Her Latin Lover (Contemporary Romance) (13 page)

So the rumours were true: Leon had killed his wife. This time Paulo did not ask the priest how he knew. He guessed that Leon had confessed his heinous sins in church knowing that the priest, sworn to secrecy in the confessional, would not have been able to tell anyone. Even if the Padre had broken the seal of the confessional, who could he tell? The police? What would they have done? They were as scared of Leon as everyone else.

“Go home,’ the priest said. ‘Look after Mary, who has been tragically caught up in all of this, and pray for the soul of your brother.”

Chapter 12

Mary lay in bed trying to make sense of everything that had happened. Paulo had called her a murderer. Was she, and what would happen to her now? She thought about how she would cope languishing in a South American jail. She didn’t think she would survive very long. Nor did she think that her impoverished mother or wastrel bother would be able to bail her out. Would she ever see them again? Perhaps she should try to call home and explain, though she didn’t know what she would say. How would her mother respond to her saying that Nick had run off (good riddance!), that she was staying with some local grandee and she had murdered a mafia boss? Mary’s head spun at the idea. Also, the mafia boss had turned out to be the grandee’s brother! Why hadn’t Paulo told her? What else hadn’t he told her about and who was he really? She was furious about the fact that she had almost let him, a comparative stranger, seduce her.

She had to get up and get out of his house. However, when she tried to stand up, the pain in her ankle prevented her from getting very far. It didn’t seem to be broken: it was more like a very bad sprain. It must have happened when she fell down, just before she shot Leon. She relived the moment when she held the gun in her hand, fired it and then witnessed Leon falling backwards, gripping his chest. How many years in prison did you get in South America for murdering someone?

She heard someone knock on her bedroom door. It didn’t sound like Isabella. This knock was much stronger, much more forceful. She looked down at herself. She was wearing a T-shirt and could just about be called decent. However, her hair was dirty and her face unwashed. Generally, she looked a mess, but she didn’t care. What did it matter if Paulo thought she looked unattractive? It wasn’t as if she wanted to impress a man who was from a mafia family. She called out for the person to come in. She was right, it was Paulo looking hot and tired, but Mary wasn’t feeling very sympathetic.

“How are you feeling?” he asked.

“Fine, thank you.” Mary replied, pulling the bed sheets up around her chin.

“If you are fine, why are you still in bed? It’s nearly lunch time.”

“I’ve hurt my ankle.” Not that it was any business of his.

“Yes, it’s a nasty sprain. The doctor looked at it the other night in Corazon, before I brought you back here. He said it should be fine in a day or two, so would your head. You will be quite alright in the head by tomorrow.”

“Are you suggesting that I’m crazy?” She couldn’t believe how rude he was.

“No, of course not!” he said. “You banged your head the other night when you fell down.

“I only fell down because you landed on me!”

“I apologise. I am not used to being shot in the shoulder.” He touched the upper part of his arm, where the bandages were, though Mary couldn’t see them as he was wearing a black jacket over his shirt.

“The doctor wasn’t sure how you hurt your ankle,” he continued. “Maybe it was when you fell down, or maybe it was when you kicked Leon.”

“Ah yes, El Leon. Why didn’t you tell me he was your brother? Why did you lie to me?”

“Firstly, I am not a liar.” Paulo looked at her with hard, cold eyes, the same irate eyes that he had when he accused her of murdering his brother. “Secondly, would you go around telling people that a man like Leon was your blood relative?”

Mary thought about her own brother, Kevin. He was not someone that she introduced to her friends. Once, she walked into a café with some girlfriends and saw Kevin sitting in the corner. Before he spotted her, she managed to usher her friends out on the pretence that she had just remembered that a work colleague had become seriously ill with food poisoning only a few weeks before, after eating in the very same café. She hadn’t been back in there since. However, she wasn’t going to let Paulo get off so lightly.

“Did you and Leon plan the whole thing from the beginning? Get rid of Nick, take all our money, then whisk me away to your hideaway in the hills and seduce me?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” he retorted. “It was you who suggested coming here to stay, not me, and as for seduction, it was you, not me that made lewd suggestions at the fiesta about being my lover.”

Mary recalled what she said the other night when she told Paulo that she was going to be his lover. She felt deeply ashamed. How could she have said such a thing, and to a man that she barely knew? Maybe it had been the oppressive heat and humidity in Corazon. He certainly wasn’t going to get the better of her now.

“I would never be your lover,” she snapped back. “How could I make love to a man like you? A man who still worships his dead girlfriend and covers up for his repulsive brother?”

Paulo just stared at her. After a few moments he said in a very subdued voice, “You better start learning Spanish so you can defend yourself at your trial, especially as it will be a murder trial. I’ll ask Isabella to bring up some books.” He walked out of the room and although Mary wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d slammed her bedroom door again, he merely closed it very quietly behind him.

*****

Paulo watched Mary for the next few days, but he didn’t speak to her. At first he thought that she would seek him out and try to talk to him in desperation for some English-speaking company. However, to his surprise, Mary began studying the books that he asked Isabella to take to her, books such as dictionaries and grammars that he had used as a child for his own studies. Then, as soon as her ankle was better, she started practising her newly-honed linguistic skills on not just Isabella, but also Javier and Carlos. Even poor Esmeralda, who only came in a few times a week to help Isabella with the heavy housework, became the victim of Mary’s attempts to learn and speak Spanish. Mary followed her around the house constantly asking her, “Que es esto?” and “Que es eso?”, “What’s this?” and “What’s that?” and then getting Esmeralda to repeat the answers several times until Mary was sure that she had learnt how to say the word for each object, such as ‘sofa’ and ‘bath tub’.

Isabella was much more tolerant. Paulo thought that she was probably glad of the company and the help, especially in the kitchen, as Mary gave her a hand with chopping vegetables and preparing meat, once Isabella told her the name for everything in Spanish first. As soon as Isabella thought that Mary had mastered a few simple recipes, she taught her how to cook some of Paulo’s favourite dishes, such as beef casserole and custard tarts. Outside, Javier and Carlos showed Mary how to groom the horses and muck out the stables, and soon Mary was doing as much work as they were. The men even showed her how to shoot a gun with reasonable accuracy, as well as how to strip one and clean it down.

Paulo watched all this from a distance through windows and open doors, as he sat in his study and walked around the house waiting for Mary to come to him. When he came back from the funeral he meant to make things up with her and look after her, just as the priest suggested. However, the conversation in her room didn’t go according to plan. Instead of ending up with her in his arms, she called him a liar which made him so angry that he said things that he shouldn’t have about her trying to seduce him at the fiesta. She’d retaliated by declaring that she would never love him. He’d been hurt, but he knew that deep down she wanted him just as much as he wanted her and that it was only a matter of time before she realised it herself.

However, he would wait for her to come to him. He knew there was no point in chasing her. She was headstrong like a wild horse, just as Señor Marcos had said. Señor Marcos would probably recommend reining her in with brute force, but Paulo knew that there was more than one way to tame a horse. So he sat and watched her from a distance admiring how clever Mary was and how quickly she was learning not just Spanish, but also the various skills that different people were teaching her on his estate.

Finally, Paulo was forced to break his silence with her early one morning when a letter arrived at the house. He had just finished his breakfast in his study and was drinking his second cup of coffee, when Javier walked in with the post. As well as the usual assortment of junk mail, advertising everything from best quality Quinceañera dresses for fifteen-year-old girls to cut-price harnesses for horses, there was a brown manila envelope with a government stamp on it. Paulo reached across his desk for his silver letter opener that once belonged to his grandfather. Carefully, he slit the envelop open and pulled out the document that was inside it. It was Mary’s court date, delivered to him as Mary’s nominated guardian in the country. Paulo’s status as Mary’s guardian had nothing to do with winning her in a poker game. After Mary shot Leon, the police said they had to take her to jail, but Paulo stepped in, posted bail for her and offered to keep her at his house. The local police readily went along with this arrangement, knowing that it would be a lot easier for Paulo to look after this foreigner, as well as making things cheaper for the local prison authorities.

Paulo walked into the kitchen where he found Mary rolling out pastry. The breakfast dishes had already been cleared away.

“Good morning,” he said, as if the silence that hung between them for the last week never existed.

“Good morning. How are you?” Mary asked, keeping up the pretence that they were all one big happy family.

“I have just received the date for your trial.” Paulo held up the letter.

Mary stopped rolling out pastry and used her apron to wipe the flour off her hands. Paulo noticed that the apron wrapped around Mary’s waist was an old one of Isabella’s. She had tied it firmly to stop it slipping, which had the effect of showing off how slender her waist was. Paulo remembered how he had almost spanned it with his hands when he pulled her up against him when they danced.

Mary looked up at him. “Well? When is it?” she asked.

“It’s in three weeks,” he said, trying not to look at the cute little gap between her two front teeth. He thought about how he’d touched it with his tongue when they kissed.

“Three weeks? That’s not possible. My flight’s next week. I have to get home. Let me see that.” She snatched the letter out of Paulo’s hand and started studying it.

“You’re lucky it’s so soon. Sometimes these things can take months. Also, they moved the case from La Puesta to the local court here in Corazon.”

It had been difficult, but Paulo had worked hard to get the location of the hearing shifted. In Corazon the judge knew all about Leon and would be much more sympathetic than some stranger behind the bench in the capital. The local police also wanted the trial in Corazon as they had no wish to see someone go to prison for ridding the region of its worst criminal, El Leon, a man who’d caused the police unlimited problems over the years. However, Paulo still found it necessary to have a word with the Chief of Police to make sure that the trial was moved and the paper work speeded up. A gentle reminder in the Chief of Police’s ear that Paulo knew what he was doing with El Leon’s girlfriend after the funeral, certainly helped to get everything moving in the direction that Paulo wanted.

“But I have to get back to London,” Mary protested. “I have to get back to work. Term starts at school in less than three weeks. I can’t be in a courtroom, no matter where it is in South America.”

Paulo tried to explain the benefits of having the hearing moved from La Puesta to Corazon, though he omitted his own dealings in it, especially the fact that he’d threatened to tell the Chief of Police’s wife that her husband had been whoring with Leon’s woman.

However, instead of thanking Paulo, Mary demanded that he try to get the date of the hearing changed. “Surely if you explain the situation to them and show them that I have an air ticket for a flight in two week’s time, they’ll understand and bring the case forward.” Mary handed the letter back to him and started rolling out the pastry that lay on the large kitchen table in the middle of the room.

“I can’t get them to hold the trial any sooner.”

“You can’t, or you won’t get it changed?” Mary asked.

“This really is the earliest possible date.” Paulo insisted. No matter how sexy Mary was, she could be infuriating.

Mary looked at him in disbelief. “I bet you could if you tried.” She looked away and began talking to Isabella in broken Spanish, asking her what she should do next to make the pie she was working on.

“No, I couldn’t,” he replied, “no matter how hard I tried.” She obviously had no idea how much he’d done for her already. “Be thankful that you have another three weeks to work on your Spanish, though I very much doubt that the judge will question you about the best way to cook a pie.”

Mary shook a rolling pin at him. As Paulo left the kitchen, a long forgotten memory drifted back to him of his mother standing in the same kitchen threatening him with a flour-covered rolling pin because he had done something wrong, but he couldn’t for the life of him recall what it was. He spent the rest of that afternoon brooding about it, locked away in his study.

Chapter 13

Mary spent every minute of the next few weeks learning Spanish. She made lists, read grammar books, poured over the dictionary and wrote notes, but most of all she talked to anyone who would listen to her: Isabella, Javier, Carlos, Esmeralda, in fact everyone except Paulo. After his comment in the kitchen about the judge not asking her about her cooking skills, she swore to herself that not only would she have great Spanish by the time she appeared in court, but she would do it without his help. She therefore avoided him as much as possible by eating her meals in the kitchen with Isabella, Javier and Carlos and by making sure that she was never in the same room as him, which was not difficult in a big house like Paulo’s.