CHAPTER ONE

      IT WAS a perfect Saturday afternoon at the Hacienda Montijo. Glamorous guests had enjoyed a long lazy lunch. Now they strolled through the famous gardens or drowsed over English tea on the lawn. Children romped in the swimming pool. The sun shone. Bees hummed.

      The shy English visitor refused to be shifted from the terrace out into the sunshine, though.

      ‘Wouldn’t you like to go and mingle, Abby?’ said her hostess, without much hope.

      ‘No, I’ll just stay here and watch. If that’s all right,’ said the English girl politely.

      Her hostess sighed and gave up. She was watching, too.

      For below them, on the velvet-smooth tennis court, a battle to the death was in progress. A tall blond giant was sweating profusely as his opponent slammed him all around the court.

      The dark tennis player was like quicksilver. He moved all the time, fast as a jaguar, graceful as a dancer. It seemed that wherever his opponent sent the ball, he was there first, totally in control.

      ‘Who is that?’ said the Montijo matriarch in displeasure. The blond giant was her favourite grandson.

      She shifted in her cane chair and her daughter-in-law sighed inwardly. She signalled to her husband across the lawn. Why wasn’t he here when she needed him? He knew this was going to be difficult. He had no business leaving her to deal with it. Especially not as she was struggling to entertain the monosyllabic English girl at the same time.

      She said brightly, ‘That’s Emilio Diz, Mama.’

      The matriarch stiffened. ‘Diz?’

      The English girl turned her head. She was a teenager; she should have been with the other teenagers, thought Annaluisa Montijo despairingly. But she was too tall and gangly to interest the boys and too suffocatingly shy to talk to the girls. So she ended up here in the middle of what was about to become a nasty family row.

      ‘Which one is Emilio Diz?’ she asked politely.

      Both older women stared at her. Blond Bruno Montijo was the son and heir. The house was full of photographs of him, posed and unposed, muddy and magnificent on a polo pony, sleek and glamorous in black evening clothes at balls and receptions and premieres. His cups for fencing filled a cabinet in the library. He was rich, he was gorgeous and, inevitably, he was a national celebrity. Even if she did not recognise the world-class tennis player, the English girl should have recognised blond and gorgeous Bruno on his own home territory. It was almost an insult to the family not to. The matriarch drew an outraged breath.

      Her daughter-in-law rushed into speech. ‘Of course, you haven’t met Bruno yet, Abby.’ She sent her mother-in-law a pleading look. ‘He’s my oldest son. The fair one.’

      ‘And the other really is Emilio Diz?’ said Abby, unaware of digging herself into a deeper hole.

      The matriarch glared.

      Her daughter-in-law intervened quickly. ‘Are you a fan, Abby?’ She tried hard to sound amused.

      Where was Felipe? She caught sight of her husband and sent him another, more urgent, signal.

      ‘Of course she isn’t a fan,’ snapped the matriarch. ‘She didn’t know what the wretched man even looked like.’

      ‘No,’ admitted Abby, blushing.

      Caught out again, she thought. This last week had been a nightmare. She seemed to have lurched from one social mistake to the next. She had never imagined people could make so many rules just to live day to day—or that she could find so many ways to break them.

      She tried to explain that she wasn’t showing off about something she didn’t really understand. ‘I’ve heard my brothers talk about him. They thought he would be Wimbledon champion this year if he hadn’t retired from the circuit.’

      But even that was wrong.

      ‘The circuit,’ sniffed the matriarch. ‘In my day lawn tennis was played by gentlemen. Not circus animals.’

      Her daughter-in-law winced. Abby blushed harder and hung her head.

      ‘Oh, be fair, Mama,’ said the daughter-in-law, with compassion for this ugly duckling who always seemed to say the wrong thing, ‘Emilio Diz is a great tennis player and a national hero.’