The Spaniard's Love-Child by Kim Lawrence

hand lightly across her forehead.
    Her reaction to his touch was instantaneous and intense; her temperature shot up several degrees and her stomach dissolved.
    â€˜Ah, I diagnose a blood-sugar dip and a tendency to dramatise.’
    Complicated by lust. Nell regained enough control to pull back. Panting gently, she angrily tugged her feathery fringe back down to cover the area he had just touched.
    â€˜I prescribe a traditional supper of paella.’
    â€˜I suppose you have a team of flunkies waiting to cook anything you fancy at any time of the day or night.’
    â€˜No, my mother is in the kitchen. My mother does not believe in therapy, but when she is stressed she cooks. Shecan only cook one dish, but,’ he added, looking into Nell’s confused face, ‘she cooks it very well.’
    Nell attributed his comments to a bizarre sense of humour until they actually entered the kitchen, a vast, cavernous room on the lower-ground-floor level, which, it seemed to an envious Nell, incorporated every modern appliance known to man.
    These gleaming appliances and the sleek units that housed them sat cheek by jowl with impressive period features such as a lead-blackened range, original bread oven and flagstone floors. The combination could have looked odd, but the stainless steel modernity married happily with the traditional.
    â€˜This is Nell.’
    Nell stepped forward. She didn’t actually have much choice in the matter; there was a firm hand in the small of her back propelling her in that direction. She slung a resentful scowl over her shoulder before arranging her features into an expression of polite neutrality.
    The woman standing stirring a saucepan on the stainless-steel hob looked from Raul to Nell. The genuine smile of delight that revealed laughter lines around her glittering eyes made it hard not to smile back. Maybe some people might be able to resist such charm and warmth, but Nell was not one of them.
    â€˜I know who this is. I am Aria Carreras.’ The woman who identified herself as Raul’s mother possessed an attractive husky voice made huskier by the emotion in it. ‘I am so glad you came!’ she cried as she floated towards Nell with the sort of natural grace that many a dancer would have envied.
    Several inches taller than Nell and slim as a wand, she stooped forward and enclosed Nell in a fragrant hug, then,drawing back, she kissed the startled younger woman soundly on both cheeks.
    â€˜You were expecting me?’
    â€˜Of course we were, and so pretty, Raul!’ she exclaimed, running a knuckle of her beautifully manicured hand softly down the curve of an astonished Nell’s cheek. Then as she turned to her son an indignant expression spread across her fine-boned patrician features. ‘Why didn’t you tell me she was so pretty?’ she scolded, wagging her finger at him.
    Because his taste runs to obvious blondes with legs that go on forever and gravity-defying bosoms, Nell thought, deriving a small degree of satisfaction from the flash of patent discomfiture that chased across his dark, devastatingly gorgeous features as he took the brunt of his parent’s teasing censure.
    â€˜And don’t tell me you didn’t notice, Raul.’
    â€˜I’ve noticed.’
    Nell’s lowered gaze lifted, and was instantly snared by his bold, glittering stare. Transfixed by the combination of sexual challenge and hunger in his half-closed eyes, she fought a crazy compulsion to walk straight into his arms.
    The craziness didn’t stop there. She had no more control over the breath she felt escape her parted lips in a long, tremulous sigh than she did the pulse of sexual longing that stabbed through her. There was a whooshing sound like the sea in her ears as she stood there feeling the vibration of each individual thud of her heartbeat echo like a drumbeat in her throat. She struggled to catch her breath and shake herself free of an atmosphere that