Free Surrender to Her Spanish Husband by Maggie Cox Page A

next Rodrigo looked she’d slid back down into the bed and buried herself beneath the plump feather duvet like a small animal going into hibernation.
    ‘Rest, then, querida ,’ he said with a smile, and although he would have been quite happy to stand and gaze at her for a while longer, he wrestled the desire to the ground and headed back downstairs.
    During the following three days it honestly went through Jenny’s mind more than once that if she slipped away into the afterlife one fever-racked night it might be a blessing. Never before had her constitution been under such miserable threat. But she held onto the vehement assurance that Rodrigo had given her—‘You’re not going to die…not on my watch.’
    Had she ever slept this much in the whole of her twenty-seven years? Her dad had told her once that even as an infant she had only slept six hours out of every twenty-four. Not much rest to be had then for her long-suffering parents.
    But during those memorable three days while she was ill Jenny heard Rodrigo moving reassuringly round the house, doing this and that, and at one point forced opened her heavy lids to see a smart-suited stranger urging her to ‘just relax’ whilst he placed a cold thermometer under her arm to take her temperature. Whatever the doctor concluded it had caused Rodrigo to move into her bedroom permanently, it seemed—because whenever Jenny did manage to open her eyes he was there in the rattan chair next to her bed, either scribbling away on a notepad with his pen or tapping away at the keys on his laptop. A couple of times she registered him speaking on the phone too…once in mellifluous Spanish.
    But, as much as his continued presence reassured her, Jenny had mixed emotions about it. Her tired brain could hardly credit why he would stay with her for so long and not simply leave…It was nothing like his old behaviour, when work had always come first.
    On the fourth day of her illness she woke up feeling less likely to die and longing for a bath. Her teeth were also in dire need of the brushing of a lifetime, because frankly her mouth tasted as though some small creature had crept inside and died in it. It was after eight in the morning, and the rattan chair beside her was empty of her handsome dark-haired guard. With a little jolt of unease in her stomach at the fresh realisation of just how much she had been relying on Rodrigo she swung her legs over the side of the bed and stood up.
    Wrong move, Jenny… The room spun alarmingly, as though she’d just stepped off a manically twirling carousel
    ‘What are you doing?’
    ‘I need a bath. If I don’t have one soon you’ll have to report me to the health and safety department.’
    Moving away from the doorway, his face unsmiling, Rodrigo walked right up to her. Recently showered and shaved, and wearing a fresh white T-shirt and black corded jeans, the man smelled gorgeous. It made Jenny all the more flustered and aware of her own less than scented condition after lying ill in bed for three days.
    ‘Are you up to having a bath, querida ? Perhaps I could bring a basin of warm water and you could have a bed-bath instead?’
    ‘With you playing nurse?’ Her eyebrows flew up to her scalp. ‘I don’t think so!’
    ‘This is hardly the time for false modesty, Jenny Wren. Besides…’ a teasing spark of heat ignited in his soulful dark eyes ‘…I’ve seen you naked, remember? And not just when I helped you change into a fresh nightgown.’
    She’d been praying she’d dreamt that. Learning that wasn’t the case, she felt her heart skip an embarrassed beat. ‘It’s hardly gentlemanly of you to remind me about that.’
    He chuckled—a husky, compelling sound that made her legs feel weaker than water. ‘Sometimes I am a gentleman and others not. I don’t have to leave it to your imagination to wonder about the times I am not…do I?’
    Clutching the front of her nightgown a little desperately, Jenny tipped up her chin. ‘I