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Never before had Cayo Garcia suffered from an inability to keep his mind on track. It was a first, and he knew who to blame.
Izzy Makepeace!
His lean, strong features hardened as the connecting door was flung open without ceremony and the object of his uncharacteristically muddled thoughts bounced in.
Even with her bright mane of hair tumbling around her flushed face, her startling blue eyes flashing like a cat’s, she was spectacularly sexy. His pulses quickened. He ignored them, deploring his body’s sexual reaction to her.
Deplorable if he’d been right about her in the first instance, and just as deplorable if she turned out to be a wronged innocent.
He didn’t bed innocents.
But he wanted to bed her.
Diana Hamilton is a true romantic, and fell in love with her husband at first sight. They still live in the fairytale Tudor house where they raised their three children. Now the idyll is shared with eight rescued cats and a puppy. But despite an often chaotic lifestyle, ever since she learned to read and write Diana has had her nose in a book—either reading or writing one—and plans to go on doing just that for a very long time to come.
Recent titles by the same author:
VIRGIN: BEDDED AT THE ITALIAN’S COMMAND
THE MEDITERRANEAN BILLIONAIRE’S SECRET BABY
THE KOUVARIS BRIDE
THE ITALIAN’S PRICE
THE SPANIARD’S VIRGIN HOUSEKEEPER
BY
DIANA HAMILTON
MILLS & BOON
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CHAPTER ONE
ISABEL MAKEPEACE, mostly known as Izzy, sank down onto a bench beneath an arching tree that would shade her from the fierce midday Spanish sun and blinked furiously at the crystal-clear blue waters of the Atlantic. She would not cry. She would not!
Thrusting out her full lower lip, she huffed at the fall of gossamer-fine, silvery blond unmanageable hair that was obscuring her vision and wished she wasn’t such a monumental failure—wished her feet didn’t hurt so much when she could envisage having to walk miles and miles in search of somewhere dirt-cheap to stay while she looked for work.
Trouble was, being a scant five feet tall, she always wore killingly high heels, no matter what. Distinctly lacking stature, in the height department she needed all the help she could get.
Not that her family had ever commented on that—to her—vitally important lack. Lacking in brains, as her much older brilliant brother had cuttingly remarked on more occasions than she cared to remember. And lacking in common sense, as her father would sigh in exasperation while her mother merely shook her head sadly at the daughter who had been a surprise late arrival. An unpleasant surprise, Izzy sometimes feared, while vowing to try harder to live up to her brilliant brother, who was the golden apple of her parents’ eyes.
The phone line from New Zealand had crackled with her father’s displeasure when she’d told him she had left her job back in England—the job, moreover, that he had created for her amongst, as she strongly suspected, opposition from the other senior partners—and was taking another as an English-speaking mother’s help to a wealthy Spanish couple in Cadiz.
He’d forecast that it would end in tears and he’d been right. It had.
The difference being she was not going to shed them!
The advertisement she’d seen in one of the national dailies had seemed heaven-sent. The successful applicant’s duties would include looking after six-year-old twin girls and practising English with them, plus a little light housework. It had seemed like the answer to her prayers—the perfect way to start a new life.
That she’d actually landed the job had been a huge boost to her self-esteem—especially after the humiliation dealt her by the man she had adored with more romantic yearning than good old-fashioned common sense. Determined to forget Marcus and her broken heart, to prove herself to be the best ever mother’s help and to show big brother James and her long-suffering parents that she didn’t fail at everything she turned her hand to, she’d embarked on her new career with energy and goodwill.
She’d cheerfully swallowed the fact that although her new employers, Señor and Señora del Amo, occupied a large, opulent villa on the outskirts of the city, the room she’d been given was not much larger than a cupboard, with a small skylight, an iron-hard narrow bed, and a rickety chest of drawers that she’d banged her shins on every time she’d had to squirm past it to get into or out of bed.
The twins had been a nightmare, refusing to do a single thing she asked of them, and pretending they understood not a single word of English when their mother had proudly claimed the opposite. They had given her either blank stares or shrill giggles when she had attempted, with the help of a phrasebook, to speak to them in their own language.
It had soon dawned on Izzy that she was regarded as a low-paid skivvy. Her day off had been cancelled more often than not, and the ‘light housework’—piled onto her between taking the girls to school and escorting them home again—had translated into anything from sweltering over an Everest of ironing to scrubbing the marble paving of the immense entrance hall. But she’d got on with it because she’d been determined she wasn’t going to walk out and admit yet another failure.
She had quickly learned to keep out of Señor del Amo’s way as much as humanly possible because he—sixteen flabby stones of oiliness—had seemed to think that because he was a wealthy banker and paid her paltry wages he was entitled to paw her whenever he felt like it.
Izzy had made up her mind to save as much as she possibly could to fund her escape. She’d planned to save the means of paying her way on public transport to one of the busy holiday costas, where her poor grasp of Spanish wouldn’t be a problem, and finding somewhere cheap to stay while she looked for work in a hotel or bar. But it was a plan that had rapidly hit the dust this morning, when Señor del Amo had sneaked up on her while she’d been loading the washing machine.
Struggling to extricate herself from what had seemed to be an octopus’s complement of arms, she’d been unaware that the Señora had walked in on the torrid scene until a shrill stacatto of Spanish had brought merciful release. Rubbing her mouth with the back of her hand to rid it of the shudder-making assault of wet, blubbery lips, she hadn’t even tried to translate Señor del Amo’s response to his wife. But her pansy-blue eyes had sparked with outrage when the Señora had turned her hard black eyes on her and ordered, ‘Get out of our home immediately! How dare you try to seduce an honorable family man—a husband and the father of two innocent girls?’
Stunned by the horrible injustice, Izzy had only been able to gasp with disbelief as her enraged employer had imparted with relish, ‘From me you will have no references,