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And then, when she reached the chair in front of his desk, it dawned on her that she hadn’t been invited to sit down, so she remained hovering with one hand on the back of the chair, waiting in tense, electric silence...
‘Why don’t you sit down, Sophie?’
He looked at her, enjoying the hectic colour in her cheeks, enjoying the fact that she was standing on shaky legs in front of him, in the role of supplicant.
And he was enjoying a hell of a lot more than that, he freely admitted to himself...
She was even more beautiful than the image he had stored in his mind carefully, as he had discovered, wrapped in tissue paper, waiting for the day when the tissue paper would be removed.
He couldn’t see how long or short her hair was but it was still the vibrant tangle of colour it had been when he had first met her. Chestnut interweaved with copper with strands of strawberry blonde threaded through in a colourful display of natural highlights.
And she hadn’t put on an ounce over the years. Indeed, she looked slimmer than ever. Gaunt, even, with smudges of strain showing under her violet eyes.
Financial stress would do that to a person, he thought, especially a person who had been brought up to expect the finest things in life.
But for all that she was as beautiful as he remembered, with that elusive quality of hesitancy that had first attracted him to her. She looked like a model, leggy, rangy and startlingly pretty, but she lacked the hard edges of someone with model looks and that was a powerful source of attraction. She had always seemed to be ever so slightly puzzled when guys spun round to stare at her.
Complete act, he now realised. Just one of the many things about her that had roped him in, one of the many things that had been fake.
‘So...’ he drawled, relaxing back in his chair. ‘Where to begin? Such a long time since we last saw one another...’
Sophie was fast realising that there was going to be no loan. He had requested an audience with her because he could, because he had known that she would be unable to refuse. He had asked to see her so that he could send her away with a flea in her ear over how he thought he had been treated by her the last time they had been together.
She was sitting here in front of him simply because revenge was a dish best served cold.
She cleared her throat, back ramrod-straight, hands clutching the bag on her lap, a leftover designer relic back from the good old days when money, apparently, had been no object.
‘My brother informs me that you might be amenable to providing us with a loan.’ She didn’t want to go down memory lane and, since this was a business meeting, why not cut to the chase? He wasn’t going to lend them the money anyway, so what was the point of prolonging the agony?
Though there was some rebellious part of her that was compelled to steal glances at the man who had once held her heart captive in his hand.
He was still so beautiful. A wave of memories washed over her and she seemed to see, in front of her, the guy who could make her laugh, who could make her tingle all over whenever he rested his eyes on her; the guy who had lusted after her and had pursued her with the sort of intent and passion she had never experienced in her life before.
She blinked; the image was gone and she was back in the present, cringing as he continued to assess her with utterly cool detachment.
‘Tut-tut-tut, Sophie. Don’t tell me that you seriously expected to walk into my office and find yourself presented with a loan arrangement all ready and waiting for you to sign, before disappearing back to...remind where it is...the wilds of Yorkshire?’ He shook his head with rueful incredulity, as though chastising her for being a complete moron. ‘I think we should at least relax and chat a bit before we begin discussing...money...’
Sophie wondered whether this meant that he would actually agree to lend them the money they so desperately needed.
‘I would offer you coffee or tea, but my secretary has gone for the day. I can, of course...’ He levered himself out of the chair and Sophie noted the length and muscularity of his body.
He had been lean and menacing years ago, with the sort of physical strength that can only be thinly hidden behind clothes. He was just as menacing now, more so because he now wielded power, and a great deal of it.
She watched as he made his way over to a bar, which she now noticed at the far side of his office, in a separate, airy room which overlooked the streets below on two sides.
It was an obscenely luxurious office suite. All that was missing was a bed.
Heat stung her cheeks and she licked her lips nervously. For all she knew, he was married with a couple of kids, even though he didn’t look it. He certainly would have a woman tucked away somewhere.
‘Have a drink with me, Sophie...’
‘I’d rather not.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because...’ Her voice trailed off and she noted that he had ignored her completely and was now strolling towards her with a glass of wine in his hand.
‘Because...what?’ Instead of returning to his chair, he perched on the edge of his desk and looked down at her with his head tilted to one side.
‘Why don’t you just lay into me and get it over and done with?’ she muttered, taking the drink from him and nursing the glass. She stared up at him defiantly, her violet eyes clashing with his unreadable, dark-as-night ones. ‘I knew I shouldn’t have come here.’
‘Lay into you?’ Javier queried smoothly. He shrugged. ‘Things happen and relationships bite the dust. We were young. It’s no big deal.’
‘Yes,’ Sophie agreed uneasily.
‘So your brother tells me that you are now a widow...’
‘Roger died in an accident three years ago.’
‘Tragic. You must have been heartbroken.’
‘It’s always tragic when someone is snatched away in the prime of their life.’ She ignored the sarcasm in his voice; she certainly wasn’t going to pretend to play the part of heartbroken widow when her marriage had been a sham from beginning to end. ‘And perhaps you don’t know but my father is also no longer with us. I’m not sure if Ollie told you, but he suffered a brain tumour towards the end. So life, you see, has been very challenging, for me and my brother, but I’m sure you must have guessed that the minute he showed up here.’ She lowered her eyes and then nervously sipped some of the wine before resting the glass on the desk.
She wanted to ask whether it was okay to do that or whether he should get a coaster or something.
But then, really rich people never worried about silly little things like wine glass ring-marks on their expensive wooden desks, did they?
‘You have my sympathies.’ Less sincere condolences had seldom been spoken. ‘And your mother?’
‘She lives in Cornwall now. We...we bought her a little cottage there so that she could be far from... Well, her health has been poor and the sea air does her good... And you?’
‘What about me?’ Javier frowned, eased himself off the desk and returned to where he had been sitting.
‘Have you married? Got children?’ The artificiality of the situation threatened to bring on a bout of manic laughter. It was surreal, sitting here making small talk with a guy who probably hated her guts, even though, thankfully, she had not been subjected to the sort of blistering attack she had been fearing.
At least, not yet.
At any rate, she could always walk out...although he had dangled that carrot in front of her, intimated that he would indeed be willing to discuss the terms and conditions of helping them. Could she seriously afford to let her pride come in the way of some sort of solution to their problems?
If she had been the only one affected, then yes, but there was her brother, her mother, those faithful employees left working, through loyalty, for poor salaries in the ever-shrinking family business.
‘This isn’t about me,’ Javier fielded silkily. ‘Although, in answer to your question, I have reached the conclusion that women, as a long-term proposition, have no place in my life at this point in time. So, times have changed for you,’ he murmured, moving on with the conversation. He reached into his drawer and extracted a sheet of paper, which he swivelled so that it was facing her.
‘Your company accounts. From riches to rags in the space of a few years, although, if you look carefully, you’ll see that the company has been mismanaged for somewhat longer than a handful of years. Your dearly departed husband seems to have failed to live up to whatever promise there was that an injection of cash would rescue your family’s business. I take it you were too busy playing the good little wife to notice that he had been blowing vast sums of money on pointless ventures that all crashed and burned?’
Sophie stared at the paper, feeling as though she had been stripped naked and made to stand in front of him for inspection.
‘I knew,’ she said abruptly. Playing the good little wife? How wrong could he have been?
‘You ditched your degree course to rush into marriage with a man who blew the money on...oh, let’s have a look...transport options for sustainable farmers...a wind farm that came to nothing...several aborted ventures into the property market...a sports centre which was built and then left to rot because the appropriate planning permission hadn’t been provided... All the time your father’s once profitable transport business was haemorrhaging money by the bucketload. And you knew...’
‘There was nothing I could do,’ Sophie said tightly, loathing him even though she knew that, if he were to lend them any money, he would obviously have to know exactly what he was getting into.
‘Did you know where else your husband was blowing his money, to the tune of several hundred thousand?’
Perspiration broke out in a fine, prickly film and she stared at him mutinously.
‘Why are you doing this?’
‘Doing what?’
‘Hanging me out to dry? If you don’t want to help, then please just say so and I’ll leave and you’ll never see me again.’
‘Fine.’ Javier sat back and watched her.
She had never lain spread across his bed. He had never seen that hair in all its glory across his pillows. He had felt those ripe, firm breasts, but through prudish layers of clothes. He had never tasted them. Had never even seen them. Before he’d been able to do any of that, before he’d been able to realise the powerful thrust of his passion and his yearning, she had walked away from him. Walked straight up to the altar and into the arms of some little twerp whose very existence she had failed to mention in the months that they had been supposedly going out.
He had a sudden vision of her lying on his bed in the penthouse apartment, just one of several he owned in the capital. It was a blindingly clear vision and his erection was as fast as it was shocking. He had to breathe deeply and evenly in an attempt to dispel the unsettling and unwelcome image that had taken up residence in his head.
‘Not going to walk out?’ Javier barely recognised the raw lack of self-control that seemed to be guiding his responses.
He’d wanted to see her squirm but the force of his antipathy took him by surprise because he was realising just how fast and tight she had stuck to him over the years.
Unfinished business. That was why. Well, he would make sure he finished it if it was the last thing he did and then he would be free of the woman and whatever useless part of his make-up she still appeared to occupy.
‘He gambled.’ Sophie raised her eyes to his and held his stare in silence before looking away, offering him her averted profile.
‘And you knew about that as well,’ Javier had a fleeting twinge of regret that he had mentioned any of this. It had been unnecessary. Then he remembered the way she had summarily dumped him and all fleeting regret vanished in a puff of smoke.
She nodded mutely.
‘And there was nothing you could have done about that either?’
‘I don’t suppose you’ve ever lived with someone who has a destructive addiction?’ she said tightly. ‘You can’t just sit them down for a pep talk and then expect them to change overnight.’
‘But you can send them firmly in the direction of professional help.’ Javier was curious. The picture he had built of her had been one of the happily married young wife, in love with Prince Charming, so in love that she had not been able to abide being away from him whilst at university—perhaps hoping that the distraction of an unsuitable foreigner might put things into perspective, only for that gambit to hit the rocks.
Then, when he had inspected the accounts closely, he had assumed that, blindly in love, she had been ignorant of her loser husband’s uncontrolled behaviour.
Now...
He didn’t want curiosity to mar the purity of what he wanted from her and he was taken aback that it was.
‘Roger was an adult. He didn’t want help. I wasn’t capable of manhandling him into a car and driving him to the local association for gambling addicts. And I don’t want to talk about...about my marriage. I... It’s in the past.’
‘So it is,’ Javier murmured. When he thought about the other man, he saw red, pure jealousy at being deprived of what he thought should have been his.
Crazy.
Since when had he considered any woman his possession?
‘And yet,’ he mused softly, ‘when is the past ever really behind us? Don’t you find that it dogs us like a guilty conscience, even when we would like to put it to bed for good?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You ran out on me.’
‘Javier, you don’t understand...’
‘Nor do I wish to. This isn’t about understanding what motivated you.’ And at this point in time—this very special point in time when the tables had been reversed, when she was now the one without money and he the one with the bank notes piled up in the coffers—well, she was hardly going to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth when it came to motivations, was she? Oh, no, she would concoct some pretty little tale to try to elicit as much sympathy from him as she could...
‘I’m not asking you to give me money, Javier. I... I’m just asking for a loan. I would pay it all back, every penny of it.’
Javier flung back his head and laughed, a rich, full-bodied laugh that managed to lack genuine warmth. ‘Really? I’m tickled pink at the thought of a Classics scholar, almost there but never graduated, and her sports scholarship brother running any company successfully enough to make it pay dividends, never mind a company that’s on its last legs.’
‘There are directors in the company...’
‘Looked at them. I would ditch most of them if I were you.’
‘You looked at them?’
Javier shrugged. His dark eyes never left her face. ‘I probably know more about your company than you do. Why not? If I’m to sink money into it, then I need to know exactly what I will be sinking money into.’
‘So...are you saying that you’ll help?’
‘I’ll help.’ He smiled slowly. ‘But there’s no such thing as a free lunch. There will be terms and conditions...’
‘That’s fine.’ For the first time in a very long time, a cloud seemed to be lifting. She had underestimated him. He was going to help and she wanted to sob with relief. ‘Whatever your terms and conditions, well, they won’t be a problem. I promise.’
CHAPTER THREE
‘PERHAPS WE SHOULD take this conversation somewhere else.’
‘Why?’ The suggestion of leaving with him for somewhere else sent little shivers of alarm skittering through her.
She could scarcely credit that she was sitting here, in this office, facing this man who had haunted her for years. All the things that had happened ever since that first tentative step as a young girl falling hopelessly in love with an unsuitable boy lay between them like a great, big, murky chasm.
There was just so much he didn’t know.
But none of that was relevant. What was relevant was that he was going to help them and that was enough.
‘Because,’ Javier drawled, rising to his feet and strolling to fetch his jacket from where it lay slung over the back of one of the expensive, compact sofas in the little sitting area of the office, ‘I feel that two old friends should not be discussing something as crass as a business bailout within the confines of an office.’
Two old friends?
Sophie scrutinised the harsh angles of his face for any inherent sarcasm and he returned her stare with bland politeness.
But his bland politeness made her feel unaccountably uneasy.
He’d never been polite.
At least, not in the way that English people were polite. Not in the middle-class way of clinking teacups and saying the right things, which was the way she had been brought up.
He had always spoken his mind and damned the consequences. She had occasionally seen him in action at university, once in the company of two of his lecturers, when they had been discussing economics.
He had listened to them, which had been the accepted polite way, but had then taken their arguments and ripped them to shreds. The breadth and depth of his knowledge had been so staggering that there had been no comeback.
He had never been scared of rocking the boat. Sometimes, she wondered whether he had privately relished it, although when she’d once asked him that directly, he had burst out laughing before kissing her senseless—at which point she had forgotten what she had been saying to him. Kissing him had always had that effect on her.
A surge of memories brought a hectic flush to her cheeks.
‘Is this your new way of dressing?’ he asked and Sophie blinked, dispelling disturbing images of when they had been an item.
‘What do you mean?’
‘You look like an office worker.’
‘That’s exactly what I am,’ she returned lightly, following him to the door, because what else could she do? At this point, he held all the trump cards, and if he wanted to go and have their business chat sitting on bar stools in the middle of Threadneedle Street, then so be it. There was too much at stake for her to start digging her heels in and telling him that she felt more comfortable discussing business in an office.
She had come this far and there was no turning back now.
This floor was a sanctum of quiet. It was occupied by CEOs and directors, most of whom were concealed behind opaque glass and thick doors. In the middle there was a huge, open-plan space in which desks were cleverly positioned to allow for maximum space utilisation and minimum scope for chatting aimlessly.
The open space was largely empty, except for a couple of diligent employees who were too absorbed in whatever they were doing to look up at them as they headed for the directors’ lift.
‘But it’s not exactly where you wanted to end up, is it?’ he asked as the lift doors quietly closed, sealing them in together.
It didn’t matter where she looked, reflections of him bounced back at her.
She shrugged and reluctantly met his dark eyes.
‘You don’t always end up where you think you’re going to,’ she said tersely.
‘You had big plans to be a university lecturer.’
‘Life got in the way of that.’
‘I’m sure your dearly departed husband wouldn’t like to be seen as someone who got in the way of your big plans.’
‘I don’t want to talk about Roger.’
Because the thought of him no longer being around was still too painful for her to bear. That thought struck Javier with dagger-like precision. The man might have been a waste of space when it came to business, and an inveterate gambler who had blown vast sums of money that should have been pumped into saving the company, yet she had loved him and now would have nothing said against him.
Javier’s lips thinned.
He noted the way she scurried out of the lift, desperate to put some physical distance between them.
‘When did you find out that the company was on the brink of going bust?’
Sophie cringed. She wanted to ask whether it was really necessary to go down that road and she knew that she had to divorce the past from the present. He wasn’t the guy she had loved to death, the guy she had been forced to give up when life as she knew it had suddenly stopped. That was in the past and right now she was in the company of someone thinking about extending credit to the company. He would want details even if she didn’t want to give them.
But there was a lot she didn’t want to tell him. She didn’t want his contempt or his pity and she knew she would have both if she presented him with the unadorned truth. That was if he believed her at all, which was doubtful.
‘I knew things weren’t too good a while back,’ she said evasively. ‘But I had no idea really of just how bad they were until...well, until I got married. ’
Javier felt the dull, steady beat of jealousy working its poisonous way through his body.
He was painfully reminded of the folly of his youth, the naivety of imagining that they would have a future together. The poor foreigner working his way up and the beautiful, well-spoken, impeccably bred English girl who just so happened to be the apple of her father’s adoring and protective eye.
At the time, he had thought himself to be as hard as nails and immune to distraction.
He’d set his course and he had been cocky enough to imagine that no ill winds would come along to blow him off target.
Of all the girls on the planet, he had found himself blown off target by one who had set her course on someone else and had been playing with him for a bit of fun, stringing him along while her heart belonged to someone else.
‘And then...what?’
‘What do you mean?’ She nervously played with her finger, where once upon an unhappy time there had been a wedding ring.
She hadn’t paid much attention to where they were going, but when he stood back to push open a door for her, she saw that they were at an old pub, the sort of pub that populated the heart of the City.
She shimmied past him, ducking under his outstretched arm as he held the door open for her. She was tall at five foot ten, but he was several inches taller and she had a memory of how protected he had always made her feel. The clean, masculine scent of him lingered in her nostrils, making her feel shaky as she sat down at a table in the corner, waiting tensely while he went to get them something to drink. She knew she should keep a clear head and drink water but her nerves were all over the place. They needed something a little stronger than water.
Outside it was hot and she could glimpse a packed garden but in here it was cool, dark and relatively empty.
The sun worshippers were all drinking in the evening sun.
Trying to elicit details about her past was not relevant. Javier knew that and he was furious with himself for succumbing to the desire to know more.
Just like that, in a matter of minutes, she had managed to stoke his curiosity. Just like that, she was back under his skin and he couldn’t wait to have her, to bed her, so that he could rid himself of the uncomfortable suspicion that she had been there all along, a spectre biding its time until it could resurface to catch him on the back foot.
For a man to whom absolute control was vital, this slither of susceptibility was unwelcome.
He realised that when he tried to think of the last woman he had slept with, a top-notch career woman in New York with legs to her armpits, he came up blank. He couldn’t focus on anyone but the woman sitting in front of him, looking at him as though she expected him to pounce unexpectedly at any minute.
She had the clearest violet eyes he had ever seen, fringed with long, dark lashes, and the tilt of them gave her a slightly dreamy look, as though a part of her was on another plane. He itched to unpin her neat little bun so that he could see whether that glorious hair of hers was still as long, still as unruly.
‘Well?’ Javier demanded impatiently, hooking a chair with his foot and angling it so that he could sit with his long legs extended. He had brought a wine cooler with a bottle of wine and one of the bartenders placed two glasses in front of them, then simpered for a few seconds, doe-eyed, before reluctantly walking back to the bar.