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  LAUREL pressed trembling fingers to her throbbing temples, willing herself to close out the steady hum of voices from the salon on the floor below.

  The antique lace of her wedding gown seemed to weigh down her slender figure like a sapling bending to the wind, and she sank down on the padded stool before an ornately mirrored dressing table, resting her elbows on the glassed top, her hands still pressing against the pulses at her temples.

  Around her the bedroom, although it was large and overwhelmingly ostentatious, seemed to close round her claustrophobically. Tall mirrored doors enclosing spacious closets reflected the monstrously large bed positioned at the far side of the room between high narrow windows. A bed whose high lofted mattresses were covered by a woven spread in an Aztec design of dark red and gold, colours which lent emphasis to the heavy black Spanish bedroom furniture and were echoed in the weighty drapes edging the windows.

  A fitting decor for the Mexican wife of Diego Cesar Davis Ramirez ... Laurel had raised her brows upon hearing an English name interspersed with the Spanish during the service, but Diego had later told her briefly that his mother had been an American like herself.

  This room would welcome his bride of Spanish extraction. To herself it had an alien air, a secretiveness far removed from the openness of her American upbringing. Had Diego's American mother lain in that

  bed, conceived her firstborn son there?

  The thought sent a shudder through her, and she almost welcomed in intrusion of Consuelo, who came into the room without knocking.

  `Diego has sent me to hurry you up,' she said with an insolence Laurel had become accustomed to after spending two nights under her roof. 'Dios! You have not yet taken off the wedding dress! You are not eager to be alone with your husband?'

  Her busy fingers began to unbutton the long line of small satin orbs reaching down Laurel's back. The dress had been made in a time long before the age of zippers, having been fashioned for Diego's grandmother sixty-five years before. The old lady, at her flower-filled estate in Cuerenava, had insisted on Laurel wearing her own wedding dress.

  'I have long dreamed of Diego's bride wearing the dress that was made for me when I married his grandfather,' she had told Laurel in surprisingly good English. Snapping black eyes, undimmed from her eighty-two years, had approved Laurel's slender form. 'No one in our family has been able to fit into it until now.'

  Consuelo now looked enviously at the oyster satin skirt suit hanging at one side of the dressing table. Jealousy had marked each moment they had been together at the dark girl's home, so much that Laurel had welcomed even Diego's presence to offset the stifling atmosphere.

  'You are lucky to have married a man as rich as Diego, I think,' she said now in her childlike voice which nevertheless held a hint of contempt.

  'You could say that luck had something to do with it,' Laurel returned wryly, stripping the old lace wed-

  ding dress from her and hanging it carefully away in its wrappings. Used as she was to the easygoing atmosphere of the fashion world, she felt no self-consciousness as she removed the floor-length under slip and stood in brief panties and scanty bra before the other girl's critical gaze.

  `I do not know why Diego chose a scrawny chicken like you for his wife,' Consuelo disparaged. 'His women have always had beautiful figures, like so.' She sketched the outline of curves even more voluptuous than her own.

  `Really!' Laurel fastened the waistband of the oyster skirt round her indented waist and reached for the jacket. 'It's strange that he didn't think of marrying one of them, then.'

  `He has this—this 'Consuelo waved her hands

  helplessly, 'craze to replace the mother he lost when he was a boy. He is—how would you say?—fixed on her image.'

  A fixation? Diego? A chill crept over Laurel's skin as she remembered the portrait of a fair woman between

  the swarthy-skinned men on the staircase a few steps

  away from the master bedroom. True, there was a

  slight surface resemblance to herself in the woman's fairness, but to suggest that a man like Diego—

  `You're being fanciful,' she dismissed briskly, seating herself before the mirror to repair the make-up she had applied earlier in the day.

  `No, I am not,' Consuelo returned fiercely. 'If it were not so, then would he not have married me? It is a custom that when a brother dies his unmarried brother will take his widow for a wife.'

  So that was the problem! Consuelo had been nourishing hopes, based on tradition, that Diego would

  make her his wife after a suitable mourning period had passed. Instead, he had taken a foreigner, a woman with no understanding of those customs. Laurel wished with all her heart that she could tell Consuelo that the marriage was likely to be shortlived. It would last only as long as her father's imprisonment lasted. She had no feeling of compunction about it. Diego, in forcing her into a marriage she wanted no part of, could expect no more.

  'You should have asked Diego about that a long time ago,' she now told the fiery-eyed Consuelo.

  'Asked me what?' his voice came lazily from the door.

  Laurel looked round quickly from the dressing table to see him saunter towards them, leanly handsome in the dark suit he had worn for the wedding. The carnation at his buttonhole reflected the deep fire in his dark eyes, the glow that had been there during the ceremony which had made them man and wife.

  However much Laurel had made up her mind to accept the marriage as a transient thing, an occurrence necessitated only by her father's imprisonment, the solemn air of sanctification in the church had had its effect on her. The ceremony had held all the elements she had dreamed of as a girl growing up in the convent ... the massed flowers adorning the altar, the hushed air of solemnity as the service proceeded, the darkly handsome man at her side promising to love and cherish her. Her own responses were given in a voice made low and vibrant by the awesomeness of the occasion, and when her eyes met the dark lustre in Diego's she wished for a fleeting moment that the ceremony was one that united them not only in fact but in spirit.

  The rest was a daze in her mind, the cool touch of

  Diego's lips on hers in a sealing kiss, the triumphal march from the chapel, the smiling faces of Diego's friends surrounding them at either side.

  Then back at the palatial Ramirez town home, where the spacious salon easily accommodated the hundred or so guests, and where prosperous men of business took advantage of the situation to kiss Laurel's smooth cheeks, their wives looking on with frank curiosity. To Laurel, their speculation was preferable to the somewhat venomous looks calk in her direction by their daughters, some of whom were petulantly plain while others had all the fire and dark-eyed beauty of their Spanish blood.

  Now Diego said a few short words in Spanish to his brother's widow, and with a shrug she went from the room, closing the door loudly behind her.

  Diego's burning eyes met Laurel's in the dressing table mirror.

  'So, mi esposa, for the first time we are alone. I have had to endure the sight of other men's lips on your skin until I wanted to carry you away to before courtesy permitted.'

  His own lips had descended to the nape of her neck, where they teased lightly at that sensitive point, sending curious sensations along Laurel's spine so that she shivered convulsively and gave a strangled : 'Don't! ' With the word she brought her head round and unwittingly exposed the soft tremble of her mouth to the marauding assault of his.

  There was nothing tentative about the pressure of lips that crushed hers and opened possessively in an instant passion which forced her own unwilling mouth into acquiescence. The awkward turn of her body on the dressing stool permitted only the ineffective lift

  of her nerveless hands to his chest, where they lay paralysed against the fine cloth of his jacket.

  Then as if his mouth 'held the power of a flaming torch, a response frightening in its intensity was ignited deep within her and swept aside every inhibition she had ever had. Nothing had ever seemed m
ore natural than that she should be straining up like this to deepen the kiss between them, or that Diego should slide her impatiently off the stool and draw her up to meet the vibrant curve of his body. Triumphant possession was in the touch of his lips to the faint hollows of her throat, the sureness of his fingers as they undid the top buttons of her jacket and slid inside to cup the urgent swelling of her breast.

  'Te adoro,' he murmured against the silky skin of her cheek. 'Must we wait until we reach ?' He pulled away from her then to regard her with eyes burning deep with the passion that still held his body in its sway. Gently his thumb rubbed lightly over her cheekbone, and he quizzed huskily: 'Shall I send them all away so that we can be alone, querida?'

  His reminder of the guests milling in the salon below was enough to still Laurel's racing pulses to a more normal rate and clear the swirling desire from her limbs. Stepping abruptly away from his unresisting arms, she turned her back to him and refastened the buttons of her jacket with trembling fingers.

  'No!' she choked. 'No matter what you tell them, it won't make this marriage any more real. I told you it was to be in n-name only.'

  Her shoulders were gripped and spun fiercely until

  her startled eyes met the suddenly harsh cast in Diego's.

  And I told you, querida, that our marriage is for all

  time. From our coming together children will be born,

  sinew of my sinew, flesh of your flesh. Our children, Laurel:

  'No!'

  Diego's expression softened slightly. 'How can you say no?' he chided, his hand sliding down to cover the wild throb of her heart. 'You want this joining as much as I. Listen to your heartbeat, and know that mine beats even stronger for you.'

  The words would have sounded overly dramatic from an American man, yet from Diego they held a kind of inevitability that sent fear shivering momentarily through her. As the fire he had aroused in her veins subsided, so cool reason took over. What woman wouldn't have been carried away by the passionate expertise of a deadly attractive man? A Latin man, far removed from the homely familiarity of Brent and the breezy non-insistence of his kisses,

  'You're living in a fantasy world, senor: she told him coolly, breaking from him to pick up the tortoiseshell comb from the dresser and rearrange the fine strands of her hair ruffled by his lovemaking. 'You know why I married you, and the reason certainly isn't the perpetuation of the Ramirez house. As soon as my father is released, I'll ' She broke off abruptly and bit her lip.

  'You will what, carina?' Diego inserted with dangerous softness, his fingers running down the silk of her sleeve to clasp her wrist and swing her in a half arc to face him again. 'You think I have proclaimed you my wife before my friends and associates, only to have you shame me as soon as my usefulness has ended? No, my wife, I will make sure that you remain mine for all time.'

  Laurel shivered as her eyes met the fiery glitter in

  his. There could be no mistaking the forceful intent of his words, although they were spoken so quietly. It needed little imagination on her part, either, to guess the direction of his thoughts. By forcing her into wifely submission, and perhaps giving her a child, he was assuming that an annulment would no longer be possible.

  In his devout eyes that was no doubt true, but in an enlightened world all things were possible, including divorce, child or no child.

  After retouching her lips with the lipstick he had kissed away, she sighed and picked up her purse from the dressing table. She rose, slim and elegant, to face Diego.

  'I'm ready,' she said quietly.

  For a moment he regarded her broodingly, then his hand came out to curve round her elbow. 'Then we can leave. Our luggage has already been taken to the car.'

  'You're not changing?' she asked, surprised.

  A faint smile touched his stormy mouth. 'The servants at were unable to attend the ceremony. They will appreciate seeing me, at least, in my wedding finery.' Sarcasm edged his voice as he raised a hand to caress her cheek with his fingertips. 'Besides, I want everyone we pass to know that I have today acquired a beautiful bride. It will give them pleasure to think of the wedding night to come.'

  'Then the pleasure is all theirs,' Laurel responded tartly, pausing at the head of the winding stairway when Diego's grip tightened on her elbow.

  'For your father's sake, if not for mine, try to act like a loving bride before my friends.'

  The veiled threat stayed with Laurel as they des-

  cended the stairs together, her fairness compellingly contrasted with his darkness. The guests, grouped round the softly playing fountain at the centre of the coolly tiled hall, fell silent when they caught sight of the wedding couple, then they surged forward to the foot of the stairs, jocularly calling good wishes that were as bold as the amount of fine champagne they had drunk.

  Diego's arm slid round Laurel's waist, halting her in mid step half way down the staircase. His hand turned her forcibly to face him and, smiling, he commanded her softly to kiss him.

  'No!' she breathed indignantly, glancing down at the upturned expectant faces.

  'Do it,' he hissed fiercely, and tightened his hold until her body was pressed intimately to his._

  Shouts of encouragement in Spanish and English seemed to propel Laurel's face upward in an automatic gesture, her lips brushing lightly against Diego's. But when she would have pulled away, his hands came up to spread across her hair at the back and her mouth was imprisoned by the warm audacity of his. She moaned in muffled protest when his tongue flicked impudently over the sensitive inner surface of her lips, and when at last he raised his head, a sardonic glitter at the back of his eyes, she looked as ruffled as he had intended. The pale flush on her cheeks could as easily be mistaken for a bride's modesty at revealing her love as for the anger that had actually caused it.

  Diego himself, once they were out of sight of the wellwishers, lapsed into a contained silence, his sole concentration on driving the sleek silver Mercedes at a rapid pace through the city and on the highway whose terminus was Acapulco. To the occasional driver who

  recognised his newly married status and to the peasants working in the fields bordering the highway, he raised a hand in salute, but limited his conversation with Laurel to noncommittal comments about the areas they passed through:

  And that was fine with her, she thought as she settled back into the sumptuous leather upholstery of her seat. It was ironic that she should be sitting next to a man she might, in other circumstances, have regarded as her ideal. Apart from sharing the faith that had always meant so much to her, Diego Ramirez had all the good looks, wealth and position a girl might dream of. He made love with a natural eagerness unknown to a man like Brent Halliday—her ex-fiancé.

  Her eyes went to the glowing emerald surrounded by flawless diamonds adorning her ring hand above the slender gold span of her wedding ring. It was Diego himself who had removed Brent's ring as if it were a paltry trinket and told her to send it back to him. As if Brent could be brushed aside by the penning of a few lines of apology, Laurel asking his forgiveness for falling in love with another man so precipitously. There had been no time for a reply to her letter, and she wondered if Brent would read between the lines of her stilted letter and know that her heart still belonged to him. She had skimmed lightly over her father's predicament, telling him that there had been a mistake which would be straightened out immediately.

  'What are you thinking of so pensively?' Diego broke into her thoughts, shattering her vision of Brent and the familiar environs of Los Angeles and bringing her back abruptly to the opulent car her new husband drove so competently.

  'I was thinking about Brent, my fiancé,' she told him

  bluntly, her mouth firming to still the sudden wave of homesickness that threatened her composure.

  After a brief pause while Diego skirted a broken down farm wagon on the road, he said with a faint frown: 'You have no fiancé, Laurel. You have a husband, and in just a few hours you will become a wife in every way,
not just in name as you persist in thinking. This Brent,' he paused again to negotiate a curve, 'would he not have made you his wife tonight if he and not I had been your bridegroom?'

  'Not if I hadn't wanted to become his wife,' Laurel returned tautly, stifling the sob that rose to her throat.

  'Then it is as I suspected,' he said with complacent dryness. 'Ice-water flows in his veins, not the hot blood of a man.'

  'Brent is as much of a man as you'll ever be,' she bridled quickly in defence. 'The only difference between you is that he's civilised and—and gentle—undemanding ...' Diego cast her a sardonic sideways glance as she floundered to a stop.

  'If all men had been such as you describe this Brent, then civilisation would have come to a halt long ago. Do you think that the conquistadores played cat and mouse with the women they desired? No. When they saw a woman who pleased them they took her. And the women they took were never known to complain.'

  'Would anyone have listened?' Laurel queried bitterly.

  'Perhaps not,' he conceded, lean hands confident at the wheel. 'But few of them took the ultimate road to freedom, which would have been death. Instead they founded families such as my own, loving their children as passionately as their husbands loved them. They were the real women, Laurel, the ones who recognised

  their fate and accepted it.'

  'The range of choice wasn't all that wide, was it?' she mocked, and Diego made no reply to that.

  They were descending now to the mountain-ringed Bay of Acapulco, and the glittering spectacle appeared to hold him as much in its thrall as it did Laurel. But in her case, the palm-fringed shores of pale gold faded into insignificance at the thought that soon she would be seeing her father again.

  The long, winding drive that curved round the tropical gardens of the estate was unfamiliar to Laurel. On her one brief visit to Diego's resort home they had arrived by sea from Acapulco, a trip made smooth by the superbly constructed motor yacht which was obviously Diego's pride and joy.