‘Not only beautiful, but bright too.’ He took her share of the bulging carriers and added them to his own. ‘Lead on. The rabbit warren of narrow streets confuses me.’
Nothing confused him, Elena thought, keeping up with his long, effortless stride. Present him with a problem and he’d work it out, calmly, intelligently and logically. Which was what he’d done regarding the problem their marriage had faced.
The fire and fury bit at first had been natural. His emotions had got in the way of logic. But he’d had his thinking time and—her heart lifted, spinning wildly—everything was going to be all right! Suddenly she was deliriously sure of it.
They found a restaurant on the Plaza Topete, and, sitting at a table on the terraza, surrounded by urns brimming with perfumed flowers, sipping huge glasses of freshly squeezed orange juice, Jed remarked, ‘I take it the creep was trying to twist your arm, using bullyboy tactics?’
She nodded. There was no need to say a thing. He’d been reviewing the scene in his mind, remembering body language, and had arrived at the right conclusion. She didn’t want to talk about her ex-husband, not now, not ever. She was feeling far too guilty because of what she had agreed to do to want him inside her head.
But Jed didn’t want to let it go. ‘Speaking objectively, and having seen him, I can’t understand why you ever married the man. You’re an intelligent woman, Elena. Independent, fastidious.’
Knowing what she knew, that she was deceiving him over the payment of Liam’s blackmailing demands, she wished he’d leave it, forget the other man had ever existed. But if there were things he wanted to know she’d tell him, because she owed him that. And his tone hadn’t been censorious, just calmly, objectively questioning.
She traced a line in the condensation on the outside of her glass, amazed to find her hand was steady when her heart was punching her breastbone. ‘He didn’t always look like that, or act like a lout. He had a silver tongue, was very easy on the eye. He had the type of charm that could dazzle. I was gullible, easily flattered, overwhelmed by his lavish gifts—glitzy designer gowns, shoes made in heaven, jewellery. A bit flashy, not the sort of thing Nolan’s would touch with a sanitised bargepole, but expensive nevertheless.’ Her fingers worried at the corner of her mouth, and the way Jed fastened on that nervous betrayal, one brow drifting upwards, told her he knew how upset this conversation was making her.
She was upset—her deceit over those blackmail demands was doing her head in—but if she weren’t careful he might think she was mourning the man her first husband had been.
She clamped both hands round her glass and forced herself on. ‘After a time, it all began to pall—the fancy restaurants, the nightclubs, the feeling of being dressed up and paraded. And I came out from under his spell for long enough to question where all the money was coming from.
‘Gambling, he told me. And that I wasn’t happy about. Poor but honest—that was the way Mum had brought me up. And that was why I was so shocked when I discovered his criminal activities, why I went to the police. Why I divorced him. Now—’ she looked at him from between her lashes, her eyes unconsciously pleading ‘—can we forget him?’
‘With pleasure.’ He was on his feet, collecting their belongings. ‘Consider the subject permanently closed. Shall we head for the hills?’
She dragged in a shuddery breath, relief smoothing down her prickly nerve-ends. Whatever test he’d been setting for her, it seemed she’d passed with flying colours.
They’d reached Las Rocas in the late afternoon, Jed flinging the windows wide while Elena dealt with the shopping. They’d taken turns to shower and change, both careful not to force an intimacy too soon, not before the problems within their marriage had been resolved.
They’d been down that road on the night of the award ceremony and it had ended in unmitigated disaster.
And now, after a quickly prepared meal of garlicky prawns, vegetable medley and masses of fruit, they were sprawled out on Siamese-twinned loungers, gazing out over the terrace at the vast starlit velvet night, the perfume from her pots of lilies and sweet-scented jasmine drugging the senses.
She’d felt so swelteringly hot and sticky when they’d arrived she’d thankfully exchanged the clothes she’d travelled in for cotton shorts and a loose, cropped and sleeveless top. Jed, too, had dressed lightly. The fine cotton, collarless black shirt hung from his rangy shoulders in soft folds, the sleeves pushed up above his elbows, his brief white shorts making those long, elegantly muscular legs look deeply tanned and unbelievably sexy in the mellow glow from the outside wall-lamps.