The Spaniard's Inconvenient Wife Read Online Free PDF

headed to the kitchen.
    ‘Ramón, where are you, man?’
    The sound of his other brother’s voice made Ramón grin. A brand-new and hopelessly besotted father, Alex liked nothing better than to bore the rest of the family with tales of his tiny daughter, and just how wonderful she was. He’d missed a couple of bulletins this week, and clearly Alex was determined that he should catch up.
    He’d opened the wine and was pouring it into a glass when the machine clicked, beeped, then moved on to the next message.
    ‘Señor Dario?’
    It was a female voice, low and slightly hesitant.
    The bottle crashed down onto the worktop, Ramón’s head coming up sharply, his face turning towards the kitchen door so that he could catch exactly what was being said.
    The last time he’d heard that voice, it had been shouting at him down a long, elegant corridor in the Castillo Medrano.
    I wouldn’t marry you if my life and the future of mankind depended on it. The words echoed inside his head, clear as if they had just been spoken in reality.
    And it’s certainly going to take a whole lot more than just one kiss to make me change my mind.
    Oh, damnation, now he’d missed what she’d said, his thoughts too occupied with the past. Just what could have brought Estrella Medrano to phone him here, when she had vowed never to see him again?
    The third message, something unimportant and uninteresting about work, was already almost finished, and he was just about to press ‘replay’ for Estrella Medrano’s message when the fourth one took over.
    ‘Señor Dario? I’ve been trying to get in touch with you.’
    She’d rung again!
    Once more Ramón stood frozen, his wineglass halfway to his mouth, his mind busy, trying to work out just why the woman who had told him that he was tenth in the line of possible suitors for her hand—and she still wouldn’t have him!—would now want to contact him so urgently.
    The answering machine message told him nothing. Just that she had been trying to get in touch with him; she had called the flat before—which of course he knew—and she would try again.
    She’d left no number, he noted. Nor had she suggested that he try to ring her.
    Once again he was about to press replay when the doorbell rang, distracting him that way instead.
    ‘I was just going to answer your call,’ he said as he pulled the door open. ‘There was no need for you to be so impatient about my getting back…’
    The words faded from his tongue as he saw who stood outside, in the hallway beyond the door.
    Not one of his brothers. Not his secretary who had left a message that she had some papers he needed to sign. Not even his young sister, Mercedes, who had clearly had something on her mind—some man on her mind—the last time he had seen her.
    No one he was expecting.
    Instead, it was the last person on earth he might have anticipated.
    ‘You!’
    Estrella Medrano stood on the landing, her shouldershunched rather defensively, her hands pushed into the pockets of the light linen jacket she wore with faded denim jeans and a soft white tee shirt.
    ‘What are you doing here?’
    ‘I thought you knew.’
    ‘How the hell would I know?’
    He knew his tone was too sharp. If he hadn’t been able to hear it for himself, then the way she took half a step back, the set of her shoulders growing even more tense, would have told him that straight away. But he wasn’t capable of controlling his tongue, or of putting on any carefully polite act just to please her. It had been a long, difficult day, at the end of a couple of long, difficult weeks and he was in no mood for playing social games with a woman who, the last time he had been in her company, had made it plain that she never wanted to see him again.
    ‘You said you were going to get back to me.’
    ‘That was before I knew it was you. I thought you were someone else,’ he amended with pointed care. ‘I was expecting my secretary.’
    ‘I see. If it’s inconvenient, I can