‘Suzy Madderton, publican’s daughter, well and truly off the market if you’re interested.’
‘I wasn’t,’ Ruy asserted, unusual colour slashing his high cheekbones because he was shamed by the throb at his groin in a place where children were present, even though in the darkness nobody could have seen or noticed his condition.
‘Heard she’s getting hitched soon and to a golden oldie, not a young chap like yourself...know what I mean,’ the older man imparted. ‘Local businessman, owns half the village...a crying shame her ending up with him!’
Ruy said nothing, too cynical after the life he had led to think it even remotely strange that a young and apparently beautiful woman would marry an older man for his money. His only concern was whether or not he could get her to model for him, and if money were a magnet that would be his ‘in’.
He wouldn’t touch a gold-digger with a bargepole, not that he had any personal interest in the dancer. A natural male response to a sensual performance was no proof of attraction, he assured himself. After all, sex was no big deal to Ruy and hadn’t been in a long time. Casual sex was easily available to him and he hadn’t been on a date in longer than he could recall. Love was anathema to him because he had witnessed and experienced how warped and damaged love could become. Someone like his former sister-in-law, Liliana, could get badly burned by that seemingly desirable emotion of love that so many foolish beings chased. Old unforgotten guilt burned in Ruy’s gut as he watched his nieces dance across the stage as very cute little mushrooms. Lucia was sylph-like in comparison to poor little Lola, who stomped like a water buffalo. Slowly, almost painfully, Ruy smiled, reflecting that if it didn’t entail getting married, he would have enjoyed having a child of his own...
‘Reckon you raised a dad temperature or two out there!’ Flora, the concert organiser, teased Suzy as she hurriedly pulled on her clothes at the back of the stage. ‘The men can’t take their eyes off you.’
‘Nonsense, they’re just keen to spot their kids,’ Suzy declared, a little nauseous at the prospect of being the target of lust in public. Wasn’t it bad enough that she had had to recently cope with it in private?
She squashed that self-pitying thought as soon as it popped up in the back of her brain. Hadn’t she chosen her own path? Hadn’t she decided to put her dad first? Her dad, the man who had loved her enough for two parents after her mother died in a car crash when she was a toddler. Roger Madderton was a great father, just not quite farsighted enough to see when a trap was being sprung in front of him. And Percy Brenton had caught both father and daughter in a hellish financial trap and there was no escaping the consequences of that miscalculation. Either she let her father go bankrupt through no fault of his own, and watched him lose his home and business, or she married Percy. And as she was marrying Percy in less than forty-eight hours, she had best settle down and accept the inevitable, she told herself irritably. By the weekend, she would be in Barbados on her honeymoon with Percy, and she cringed at the prospect.
The concert was over. People were already starting to leave as Suzy descended the stage steps. In her haste her rich auburn hair bounced against her spine in a flyaway mop of curls. Lola and Lucia came running across the floor to greet her, full of excitement after their performance. They were the cutest little girls, one seven, one four, and they were in the dance class that Suzy taught every week. Even though she was keen to escape the hall before Percy could put in an appearance, she couldn’t resist the little hands grabbing hold of hers and pulling her forward. Laughing, green eyes sparkling with mirth at their enthusiasm, Suzy found herself looking, not at the parents she expected or even the nanny, but at a tall, dark total stranger.
A tall, dark, quite magnificent stranger, she adjusted, her tongue sticking to the roof of her mouth, because he was breathtakingly handsome. Olive-tinted skin stretched taut over a superb bone structure that formed the perfect backdrop to spare, flaring cheekbones, a sculpted jawline shadowed with a blue-black hint of stubble, a classic nose and wide, sensual lips. Add in his height and lean, powerful build and he came as close to a fantasy male as Suzy had ever seen in reality.
Beautiful wasn’t an expressive enough word to describe Suzy Madderton, Ruy conceded, taken aback by her sheer visual impact. She glowed like a spectacular sunset with her vibrant copper-red spirals of hair, porcelain-pale skin, a scattering of freckles across the bridge of her small nose and green eyes brighter than polished emeralds. Spirit and energy bubbled out of her. All his defensive antennae came into play, snapping up his reserve like a safety barrier because Ruy instantly loathed the strength of his response to her. Even worse, he was deeply uneasy around any woman he sensed to be volatile in the emotional field.
‘Tio Ruy!’ Lola proclaimed importantly. ‘Our Tio Ruy!’
‘Their mother’s brother, their uncle,’ Ruy interpreted smoothly.
Suzy was ensnared by eyes as dark as Hades and full of sardonic superiority. She didn’t know why or how she read that message in his stunningly dark gaze, but she did, and her chin came up at an angle, her eyes sparkling with animosity. ‘Thanks for the translation but I didn’t need it. My mother was Spanish. I have a few words,’ she murmured, thinking it was very few words, even after the evening classes she had attended for years, because lack of practice had killed her hope of becoming fluent in her mother’s language.
Everything that was masculine and proud in Ruy thrilled to that unexpected challenge and he had all the pride of his hidalgo forebears. A firecracker, yes, he could see that in the aggressive lift of her delicate chin, the toss of her shamelessly untidy hair. She wouldn’t suit his needs at all in the sex department, he acknowledged without hesitation. He preferred his women neat, meek and mild and unlikely to cause waves, but that didn’t mean that he didn’t still want her as a model. After all, he had barely spoken to his last model, now world-famous thanks to the exposure of his previous year’s exhibition because his portraits of beautiful women sold for millions. He didn’t do involvement in any part of his life and that was how he avoided the messy chaos of emotions that had once engulfed him in family disaster.
He spoke to Suzy in Spanish too fast for her to follow in detail and she only got the gist of what he was saying. He was offering her a job as a model. An artist’s model. Her? Suzy couldn’t believe her ears and marvelled that the girls’ friendly outgoing mother, Cecile, hadn’t mentioned the fact that her brother was an artist or that he had come to stay with her.
‘Name your price,’ he said to conclude in English, wanting to be sure she got that message. ‘It would only take a couple of weeks of your time.’
A heavy arm fell round Suzy’s shoulders and her heart sank instantly to the soles of her biker boots: Percy had arrived. ‘Price for what?’ he demanded.
‘I was asking Miss Madderton if she would consider acting as an artist’s model for me.’ Ruy extended his hand politely to Percy. ‘Ruy Rivera,’ he murmured, borrowing his illegitimate half-sister’s maiden name to assure his anonymity. When he was in artist mode and he wanted to be anonymous, he generally used Rivera as a name to cover his tracks.