‘You wouldn’t believe how good for ever sounds,’ Ruy admitted with a brilliant smile.
‘But you didn’t do serious relationships! How has this happened?’
‘Liliana scared me off. I saw how devastated Rigo was by her betrayal. And her death. I thought it was safer to keep my distance from deeper relationships with women and that then I could control things. But you broke through my defences, you made me want stuff I had never wanted before...and I wanted you more than anything I had ever wanted in my life and all of a sudden nothing else mattered. Not my pride and not all the anger and bitterness I had suppressed over Liliana. I suppose, a little like my brother, I was ready to make a fresh start and there you were in your tatty wedding dress, swinging those ridiculous boots over the edge of that tree-house platform and being very cheeky.’
Suzy grinned and traced a fingertip along his full lower lip. ‘And you like cheeky.’
‘I didn’t know that until you fell into my arms in the woods.’
‘That’s not how it happened!’ Suzy argued, her pride stung by that claim.
‘Technically it is and you smelled so good and felt so amazing in my arms, mi corazón,’ Ruy husked, running the very tip of his tongue along the finger she still had resting against his lips. ‘I started to fall for you that same moment, but when you did that handstand in the middle of a modelling session I knew I was definitely in trouble.’
‘How?’
Ruy dealt her a look of wicked amusement. ‘I would have strangled any other model who pulled a stunt like that but when you did it, I thought it was cute,’ he confessed with a chuckle. ‘Cute! Should’ve realised that I was in love with you then.’
‘You’re my first love too,’ Suzy admitted, her hands sliding below his shirt to find the silky skin of his long smooth back, making him flex against her and grind his hips into hers.
That was the sole invitation that Ruy required to ravish her parted lips with his and before very long the breathless kisses they exchanged were interspersed by impatient attempts to rid themselves of their clothes without separating their bodies. And when that was finally accomplished, and they lay skin to skin, there was no more conversation. They made love with frantic passionate energy and lay in each other’s arms afterwards, sated and blessed with a quiet sense of having finally come home.
‘So you want to get married this week,’ Suzy remarked when she had her breath back enough to talk. ‘You realise that there are formalities that have to be met?’
‘Special licence...already have it in the pipeline.’ Ruy dealt her a victorious look. ‘I never suggest anything I can’t do.’
‘I’ll wear the feather dress... I loved it and you painting me in it made it kind of special,’ Suzy told him dreamily. ‘And I may just be persuaded to borrow the small diamond tiara in that family jewel chest you let me rake through—it was very pretty.’
‘Do you want children?’
‘Oh, at least a dozen!’ she replied.
‘A dozen?’ Ruy exclaimed in disbelief.
‘Well, more than one, less than ten. I always kind of saw myself with a little team of kids. You should have asked that question before you proposed,’ Suzy pointed out with a grin. ‘You look so horrified. We can negotiate. Don’t worry about it.’
As a slender hand ran down appreciatively over his abdomen, Ruy discovered that he didn’t have it in him to worry about anything at all. ‘Te amo, tesora mia.’
Suzy sat up in sudden dismay. ‘Oh, my goodness, I left Dad sitting outside in his car and forgot about him!’
Ruy tugged her lazily down to him again. ‘He had driven off before I even brought you up here. I told him I was proposing.’
‘Oh...’ Suzy flopped back. ‘It’s going to be a constant game of one-upmanship with you, isn’t it?’
Ruy kissed her again and she forgot to talk.
EPILOGUE
Four years later
‘I’M AMAZED RUY let that painting out of the palacio from its place of honour at the top of the stairs,’ Mercedes teased as she glanced at the huge portrait of Suzy at the centre of the exhibition, the one of her in her feather dress in the orange grove. ‘Rigo had to really work on him to get him to loan it out for this and he’s gnashing his teeth now because he could have sold it ten times over! And, of course, Ruy will not sell a picture of you to anyone.’
‘Or of Mateo,’ Suzy added, thinking warmly of her two-year-old son and of the pair of little girls she was currently carrying.
It was only a few weeks since the gender scan and only a couple of weeks more since she had learned that she had conceived twins. Her pregnancy with Mateo had been easy but the twin one was proving a little tougher in terms of nausea and tiredness and she would be glad when her due date arrived. Although she was wildly excited at the prospect of two little girls to dress, she adored her son. He was a black-haired dark-eyed little replica of his father, full of energy and personality. She was already wondering what the girls she was carrying would be like and was considering the names Rosa, after her own mother, and Ramona, after Ruy’s late mother. She liked names with a family connection.
‘We wouldn’t ever sell the one Ruy did of Javier either.’ Mercedes laughed, mentioning her little boy, who was barely six months older than Mateo. ‘I don’t know how he got either of the boys to sit still long enough for him—’
‘He made me amuse them. I tried balloons and that was a disaster, so were the bubbles because the boys got up to chase them, but turning handstands worked and plain bribery worked. Your son is particularly fond of ice cream with multicoloured sprinkles. Mateo’s more into crisps.’
‘It meant so much to Rodrigo that Ruy came out as V at his gallery with that first exhibition he allowed him to put on for him. That’s when the frost really started to melt between them,’ the curvy brunette opined.
‘Or it could have been the fact that we simply ignored the frost and kept on forcing them together by making dinner dates!’ Suzy commented with dancing eyes, loving above all things that, along with Ruy, she had married into a happy family. Rigo had also finally met Cecile and a cautious friendship was beginning to grow between him and the half-sister whom he had once refused to acknowledge.
Mercedes had become Suzy’s best friend, always ready to offer advice in the early days of Suzy’s marriage when she had been less sure of herself dealing with Ruy’s relatives and entertaining. That they were almost the same age, married to brothers and both had young children had undoubtedly helped as well. Suzy’s Spanish had come on by leaps and bounds once she was living in Spain.
Ruy had retained the house in Norfolk but he had had to extend it to accommodate their family. Their last wedding anniversary had been spent in England and Suzy had been stunned when Ruy took her through the woods to show her the tree house he had had built. It was a monster of a construction with proper stairs and loads of safety features and Mateo was going to love it when he was old enough to use it. It had provided Suzy with yet another glimpse of her husband’s essentially romantic and passionate soul. He had been determined to commemorate that meeting of theirs in the woods when she had been so rude to him.