolled her eyes. ‘Why do you think?’

His eyes glittered. ‘Spell it out to me.’

Jutting her chin, trying hard to adopt her own poker face, she pointed at her post-baby belly.

His gaze drifted down to it then back to her face. He shrugged. ‘I don’t know what you’re seeing but it is not what I see. You are as beautiful as you have always been. More so now. But I will tell you why I have the nerve to be macho and possessive about you having an affair and that’s because you are my wife.’

‘Your wife in name only,’ she hit back, her brief flare of happiness that he’d called her beautiful doused with fury at his double standards. ‘I don’t want to have an affair but I don’t see why I’m expected to stay home all chaste and pure when you can take all the mistresses and lovers that you like.’

His eyes narrowed. ‘Oh, I can, can I?’

‘There is nothing to stop you doing whatever you like and sleeping with whoever you like.’ She folded her arms across her chest and tucked her hands into her sides so he couldn’t see the tremors in them. ‘But while we’re on the subject I might as well ask you to show some discretion in your affairs—one day Benjamin will be old enough to read and he might find it upsetting to find details of his father’s sex life splashed everywhere like happened with Aimee and all the others before her.’

Proud that she had managed to say all this without her voice choking, Flora forced herself to maintain eye contact with him.

But it was hard. There was something swirling in those melting depths, more than the toxic anger shrouding them, but she couldn’t decipher its meaning.

A long period of dangerously uncomfortable silence ended when he coolly clarified, ‘You are comfortable for me to have lovers?’

‘Absolutely.’ She wished that weren’t a lie. ‘Fill your boots.’

‘You wouldn’t find it upsetting?’

‘Why would I?’ she challenged.

‘You don’t want your husband to be faithful to you?’

‘If I was married to a man I loved and had a proper marriage then of course, but even if we did have a proper marriage, I’m not naïve. Leopards can’t change their spots. Some men are incapable of being faithful and you’re one of them.’

His features darkened but his tone remained coolly moderate. ‘You seem quite the expert on me.’

‘An expert on men’s infidelities. My dad’s a serial philanderer, Justin too.’

Flora had been a baby when her mum had kicked her dad out. She’d been the same age as Benjamin was now. How her poor mum must have suffered, discovering her husband in bed with another woman, a much younger woman just to add insult to injury. She’d never bad-mouthed him to Flora but the fact she’d never dated again proved how damaging it had been to her. It pained Flora to acknowledge that, in this one respect, Justin was just like their father...or, he had been. Since his release from prison he’d lived quietly and, at her urging, joined Gamblers Anonymous.

Ramos steepled his fingers together. ‘Let me see if I am understanding you correctly. Your father and brother are cheats, so therefore I am a cheat too?’

‘Oh, come on.’ She forced a laugh. The last thing she wanted was for him to think she cared what he did or who he did it with, but, as she’d learned, Ramos was far more observant than she’d ever given him credit for. She couldn’t bear to think of him knowing how much it shredded her insides to imagine him with other women. ‘I’ve been on the periphery of your life since I was a kid. Justin never mentioned you with the same woman twice. I never sawyou with the same woman twice.’

Blonde Miranda again floated into her mind. And the women on his yacht and all the other women photographed with him she’d seen before she’d trained herself only to use social media for work purposes. And the women at his birthday pool party that she’d stupidly let her mother talk her into going to.

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