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Whether Margaret agreed or not, he would go ahead with his plans. Who was going to stand in his way? Not Rosie Clifton, that was for sure—
Rosie Clifton...
He couldn’t get her out of his head. Just her name was enough to set his senses raging. He suspected that beneath her composure Señorita Clifton could whip up quite a storm...
‘I’ve never known you to be so distracted at a meeting,’ Margaret commented discreetly.
He noticed everyone was leaving the room, while he had been thinking about Rosie Clifton. He was glad there was an air of excitement. His team was like a pack of greyhounds in the traps, eager to chase up every detail in his plan.
‘You’re right,’ he agreed, standing to hold Margaret’s chair. ‘I’ve got a lot on my mind.’
Women had always been ornaments in the past, to be enjoyed and briefly admired. He had never thought of them as potential mothers to any children he might have. He’d never thought of having children, or settling down. Life had kicked that notion out of him. His best plan was to make Rosie Clifton an offer for her half of the island that she couldn’t possibly refuse.
She might refuse.
There was that possibility, he conceded now he’d met her. The figure he had in mind was substantial, but would she take it? She was an idealist with her own plans for the island. She knew his reputation for taking wasteland and transforming it into a site of unparalleled luxury, but to Rosie every inch of that island held magic and potential—and not for a six-star hotel.
‘Xavier...’
‘Yes, Margaret?’ He would trust this woman with his life. She was the only woman he would trust with his fortune. Margaret was his fifty-four-year-old financial director, an accountant with a steel-trap mind who could run circles around every bean counter he knew. It was thanks to Margaret that he could take time away from the business. As a judge of people she had no equal. What would Margaret make of Señorita Clifton? he wondered.
‘I knew the meeting might run over,’ she said as he held the door for her, ‘and so I took the liberty of ordering the chopper to be fuelled and ready for you. You can leave at once.’
Margaret’s second talent was for reading his mind. His mood lifted, and he smiled at her decadent English vowels. Years of drilling in a strict UK boarding school accounted for the precision of her accent, Margaret had once told him. He didn’t care. He’d forgive her anything. She was the one woman in his life who had never disappointed him. Nodding briefly, he smiled his thanks and then they both went their separate ways.
* * *
It was late afternoon. Rosie was sitting on the beach, staring out to sea as she dabbled her feet in the water. She kept telling herself she knew Don Xavier wouldn’t come.
She should be relieved he wasn’t coming. She wasn’t relieved. Part of her wanted to get their business over with as fast as she could, while another, far less worthy part of her just wanted to see him again. Her best guess was that he couldn’t admit—not even to himself—that the island still meant something to him, and so he had decided to stay away. She got that. She had difficulty with emotions, having hidden hers for years. She would have been laughed at when she lived at the orphanage if she had given away even a hint of her romantic dreams, but that had never stopped her dreaming. In fact, sometimes, she thought she was overburdened with dreams, but they had never turned her into a block of ice like Don Xavier.
Almost six o’clock! The day was flying away. It was time to go back to the house. The glaring light of a sultry Spanish afternoon was fast burning out to burnished gold. The sunset promised to be spectacular, which was the only thing holding her on the beach. The sky was an intense, almost metallic blue, while the first signs of dusk were appearing on the horizon in random drifts of fluffy pink clouds. The sea was so smooth it looked like a skating rink, as if the waves, having exerted themselves all day, couldn’t be bothered to crash on the shore, so they were creeping up it instead. She scrunched her toes in the wet sand, loving the sensation as she allowed the rhythmical sound of the waves to flitter across her eardrums. Even that wasn’t soothing. Her irritation about the missing guest was stronger. Don Xavier seemed to find it easy to walk away from things and she’d been looking forward to another verbal sparring match with him. They had to get together if they were going to sort out the future of the island, and they should do that as soon as possible. They had a duty to the islanders.
She had wanted a chance to make him understand how much she cared for the island, and how lucky she felt to have been given the chance to live here. Helping the islanders was just her way of thanking them for their kindness towards her. Her dream was to share the island one day with other young people who’d had no advantages in life. She guessed that would have to wait, as her tiny pot of money would run out soon—
A sound distracted her. She couldn’t identify it at first. Then she realised it was the sound of rotor blades approaching fast. As she sprang to her feet a gleaming black craft appeared over the cliff at the far end of the bay. She remained motionless as it wheeled onto its side, at what appeared to her to be an impossibly acute angle.
She exhaled with relief when it levelled off to skim the surface of the sea, driving up spumes of water in glittering clouds. It kept on coming towards her, and only wheeled away at the very last minute. Rising rapidly, it banked steeply before turning inland. The pilot seemed to be flying on the edge of what was possible.
So it could only be one man, Rosie reasoned. Who else would take such risks with his life and company property?
And she shouldn’t be here on the beach daydreaming, but up at the house ready to greet him—or to hold him off!
To hell with greeting him! She should be up at the house to establish her right to call the hacienda home—the only home she’d ever known. More importantly, the hacienda had meant everything to Doña Anna, and no patronising, nose-in-the-air grandee was going to bulldoze it, to build yet another of his glitzy hotels. Kicking off her flip-flops, she began to run.
Rosie scrambled up the cliff path as if the hounds of hell were after her, and she didn’t stop until she reached the boundary to the property—a fence she hadn’t realised was quite so broken down. She picked her way carefully through the broken struts of a barrier that was supposed to divide a once beautiful formal garden from the glorious wilderness. As of now, it was all glorious wilderness, she saw with concern.
Imagining Don Xavier seeing the same thing made Rosie wince. She’d known things were bad, but not this bad. She’d meant to do something about the garden, but had no money to pay a gardener, and there was so much to do inside the house. Any spare time she had was spent researching grants and subsidies for the islanders, to help them get their plans for marketing their organic produce off the ground.
She glanced up to see the helicopter hovering over the hacienda. It looked like a giant black hand come to claim its rightful property. Its shadow was like an omen. Descending slowly from the sky, it looked like a malevolent locust as it settled on its widespread skids. It seemed to Rosie to be the clearest signal yet that she had no money, no power, no influence, while Don Xavier Del Rio had a cash register for a heart. What was going to happen to the island if she didn’t stand firm? Why had Doña Anna set them against each other like this? She couldn’t have expected them to work together. Don Xavier would never consider it. Doña Anna hadn’t been exactly noted for her willingness to compromise, and yet that was what she expected them to do.
So was she going to disappoint the woman who had given her a fresh chance in life?
Drawing a deep steadying breath, Rosie smoothed her hair and straightened her dress, ready for her second meeting with Don Xavier.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE KITCHEN DOOR was open so he walked straight in. It smelled clean, but looked shabby. He leaned over the pristine sink to see if the window really was in as much danger of falling out as he’d first thought. He heard a faint noise behind him—just a breath, a slight shift in the air. He turned and she was there.
His good intentions counted for nothing. His body responded instantly to the sight of Rosie Clifton, his groin tightening as blood ripped through his veins. She was so young, so innocent—and so not his type, but it seemed that no argument he could put up could take anything away from her appeal. The low-slanting sun was shining straight into her face. She looked like an angel waiting to fall, in shades of white and gold—and yellow? As she came deeper into the kitchen he took more notice of the dress. It was a hideous dress that must have hung unloved in a thrift shop for years, but on Señorita Clifton it served a very definite purpose, which was to cling to her shapely form with loving attention to detail.
‘Don Xavier,’ she exclaimed in a calm, clear voice, walking forward to greet him.
‘Señorita Clifton.’ His tone was cool.
‘Rosie, please,’ she insisted, forming the words with the kissable lips he hadn’t been able to get out of his mind.
‘Rosie.’ He inclined his head slightly in acknowledgement of her arrival, and then he remained still, waiting for her to come to him.
He could try every trick in the book, but she was never dismayed. The power of her easy-going personality was undeniable. As she extended her tiny hand for him to shake, she tipped up her chin to look him in the eyes, and he felt the force of that stare in his groin, which didn’t just tighten now, but ached with the most urgent need.
‘Welcome to Hacienda de Rio,’ she said with a smile, as if he were the interloper. And then, having realised her mistake, instead of blushing or showing how awkward she surely must feel at the blunder, she put her hand over her mouth and giggled before exclaiming, ‘That was a bit of a clanger, wasn’t it?’
He stared coolly into her eyes, trying to read her. He could read every woman he’d ever met, from the mother who had barely made eye contact with him, to Doña Anna’s scathing and ironic stare, and, after them, the legions of women who knew very well how to flirt with their eyes; they were all transparent to him, but Rosie Clifton was an enigma, and she intrigued him. She was also extremely self-possessed for a girl from nowhere, who had owned nothing but the clothes she stood up in until a few weeks ago.
Seeing the cold suspicion in his eyes, she had taken a step back. Feeling the table behind her legs, she reached behind her to rest her palms on the scrubbed pine surface, making her breasts appear more prominent than ever. Had any other woman done the same thing, he might have wondered if it was an invitation, but Rosie Clifton only succeeded in making herself look younger and more vulnerable than ever. Perhaps that too was a ploy of sorts, he reflected.
‘So, you got here at last?’ she challenged him lightly.
He shrugged. ‘I came as soon as I could.’
She pressed her lips together in a wry, accepting smile. ‘Your aunt mentioned that you’re a workaholic.’
He had forgotten how self-possessed she was. But now there was a faint blush on her face, and her amethyst eyes had darkened. He watched her breathing quicken, displaying the shape of her full breasts quite graphically in the close-fitting dress.
‘This is, of course, as much your home as mine,’ she said candidly.
‘How kind of you to say so.’ He resisted the temptation to state the obvious: that his claim went back a thousand years.
‘You haven’t forgotten the ice cream I promised, have you? I made two flavours.’
Rosie wasn’t sure when she had decided to treat Don Xavier as a normal human being, rather than as an aristocrat with centuries of breeding behind him. They were wildly unequal in every sense, but, as nothing could change that, she had decided to be herself.
Maybe it was the Doña Anna effect, Rosie reflected as she reached for two bowls. In this one precious inheritance Doña Anna had made sure they were equals. The Spanish Grandee and the orphan housekeeper shared a huge responsibility thanks to the way that Doña Anna had drafted her will, but the more Rosie thought about it, the more it seemed to her that Don Xavier’s need for an heir gave her some leverage over him. She had no other power to wield, but he had a schedule to meet, or he would forfeit his fifty per cent of the island to her. Of course, she could just wait him out and hope he couldn’t produce an heir in the time specified, but she had no intention of wasting two years of her life hanging around for that. She wanted to get things moving on the island for the sake of the islanders as soon as she could.
Which, ideally, would mean working together, she thought, deflating somewhat when she caught sight of Don Xavier’s unsmiling face.
Dipping down, she reached into the freezer to pull out the boxes of ice cream. The air in the kitchen seemed to have frozen harder than the ice cream in the tub.
Whatever happened next, she wasn’t going to be railroaded into making any decision that didn’t feel right. She might have everything to learn about being a landowner, but Doña Anna had taught her not to be silent and accepting, but to question everything.
‘Vanilla,’ she announced, prising the lid off the tub. ‘And Doña Anna’s favourite—fresh strawberry. I picked the fruit from the garden this morning—’
‘I haven’t come here to eat ice cream,’ the towering monument to privilege and wealth currently occupying her kitchen coldly stated.
He hadn’t expected Rosie to be so relaxed on this second meeting, Xavier realised. She’d had time to think about things, and must surely realise the hopelessness of her situation. He was stationed at one end of the kitchen table, while she was at the other, and she didn’t seem concerned at all. As she opened a drawer to reach for a serving spoon he put the documents he’d brought with him very prominently on the table.
She didn’t look at them once—or didn’t appear to, but then she baited him with a level stare. ‘These look official,’ she said, moving them out of the way so she could arrange her dishes. ‘They look like the type of papers that won’t bring anyone any happiness. “Beware of lawyers, ” Doña Anna used to tell me. “Trust no one but yourself, Rosie.” So...what flavour would you like?’
He was taken aback for a moment. He had dealt with many difficult situations in business, but nothing like this. ‘What else did Doña Anna warn you about?’
‘Honestly?’ she said, pulling an attractive face as she thought about it for two seconds. ‘Nothing. Not you. Not anything. I think she must have trusted me to get on with things. And at the end, when she was dying, and I knew I was about to lose the best friend I’d ever had, the last thing on my mind was lawyers, or wills.’
He believed her.
‘I’ll look at the documents later,’ she said, ‘if that’s all right with you?’
And if it wasn’t all right with him, she would still look at the documents later, he guessed. In fairness, nothing would bounce him into doing anything in a hurry, so he couldn’t argue with that.
‘There is one thing I feel compelled to do,’ she said, ‘and I hope you’ll go along with me in this one little thing...’
‘That depends what it is,’ he said.
If they never did anything else together, they would do this, Rosie determined. The ceremony she had in mind held as much significance for her as toasting the life of a loved one in champagne at a wake. Taking a moment to celebrate the life of a very special woman, who had done so much for both of them, before normal hostilities were resumed shouldn’t be too much to ask. It was time to find out.
‘No ice cream for me, thank you.’ Don Xavier put up his hand as if to ward off the scoop of ice cream she was offering him.
Her stomach was clenching with apprehension, but she’d started so she’d finish. ‘I’m afraid I must insist.’
‘You must insist?’ he said, scanning her face as if he thought she’d gone mad.
‘I don’t have any champagne to toast your aunt,’ Rosie explained, ‘and as Doña Anna loved ice cream, I thought we could both take a moment to remember her.’
Her throat was so tight by the time she’d finished this little speech she couldn’t have argued with him if she’d tried, so it was a relief when he reached for the bowl. Lifting her own bowl, she proposed huskily, ‘To Doña Anna...’
A muscle flexed in Don Xavier’s jaw, and then—and she was sure she wasn’t mistaken—the faintest hint of amusement sparked in his eyes. So he was human after all. ‘I’m sure if we do this together, we can do more things together,’ she prompted as she waited for him to start eating. She had to stop herself exclaiming with relief when his firm mouth closed around the spoon.
‘Doña Anna,’ he murmured, holding her gaze until heat flared inside her.
‘Doña Anna,’ she repeated, trying not to meet his eyes as she wondered what else he could do with that sexy mouth. He was just so unreasonably hot. She had never been alone with such a good-looking man before, let alone so close to him. Her ideal was based on the heroes in the books she used to read to Doña Anna, and they were all big and dark and dangerous too.
And that was quite enough rambling off-track for one day, Rosie warned herself firmly. If Don Xavier had made the slightest move she’d have run a mile.
‘Are we done here?’ he asked, dipping his head to bait her with his piercing stare.
‘Yes, I think so. Thank you for that.’ Her body thanked him very much. She was tingling with awareness.
* * *
He wanted to smear her with ice cream and lick it off slowly. He wanted to lay her down on the kitchen table and attend quite thoroughly to Señorita Clifton’s every need. He wanted to explore every hungry part of her body slowly. He could certainly see some use for the ice cream. The contrast of heat and cold would be a torment to her—to him too, but that torment would end with pleasure so extreme, they would never forget it.
‘The tour?’ he prompted, shaking himself around.
‘Of course.’ She smiled primly into his eyes, but he couldn’t help wondering what was going on behind that lambent gaze.
Why did the one woman in the world he needed to eject from his life as efficiently and quickly as possible have to be so desirable, and so ready for seduction?
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