CHAPTER 2

       

          While trying to change Azura’s t-shirt, Jacqueline couldn’t resist the temptation and blew a raspberry on her niece’s tummy. Convulsing with chuckles, Azura held up her arms to be lifted, her little face below her soft brown curls lit by a sunny smile.

“Looking at you two, I really have to say that I don’t know which one of you is the bigger kid!” Sandra Fanning teased them while her stocky, well-built son, Steve, set the old highchair out beside the pine kitchen table.

          Tiny in stature and slender as a ribbon, Jacqueline thrust her own curls back off her eyebrow in a rueful gesture and resisted the urge to admit that grief, stress, and a heavy workload were combining to make her feel more like a hundred years old.

          Staying financially afloat was a constant struggle and since Azura’s birth, had required her to do two jobs. Her main income came from working as a cleaner for the Fannings.

          Mother and son owned a trailer park in Stinson Beach where she had lived for almost four years, after leaving England for sunny California. At present, Jacqueline cleaned the caravans that were rented out as holiday lets. But quite a few were lived in all the year-round by people like herself who couldn’t afford more expensive accommodation.

          She made extra cash from embroidering clothes for an exclusive mail-order firm. Her earnings might be poor in comparison to the hours she put in but she was grateful for any work that she could combine with caring for Azura.

“But I know which one of you is the prettiest,” Steve declared with a meaningful look in Jacqueline’s direction.

          As Jacqueline strapped Azura into the high chair, she managed to evade his admiring gaze and wondered why Mother Nature was always encouraging the wrong men to chase her.

          Jacqueline liked Steve. She had tried, she really had tried to find him attractive because he was hardworking, honest, and decent. He was everything her irresponsible father hadn’t been and a solid gold choice for a sensible woman. As always, she wished that she were less fanciful and more prudent.

“Right now, I should think Jacqueline’s more concerned about what this lawyer might have to say to her,” Sandra, a thin woman with short grey hair, told her son brusquely.

“I really can’t understand why Alyssa even bothered to make a will when she had no fortune to leave.”

“Well, she had Azura,” Jacqueline pointed out to the older woman. “Alyssa had the will drawn up after Jaime died. I think it must’ve been her way of making a new start and showing her independence.”

“Yes, your sister loved her independence,” Sandra said with a sniff. “And not so fond of being tied down to a small child once Azura was born.”

“It was hard for her.”

          Jacqueline lifted a slight shoulder in an evasive shrug because it hurt that she couldn’t actively defend Alyssa’s rash behavior during the last months of her life. At least, not to a woman who had repeatedly helped her out with the task of caring for Alyssa’s daughter.

          But then that was what she most liked about the Fannings, she reminded herself. They spoke the truth and there was nothing false about them.

“It was even harder for you, sweetie,” Sandra told her squarely. “I felt very sorry for Alyssa when she first came here. She’d had a tough time. But when she took up with that new boyfriend of hers and abandoned you with Azura, she kinda made me angry.”

“I loved then as I love now to have my little princess in my life,” Jacqueline declared staunchly.

“Sometimes what you love may not be what’s good for you, Jackie,” the older woman retorted crisply.

          But at a time when Jacqueline’s heart still ached from the cruelly sudden death of her sister, her baby niece was her only real comfort. Although Jacqueline and Alyssa had had different mothers and hadn’t met until Alyssa had sought Jacqueline out.

          Jacqueline had grown very fond of her older sister. Alyssa had, after all, shown Jacqueline the first family affection that the younger woman had ever known. Yet the stark difference between their respective backgrounds might more easily have ensured that the two sisters remained lifelong strangers.

          While Alyssa had grown up in a lovely country house with her own pony and every childhood extra her parents could afford, Jacqueline had been born illegitimate and raised in a council flat by a mother who was always broke or drunk or both.

          Jacqueline was the result of an extramarital affair. After his infatuation had subsided, Jonathan Maxwell, her father, had won his estranged wife back by leaving Jacqueline behind with his lover. Jacqueline’s useless mother had brought her up with the help of a succession of ‘uncles’. She had learned when she was very young that her wants and wishes were rarely of interest to the self-seeking adults who surrounded her.

          At first meeting, Jacqueline had been in awe of her beautiful, sophisticated sister. Five years older, Alyssa had been educated at a fancy boarding school and she had talked with a cut-glass accent similar to a member of the royal family.

          Her warm and affectionate nature had however soon won Jacqueline’s trust and love. Perhaps more slowly and rather more painfully, she had come to appreciate that Alyssa wasn’t very clever and was extremely vulnerable to falling for handsome men who talked big and impressed her.

          Leaving her niece in Sandra Fanning’s capable care, Jacqueline climbed into Steve’s pick-up. He gave her a lift to the Stinson Beach city center and, stopping right outside the lawyer’s office, he offered to wait for her.

          As always in a hurry to escape Steve’s hopeful air of expectation, Jacqueline had already jumped out onto the concrete.

“There’s no need, Steve. Really,” she said breezily. “I’ll walk back.”

          Steve behaved as if she hadn’t spoken and told her where he would be parked. A young car driver waiting at the lights, buzzed down his window and call, ‘Hey, gorgeous! Wanna go for a ride?’ Jacqueline flung him a pained glance from eyes as deep and rich and green as a meadow in the springtime.

“Seriously, boy? Shouldn’t you be in school?”

          He looked startled by the comeback. Jacqueline considered the obvious embarrassment of still looking like a sixteen-year-old when she was almost twenty-three years old. She blamed her youthful appearance on her lack of height and skinny build.

          She also kept her wavy toffee brown hair long because, although she wouldn’t have admitted it to a living soul, she was always terrified that her slender curves might lead to her being mistaken for a boy.

          As she entered the small legal firm’s office, Jacqueline tugged uneasily at the hem of her denim skirt, which rejoiced in floral cotton frills. The skirt was well out of fashion and she had worn it only because she thought it looked more formal than the jeans that filled her limited wardrobe.

          All her clothes came from charity shops and none were of the designer cast-off variety. Without complaint, she hovered while the receptionist chatted to a colleague and answered a call before finally deigning to take note of her arrival.

          In the waiting room, Jacqueline stood by the window, feeling quite restless. She watched a limousine force its passage along the street outside and cause traffic chaos. The long black vehicle came to a halt and a chauffeur emerged.

          Indifferent to the car horns that protested the obstruction that the limo was creating, he opened a rear door for his passenger. As the passenger sprang out and straightened to an imposing height the breath caught in Jacqueline’s throat.

          Her green eyes widened with disbelief. It couldn’t be, it simply couldn’t be! The man was Jaime’s despotic big brother, Diego Francisco Martinez del Río! She shrank back to the side of the window but continued to stare at him.

          It was Diego, the duke, all right! He had the impact of a tidal wave on her self-command. There he was: the male who had crushed her every prejudice overpowered her defenses and reduced her to a level of eyelash-fluttering, giggly compliance.

          Jacqueline suppressed a quiver of shame at that recollection. For nearly three years since that awful day, Jacqueline had told herself that Diego couldn’t possibly have been half as devastatingly attractive as she had believed him to be.

          And now here he was in the flesh to destroy even that comforting lie with his smooth aristocratic façade that set her teeth on edge and his altogether more disturbing quality of raw sexuality. His gleaming black hair was cut fashionably short. His lean, classic features were stamped with bold masculinity that attracted female admiration wherever he went.

          ‘He’s still a wonderful work of art,’ Jacqueline acknowledged grudgingly.

          Not only did Diego look like some mythical Greek god, but he was also built like one. He had broad shoulders, a narrow waist, and long, powerful legs. Dressed in a trendy dark designer suit, he looked achingly handsome.

          Only when he strode into the same legal practice did she break free of her paralysis and sincerely doubt the evidence of her own eyes. Why would Diego be over in California and not in Mexico? What was he doing in Stinson Beach, a place meant only for families on vacation and good for beginner surfers?

          Surely, he could only be here on this particular day to keep the same appointment that she had been asked to attend? No other reason could rationally explain such a coincidence.