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Briana made a half-hearted attempt at tidying her hair. The bank of sparkling mirrors in the luxurious ladies’ powder room left her with no place to hide her distress. She should have controlled her emotions better just now in the gaming room! But it had been so hard, when the reality of Pascual had just kept overwhelming her. And then when he had so carelessly and tauntingly put that little pile of coloured chips in front of her, each one reflecting a sum that would easily pay three months’ rent on her house, it had all been too much. Here she was, worrying herself sick over her business and facing potential bankruptcy, and Pascual was acting as if money was nothing to him! But of course with the vast wealth he had at his disposal the value of those coloured chips was even less than a drop in the ocean. If Briana was really honest it was not her financial worries that were causing her the most concern right then. Her little son’s beautiful face was constantly in her mind—a face that was a perfect miniature version of his father’s—and she wondered how on earth she could break the earth-shattering news of his existence to a man who would probably despise her even more than he did already when he heard it. She had kept Adán from him, and Pascual had every right to deride her.
    But she had been utterly devastated when she had seen him with Claudia in his arms that night. Briana’s motives in doing what she had done had only been to try to protect herself and her son from possible future hurt…Not for the first time fear that her decision had been the wrong one clutched deep in her vitals. Claudia had been drunk, he had said. Was he telling her the truth?
    Drawing the flat of her hand across her jittery stomach, she resignedly moved away from the uncomfortably candid bank of mirrors and returned to the gaming room. When she did, true to his word Pascual was waiting for her, his dark elegant suit and disturbingly handsome face easily singling him out from all the other men in the room.
    ‘Are you ready to leave?’ he asked, his sable eyes flicking over her from head to toe.
    ‘What about the others?’ she returned anxiously, glancing back at the roulette table and the three men they had arrived with.
    ‘I will instruct the chauffeur to return for them. Do not fret—we will not leave them stranded!’
    Almost complete silence reigned on the journey back to the house. Both parties were painfully, acutely aware of the shattered past that lay between them, and they barely knew how to raise the topic again—a topic that was akin to negotiating a bed of jagged broken glass in their bare feet.
    Inevitably, the growing tension gathered uncomfortable strength in the small luxurious space that was the passenger seat of the Rolls…like a small but lethal storm about to break. There had already been evidence of thunder and lightning. Thinking back to the scene in the gaming room earlier, when Pascual had let his temper and impatience with her spill over, Briana knew a major confrontation was definitely brewing.
    Protectively, she folded her arms over her middle, the too intimate scent of his aftershave and his disturbing body heat unsettling her even more. Everything about the imposing man beside her seemed to emphatically illustrate the marked differences between them. He was wealthy, beautiful and powerful—and as out of reach as he had always been. Oh, he might have professed to love her but he had always held something back…something that had fuelled Briana’s already damaging belief that she really wasn’t quite good enough for him after all. When she’d seen him kissing his elegant model ex-girlfriend at that tension-filled family party it had inevitably highlighted all her very worst fears that their union wouldn’t last—that she wasn’t just ‘not good enough’ but not enough…period! Now she turned her face away to try and prevent herself from weeping.
    Back inside the house, she prayed hard that