The Man From Madrid. Anne Weale

      CHAPTER ONE

      THE muffled jangling of a distant bell made Cally give a soft snarl, the way Mog did when something annoyed him. Though, by nature, both she and the large tabby cat were good-tempered beings from whom smiles and purrs were more characteristic. It was just that right now she was busy preparing the bedrooms for tonight’s guests and didn’t want to be interrupted.

      Leaving the floor mop propped against the wall, she crossed the landing, catching a glimpse of herself as she passed a large mirror. Any resemblance between the figure in jeans, T-shirt, sneakers and household gloves and her real self, the high-flying young businesswoman, designer-suited and always immaculately groomed, was ‘purely coincidental’ as the disclaimers in books said, she thought with wry humour. Who, seeing her now, would guess that a week ago she had been chairing a meeting in London?

      Running down the three flights of stone stairs that connected the floors in the tall old Spanish house, she hurried to open the left-hand section of the massive door. In times gone by, when it was fully open, it had allowed a mule and cart to pass through to the stable at the rear of the premises.

      In the street outside the great door stood a man of the type Cally had sometimes imagined but never actually met: a Spaniard to die for.

      Well over six feet tall and built in proportion to his height, he had hair as dense and glossy as a black labrador’s coat and features that were a replica of those on the Moor’s head fountain in the village. Unlike the Moor he didn’t have a beard, only what might be designer stubble or merely the result of a mountain walker not bothering to shave for a couple of days ‘on the hill’ as the British walkers called their excursions into the mountains.

      It was the heavy backpack he had shrugged off his broad shoulders and propped against his long legs that made her think he was a walker looking for a bed for the night.

      He said, in Spanish, ‘Good afternoon, señorita. I’ve reserved a room for three nights. My name is Nicolás Llorca.’

      When someone, a woman, had made the reservation by telephone, Cally had assumed that Señor Llorca was a company representative, using the casa rural owned by her parents as an inexpensive base for his sales sorties in the area. During the week they rarely had Spanish guests and not many at weekends. Most of their visitors were foreigners like her father and mother.

      ‘Please come in, señor. We weren’t expecting you to arrive until later, but everything is ready for you,’ she answered, in the fluent Spanish he was unlikely to guess was not her native tongue.

      ‘Have you come far?’ she asked, as he ducked his head to avoid hitting the lintel of the wicket door made in an era when Spanish country people were rarely if ever six-footers.

      ‘Not far.’ He left it at that. So far he had not smiled as men usually did when they met her—especially Spanish men.

      Not the friendly type, thought Cally.

      She said, ‘I expect you’d like to dump your pack before you do anything else. I’ll show you your room.’

      Leading the way back to the top of the house, she wondered if the bed in the room she had planned to give him would be long enough for someone of his height. Perhaps it would be better to switch him to the room with a cama de matrimonio where he could lie diagonally.

      The other double rooms had twin beds, but then most of the couples who came here looked as if, like her parents, they had given up sex some time ago. Cally had been told by a Spanish friend that, in rural Spain, the hurly-burly of the marriage bed came to an end at the menopause. After that husbands had to look elsewhere for those pleasures.