About the Authors

CATHY WILLIAMS can remember reading Mills & Boon books as a teenager, and now that she is writing them she remains an avid fan. For her, there is nothing like creating romantic stories and engaging plots, and each and every book is a new adventure. Cathy lives in London, and her three daughters – Charlotte, Olivia and Emma – have always been, and continue to be, the greatest inspirations in her life.

MAYA BLAKE’S hopes of becoming a writer were born when she picked up her first romance book aged thirteen. Little did she know her dream would come true! Does she still pinch herself every now and then, to make sure it’s not a dream? Yes, she does!

Feel free to pinch her too, via Twitter, Facebook or Goodreads! Happy reading!

CHANTELLE SHAW lives on the Kent coast and thinks up her stories while walking on the beach. She has been married for over thirty years and has six children. Her love affair with reading and writing Mills & Boon stories began as a teenager, and her first book was published in 2006. She likes strong-willed, slightly unusual characters. Chantelle also loves gardening, walking and wine!

Ruthless Revenge: Passionate Possession

A Virgin for Vasquez

Cathy Williams

A Marriage Fit for a Sinner

Maya Blake

Mistress of His Revenge

Chantelle Shaw

www.millsandboon.co.uk

ISBN: 978-1-474-08508-3

RUTHLESS REVENGE: PASSIONATE POSSESSION

A Virgin for Vasquez © 2016 Cathy Williams A Marriage Fit for a Sinner © 2015 Maya Blake Mistress of His Revenge © 2016 Chantelle Shaw

Published in Great Britain 2018

by Mills & Boon, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers 1 London Bridge Street, London, SE1 9GF

All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. This edition is published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, locations and incidents are purely fictional and bear no relationship to any real life individuals, living or dead, or to any actual places, business establishments, locations, events or incidents. Any resemblance is entirely coincidental.

By payment of the required fees, you are granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right and licence to download and install this e-book on your personal computer, tablet computer, smart phone or other electronic reading device only (each a “Licensed Device”) and to access, display and read the text of this e-book on-screen on your Licensed Device. Except to the extent any of these acts shall be permitted pursuant to any mandatory provision of applicable law but no further, no part of this e-book or its text or images may be reproduced, transmitted, distributed, translated, converted or adapted for use on another file format, communicated to the public, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of publisher.

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Version: 2020-03-02

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Table of Contents

Cover

About the Authors

Title Page

Copyright

A Virgin for Vasquez

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

A Marriage Fit for a Sinner

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

EPILOGUE

Mistress of His Revenge

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

About the Publisher

A Virgin for Vasquez

Cathy Williams

CHAPTER ONE

JAVIER VASQUEZ LOOKED around his office with unconcealed satisfaction.

Back in London after seven years spent in New York and didn’t fate move in mysterious ways...?

From his enviable vantage point behind the floor-to-ceiling panes of reinforced rock-solid glass, he gazed down to the busy city streets in miniature. Little taxis and little cars ferrying toy-sized people to whatever important or irrelevant destinations were calling them.

And for him...?

A slow, curling smile, utterly devoid of humour, curved his beautiful mouth.

For him, the past had come calling and that, he knew, accounted for the soaring sense of satisfaction now filling him because, as far as offices went, this one, spectacular though it was, was no more or less spectacular than the offices he had left behind in Manhattan. There, too, he had looked down on busy streets, barely noticing the tide of people that daily flowed through those streets like a pulsing, breathing river.

Increasingly, he had become cocooned in an ivory tower, the undisputed master of all he surveyed. He was thirty-three years old. You didn’t get to rule the concrete jungle by taking your eye off the ball. No; you kept focused, you eliminated obstacles and in that steady, onward and upward march, time passed by until now...

He glanced at his watch.

Twelve storeys down, in the vast, plush reception area, Oliver Griffin-Watt would already have been waiting for half an hour.

Did Javier feel a twinge of guilt about that?

Not a bit of it.

He wanted to savour this moment because he felt as though it had been a long time coming.

And yet, had he thought about events that had happened all those years ago? He’d left England for America and his life had become consumed in the business of making money, of putting to good use the education his parents had scrimped and saved to put him through, and in the process burying a fleeting past with a woman he needed to consign to the history books.

The only child of devoted parents who had lived in a poor barrio in the outskirts of Madrid, Javier had spent his childhood with the driving motto drummed into him that to get out, he had to succeed and to succeed, he had to have an education. And he’d had to get out.

His parents had worked hard, his father as a taxi driver, his mother as a cleaner, and the glass ceiling had always been low for them. They’d managed, but only just. No fancy holidays, no flat-screen tellies for the house, no chichi restaurants with fawning waiters. They’d made do with cheap and cheerful and every single penny had been put into savings for the time when they would send their precociously bright son to university in England. They had known all too well the temptations waiting for anyone stupid enough to go off the rails. They had friends whose sons had taken up with gangs, who had died from drug overdoses, who had lost the plot and ended up as dropouts kicked around on street corners.

That was not going to be the fate of their son.

If, as a teenager, Javier had ever resented the tight controls placed on him, he had said nothing.

He had been able to see for himself, from a very young age, just what financial hardship entailed and how limiting it could be. He had seen how some of his wilder friends, who had made a career out of playing truant, had ended up in the gutter. By the time he had hit eighteen, he had made his plans and nothing was going to derail them: a year or two out, working to add to the money his parents had saved, then university, where he would succeed because he was bright—brighter than anyone he knew. Then a high-paying job. No starting at the ground level and making his way up slowly, but a job with a knockout financial package. Why not? He knew his assets and he had had no intention of selling himself short.

He wasn’t just clever.

Lots of people were clever. He was also sharp. Sharp in a streetwise sort of way. He possessed the astuteness of someone who knew how to make deals and how to spot where they could be made. He knew how to play rough and how to intimidate. Those were skills that were ingrained rather than learnt and, whilst they had no place in a civilised world, the world of big business wasn’t always civilised; it was handy having those priceless skills tucked up his sleeve.

He’d been destined to make it big and, from the age of ten, he had had no doubt that he would get there.

He’d worked hard, had honed his ferocious intelligence to the point where no one could outsmart him and had sailed through university, resisting the temptation to leave without his Master’s. A Master’s in engineering opened a lot more doors than an ordinary degree and he wanted to have the full range of open doors to choose from.

And that was when he had met Sophie Griffin-Watt. The only unexpected flaw in his carefully conceived life plan.

She had been an undergraduate, in her first excitable year, and he had been on the last leg of his Master’s, already considering his options, wondering which one to take, which one would work best for him when he left university in a little under four months’ time.

He hadn’t meant to go out at all but his two housemates, usually as focused as he was, had wanted to celebrate a birthday and he’d agreed to hit the local pub with them.

He’d seen her the second he’d walked in. Young, impossibly pretty, laughing, head flung back with a drink in one hand. She’d been wearing a pair of faded jeans, a tiny cropped vest and a denim jacket that was as faded as the jeans.

And he’d stared.

He never stared. From the age of thirteen, he’d never had to chase any girl. His looks were something he’d always taken for granted. Girls stared. They chased. They flung themselves in his path and waited for him to notice them.

The guys he’d shared his flat with had ribbed him about the ease with which he could snap his fingers and have any girl he wanted but, in actual fact, getting girls was not Javier’s driving ambition. They had their part to play. He was a red-blooded male with an extremely healthy libido—and, as such, he was more than happy to take what was always on offer—but his focus, the thing that drove him, had always been his remorseless ambition.

Girls had always been secondary conquests.

Everything seemed to change on the night he had walked into that bar.

Yes, he’d stared, and he’d kept on staring, and she hadn’t glanced once at him, even though the gaggle of girls she was with had been giggling pointing at him and whispering.

For the first time in his life, he had become the pursuer. He had made the first move.

She was much younger than the women he usually dated. He was a man on the move, a man looking ahead to bigger things—he’d had no use for young, vulnerable girls with romantic dreams and fantasies about settling down. He’d gone out with a couple of girls in his years at university but, generally speaking, he had dated and slept with slightly older women—women who weren’t going to become clingy and start asking for the sort of commitment he wasn’t about to give them. Women who were experienced enough to understand his rules and abide by them.

Sophie Griffin-Watt had been all the things he’d had no interest in and he’d fallen for her hook, line and sinker.

Had part of that driving obsession for her been the fact that he’d actually had to try? That he’d had to play the old-fashioned courting game?

That she’d made him wait and, in the end, had not slept with him?

She’d kept him hanging on and he’d allowed it. He’d been happy to wait. The man who played by his own rules and waited for no one had been happy to wait because he’d seen a future for them together.

He’d been a fool and he’d paid the price.

But that was seven years ago and now...

He strolled back to his chair, leant forward and buzzed his secretary to have Oliver Griffin-Watt shown up to his office.

The wheel, he mused, relaxing back, had turned full circle. He’d never considered himself the sort of guy who would ever be interested in extracting revenge but the opportunity to even the scales had come knocking on his door and who was he to refuse it entry...?

* * *

‘You did what?’

Sophie looked at her twin brother with a mixture of clammy panic and absolute horror.

She had to sit down. If she didn’t sit down, her wobbly legs would collapse under her. She could feel a headache coming on and she rubbed her temples in little circular movements with shaky fingers.

Once upon a time, she’d been able to see all the signs of neglect in the huge family house, but over the past few years she’d become accustomed to the semi-decrepit sadness of the home in which she and her brother had spent their entire lives. She barely noticed the wear and tear now.

‘What else would you have suggested I do?’ There was complaint in his voice as he looked at his sister.

‘Anything but that, Ollie,’ Sophie whispered, stricken.

‘So you went out with the guy for ten minutes years ago! I admit it was a long shot, going to see him, but I figured we had nothing to lose. It felt like fate that he’s only been back in the country for a couple of months, I just happen to pick up someone’s newspaper on the tube and, lo and behold, who’s staring out at me from the financial pages...? It’s not even as though I’m in London all that much! Pure chance. And, hell, we need all the help we can get!’

He gestured broadly to the four walls of the kitchen which, on a cold winter’s night, with the stove burning and the lights dimmed, could be mistaken for a cosy and functioning space but which, as was the case now, was shorn of any homely warmth in the glaring, bright light of a summer’s day.

‘I mean...’ His voice rose, morphing from complaint to indignation. ‘Look at this place, Soph! It needs so much work that there’s no way we can begin to cover the cost. It’s eating every penny we have and you heard what the estate agents have all said. It needs too much work and it’s in the wrong price bracket to be an easy sell. It’s been on the market for two and a half years! We’re never going to get rid of it, unless we can do a patch-up job, and we’re never going to do a patch-up job unless the company starts paying its way!’

‘And you thought that running to...to...’ She could barely let his name pass her lips.

Javier Vasquez.

Even after all these years the memory of him still clung to her, as pernicious as ivy, curling round and round in her head, refusing to go away.

He had come into her life with the savage, mesmerising intensity of a force-nine gale and had blown all her neat, tidy assumptions about her future to smithereens.

When she pictured him in her head, she saw him as he was then, more man than boy, a towering, lean, commanding figure who could render a room silent the minute he walked in.

He had had presence.

Even before she’d fallen under his spell, before she’d even spoken one word to him, she’d known that he was going to be dangerous. Her little clutch of well-bred, upper-middle-class friends had kept sneaking glances at him when he’d entered that pub all those years ago, giggling, tittering and trying hard to get his attention. After the first glance, she, on the other hand, had kept her eyes firmly averted. But she hadn’t been able to miss the banging of her heart against her ribcage or the way her skin had broken out in clammy, nervous perspiration.

When he’d sauntered across to her, ignoring her friends, and had begun talking to her, she’d almost fainted.

He’d been doing his Master’s in engineering and he was the cleverest guy she’d ever met in her life. He was so good-looking that he’d taken her breath away.

He’d been also just the sort of boy her parents would have disapproved of. Exotic, foreign and most of all...unashamedly broke.

His fantastic self-assurance—the hint of unleashed power that sat on his shoulders like an invisible cloak—had attracted and scared her at the same time. At eighteen, she had had limited experience of the opposite sex and, in his company, that limited experience had felt like no experience at all. Roger, whom she had left behind and who had been still clinging to her, even though she had broken off their very tepid relationship, had scarcely counted even though he had been only a couple of years younger than Javier.

She’d felt like a gauche little girl next to him. A gauche little girl with one foot poised over an unknown abyss, ready to step out of the comfort zone that had been her privileged, sheltered life.

Private school, skiing holidays, piano lessons and horse riding on Saturday mornings had not prepared her for anyone remotely like Javier Vasquez.

He wasn’t going to be good for her but she had been as helpless as a kitten in the face of his lazy but targeted pursuit.

‘We could do something,’ he had murmured early on when he had cornered her in that pub, in the sort of seductive voice that had literally made her go weak at the knees. ‘I don’t have much money but trust me when I tell you that I can show you the best time of your life without a penny to my name...’

She’d always mixed with people just like her: pampered girls and spoilt boys who had never had to think hard about how much having a good night out might cost. She’d drifted into seeing Roger, who’d been part of that set and whom she’d known for ever.

Why? It was something she’d never questioned. Oliver had taken it all for granted but, looking back, she had always felt guilty at the ease with which she had always been encouraged to take what she wanted, whatever the cost.

Her father had enjoyed showing off his beautiful twins and had showered them with presents from the very second they had been born.

She was his princess, and if occasionally she’d felt uneasy at the way he’d dismissed people who were socially inferior to him, she had pushed aside the uneasy feeling because, whatever his faults, her father had adored her. She’d been a daddy’s girl.

And she’d known, from the second Javier Vasquez had turned his sexy eyes to her, that she was playing with fire, that her father would have had a coronary had he only known...

But play with fire she had.

Falling deeper and deeper for him, resisting the driving desire to sleep with him because...

Because she’d been a shameless romantic and because there had been a part of her that had wondered whether a man like Javier Vasquez would have ditched her as soon as he’d got her between the sheets.

But he hadn’t forced her hand and that, in itself, had fuelled her feelings towards him, honed and fine-tuned them to the point where she had felt truly alive only when she’d been in his company.

It was always going to end in tears, except had she known just how horribly it would all turn out...

‘I didn’t think the guy would actually agree to see me,’ Oliver confessed, sliding his eyes over to her flushed, distressed face before hurriedly looking away. ‘Like I said, it was a long shot. I actually didn’t even think he’d remember who I was... It wasn’t as though I’d met him more than a couple of times...’

Because, although they were twins, Oliver had gone to a completely different university. Whilst she had been at Cambridge, studying Classics with the hope of becoming a lecturer in due course, he had been on the other side of the Atlantic, going to parties and only intermittently hearing about what was happening in her life. He’d left at sixteen, fortunate enough to get a sports scholarship to study at a high school, and had dropped out of her life aside from when he’d returned full of beans during the holidays.

Even when the whole thing had crashed and burned a mere few months after it had started, he had only really heard the edited version of events. Anyway, he had been uninterested, because life in California had been far too absorbing and Oliver, as Sophie had always known, had a very limited capacity when it came to empathising with other people’s problems.

Now she wondered whether she should have sat him down when he’d eventually returned to the UK and given him all the miserable details of what had happened.

But by then it had been far too late.

She’d had an engagement ring on her finger and Javier had no longer been on the scene. Roger Scott had been the one walking up the aisle.

It didn’t bear thinking about.

‘So you saw him...’ What did he look like? What did he sound like? Did he still have that sexy, sexy smile that could make a person’s toes curl? So much had happened over the years, so much had killed her youthful dreams about love and happiness, but she could still remember, couldn’t she?

She didn’t want to think any of those things, but she did.

‘Didn’t even hesitate,’ Oliver said proudly, as though he’d accomplished something remarkable. ‘I thought I’d have to concoct all sorts of stories to get to see the great man but, in fact, he agreed to see me as soon as he found out who I was...’

I’ll bet, Sophie thought.

‘Soph, you should see his office. It’s incredible. The guy’s worth millions. More—billions. Can’t believe he was broke when you met him at university. You should have stuck with him, sis, instead of marrying that creep.’

‘Let’s not go there, Ollie.’ As always, Sophie’s brain shut down at the mention of her late husband’s name. He had his place in a box in her head, firmly locked away. Talking about him was not only pointless but it tore open scabs to reveal wounds still fresh enough to bleed.

Roger, she told herself, had been a learning curve and one should always be grateful for learning curves, however horrible they might have been. She’d been young, innocent and optimistic once upon a time, and if she was battle-hardened now, immune to girlish daydreams of love, then that was all to the good because it meant that she could never again be hurt by anyone or anything.

She stood up and gazed out of the patio doors to the unkempt back garden which rolled into untidy fields, before spinning round, arms folded, to gaze at her brother. ‘I’d ask you what he said...’ her voice was brisk and unemotional ‘...but there wouldn’t be any point because I don’t want to have anything to do with him. He’s...my past and you shouldn’t have gone there without my permission.’

‘It’s all well and good for you to get sanctimonious, Soph, but we need money, he has lots of it and he has a connection with you.’

‘He has no connection with me!’ Her voice was high and fierce.

Of course he had no connection with her. Not unless you called hatred a connection, because he would hate her. After what had happened, after what she had done to him.

Suddenly exhausted, she sank into one of the kitchen chairs and dropped her head in her hands for a few moments, just wanting to block everything out. The past, her memories, the present, their problems. Everything.

‘He says he’ll think about helping.’

‘What?’ Appalled, she stared at him.

‘He seemed very sympathetic when I explained the situation.’

‘Sympathetic.’ Sophie laughed shortly. The last thing Javier Vasquez would be was sympathetic. As though it had happened yesterday, she remembered how he had looked when she had told him that she was breaking up with him, that it was over between them, that he wasn’t the man for her after all. She remembered the coldness in his eyes as the shutters had dropped down. She remembered the way he had sounded when he had told her, his voice flat and hard, that if he ever clapped eyes on her again it would be too soon... That if their paths were ever to cross again she should remember that he would never forget and he would never forgive...

She shivered and licked her lips, resisting the urge to sneak a glance over her shoulder just to make sure that he wasn’t looming behind her like an avenging angel.

‘What exactly did you tell him, Ollie?’

‘The truth.’ He looked at his twin defensively. ‘I told him that the company hit the buffers and we’re struggling to make ends meet, what with all the money that ex of yours blew on stupid ventures that crashed and burned. He bankrupted the company and took us all down with him.’

‘Dad allowed him to make those investments, Oliver.’

‘Dad...’ His voice softened. ‘Dad wasn’t in the right place to stop him, sis. We both know that. Roger got away with everything because Dad was sick and getting sicker, even if we didn’t know it at the time, even if we were all thinking that Mum was the one we had to worry about.’

Tears instantly sprang to Sophie’s eyes. Whatever had happened, she still found it hard to blame either of her parents for the course her life had eventually taken.

Predictably, when her parents had found out about Javier, they had been horrified. They had point-blank refused to meet him at all. As far as they were concerned, he could have stepped straight out of a leper colony.

Their appalled disapproval would have been bad enough but, in the wake of their discovery, far more than Sophie had ever expected had come to the surface, rising to the top like scum to smother the comfortable, predictable lifestyle she had always taken for granted.

Financial troubles. The company had failed to move with the times. The procedures employed by the company were cumbersome and time-consuming but the financial investment required to bring everything up to date was too costly. The bank had been sympathetic over the years as things had deteriorated but their patience was wearing thin. They wanted their money returned to them.

Her father, whom she had adored, had actually buried his head in his hands and cried.

At the back of her mind, Sophie had stifled a spurt of anger at the unfairness of being the one lumbered with these confidences while her brother had continued to enjoy himself on the other side of the world in cheerful, ignorant bliss. But then Oliver had never been as serious as her, had never really been quite as responsible.

She had always been her father’s ‘right-hand man’.

Both her parents had told her that some foreigner blown in from foreign shores, without a penny to his name, wasn’t going to do. They were dealing with enough stress, enough financial problems, without her taking up with someone who will end up being a sponge, because you know what these foreigners can be like... The man probably figures he’s onto a good thing...

Roger was eager to join the company and he had inherited a great deal of money when his dear parents had passed away. And hadn’t they been dating? Wasn’t he already like a member of the family?

Sophie had been dumbstruck as her life had been sorted out for her.

Yes, she had known Roger for ever. Yes, he was a perfectly okay guy and, sure, they had gone out for five minutes. But he wasn’t the one for her and she’d broken it off even before Javier had appeared on the scene!

But her father had cried and she’d never seen her dad in tears before.

She had been so confused, torn between the surging power of young love and a debt of duty towards her parents.

Surely they wouldn’t expect her to quit university when she was only in her first year and loving it?

But no. She’d been able to stay on, although they hoped that she would take over the company alongside Roger, who would be brought on board should they cement a union he had already intimated he was keen on.

He was three years older than her and had experience of working for a company. He would sink money into the company, take his place on the board of directors...

And she, Sophie had read between the lines, would have to fulfil her obligations and walk up the aisle with him.

She hadn’t been able to credit what she had been hearing, but seeing her distraught parents, seeing their shame at having to let her down and destroy her illusions, had spoken so much more loudly and had said so much more than mere words could convey.

Had Roger even known about any of these plans? Was that why he’d been refusing to call it quits between them even though they’d been seeing one another for only less than eight months before she had left for university? Had he already been looking to a future that involved her parents’ company?

She had called him, arranged to see him, and had been aghast when he had told her that he knew all about her parents’ situation and was keen to do the right thing. He was in love with her, always had been...

With no one in whom to confide, Sophie had returned to university in a state of utter confusion—and Javier had been there. She had mentioned nothing but she had allowed herself to be absorbed by him. With him, she could forget everything.

Swept along on a heady tide of falling in love, the panic she had felt at what was happening on the home front had been dulled. Her parents had not mentioned the situation again and she had uneasily shoved it to the back of her mind.

No news was good news. Wasn’t that what everyone said?

She surfaced from the past to find a drink in front of her and she pushed it aside.

‘I’ve got another appointment to see the bank tomorrow,’ she said. ‘And we can change estate agents.’

‘For the fourth time?’ Oliver gave a bark of laughter and downed his drink in one gulp. ‘Face it, Soph. The way things are going, we’ll be in debt for the rest of our lives if we’re not careful. The company is losing money. The house will never sell. The bank will take it off our hands to repay our overdraft and we’ll both be left homeless. It’s not even as though we have alternative accommodation to return to. We don’t. You bailed university to get married and moved into the family pile with Roger. I may have stayed on to get my diploma, but by the time I got back here everything had changed and we were both in it together. Both here, both trying to make the company work...’ His voice had acquired the bitter, plaintive edge Sophie had come to recognise.

She knew how this would go. He would drink away his sorrows and wake up the following morning in a blurry, sedated haze where all the problems were dulled just enough for him to get through the day.

He was, she had been forced to accept, a weak man not made for facing the sort of situation they were now facing.

And she hated that she couldn’t do more for him.

He was drinking too much and she could see the train coming off the tracks if things didn’t change.

Did she want that? Wasn’t there too much already on her conscience?

She shut down that train of thought, shut down the deluge of unhappy memories and tried hard to focus on the few bright things in her life.

She had her health.

They might be struggling like mad trying not to drown but at least Mum was okay, nicely sorted in a cottage in Cornwall, far from the woes now afflicting herself and her brother.

It might have been a rash expenditure given the dire financial circumstances, but when Gordon Griffin-Watt had tragically died, after a brief but intense period of absolute misery and suffering, it had seemed imperative to try to help Evelyn, their mother, who was herself frail and barely able to cope. Sophie had taken every spare penny she could from the scant profits of the company and sunk it all into a cottage in Cornwall, where Evelyn’s sister lived.

It had been worth it. Her mother’s contentment was the brightest thing on the horizon, and if she was ignorant about the extent of the troubles afflicting her twins, then that was for her own good. Her health would never be able to stand the stress of knowing the truth: that they stood to lose everything. One of the sweetest things Gordon Griffin-Watt had done had been to allay her fears about their financial situation while dealing with his own disastrous health problems, which he had refused to tell his wife about. She had had two strokes already and he wasn’t going to send her to her grave with a third one.

‘Vasquez is willing to listen to what we have to say.’

‘Javier won’t do a thing to help us. Trust me, Ollie.’ But he would have a merry time gloating at how the mighty had fallen, that was for sure.

‘How do you know?’ her brother fired back, pouring himself another drink and glaring, challenging her to give him her little lecture about staying off the booze.

‘Because I just do.’

‘That’s where you’re wrong, sis.’

‘What do you mean? What are you talking about? And should you...be having a second drink when it’s not yet four in the afternoon?’

‘I’ll stop drinking when I’m not worrying 24/7 about whether I’ll have a roof over my head next week or whether I’ll be begging in the streets for loose change.’ He drank, refilled his glass defiantly, and Sophie stifled a sigh of despair.

‘So just tell me what Javier had to say,’ she said flatly. ‘Because I need to go and prepare information to take with me to the bank tomorrow.’

‘He wants to see you.’

‘He...what?’

‘He says he will consider helping us but he wants to discuss it with you. I thought it was pretty decent of him, actually...’

A wave of nausea rushed through her. For the first time ever, she felt that at the unseemly hour of four in the afternoon she could do with a stiff drink.

‘That won’t be happening.’

‘You’d rather see us both living under a bridge in London with newspapers as blankets,’ Oliver said sharply, ‘rather than have a twenty-minute conversation with some old flame?’

‘Don’t be stupid. We won’t end up living under a bridge with newspapers as blankets...’

‘It’s a bloody short drop from the top to the bottom, Soph. Can take about ten minutes. We’re more than halfway there.’

‘I’m seeing the bank tomorrow about a loan to broaden our computer systems...’

‘Good luck with that! They’ll say no and we both know that. And what do you think is going to happen to that allowance we give Mum every month? Who do you think is going to support her in her old age if we go under?’

‘Stop!’ Never one to dodge reality, Sophie just wanted to blank it all out now. But she couldn’t. The weight of their future rested on her shoulders, but Oliver...

How could he?

Because he didn’t know, she thought with numb defeat. What he saw was an ex who now had money and might be willing to lend them some at a reasonable rate for old times’ sake. To give them a loan because they had nowhere else to turn.

She could hardly blame him, could she?

‘I told him that you’d be at his office tomorrow at six.’ He extracted a crumpled piece of paper from his pocket and pushed it across the table to her.

When Sophie flattened it out, she saw that on it was a scribbled address and a mobile number. Just looking at those two links with the past she had fought to leave behind made her heart hammer inside her.

‘I can’t make you go and see the man, Sophie.’ Oliver stood up, the bottle of whisky in one hand and his empty glass in the other. There was defeat in his eyes and it pierced her heart because he wasn’t strong enough to take any of this. He needed looking after as much as their mother did. ‘But if you decide to go with the bank, when they’ve already knocked us back in the past and when they’re making noises about taking the house from us, then on your head be it. If you decide to go, he’ll be waiting for you at his office.’

Alone in the kitchen, Sophie sighed and rested back in the chair, eyes closed, mind in turmoil.

She had been left without a choice. Her brother would never forgive her if she walked away from Javier and the bank ended up chucking her out. And her brother was right; the small profits the company was making were all being eaten up and it wouldn’t be long before the house was devouring far more than the company could provide. It was falling down. Who in their right mind wanted to buy a country mansion that was falling down, in the middle of nowhere, when the property market was so desperate? And they couldn’t afford to sell it for a song because it had been remortgaged...

Maybe he’d forgotten how things had ended, she thought uneasily.

Maybe he’d changed, mellowed. Maybe, just maybe, he really would offer them a loan at a competitive rate because of the brief past they’d shared.

Maybe he’d overlook how disastrous that brief past had ended...

At any rate, she had no choice, none at all. She would simply have to find out...

CHAPTER TWO

SOPHIE STARED UP at the statement building across the frenzied, busy street, a soaring tower of glass and chrome.

She’d never had any driving desire to live in London and the crowds of people frantically weaving past her was a timely reminder of how ill-suited she was to the fierce thrust of city life.

But neither had she ever foreseen that she would be condemned to life in the tiny village where she had grown up, out in rugged Yorkshire territory. Her parents had adored living there; they’d had friends in the village and scattered in the big country piles sitting in their individual acres of land.

She had nothing of the sort.

Having gone to boarding school from the age of thirteen, her friends were largely based in the south of England.

She lived in a collapsing mansion, with no friends at hand with whom she could share her daily woes, and that in itself reminded her why she was here.

To see Javier.

To try to pursue a loan so that she could get out of her situation.

So that she and her brother could begin to have something of a life free from daily worry.

She had to try to free herself from the terror nibbling away at the edges of her resolute intentions and look at the bigger picture.

This wasn’t just some silly social visit. This was...a business meeting.

She licked her lips now, frozen to the spot while the crowds of people continued to swerve around her, most of them glaring impatiently. There was no time in London to dawdle, not when everyone was living life in the fast lane.

Business meeting. She rather liked that analysis because it allowed her to blank out the horrifying personal aspect to this visit.

She tried to wipe out the alarming total recall she had of his face and superimpose it with the far more manageable features of their bank manager: bland, plump, semi-balding...

Maybe he had become bland, plump and semi-balding, she thought hopefully as she reluctantly propelled herself forward, joining the throng of people clustered on the pavement, waiting for the little man in the box to turn green.

She had dressed carefully.

In fact, she wore what she had planned to wear to visit the bank manager: black knee-length skirt, crisp white blouse—which was fine in cool Yorkshire, but horribly uncomfortable now in sticky London—and flat black pumps.

She had tied her hair back and twisted it into a sensible chignon at the nape of her neck.

Her make-up was discreet and background: a touch of mascara, some pale lip gloss and the very sheerest application of blusher.

She wasn’t here to try to make an impression. She was here because she’d been pushed and hounded into a corner and now had to deal with the unfortunate situation in a brisk and businesslike manner.

There was no point travelling down memory lane because that would shatter the fragile veneer of self-confidence she knew she would need for this...meeting.

Another word she decided she rather liked.

And, at the end of the day, Oliver was happy. For the first time in ages, his eyes had lit up and she’d felt something of that twin bond they had shared when they’d been young but which seemed to have gone into hiding as their worries had begun piling up.

She took a deep breath and was carried by the crowd to the other side of the road as the lights changed. And then she was there, right in front of the building. Entering when most of the people were heading in the opposite direction because, of course, it was home time and the stampede to enjoy what remained of the warm weather that day was in full swing.

She pushed her way through the opaque glass doors and was disgorged into the most amazing foyer she had ever seen in her entire life.

Javier, naturally, didn’t own the building, but his company occupied four floors at the very top and it was dawning on her that when Oliver had labelled him a ‘billionaire’ he hadn’t been exaggerating.

You would have to have some serious money at your disposal to afford to rent a place like this, and being able to afford to rent four floors would require very serious money.

When had all that happened?

She’d reflected on that the evening before and now, walking woodenly towards the marble counter, which at six in the evening was only partially staffed, she reflected on it again.

When she’d known him, he hadn’t had a bean. Lots of ambition, but at that point in time the ambition had not begun to be translated into money.

He had worked most evenings at the local gym in the town centre for extra cash, training people on the punching bags. If you hadn’t known him to be a first-class student with a brain most people would have given their right arm for, you might have mistaken him for a fighter.

He hadn’t talked much about his background but she had known that his parents were not well off, and when she had watched him in the gym, muscled, sweaty and focused, she had wondered whether he hadn’t done his fair share of fighting on the streets of Madrid.

From that place, he had gone to...this: the most expensive office block in the country, probably in Europe... A man shielded from the public by a bank of employees paid to protect the rich from nuisance visits...

Who would have thought?

Maybe if she had followed his progress over the years, she might have been braced for all of this, but, for her, the years had disappeared in a whirlpool of stress and unhappiness.

She tilted her jaw at a combative angle and squashed the wave of maudlin self-pity threatening to wash away her resolve.

Yes, she was told, after one of the women behind the marble counter had scrolled down a list on the computer in front of her, Mr Vasquez was expecting her.

He would buzz when he was ready for her to go up.

In the meantime...she was pointed to a clutch of dove-grey sofas at the side.

Sophie wondered how long she would have to wait. Oliver had admitted that he had had to wait for absolutely ages before Javier had deigned to see him and she settled in for the long haul. So she was surprised when, five minutes later, she was beckoned over and told that she could take the private lift to the eighteenth floor.

‘Usually someone would escort you up,’ the blonde woman told her with a trace of curiosity and malicious envy in her voice. ‘I suppose you must know Mr Vasquez...?’

‘Sort of,’ Sophie mumbled as the elevator doors pinged open and she stepped into a wonder of glass that reflected her neat, pristine, sensible image back at her in a mosaic of tiny, refracted detail.

And then, thankfully, the doors smoothly and quietly shut and she was whizzing upwards, heart in her mouth, feeling as though she was about to step into the lion’s den...

* * *

She was on her way up.

Javier had never been prone to nerves, but he would now confess to a certain tightening in his chest at the prospect of seeing her in a matter of minutes.

Of course he had known, from the second her brother had entered his offices with a begging bowl in his hand, that he would see Sophie once again.

As surely as night followed day, when it came to money, pride was the first thing to be sacrificed.

And they needed money. Badly. In fact, far more badly than Oliver had intimated. As soon as he had left, Javier had called up the company records for the family firm and discovered that it was in the process of free fall. Give it six months and it would crash-land and splinter into a thousand fragments.

He smiled slowly and pushed his chair back. He linked his fingers loosely together and toyed with the pleasurable thought of how he would play this meeting.

He knew what he wanted, naturally.

That had come as a bit of a surprise because he had truly thought that he had put that unfortunate slice of his past behind him, but apparently he hadn’t.

Because the very second Oliver had opened his mouth to launch into his plaintive, begging speech, Javier had known what he wanted and how he would get it.

He wanted her.

She was the only unfinished business in his life and he hadn’t realised how much that had preyed on his mind until now, until the opportunity to finish that business had been presented to him on a silver platter.

He’d never slept with her.

She’d strung him along for a bit of fun, maybe because she’d liked having those tittering, upper-class friends of hers oohing and aahing with envy because she’d managed to attract the attention of the good-looking bad boy.

Didn’t they say that about rich, spoilt girls—that they were always drawn to a bit of rough because it gave them an illicit thrill?

Naturally, they would never marry the bit of rough. That would be unthinkable!

Javier’s lips thinned as he recalled the narrative of their brief relationship.

He remembered the way she had played with him, teasing him with a beguiling mixture of innocence and guileless, sensual temptation. She had let him touch but he hadn’t been able to relish the full meal. He’d been confined to starters when he had wanted to devour all courses, including dessert.

He’d reached the point of wanting to ask her to marry him. He’d been offered the New York posting and he’d wanted her by his side. He’d hinted, saying a bit, dancing around the subject, but strangely for him had been too awkward to put all his cards on the table. Yet she must have suspected that a marriage proposal was on the cards.

Just thinking about it now, his insane stupidity, made him clench his teeth together with barely suppressed anger.

She was the only woman who had got to him and the only one who had escaped him.

He forced himself to relax, to breathe slowly, to release the cold bitterness that had very quickly risen to the surface now that he knew that he would be seeing her in a matter of minutes.

The woman who had...yes...hurt him.

The woman who had used him as a bit of fun, making sure that she didn’t get involved, saving herself for one of those posh, upper-class idiots who formed part of her tight little circle.

He was immune to being hurt now because he was older and more experienced. His life was rigidly controlled. He knew what he wanted and he got what he wanted, and what he wanted was the sort of financial security that would be immune to the winds of change. It was all that mattered and the only thing that mattered.

Women were a necessary outlet and he enjoyed them but they didn’t interrupt the focus of his unwavering ambition. They were like satellites bobbing around the main planet.

Had he only had this level of control within his grasp when he’d met Sophie all those years ago, he might not have fallen for her, but there was no point in crying over spilt milk. The past could not be altered.

Which wasn’t to say that there couldn’t be retribution...

He sensed her even before he was aware of the hesitant knock on the door.

He had given his secretary the afternoon off. He’d been in meetings all afternoon, had returned to his offices only an hour previously, and something in him wanted to see Sophie without the presence of his secretary around.

He had brought Eva back with him from New York. A widow in her sixties, originally from the UK anyway with all her family living here, she had been only too glad to accompany him back to London. She could be trusted not to gossip, but even so...

Seeing Sophie after all this time felt curiously intimate.

Which was something of a joke because intimacy implied some level of romance, of two people actually wanting to be in one another’s company...

Hardly the case here.

Although, if truth be told, he was almost looking forward to seeing the woman again, whilst she...

He settled back in his leather chair and mused that he was probably the last person in the world she wanted to see.

But needs must...

‘Enter.’

The deep, controlled tenor of that familiar voice chilled Sophie to the bone. She took a deep breath and nervously turned the handle before pushing open the door to the splendid office which, in her peripheral vision, was as dauntingly sophisticated as she had mentally predicted.

She had hoped that the years might have wrought changes in him, maybe even that her memory might have played tricks on her. She had prayed that he was no longer the hard-edged, proud, dangerous guy she had once known but, instead, a mellow man with room in his heart for forgiveness.

She’d been an idiot.

He was as dangerous as she remembered. More so. She stared and kept on staring at the familiar yet unfamiliar angles of his sinfully beautiful face. He’d always been incredibly good-looking, staggeringly exotic with finely chiselled features and lazy dark eyes with the longest eyelashes she had ever seen on a guy.

He was as sinfully good-looking as he had been then, but now there was a cool self-possession about him that spoke of the tough road he had walked to get to the very top. His dark, dark eyes were watchful and inscrutable as she finally dragged her mesmerised gaze away from him and made her way forward with the grace and suppleness of a broken puppet.

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.

‘Well...what?’

‘What was the order of events? Heady marriage, fairy-tale honeymoon and then, lo and behold, no more money? Life can be cruel. And where was your brother when all this was happening?’

‘In America.’ She sighed.

‘By choice, even though he knew?’ With the family company haemorrhaging money, surely it would have been an indulgence for Oliver to have stayed in California, enjoying himself...

‘He didn’t know,’ Sophie said abruptly. ‘And I don’t know why...how all this is relevant.’

‘I’m fleshing out the picture,’ Javier said softly. ‘You’ve come to me with a begging bowl. What did you think I was going to do? Give you a big, comforting hug and write out a cheque?’

‘No, but...’

‘Let’s get one thing straight here, Sophie.’ He leant forward and held her gaze. She couldn’t have said a word even if she had wanted to. She could hardly breathe. ‘You’re here to ask a favour of me and, that being the case, whether you like it or not, you don’t get to choose what questions to answer and what questions to ignore. Your private life is your business. Frankly, I don’t give a damn. But I need to know your levels of capability when it comes to doing business. I need to know whether your brother is committed to working for the company, because if he was left to enjoy four years of playing sport in California, then I’m guessing he wouldn’t have returned to the sick fold with a cheerful whistle. Most of the directors of the company aren’t worth the money they’re being paid.’

‘You know how much they’re being paid!’

‘I know everything worth knowing about your crippled family company.’

‘When did you get so...so...hard?’

Roughly around the same time I discovered what sort of woman I’d been going out with, Javier thought with the sour taste of cynicism in his mouth.

He leant back and crossed his legs, lightly cradling the stem of the wine glass between his long fingers.

‘You don’t make money by being a sap for sob stories,’ he informed her coolly, keen eyes taking in the delicate bloom of colour in her cheeks. ‘You’ve come to me with a sob story.’ He shrugged. ‘And the bottom line is this—if you don’t like the direction this conversation is going, then, like I said before, you’re free to go. But of course, we both know you won’t, because you need me.’

He was enjoying this little game of going round the houses before he laid all his cards on the table, before she knew exactly what the terms and conditions of her repayment would be.

It wouldn’t hurt her to realise just how dangerously close the company was to imploding.

It wouldn’t hurt her to realise just how much she needed him...

‘If you knew about your husband’s hare-brained schemes and addiction to gambling, and you allowed it to go under the radar, then are you a trustworthy person to stand at the helm of your company?’

‘I told you that there was nothing I could do,’ she said with a dull flush.

‘And if your brother was so clueless as to what was happening on the home front, then is he competent enough to do what would need to be done should I decide to help you out?’

‘Ollie...doesn’t have a huge amount of input in the actual running of things...’

‘Why?’

‘Because he’s never been interested in the company and, yes, you’re right—he’s always resented the fact that he had to finally return to help out. He’s found it difficult to deal with not having money.’

‘And you’ve found it easy?’

‘I’ve dealt with it.’

Javier looked at her narrowly and with a certain amount of reluctant admiration for the streak of strength he glimpsed.

Not only had she had to face a tremendous fall from the top of the mountain, but the loss of her husband and the father she had adored.

Yet there was no self-pity in the stubborn tilt of her chin.

‘You’ve had a lot to deal with, haven’t you?’ he murmured softly and she looked away.

‘I’m no different from loads of people the world over who have found their lives changed in one way or another. And, now that you’ve got the measure of the company, will you lend us some money or not? I don’t know if my brother told you, but the family house has been on the market for over two years and we just can’t seem to sell it. There’s no appetite for big houses. If we could sell it, then we might be able to cover some of the expenses...’

‘Although a second mortgage was taken out on it...’

‘Yes, but the proceeds would go a little way to at least fixing certain things that need urgent attention.’

‘The dated computer systems, for example?’

‘You really did your homework, didn’t you? How did you manage that in such a small amount of time? Or have you been following my father’s company over the years? Watching while it went downhill?’

‘Why would I have done that?’

Sophie shrugged uncomfortably. ‘I know you probably feel... Well, you don’t understand what happened all those years ago.’

‘Don’t presume to think that you know what goes on in my head, Sophie. You don’t. And, in answer to your preposterous question, I haven’t had the slightest clue what was going on in your father’s company over the years, nor have I cared one way or the other.’ He saw that the bottle was empty and debated whether or not to get another, deciding against it, because he wanted them both to have clear heads for this conversation.

When he knew that he would be seeing her, he had predicted how he would react and it hadn’t been like this.

He’d thought that he would see her and would feel nothing but the acid, bilious taste of bitterness for having been played in the past and taken for a chump.

He’d accepted that she’d been in his head more than he’d ever imagined possible. A Pandora’s box had been opened with her brother’s unexpected appearance at his office. Javier had recognised the opportunity he had been given to put an end to her nagging presence, which, he now realised, had been embedded in him like a virus he’d never managed to shake off.

He would have her and he had the means to do so at his disposal.

She needed money. He had vast sums of it. She would take what was offered because she would have no choice. His terms and conditions would be met with acquiescence because, as he had learned over the years, money talked.

He had slept with some of the world’s most desirable women. It had followed that whatever she had that had held him captive all those years ago, she would lose it when he saw her in the flesh once again. How could she compete with some of the women who had clamoured to sleep with him?

He’d been wrong.

And that was unbelievably frustrating because he was beginning to realise that he wanted a lot more from her than her body for a night or two.

No, he needed a lot more from her than her body for a night or two.

He wanted and needed answers and his curiosity to pry beneath the surface enraged him because he had thought himself above that particular sentiment when it came to her.

Nor, he was discovering, did he want to take what he knew she would have no choice but to give him in the manner of a marauding plunderer.

He didn’t want her reluctance.

He wanted her to come to him and in the end, he reasoned now, if revenge was what he was after, then wouldn’t that be the ultimate revenge? To have her want him, to take her and then to walk away?

The logical part of his brain knew that to want revenge was to succumb to a certain type of weakness, and yet the pull was so immensely strong that he could no more fight it than he could have climbed Mount Everest in bare feet.

And he was enjoying this.

His palate had become jaded and that was something he had recognised a while back, when he had made his first few million and the world had begun to spread itself out at his feet.

He had reached a place in life where he could have whatever he wanted and sometimes having everything at your fingertips removed the glory of the chase. Not just women, but deals, mergers, money...the lot.

She wasn’t at his fingertips.

In fact, she was simmering with resentment that she had been put in the unfortunate position of having to come to him, cap in hand, to ask for his help.

He was a part of her past that she would rather have swept under the carpet and left there. He was even forced to swallow the unsavoury truth that he was probably a part of her past she bitterly regretted ever having gone anywhere near in the first place.

But she’d wanted him.

That much he felt he knew. She might have played with him as a distraction from the main event happening in her life somewhere else, or maybe just to show off in front of her friends that she had netted the biggest fish in the sea—which Javier had known, without a trace of vanity, he was.

But perhaps she hadn’t actually banked on the flare of physical attraction that had erupted between them. She had held out against him and he had seen that as shyness, youthful nerves at taking the plunge... He’d been charmed by it. He’d also been wrong about it, as it turned out. She’d held out against him because there had been someone else in her life.

But she’d still fancied him like hell.

She’d trembled when he’d traced his finger across her collarbone and her eyes had darkened when their lips had touched. He hadn’t imagined those reactions. She might have successfully fought that attraction in the end and scurried back to her comfort zone, but, for a brief window, he’d taken her out of that comfort zone...

Did she imagine that she was now immune to that physical attraction because time had passed?

He played with the thought of her opening up to him like a flower and this time giving him what he had wanted all those years ago. What he wanted now.

He wondered what she would feel when she found herself discarded.

He wondered whether he would really care or whether the mere fact that he had had her would be sufficient.

He hadn’t felt this alive in a long time and it was bloody great.

‘I was surprised when your brother showed up on my doorstep, so to speak, in search of help.’

‘I hope you know that I never asked him to come to see you.’

‘I can well imagine, Sophie. It must cut to the quick having to beg favours from a man who wasn’t good enough for you seven years ago.’

‘That’s not how it was.’

Javier held up one hand. ‘But, as it happens, to see you evicted and in the poorhouse would not play well on my conscience.’

‘That’s a bit of an exaggeration, don’t you think?’

‘You’d be surprised how thin the dividing line is between the poor and the rich and how fast places can be swapped. One minute you’re on top of the world, the ruler of everything around you, and the next minute you’re lying on the scrap heap, wondering what went wrong. Or I could put it another way—one minute you’re flying upwards, knocking back all those less fortunate cluttering your path, and the next minute you’re spiralling downwards and the people you’ve knocked back are on their way up, having the last laugh.’

‘I bet your parents are really sad at the person you’ve become, Javier.’

Javier flushed darkly, outraged at her remark, and even more outraged by the disappointed expression on her lovely face.

Of course, in those heady days of thinking she was his, he had let her into his world, haltingly confided in her in a way he had never done with any woman either before or since. He had told her about his background, about his parents’ determination to make sure he left that life behind. He had painted an unadorned picture of life as he had known it, had been amused at the vast differences between them, had seen those differences as a good thing, rather than an unsurmountable barrier, as she had. If she’d even thought about it at all.

‘I know you’ve become richer than your wildest dreams.’ She smiled ruefully at him. ‘And you always had very, very wild dreams...’

The conversation seemed to have broken its leash and was racing away in a direction Javier didn’t like. He frowned heavily at her.

‘And now here we are.’

‘You once told me that all your parents wanted was for you to be happy, to make something of your life, to settle down and have a big family.’

Javier decided that he needed another drink after all. He stood up abruptly, which seemed to do the trick, because she started, blinked and looked up at him as if suddenly remembering that she wasn’t here for a trip down memory lane. Indeed, that a trip down memory lane was the very last thing she had wanted.

He’d forgotten that habit of hers.

He was barely aware of placing his order for another bottle of wine at the bar and ordering some bar snacks because they were now both drinking on fairly empty stomachs. He hadn’t a clue what bar snacks he ordered, leaving it to the guy serving him to provide whatever was on the menu.

She was filling up his head. He could feel her eyes on him even as he stood here at the bar with his back to her.

Whatever memories he’d had of her, whatever memories he’d kidded himself he’d got rid of and had buried, he was now finding in a very shallow grave.

She’d always had that habit of branching out on a tangent. It was as if a stray word could spark some improbable connection in her head and carry her away down unforeseen paths.

There were no unforeseen paths in this scenario, he thought grimly as he made his way back to the table, where she was sitting with the guarded expression back on her face.

The only unforeseen thing—and it was something he could deal with—was how much he still wanted her after all this time.

‘I should be getting back,’ she said as he poured her a glass of wine and nodded to her to drink.

‘I’ve ordered food.’

‘My ticket...’

‘Forget about your ticket.’

‘I can’t do that.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because I’m not made of money. In fact, I’m broke. There. Are you satisfied that I’ve said that? I can’t afford to kiss sweet goodbye to the cost of the ticket to get me down here to London. You’ve probably forgotten how much train tickets cost, but if you’d like a reminder, I can show you mine. They cost a lot. And if you want to do a bit more gloating, then go right ahead.’ She fluttered her hand wearily. ‘I can’t stop you.’

‘You’ll need to pare down the staff.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘The company is top-heavy. Too many chiefs and very few Indians.’

Sophie nodded. It was what she had privately thought but the thought of sitting down old friends of her parents and handing them their marching orders had been just too much to contemplate. Oliver couldn’t have done that in a million years and, although she was a heck of a lot more switched on than he was, the prospect of sacking old retainers, even fairly ineffective old retainers, still stuck in her throat.

Few enough people had stuck by them through thin times.

‘And you need to drag the business into this century. The old-fashioned transport business needs to be updated. You need to take risks, to branch out, to try to capture smaller, more profitable markets instead of sticking to having lumbering dinosaurs doing cross-Channel deliveries. That’s all well and good but you need a lot more than that if your company is to be rescued from the quicksand.’

‘I...’ She quailed at the thought of herself and Oliver, along with a handful of maybe or maybe not efficient directors, undertaking a job of those proportions.

‘You and your brother are incapable of taking on this challenge,’ Javier told her bluntly and she glared at him even though he had merely spoken aloud what she had been thinking.

‘I’m sure if you agree to extend a loan,’ she muttered, ‘we can recruit good people who are capable of—’

‘Not going to happen. If I sink money into that business of yours, I want to be certain that I won’t be throwing my money into a black hole.’

‘That’s a bit unfair.’ She fiddled with the bun which, instead of making her feel blessedly cool in the scorching temperatures, was making her sweaty and uncomfortable. As were the formal, scratchy clothes, so unlike her normal dress code of jeans, tee shirts and sneakers.

She didn’t feel like the brisk, efficient potential client of someone who might want to extend a loan. She felt awkward, gauche and way too aware of the man looking at her narrowly, sizing her up in a way that made her want to squirm.

This wasn’t the guy she had known and loved. He hadn’t chucked her out of his office but, as far as feelings went, there was nothing there. There wasn’t a trace of that simmering attraction that had held them both mesmerised captives all those years ago. He wasn’t married but she wondered whether there was a woman in his life, someone rich and beautiful like him.

Even when he’d had no money, he could have had any woman he wanted.

Her mind boggled at the thought of how many women would now fall at his feet because he was the guy who had the full package.

A treacherous thought snaked into her head...

What if she’d defied her parents? What if she’d carried on seeing Javier? Had seen where that love might have taken them both?

It wouldn’t have worked.

Despite the fact that she had grown up with money, had had a rich and pampered life, money per se was not what motivated her. For Javier, it was the only thing that motivated him.

She looked at him from under her lashes, taking in the cut of his clothes, the hand-tailored shoes, the mega-expensive watch around which dark hair curled. He breathed wealth. It was what made him happy and made sense of his life.

She might be stressed out because of all the financial worries happening in her life, but if those worries were removed and she was given a clean slate, then she knew that she wouldn’t really care if that slate was a rich slate or not.

So, if she’d stayed with him, she certainly wouldn’t have been the sort of woman he’d have wanted. She might talk the talk but her jeans, tee shirts and sneakers would not have been found acceptable attire.

They’d had their moment in time when they’d both been jeans and tee shirts people but he’d moved on, and he would always have moved on.

The attraction, for him, would have dimmed and finally been snuffed out.

The road she’d taken had been tough and miserable and, as things had turned out, the wrong one. But it would be silly to think that she would have been any happier if she’d followed Javier and held the hand he’d extended.

‘We can go round the houses discussing what’s fair and what’s unfair,’ he said in a hard voice. ‘But that won’t get us anywhere. I’m prepared to sink money in, but I get a cut of the cake and you abide by my rules.’

‘Your rules?’ She looked at him in bewilderment.

‘Did you really think I’d write a cheque and then keep my fingers crossed that you might know what to do with the money?’ He’d had one plan when this situation had first arisen—it had been clean and simple—but now he didn’t want clean and simple. He needed to get more immersed in the water...and he was looking forward to that.

‘I will, to spell it out, want a percentage of your business. There’s no point my waiting for the time when you can repay me. I already have more money than I can shake a stick at, but I could put your business to some good use, branch out in ways that might dovetail with some of my other business concerns.’

Sophie shifted, not liking the sound of this. If he wanted a part of their business, wouldn’t that involve him being around? Or was he talking about being a silent partner?

‘Does your company have a London presence at all?’ Javier was thoroughly enjoying himself. Who said the only route to satisfaction was getting what you wanted on demand? He’d always been excellent when it came to thinking outside the box. He was doing just that right now. Whatever he sank into her business would be peanuts for him but he could already see ways of turning a healthy profit.

And as for having her? Of course he would, but where was the rush after all? He could take a little time out to relish this project...

‘Barely,’ she admitted. ‘We closed three of the four branches over the years to save costs.’

‘And left one open and running?’

‘We couldn’t afford to shut them all...even though the overheads are frightening.’

‘Splendid. As soon as the details are formalised and all the signatures are in place, I will ensure that the office is modernised and ready for occupation.’

‘It’s already occupied,’ Sophie said, dazed. ‘Mandy works on reception and twice a week one of the accountants goes down to see to the various bits of post. Fortunately nearly everything is done by email these days...’

‘Pack your bags, Sophie. I’m taking up residence in your London office, just as soon as it’s fit for habitation, and you’re going to be sitting right there alongside me.’

Not quite the original terms and conditions he had intended to apply, but in so many ways so much better...

CHAPTER FOUR

‘I DON’T KNOW what you’re so worried about. His terms and conditions seem pretty fair to me. In fact, better than fair. He’s going to have a percentage interest in the company but at least it’ll be a company that’s making money.’

That had been Oliver’s reaction when she had presented him, a fortnight ago, with the offer Javier had laid out on the table for her to take or reject.

He had been downright incredulous that she might even be hesitating to eat from the hand that had been extended to feed her. In a manner that was uncharacteristically proactive for him, he had called an extraordinary meeting of the directors and presented them with Javier’s plan, and Sophie had had to swallow the unpalatable reality that her past had caught up with her and was now about to join hands with her present.

Since then, with papers signed and agreements reached at the speed of light, the little office they had kept open in Notting Hill had been awash with frantic activity.

Sophie had refused to go. She had delegated that task to her brother, who had been delighted to get out of Yorkshire for a couple of weeks. He had reported back with gusto at the renovations being made and, inside, Sophie had quailed at the way she felt, as though suddenly her life was being taken over.

She knew she was being ridiculous.

Javier had agreed to see them because of their old connection but there had been nothing there beyond that historic connection. He had made no attempts to pursue any conversations about what had happened between them. He had been as cool as might have been expected given the circumstances of their break-up and she was in no doubt that the only reason he had agreed to help them was because he could see a profit in what was being offered.

Money was what he cared about and she suspected that he would be getting a good deal out of them. They were, after all, in the position of the beggars who couldn’t be choosers.

Hadn’t he greeted her with all the information he had accumulated about the company?

He had done his homework and he wouldn’t be offering them a rescue package if he wasn’t going to get a great deal out of it.

She brushed her skirt, neatened her blouse and inspected herself in the mirror in the hallway, but she wasn’t really seeing her reflection. She was thinking, persuading herself that his attitude towards her made everything much easier. For him, the past was history. What he had with her now was a business deal and one that had fallen into his lap like a piece of ripe fruit that hadn’t even needed plucking from the tree.

Maybe in some distant corner of his mind there was an element of satisfaction that he was now in a position to be the one calling the shots, but if that was the case, he would have to have cared one way or another about her and he didn’t.

The effect he still had on her was not mutual. And even her responses to him were an illusion, no more than a reminder of the power of nostalgia, because truthfully her heart was safely locked away, never again to be taken out to see the light of day.

She blinked and focused on the tidy image staring back at her. Everything in place. In a few minutes the taxi would come to take her to the station. A month ago, she would have hit the bus stop, which was almost a mile away, but he had deposited a large advance of cash in the company account to cover expenses and to ensure that everyone on the payroll was compensated for the overtime which they had contributed over the months and which had not been paid.

She would take the taxi to the station and then the train down to London so that she could see the final, finished product, the newly refurbished offices in which she would be stationed for as long as it took to get things up and running.

‘How long do you think that’s going to take?’ she had asked Javier on day one, heart thumping at the prospect of being in an office where, on a whim, he could descend without warning.

He had shrugged, his dark-as-night eyes never leaving her face. ‘How long is a piece of string? There’s a lot of work to do with the company before it begins to pull its weight. There’s been mass wastage of money and resources, expenditures that border on criminal and incompetent staff by the bucketload.’

‘And you’re going to...er...be around, supervising...?’

His eyes had narrowed on her flushed face. ‘Does the prospect of that frighten you, Sophie?’

‘Not in the slightest,’ she had returned quickly. ‘I would just be surprised if you managed to take time off from being the ruler of all you surveyed to help out an ailing firm. I mean, don’t you have minions who move in when you take over sick companies?’

‘I think I might give the minions a rest on this particular occasion,’ he had murmured softly.

‘Why?’ Sophie had heard the thread of desperation in her voice. She couldn’t be within five feet of him without her body reliving the way he had once made it feel, playing stupid games with her mind.

‘This is a slightly more personal venture for me, Sophie,’ he had told her, leaning across the boardroom table where both of them had remained after the legal team had exited. ‘Maybe I want to see that the job is done to the highest possible standard given our...past acquaintanceship.’

Sophie hadn’t known whether to thank him or quiz him, so she had remained silent, her eyes helplessly drifting down to his sensual mouth before sliding away as heat had consumed her.

With a little sigh, she grabbed her handbag as she heard the taxi circle the gravelled forecourt, and then she was on her way, half hoping that Javier wouldn’t be there waiting at the office when she finally arrived, half hoping that he might be, and hating herself for that weakness.

She had no idea what to expect to find. The last time she had visited this particular office had been two years previously, when she and Oliver had been trying to decide which of the offices to shut. She remembered it as spacious enough but, without any money having been spent on it at all, it had already been showing telltale signs of wear and tear. That said, it had been the biggest and the least run-down, so they’d been able to amalgamate the diminishing files and folders there from the other offices.

Not for the first time, as she was ferried from north to south, she thought about how clueless she had been about the groundbreaking changes that had been happening right under her nose.

Ollie, at least, had had the excuse of being abroad, because he had left on his sports scholarship two years before she had gone to Cambridge. He’d been a fresh-faced teenager wrapped up in his own life, with no vision of anything happening outside it.

But she had still been living at home, in her final years at school. Why hadn’t she asked more probing questions when her mother’s health had begun to fail? The doctor had talked about stress, and now Sophie marvelled that she hadn’t dug deeper to find out what the stress had been all about, because on the surface her mother could not have been living a less stressed-out life.

And neither had she questioned the frequency with which Roger’s name had cropped up in conversations or the number of times he’d been invited along to the house for various parties. She had been amused at his enthusiasm and had eventually drifted into going out with him; she had never suspected the amount of encouragement he had got from her parents.

All told, she had allowed herself to be wrapped up in cotton wool. So when that cotton wool had been cruelly yanked off, she had been far more shell-shocked than she might otherwise have been.

Everything had hit her at once. She had been bombarded from all sides and, in the middle of this, had had to wise up quickly to the trauma of discovering just how ill her father was and the lengths he had gone to to protect them all from knowing.

She should have been there helping out long before the bomb had detonated, splintering shrapnel through their lives.

If she had been, then perhaps the company could have taken a different direction. And, if it had taken a different direction, then she wouldn’t be here now, at the mercy of a guy who could still send her senses reeling, whatever her head was telling her.

Once in London, Sophie took a black cab to the premises of the office in Notting Hill.

Oliver had told her that things were coming along brilliantly but he had undersold just how much had been done in the space of a few days. It wasn’t just about the paint job on the outside or the impressive potted plants or the newly painted black door with its gold lettering announcing the name of the company.

Standing back, Sophie’s mouth fell open as she took in the smart exterior. Then the door opened and she was staring at a casually dressed Javier, who, in return, stared back at her as he continued to lounge indolently against the door frame. Arms folded, he was already projecting the signs of ownership so that, as she took a few tentative steps towards him, she felt herself to be the visitor.

‘Wow.’ She hovered, waiting for him to step back, which he did after a couple of seconds, taking his time to unfold his gloriously elegant body and then stand aside so that she had to brush past him, immediately turning around and establishing a safe physical distance between them. ‘It’s completely changed on the outside.’

‘There’s no point having an office that repels potential clients,’ Javier said drily.

Yet again, she was in work attire. The sort of clothes that drained her natural beauty.

‘Why have you shown up wearing a suit?’ he asked, strolling past her and expecting her to follow, which she duly did. ‘And where is your bag? You do realise that you will be relocating to London for the foreseeable future?’

‘I’ve been giving that some thought...’

Javier stopped and turned to look at her. ‘Forget it.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Remember the terms and conditions? One of them is that you relocate down here so that you can oversee the running of the London arm of the business.’

‘Yes, but—’

‘No buts, Sophie.’ His voice was cool and unyielding. He hooked his fingers on the waistband of his black jeans, which sat low on his lean hips, and held her stare. ‘You don’t get to dip in and out of this. You’re on the letterhead, along with your brother, and of course myself. Don’t think that you’re going to reap the rewards without doing any of the hard graft. I intend to oversee proceedings initially but I need to be assured that you and your brother won’t run the company back into the ground the second my back’s turned. Don’t forget, this isn’t a charity gesture of goodwill on my part. I’m not parting with cash if I don’t think that there will be a decent return on my investment.’

Sophie thought that she’d been right. It was all about the money for him. Yes, there was a personal connection, but the animosity of their break-up wasn’t paramount in his decision to help them. What mattered was that he was being handed a potentially very profitable business with an age-old reputation at a very cheap price because she and Oliver were desperate.

She imagined that, once the company was sorted, its reputation would not only be repaired but would ensure gold-plated business and a return of all the customers they had sadly lost over the years.

Right now, Oliver had an interest in a third of the company, but he would quickly lose interest and, she foresaw, would cash in his shares, take the money and head back to California, where he could continue his sporting career in a teaching capacity.

In due course, Javier would have invested in a very worthwhile project at a very good price.

And their past history did not figure in the calculations. In fact, she wondered whether he felt anything at all about what had happened between them.

‘I thought I might commute down.’

Javier burst out laughing before sobering up to look at her with a gimlet-eyed warning. ‘I wouldn’t even entertain that notion if I were you,’ he informed her in the sort of voice that did not expect contradiction. ‘In the first few weeks there will probably be a great deal of overtime, and hopping on and off a train to try to get the work done just isn’t going to cut it.’

‘I have nowhere to stay here.’ Once upon a time, there had been a snazzy apartment in Kensington but, she had discovered, that had been mortgaged up to the hilt when the company had started shedding customers and losing profit. It had been sold ages ago.

‘Your brother has stayed in a hotel when he’s been down.’ Javier’s eyes roved over her flushed face. ‘But,’ he mused with soft speculation, ‘as you’re going to be here for considerably longer, I have already made arrangements for you to have use of one of my apartments in Notting Hill. You’ll be within convenient walking distance of the company. No excuse for slacking off.’

‘No!’ She broke out in clammy perspiration.

‘Reason being...?’

‘I...I can’t just decamp down here to London, Javier!’

‘This isn’t something that’s open to debate.’

‘You don’t understand.’

‘Then enlighten me.’ They hadn’t even stepped foot into the renovated office and already they were arguing.

He couldn’t credit that he had originally played with the thought of helping her in return for having her. He couldn’t think of anything less satisfying than having her blackmailed into coming to him as a reluctant and resentful partner when he wanted her hot, wet and willing...

He also couldn’t credit that he had simplistically imagined that one scratch would ease this itch that had surfaced with such surprising speed the second her brother had opened that door back into the past. The more he saw of her, the more he thought of her, the more dangerously deep his unfinished business with her felt. One or two nights wasn’t going to be enough.

‘I have to keep an eye on the house,’ she said with obvious reluctance.

‘What house?’

‘The family home.’

‘Why? Is it in imminent danger of falling down if you’re not at hand with some sticking plaster and masking tape?’

Bitter tears sprang to her eyes and she fought them down as a red mist of anger swirled through her in a tidal rush.

‘Since when did you get so arrogant?’ she flung at him. They stared at one another in electric silence before she broke eye contact to storm off, out of the beautiful reception area, which she had barely noticed at all, and into the first set of offices.

It took a couple of seconds before Javier was galvanised into following her.

Being accused of arrogance was not something he was accustomed to. Indeed, being spoken to in that accusatory, critical tone of voice was unheard of. He caught her arm, tugging her to face him and then immediately releasing her because just the feel of her softness under his fingers was like putting his hand against an open flame. It enraged him that she could still have this effect on him. It enraged him that, for the first time in living memory, and certainly for the first time in many, many years, his body was refusing to obey his mind.

‘Are you sure it’s the house you need to be close to?’ he growled.

‘What are you talking about?’

‘Maybe there’s a man lurking in the background...’ Javier was disgusted to realise that he was fishing. Did he care whether there was some lame boyfriend in the background? She wasn’t married and that was the main thing. He would never have gone near any woman with a wedding ring on her finger, but if she had a boyfriend somewhere, another one of those limp ex–public school idiots who thought that a polished accent was all that it took to get you through life, well...

All was fair in love and war...

Sophie reddened. The dull prickle of unpleasant memories tried to surface and she resolutely shoved them back where they belonged, in the deepest corners of her mind.

‘Because, if you have, then he’ll just have to take a back seat for...however long it takes. And word of warning—my apartment is for sole occupation only...’

‘You mean if there was a guy in my life, and I happened to be living in one of your apartments, I wouldn’t be allowed to entertain him?’

Javier looked at her appalled expression and swatted away the uncomfortable feeling that he was being pigeon-holed as some kind of dinosaur when that couldn’t have been further from the truth. Having reached the soaring heights the hard way, he made a conscious effort to ensure that the employees of his company were hand-picked for all the right reasons: talent, merit and ability. He made sure that there were no glass ceilings for women, or for those who had had to struggle to find their way, as he had.

He was not the sort of guy who would ever have dreamt of laying down pathetic rules about men being kept apart from women, like teenagers in boarding schools overseen by strict house masters.

So what was he doing right now? And how was it that he had no intention of doing otherwise?

‘I mean you’re probably going to be working long hours. The distraction of some man who wants you back home to cook his meal by five-thirty isn’t going to work’ was the most he would offer.

Sophie laughed shortly. If only he knew...

‘There’s no man around to distract me,’ she said in a low voice. ‘And, yes, as a matter of fact the house is falling down, and Oliver won’t be there because he’s been dispatched to France to see what’s happening to the company over there...’

‘Your house is falling down?’

‘Not literally,’ Sophie admitted. ‘But there’s a lot wrong with it and I’m always conscious of the fact that if it springs a leak and I’m not there to sort it out, well...’

‘Since when has your house been falling down?’

‘It doesn’t matter.’ She sighed and began to run her fingers through her hair, only to realise that she had pinned it up, and let her hand drop to her side. She looked around her but was very much aware of his eyes still on her, and even more aware that somehow they were now standing way too close for comfort.

‘You’ve done marvellous things with the space.’ She just wanted to get away from the threat of personal quizzing. She took a few steps away from him and now took time really to notice just how much had been done. It was not just a paint job; everything seemed very different from what she remembered.

It seemed much, much larger and that, she realised, was because the space within the first-floor office block had been maximised. Partitions had been cleverly put in where before there had been none. The dank carpeting had been replaced with wooden floors. The desks and furniture were all spanking new. She listened and nodded as he explained the dynamics of the place being manned and who should be working the London office. The client list would have to be updated. The sales team would need to be far more assertive. He had identified useful gaps in the market that could be exploited.

Everything was perfect. There were two private offices and she would be occupying one. Again she nodded because, like it or not, she was going to be here, in London.

‘But,’ she said when the tour had been concluded and they were in the pristine, updated kitchen, sitting at the high-tech beaten metallic table with cups of steaming coffee in front of them, ‘I still don’t feel comfortable leaving the house and I don’t want to live in one of your apartments.’ He would have a key... He would be able to walk in unannounced at any given time... She could be in the shower and he could just stroll in...

Her nipples tightened, pushing against her lacy bra and sending tingles up and down, in and out and through her from her toes to her scalp. She licked her lips and reminded herself that if he felt anything towards her at all it would be loathing because of what had happened between them in the past. Although, in reality, he couldn’t even be bothered to feel such a strong emotion. What he felt was...indifference.

So if he were to let himself in, which he most certainly wouldn’t, the shower would be the last place he would seek her out. Her responses were all over the place and it wouldn’t be long before he started to realise that she wasn’t as immune to him as she was desperately trying to be.

‘I’ll bring your brother back over.’

‘No! Don’t...’

‘Why not?’ Javier raised his eyebrows expressively, although he knew the reason well enough. Oliver didn’t want to be stuck in Yorkshire and he didn’t see his future with the family business. He resented the penury into which they had been thrust and, although he recognised the importance of rebuilding what had fallen into disrepair, he really thought no further than what that personally meant for him. Given half a chance, he would have cashed in his shares and headed for the hills. In due course he would, which would be interesting should Javier decide he wanted more than he had. That was unlikely, because once he was done with getting what he wanted, he would be more than happy to disappear and leave the running of the business to an underling of his choice.

‘He’s enjoying being in Paris.’

‘And that’s how it’s always been, isn’t it?’ Javier asked softly and Sophie raised translucent violet eyes to look at him with a frown.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I remember how you used to talk about your twin.’ He had resolved not to go down any maudlin, reminiscing roads but now found that he couldn’t help himself. ‘The party animal. Off to California while you stayed behind to do your A levels. Praised for being sporty and indulged at a time when most kids that age would have had their head in textbooks to make sure they passed exams. When he came down to see you, he barely stayed put. He managed to make friends in five seconds and then off he went to see what nightclubs there were. He had his fun, enjoyed Mummy and Daddy’s money and never had to face up to any grim realities because by then he was in California on his sports scholarship...

‘I bet no one ever filled him in about the reality of the company losses, not even you...not even when they were glaringly obvious. I’ll bet he only found out the extent of the trouble when you couldn’t hide it from him any longer. Did your beloved ex-husband likewise conspire to keep your immature brother in the dark?’

‘I told you.’ Sophie stiffened at the mention of her ex-husband. ‘I don’t want to talk about Roger.’

Javier’s lips tightened. The more she shied away from all mention of her ex, the more his curiosity was piqued. He was bitterly reminded of his pointless wondering when she had dumped him, when she had told him that she was destined to marry someone else... When she had married a guy whom he had found himself researching on the Internet even though it had been an exercise in masochism.

He had learned strength from a very young age. It had taken a great deal of willpower to avoid the pitfalls of so many of his friends when he had been growing up in poverty in Spain. The easy way out had always been littered with drugs and violence, and that easy way had been the popular route for many of the kids he had known. He had had to become an island to turn his back on all of that, just as he had had to develop a great deal of inner strength when he had finally made it to England to begin his university career. He had had to set his sights on distant goals and allow himself to be guided only by them.

Sophie had taken his eye off the ball, and here she was, doing it again.

The sooner he got her out of his system, the better.

‘So your brother stays in Paris,’ he said, with the sort of insistence that made her think of steamrollers slowly and inexorably flattening vast swathes of land. ‘I could get someone to house-sit and daily look for walls falling down...’

‘You might think it’s funny, Javier, but it’s not. You might live in your mansion now, and you might be able to get whatever you want at the snap of a finger, but it’s just not funny when you have to watch every step you take because there might just be a minefield waiting to explode if you put your foot somewhere wrong. And I’m surprised you have no sympathy at all, considering you...you were...’

‘I was broke? Penniless? A poor immigrant still trying to get a grip on the first rung of that all-important ladder? I feel it’s fair to say that our circumstances were slightly different.’

‘And, in a way, you probably have no idea how much worse it makes it for me.’ She swung her head away. Her prissy, formal clothes felt like a straitjacket and her tidy bun nestled at the nape of her neck was sticky and restricting.

Without thinking, she released it and sifted restless fingers through the length of her tumbling hair.

And Javier watched. His mouth went dry. Her hair cascaded over her shoulders and down her back, a vibrant wash of colour that took his breath away. He had to look away but he knew that he was breathing fast, imagining her naked, projecting how her body would feel were he to run his hands along its shapely contours.

‘You’re right. Oliver has always been protected,’ she told him bluntly. He might very well be the first person she was telling this to. It was a truth she had always kept to herself because to have voiced it would have felt like a little betrayal. ‘He only found out about...everything when Dad’s illness was finally revealed, and even then we didn’t tell him that the company was on its last legs. In fact, he returned to California and only came back after the...the accident when... Well, he came back for Dad’s funeral, and of course Roger’s, and by then he had to be told.

‘But his heart isn’t in getting the company up and running. His heart isn’t in the house either. Mum’s now living in Cornwall and, as far as Ollie is concerned, he would sell the family home to the highest bidder if there was anyone around who was in the slightest bit interested. He doesn’t give a hoot if it all falls down in a pile of rubble just so long as we got some money for the rubble. So, no, he wouldn’t be at all happy to leave Paris to house-sit.’

She took a deep, shaky breath. ‘The house hasn’t been maintained for years. It always looked good on the outside, not that I ever really looked, but it turned out that there were problems with the roof and subsidence that had never been sorted. There’s no money left in the pot to sort that stuff out, so I keep my eyes peeled for anything that might need urgent attention. The worse the house is, the less money we’ll get, if we ever manage to sell at all. I can’t afford for a leak to spring in the cellar and start mounting the stairs to the hallway.’ She sighed and rubbed her eyes.

‘Why did you let him get away with it?’ It was more of a flat, semi-incredulous statement than a question and Sophie knew exactly who he was talking about even though no name had been mentioned.

‘I don’t want to talk about that. It’s in the past and there’s no point stressing about the stuff you can’t change. I just have to deal with the here and now...’

‘Oliver,’ Javier ploughed on, ‘might be indifferent and clueless when it comes to business, but you clearly have the capacity to get involved, so why didn’t you? You knew what was happening.’

‘Mum wasn’t in good health. Hadn’t been for ages. And then Dad’s behaviour started getting weird...erratic... Suddenly everything seemed to be happening at the same time. We found out just how ill he was and then, hard on the heels of that, the full repercussions of...of Roger’s gambling and all the bad investments began coming to light. There was no one at the helm. All the good people were leaving. Lots had already left, although I didn’t know that at the time, because I’d never been involved in the family business. It was...chaos.’

Even in the midst of this tale of abject woe, Javier couldn’t help but notice that there was no condemnation of her scoundrel husband. Loyalties, he thought with a sour taste, were not divided.

‘So I’ll get a house-sitter,’ he repeated and she shook her head. He had already infiltrated her life enough. She wasn’t sure she could cope with more.

‘I’ll come here,’ she conceded, ‘and go home at the weekends.’ She breathed in deeply. ‘And thank you for the use of an apartment. You have to let me know... I don’t have a great deal of disposable income, as you can imagine, but please let me know how much rent I will owe you.’

Javier sat back and looked at her from under sinfully long lashes, a lazy, speculative look that felt like a caress.

‘Don’t even think of paying me rent,’ he told her silkily. ‘It’s on the house...for old times’ sake. Trust me, Sophie, I want you...’ he paused fractionally ‘...there at the helm while changes are taking place, and what I want, I usually get...whatever the cost.’

CHAPTER FIVE

SOPHIE LOOKED AROUND her and realised guiltily that, after two weeks’ living in the apartment Javier had kindly loaned her, refusing to countenance a penny in payment, she was strangely happy.

The apartment was to die for. She still found herself admiring the décor, as she was doing right now, having just returned from the office and kicked off her stupid pumps so that she could walk barefoot on the cool, wooden floor.

She had expected minimalist with lots of off-putting glossy white surfaces, like the inside of a high-tech lab. Images of aggressive black leather and chrome everywhere had sprung to mind when she had been handed the key to the apartment by his personal assistant, who had accompanied her so that the workings of the various gadgets could be explained.

She had assumed that she would be overwhelmed by an ostentatious show of wealth, would be obliged to gasp appropriately at furnishings she didn’t really like and would feel like an intruder in a foreign land.

The Javier of today was not the teasing, warm, sexy, funny guy she had once known. The today Javier was tough, rich beyond most people’s wildest dreams, ruthless and cutting edge in his hand-tailored suits and Italian shoes. And that would be reflected in any apartment he owned.

She’d been surprised—shocked, even—when she was shown the apartment.

‘It’s had a makeover,’ the personal assistant had said in a vaguely puzzled voice, but obviously far too well-trained to comment further. ‘So this is the first time I’m seeing the new version...’

Sophie hadn’t quizzed her on what it had been like previously. Tired and in need of updating, she had assumed. He’d probably bought a bunch of apartments without even seeing them, the way you do when you have tons of money, and then paid someone handsomely to turn them into the sort of triple-A, gold-plated investments that would rent for a small fortune and double in value if he ever decided to sell.

Whoever had done the interior design had done a great job.

She padded towards the kitchen, which was cool, in shades of pale grey with vintage off-white tiles on the floor and granite counters that matched the floor.

Everything was open-plan. She strolled into the living room with a cup of tea and sank into the cosy sofa, idly flicking on the television to watch the early-evening news.

It was Friday and the work clothes had been dumped in the clothes hamper. Javier had told her that it was fine to dress casually but she had ignored him.

Keep it professional; keep it businesslike... she had decided.

Jeans and tee shirts would blur the lines between them...at least for her...

Not, in all events, that it made a scrap of difference how she dressed, because, after the first day, he had done a disappearing act, only occasionally emailing her or phoning her for updates. A couple of times he had visited the branch when she had been out seeing customers, trying to drum up business, and she could only think that he had timed his arrivals cleverly to avoid bumping into her.

He didn’t give a passing thought to her, whilst she, on the other hand, couldn’t stop thinking about him.

She didn’t think that she had ever really stopped thinking about him. He’d been in her head, like the ghost of a refrain from a song that wouldn’t go away.

And now she couldn’t stop thinking about him. Worse than that, she spent every day at the office anticipating his unexpected arrival and was disproportionately disappointed when five-thirty rolled round and he’d failed to make an appearance.

Her heart skipped a beat when she opened up her emails and found a message from him waiting for her.

Her throat went dry when she heard the deep, sexy timbre of his voice on the end of the line.

She was in danger of obsessing over a guy who belonged to her past. At least, emotionally.

He’d suddenly reappeared on the scene, opening all sorts of doors in her head, making her think about choices she had made and bringing back memories of the horror story that had followed those choices.

He made her think about Roger. He was curious about her ex. She sensed that. Perhaps not curious in a personal way, but mildly curious, especially because so many things didn’t quite add up. Why, he had asked her, hadn’t she intervened when she’d known that he was blowing vast sums of money gambling? When she’d discovered the scale of the financial problems with the company? Why hadn’t she acted more decisively?

But, of course, that was the kind of person he was. Someone who was born and bred to act decisively. He could never begin to understand how easy it was just to get lost and find yourself in a fog, with no guiding lights to lead you out.

She had grown up a lot since then. She had had to. And, in the process of taking charge, she had realised just how feeble her brother was when it came to making decisions and taking difficult paths.

When she looked back at herself as she had been seven years ago, it was like staring at a stranger. The carefree girl with a life full of options was gone for ever. She was a woman now with limited options and too many bad memories to deal with.

Was that why she was now obsessing over Javier, someone she had known for such a short space of time? Was it because he reminded her of the girl she used to be? Was it obsession by association, so to speak?

He made her think things she would rather have forgotten but he also made her heart skip a beat the way it once used to when she’d been with him.

And more than that, he made her body feel alive the way it hadn’t for years. Not since him, in fact. He made her feel young again and that had a very seductive appeal.

With an impatient click of her tongue, she raised the volume of the television, determined not to waste the evening thinking about Javier and remembering what life had been like when they had been going out.

She almost didn’t hear the buzz of the doorbell, and when she did, she almost thought that she might have made a mistake because no one could possibly be calling on her.

Since she had moved to London, she had kept herself to herself. She knew a couple of people who had relocated from the northern branch but the London crew, all very able and super-efficient, were new and she had shied away from making friends with any of them.

For starters, although it wasn’t advertised and in all probability none of them knew, she was more or less their boss. And also...did she really want anyone knowing her backstory? It was just easier to maintain a healthy distance, so there was no way whoever had buzzed her from downstairs was a colleague on the hunt for a Friday night companion.

She picked up the intercom which allowed her to see her unexpected visitor and the breath left her in a whoosh.

‘You’re in.’ Javier had come to the apartment on the spur of the moment. Since she’d started at the London office, he had seen her once, had spoken to her six times and had emailed her every other day. He had purposefully kept his distance because the strength of his response to her had come as a shock. Accustomed to having absolute control over every aspect of his life, he had assumed that her sudden appearance in his highly ordered existence would prove interesting—certainly rewarding, bearing in mind he intended to finish what had been started seven years previously—and definitely nothing that he wouldn’t be able to handle.

Except that, from the very minute he had laid eyes on her, all that absolute certainty had flown through the window. The easy route he had planned to take had almost immediately bitten the dust. He’d had every intention of coolly trading his financial help for the body he had been denied, the body he discovered he still longed to touch and explore.

She’d used him and now he’d been given a golden opportunity to get his own back.

Except, he’d seen her, and that approach had seemed worse than simplistic. It had seemed crass.

There was no way he was going to pursue her and showing up at the workplace every day would have smelled a lot like pursuit, even though he had every right to be there, considering the amount of money he was sinking into the failing company.

He wanted her to come to him but staying away had been a lot more difficult than he’d dreamed possible.

Like someone dying of thirst suddenly denied the glass of ice-cold water just within his reach, he had found himself thinking about her to the point of distraction, and that had got on his nerves.

So here he was.

Sophie frantically wondered whether she could say that she was just on her way out. His unexpected appearance had brought her out in a nervous cold sweat. She had been thinking about him, and here he was, conjured up from her imagination.

‘I...I...’

‘Let me in.’

‘I was just about to...have something to eat, actually...’

‘Perfect. I’ll join you.’

That wasn’t what she’d had in mind. What she’d had in mind was a lead-up to a polite excuse and an arrangement to meet when she had some sort of defence system in place. Instead, here she was, hair all over the place, wearing jogging bottoms and an old, tight tee shirt bought at a music festival a dozen years ago and shrunk in the wash over time.

‘Come on, Sophie! I’m growing older by the minute!’

‘Fine!’ She buzzed him in, belatedly remembering that it was actually his apartment, so he had every right to be here. And not only was it his apartment, but she wasn’t paying a penny towards the rent, at his insistence.

She scrambled to the mirror by the front door, accepted that it was too late to start pinning her hair back into something sensible, and even though she was expecting him, she still started when he rapped on the door.

He’d obviously come straight from work, although, en route, he had divested himself of his tie, undone the top couple of buttons of his shirt and rolled his sleeves to his elbows. Her eyes dipped to his sinewy forearms and just as quickly back to his face.

‘You look flustered,’ Javier drawled, leaning against the door frame and somehow managing to crowd her. ‘I haven’t interrupted you in the middle of something pressing, have I?’ This was how he remembered her. Tousled and sexy and so unbelievably, breathtakingly fresh.

And innocent.

Which was a bit of a joke, all things considered.

Dark eyes drifted downwards, taking in the outline of her firm, round breasts pushing against a tee shirt that was a few sizes too small, taking in the slither of flat belly where the tee shirt ended and the shapeless jogging bottoms began. Even in an outfit that should have done her no favours, she still looked hot, and his body responded with suitable vigour.

He straightened, frowning at the sudden discomfort of an erection.

‘I haven’t managed to catch much of you over the past couple of weeks.’ He dragged his mind away from thoughts of her, a bed and a heap of hurriedly discarded clothes on the ground. ‘So I thought I’d try you at home before you disappeared up north for the weekend.’

‘Of course.’

There was a brief pause, during which he tilted his head to one side, before pointedly looking at the door handle.

‘So...’ He looked around him at his apartment with satisfaction. He’d had it redone. ‘How are you finding the apartment?’

Some might say that he’d been a little underhand in the renovating of the apartment, which had been in perfectly good order a month previously. He’d walked round it, looking at the soulless, sterile furnishings, and had been able to picture her reaction to her new surroundings: disdain. He had always been amused at her old-fashioned tastes, despite the fact that she had grown up with money.

‘I imagine your family home to be a wonder of the most up-to-the-minute furnishings money can buy,’ he had once teased, when she’d stood staring in rapt fixation at a four-poster bed strewn with a million cushions in the window of a department store. She’d waxed lyrical then about the romance of four-poster beds and had told him, sheepishly, that the family home was anything but modern.

‘My mum’s like me,’ she had confessed with a grin. ‘She likes antiques and everything that’s old and worn and full of character.’

Javier had personally made sure to insert some pieces of character in the apartment. He, himself, liked modern and minimalist. His impoverished family home had been clean but nearly everything had been bought second-hand. He’d grown up with so many items of furniture that had been just a little too full of character that he was now a fully paid-up member of all things modern and lacking in so-called character.

But he’d enjoyed hand-picking pieces for the apartment, had enjoyed picturing her reaction to the four-poster bed he had bought, the beautifully crafted floral sofa, the thick Persian rug that broke up the expanse of pale flooring.

‘The apartment’s fine.’ Sophie stepped away from him and folded her arms. ‘Better than fine,’ she admitted, eyes darting to him and then staying there because he was just so arresting. ‘I love the way it’s been done. You should congratulate your interior designer.’

‘Who said I used one?’ He looked at her with raised eyebrows and she blushed in sudden confusion, because to picture him hand-picking anything was somehow...intimate. And of course he would never have done any such thing. What über-rich single guy would ever waste time hunting down rugs and curtains? Definitely not a guy like Javier, who was macho to the very last bone in his body.

‘I’m afraid there’s not a great deal of food.’ She turned away because her heart was beating so fast she could barely breathe properly. His presence seemed to infiltrate every part of the apartment, filling it with suffocating, masculine intensity. This was how it had always been with him. In his presence, she’d felt weak and pleasurably helpless. Even as a young guy, struggling to make ends meet, he’d still managed to project an air of absolute assurance. He’d made all the other students around him seem like little boys in comparison.

The big difference was that, back then, she’d had a remit to bask and luxuriate in that powerful masculinity. She could touch, she could run her fingers through his springy, black hair and she’d had permission to melt at the feel of it.

She’d been allowed to want him and to show him how much she wanted him.

Not so now.

Furthermore, she didn’t want to want him. She didn’t want to feel herself dragged back into a past that was gone for good. Of course, foolish love was gone for good, and no longer a threat to the ivory tower she had constructed around herself that had been so vital in withstanding the years spent with her husband, but she didn’t want to feel that pressing, urgent want either...

She didn’t want to feel her heart fluttering like an adolescent’s because he happened to be sharing the same space as her. She’d grown up, gone through some hellish stuff. Her outlook on life had been changed for ever because of what she’d had to deal with. She had no illusions now and no longer believed that happiness was her right. It wasn’t and never would be. Javier Vasquez belonged to a time when unfettered optimism had been her constant companion. Now, not only was the murky past an unbreachable wall between them, but so were all the changes that had happened to her.

‘I wasn’t expecting company.’ She half turned to find him right behind her, having followed her into the kitchen.

The kitchen was big, a clever mix of old and new, and she felt utterly at home in it.

‘Smells good. What is it?’

‘Just some tomato sauce. I was going to have it with pasta.’

‘You never used to enjoy cooking.’ Yet again, he found himself referring to the past, dredging it up and bringing it into the present, where it most certainly did not belong.

‘I know.’ She shot him a fleeting smile as he sat down at the table, angling his chair so that he could extend his long legs to one side. ‘I never had to do it,’ she explained. ‘Mum loved cooking and I was always happy to let her get on with it. When she got ill, she said it used to occupy her and take her mind off her health problems, so I never interfered. I mean, I’d wash the dishes and tidy behind her, but she liked being the main chef. And then...’

She sighed and began finishing the food preparation, but horribly aware of those lazy, speculative eyes on her, following her every movement.

Javier resisted the urge to try to prise answers out of her. ‘So you learned to cook,’ he said, moving the conversation along, past the point of his curiosity.

‘And discovered that I rather enjoyed it.’ She didn’t fail to notice how swiftly he had diverted the conversation from the controversial topic of her past, the years she had spent after they had gone their separate ways. His initial curiosity was gone, and she told herself that she was very thankful that it had, because there was far too much she could never, would never, tell him.

But alongside that relief was a certain amount of disappointment, because his lack of curiosity was all wrapped up with the indifference he felt for her.

She suddenly had the strangest temptation to reach out and touch him, to stroke his wrist, feel the familiar strength of his forearm under her fingers. What would he do? How would he react? Would he recoil with horror or would he touch her back?

Appalled, she thrust a plate of food in front of him and sat down opposite him. She wanted to sit on her treacherous hands just in case they did something wildly inappropriate of their own accord and she had to remind herself shakily that she was a grown woman, fully in control of her wayward emotions. Emotions that had been stirred up, as they naturally would be, by having him invade her life out of the blue.

She heard herself babbling on like the village idiot about her culinary exploits while he ate and listened in silence, with every show of interest in what she was saying.

Which was remarkable, given she had just finished a lengthy anecdote about some slow-cooked beef she had tried to cook weeks previously, which had been disastrous.

‘So you like the apartment,’ Javier drawled, eyes not leaving her face as he sipped some wine. ‘And the job? Now that the work of trying to repair the damage done over the years has begun?’

‘It’s...awkward,’ Sophie told him truthfully.

‘Explain.’

‘You were right,’ she said bluntly, rising to begin clearing the table, her colour high. ‘Some of the people my father trusted have let the company down badly over the years. I can only think that employing friends was a luxury my father had when he started the company, and he either continued to trust that they were doing a good job or he knew that they weren’t but found it difficult to let them go. And then...’

‘And then?’ Javier queried silkily and Sophie shrugged.

‘Getting rid of them never happened. Thankfully the majority have now left, but with generous pension payments or golden handshakes...’ Yet more ways money had drained away from the company until the river had run dry.

‘The company is in far worse shape than even I imagined...’

Sophie blanched. She watched as he began helping to clear the table, bringing plates to the sink.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Your father didn’t just take his eye off the ball when he became ill. I doubt his eye had ever really been fully on it in the first place.’

‘You can’t say that!’

‘I’ve gone through all the books with a fine-tooth comb, Sophie.’ He relieved her of the plate she was holding and dried it before placing it on the kitchen counter, then he slung the tea towel he had fetched over his shoulder and propped himself against the counter, arms folded.

Javier had always suspected that her father had been instrumental in her decision to quit university and return to the guy she had always been destined to marry. Even though she had never come right out and said so; even though she had barely had the courage to look him in the face when she had announced that she’d be leaving university because of a family situation that had arisen.

He had never told her that he had subsequently gone to see her parents, that he had confronted her father, who had left him in no doubt that there was no way his precious daughter would contemplate a permanent relationship with someone like him.

He wondered whether the old man’s extreme reaction had been somehow linked to his decline into terminal ill health, and scowled as he remembered the heated argument that had resulted in him walking away, never looking back.

This was the perfect moment to disabuse her of whatever illusions she had harboured about a father who had clearly had little clue about running a business, but the dismay on her face made him hesitate.

He raked his fingers uncomfortably through his hair and continued to stare down at her upturned face.

‘He was a terrific dad,’ she said defensively, thinking back to the many times he had taken the family out on excursions, often leaving the running of the company to the guys working for him. ‘Life was to be enjoyed’ had always been his motto. He had played golf and taken them on fantastic holidays; she recognised now that ineffective, relatively unsupervised management had not helped the company coffers. He had inherited a thriving business but, especially when everything had gone electronic, he had failed to move with the times and so had his pals who had joined the company when he had taken it over.

In retrospect, she saw that so much had been piling up like dark clouds on the horizon, waiting for their moment to converge and create the thunderstorm of events that would land her where she was right now.

Javier opened his mouth to disabuse her of her girlish illusions and then thought of his own father. There was no way he would ever have had a word said against him, and yet, hadn’t Pedro Vasquez once confessed that he had blown an opportunity to advance himself by storming out of his first company, too young and hot-headed to take orders he didn’t agree with? The golden opportunity he had walked away from had never again returned and he had had to devote years of saving and scrimping to get by on the low wages he had earned until his retirement.

But Javier had never held that weak moment against him.

‘Your father wouldn’t be the first man who failed to spot areas for expansion,’ he said gruffly. ‘It happens.’

Sophie knew that he had softened and something deep inside her shifted and changed as she continued to stare up at him, their eyes locked.

She could scarcely breathe.

‘Thank you,’ she whispered and he shook his head, wanting to break a connection that was sucking him in, but finding it impossible to do so.

‘What are you thanking me for?’

‘He was old-fashioned, and unfortunately the people he delegated to were as old-fashioned as he was. Dad should have called a troubleshooter in the minute the profits started taking a nosedive, but he turned a blind eye to what was going on in the company.’

And he turned a blind eye to your ex as well...

That thought made Javier stiffen. Her father had been old-fashioned enough to hold pompous, arrogant views about foreign upstarts, to have assumed that some loser with the right accent was the sort of man his daughter should marry.

But that wasn’t a road he was willing to go down because it would have absolved Sophie of guilt and the bottom line was that no one had pointed a gun to her head and forced her up the aisle.

She had wanted to take that step.

She had chosen to stick with the guy even though she knew that he was blowing up the company with his crazy investments.

She had watched and remained silent as vast sums of vitally needed money had been gambled away.

She had enabled. And the only reason she had done that was because she had loved the man.

He turned away abruptly, breaking eye contact, feeling the sour taste of bile rise to his mouth.

‘The company will have to be streamlined further,’ he told her curtly. ‘Dead wood can no longer be tolerated.’ He remained where he was, hip against the counter, and watched as she tidied, washed dishes, dried them and stayed silent.

‘All the old retainers will end up being sacked. Is that it?’

‘Needs must.’

‘Some of the old guys have families... They’re nearing retirement—and, okay, they may not have been the most efficient on the planet, but they’ve been loyal...’

‘And you place a lot of value on loyalty, do you?’ he murmured.

‘Don’t you?’

‘There are times when common sense has to win the battle.’

‘You’re in charge now. I don’t suppose I have any choice, have I?’

Instead of soothing him, her passive, resentful compliance stoked a surge of anger inside him.

‘If you’d taken a step back,’ he said with ruthless precision, ‘and swapped blind loyalty for some common sense, you might have been able to curb some of your dear husband’s outrageous excesses...’

‘You truly believe that?’ She stepped back, swamped by his powerful, aggressive presence, and glared at him.

The last thing Javier felt he needed was to have her try to make feeble excuses for the man who had contributed to almost destroying her family business. What he really felt he needed right now was something stiff to drink. He couldn’t look at her without his body going into instant and immediate overdrive and he couldn’t talk to her without relinquishing some of his formidable and prized self-control. She affected him in a way no other woman ever had and it annoyed the hell out of him.

‘What else is anyone supposed to believe?’ he asked with rampant sarcasm. ‘Join the dots and you usually get an accurate picture at the end of the exercise.’

‘There was no way I could ever have stopped Roger!’ Sophie heard herself all but shout at him, appalled by her outburst even as she realised that it was too late to take it back. ‘There were always consequences for trying to talk common sense into him!’

The silence that greeted this outburst was electric, sizzling around them, so that the hairs on the back of her neck stood on end.

‘Consequences? What consequences?’ Javier pressed in a dangerously soft voice.

‘Nothing,’ Sophie muttered, turning away, but he reached out, circling her forearm to tug her back towards him.

‘You don’t get to walk away from this conversation after you’ve opened up a can of worms, Sophie.’

There were so many reasons this was a can of worms that she didn’t want to explore. On a deeply emotional level, she didn’t want to confront, yet again, the mistakes she had made in the past. She’d done enough of that to last a lifetime and she especially didn’t want to confront those mistakes aloud, with Javier as her witness. She didn’t want his pity. She didn’t want him to sense her vulnerability. He might no longer care about her, but she didn’t want to think that he would be quietly satisfied that, having walked out on him, she had got her comeuppance, so to speak.

‘It’s not relevant!’ she snapped, trying and failing to tug her arm out of his grasp.

‘Was he...? I don’t know what to think here, Soph...’

That abbreviation of her name brought back a flood of memories and they went straight to the core of her, burning a hole through her defence mechanisms. Her soft mouth trembled and she knew that her eyes were glazing over, which, in turn, made her blink rapidly, fighting back the urge to burst into tears.

‘He could be unpredictable.’ Her jaw tightened and she looked away but he wouldn’t allow her to avoid his searching gaze, tilting her to face him by placing a finger gently under her chin.

‘That’s a big word. Try breaking it down into smaller components...’

‘He could be verbally abusive,’ she told him jerkily. ‘On one occasion he was physically abusive. So there you have it, Javier. If I’d tried to interfere in his gambling, there’s no accounting for what the outcome might have been for me.’

Javier was horrified. He dropped his hand and his fingers clenched and unclenched. She might have fancied herself in love with the guy but that would have been disillusionment on a grand scale.

‘Why didn’t you divorce him?’

‘It was a brief marriage, Javier. And there is more to this than you know...’

‘Did you know that the man had anger issues?’ Javier sifted his fingers through his hair. Suddenly the kitchen felt the size of a matchbox. He wanted to walk, unfettered; he wanted to punch something.

‘Of course I didn’t, and that certainly wasn’t the case when... You don’t get it,’ she said uneasily. ‘And I’d really rather not talk about this any more.’

Javier had been mildly incredulous at her declaration that her descent into penury had been tougher to handle than his own lifetime of struggle and straitened circumstances. She, at least, had had the head start of the silver spoon in the mouth and a failing company was, after all, still a company with hope of salvation. The crumbling family pile was still a very big roof over her head.

Now there were muddy, swirling currents underlying those glib assumptions, and yet again, he lost sight of the clarity of his intentions.

He reminded himself that fundamentally nothing had changed. She had begun something seven years ago and had failed to finish it because she had chosen to run off with her long-time, socially acceptable boyfriend.

That the boyfriend had failed to live up to expectation, that events in her life had taken a fairly disastrous turn, did not change the basic fact that she had strung him along.

But he couldn’t recapture the simple black-and-white equation that had originally propelled him. He wondered, in passing, whether he should just have stuck to his quid pro quo solution: ‘you give me what I want and I’ll give you what you want’.

But no.

He wanted so much more and he could feel it running hot through his veins as she continued to stare at him, unable to break eye contact.

Subtly, the atmosphere shifted. He sensed the change in her breathing, saw the way her pupils dilated, the way her lips parted as if she might be on the brink of saying something.

He cupped her face with his hand and felt rather than heard the long sigh that made her shudder.

Sophie’s eyelids felt heavy. She wanted to close her eyes because if she closed her eyes she would be able to breathe him in more deeply, and she wanted to do that, wanted to breathe him in, wanted to touch him and scratch the itch that had been bothering her ever since he had been catapulted back into her life.

She wanted to kiss him and taste his mouth.

She only realised that she was reaching up to him when she felt the hardness of muscled chest under the palms of her flattened hands.

She heard a whimper of sheer longing which seemed to come from her and then she was kissing him...tongues entwining...exploring...easing some of the aching pain of her body...

She inched closer, pressed herself against him and wanted to rub against his length, wanted to feel his nakedness against hers.

She couldn’t get enough of him.

It was as if no time had gone by between them, as if they were back where they had been, a time when he had been able to set fire to her body with the merest of touches. Nothing had changed and everything had changed.

‘No!’ She came to her senses with horrified, jerky panic. ‘This is... I am not that girl I once was. I... No!’

She’d flung herself at him! She’d practically assaulted the man like a sex-starved woman desperate to be touched! He didn’t even care about her! She’d opened up and on the back of that had leapt on him and had managed to surface only after damage had been done!

Humiliation tore through her. She went beetroot-red and stumbled backwards.

‘I apologise for that.’ She immediately went on the attack. ‘It should never have happened and I don’t know what came over me!’ She ran her fingers through her hair and tried to remain calm but she was shaking like a leaf. ‘This isn’t what we’re about! Not at all.’

Javier raised his eyebrows and her colour deepened.

‘There’s only business between us,’ she insisted through clenched teeth. ‘I must have had... I don’t normally drink...’

‘Now, isn’t that the lamest excuse in the world?’ Javier murmured. ‘Let’s blame it on the wine...’

‘I don’t care what you think!’ How could he be so cool and composed when she was all over the place? Except, of course, she knew how. Because she was just so much more affected by him than he was by her and she could see all her pride and self-respect disappearing down the plug hole if she didn’t get a grip on the situation right now.

She cleared her throat and stared, at him and through him. ‘I... We have to work alongside one another for a while and...this was just an unfortunate blip. I would appreciate it if you never mention it again. We can both pretend that it never happened, because it will never happen again.’

Javier lowered his eyes and tilted his head to one side as if seriously considering what she had just said.

So many challenges in that single sentence. Did she really and truly believe that she could close the book now that page one had been turned?

He’d tasted her and one small taste wasn’t going to do. Not for him and not for her. Whatever her backstory, they both needed to sate themselves with one another and that was what they would do before that place was inevitably reached where walking away was an option.

‘If that’s how you want to play it.’ He shrugged and looked at her. ‘And from Monday,’ he said with lazy assurance, ‘bank on me being around most of the time. We both want the same thing, don’t we...?’

‘What?’ Confused, the only thought that came to her was each other—that, at any rate, was the thing that she wanted, and she could smell that it was what he wanted as well.

‘For us to sort out the problems in this company as quickly as possible,’ he said in a voice implying surprise that she hadn’t spotted the right answer immediately. ‘Of course...’

CHAPTER SIX

‘NO.’

‘Give me three good reasons and maybe I’ll let you get away with that response.’

Sophie stared at Javier, body language saying it all as she supported herself on her desk, palms flattened on the highly polished surface, torso tilted towards him in angry refusal.

True to his word, he had more or less taken up residence in the premises in Notting Hill.

He wasn’t there all the time. That would actually have been far easier for her to deal with. No, he breezed in and out. Sometimes she would arrive at eight-thirty to find him installed at the desk which he had claimed as his own, hard at it, there since the break of dawn and with a list of demands that had her on her feet running at full tilt for the remainder of the day.

Other times he might show up mid-afternoon and content himself with checking a couple of things with members of staff before vanishing, barely giving her a second glance.

And there had been days when he hadn’t shown up at all and there had been no communication from him.

After six weeks, Sophie felt as though she had been tossed in a tumble dryer with the speed turned to high. She had been miserable, uncertain and fearful when she had had to deal with the horrendous financial mess into which she had been plunged. After her marriage, that had just felt like a continuation of a state of mind that had become more or less natural to her.

Now, though...

She was none of those things. She was a high-wire walker, with excitement and trepidation fighting for dominance. She leapt out of bed every morning with a treacherous sense of anticipation. Her pulses raced every time she took a deep breath and entered the office. Her blood pressure soared when she glanced to the door and saw him stride in. Her heart sang when she saw him stationed at his desk first thing, with his cup of already tepid black coffee on the desk in front of him.

Life was suddenly in technicolor and it scared the living daylights out of her. It had become obvious that she’d never got him out of her system and she seemed to have no immunity against the staggering force of his impact on all her senses. Her heart might be locked away behind walls of ice but her body clearly wasn’t.

‘I don’t have to give you any reasons, Javier.’ She was the last man standing and had been about to leave the office at a little after six when Javier had swanned in and stopped her in the act of putting on her jacket.

‘Quick word,’ he had said, in that way he had of presuming that there would be no argument. He’d then proceeded to lounge back in his chair, gesturing for her to drop what she was doing and take the seat facing him across his desk.

That had been half an hour ago.

‘You do, really.’ He looked at her lazily. Despite the fact that the largely young staff all dressed informally, Sophie had stuck it out with her prissy work outfits, which ranged from drab grey skirts and neat white blouses to drab black skirts and neat white blouses, all worn with the same flat black pumps. The ravishing hair which he had glimpsed on the one occasion when he had surprised her weeks ago at the apartment had gone back into hiding. Woe betide she actually released it from captivity between the hours of eight-thirty and five-thirty!

‘Why?’

‘Because I think it would work.’

‘And of course, because you think it would work, means I have to agree and go along with it!’

‘How many of the programmes that I’ve set in motion over the past couple of months have failed?’

‘That’s not the point.’

‘Any? No. Is the company seeing the start of a turnaround? Yes. Have the sales team been reporting gains? Yes.’ He folded his hands behind his head and looked at her evenly. ‘Ergo, this idea makes sense and will generate valuable sales.’

‘But I’m not a model, Javier!’

‘That’s the point, Sophie. You’re the face of your company. Putting your image on billboards and in advertising campaigns will personalise the company—half the battle in wooing potential customers is making them feel as though they’re relating to something more than just a name and a brand.’

She stared at him mutinously and he gazed calmly back at her.

The waiting game was taking longer than he had anticipated and he was finding that he was in no rush to speed things up. He was enjoying her. He was enjoying the way she made him feel and it wasn’t just the reaction of his body to her. No, he realised that the years of having whatever he wanted and whoever he chose had jaded him. This blast from the past was...rejuvenating. And who didn’t like a spot of rejuvenation in their lives? Of course, he would have to hurry things along eventually, because bed was the conclusion to the exercise before normal service was resumed and he returned to the life from which he had been taking a little holiday.

But for the moment...

He really liked the way she blushed. He could almost forget that she was the scheming young girl who had played him for an idiot.

‘So we just need to talk about the details. And stop glaring. I thought all women liked to show off their bodies.’

Sophie glared. ‘Really, Javier? You really think that?’

‘Who wouldn’t like to be asked to model?’

‘Is that the message you’ve got from...from the women you’ve been out with?’

Javier looked at her narrowly because this was the first time she had ventured near the question of his love life. ‘Most of the women I’ve been out with,’ he murmured, ‘were already catwalk models, accustomed to dealing with the full glare of the public spotlight.’

She’d wondered. Of course she had. Now she knew. Models. Naturally. He certainly wouldn’t have dated normal, average women holding down normal, average jobs. He was the man who could have it all and men who could have it all always, but always, seemed to want to have models glued to their arm. It was just so...predictable.

‘You’ve stopped glaring,’ Javier said. ‘Which is a good thing. But now there’s disapproval stamped all over your face. What are you disapproving of? My choice of woman?’

‘I don’t care what your choice of girlfriends has been!’

‘Don’t you?’ He raised his eyebrows. ‘Because you look a little agitated. What’s wrong with models? Some of them can be relatively clever, as it happens.’

‘Relatively clever...’ Sophie snorted. Her colour was high and the look in his sinfully dark eyes was doing weird things to her, making her feel jumpy and thrillingly excited.

Making her nipples tighten...stoking a dampness between her thighs that had nothing to do with her scorn for his choice of dates, whoever those nameless dates had been.

Instant recall of that kiss they had shared made her breath hitch temporarily in her throat.

Just as she had stridently demanded, no mention had been made of it again. It was as though it had never happened. Yes, that was exactly what she had wanted, but it hadn’t stopped her constantly harking back to it in her head, reliving the moment and burning up just at the thought of it. How could a bruised and battered heart take second billing to a body that seemed to do whatever it felt like doing?

‘You used to tell me that you liked the fact that I had opinions!’

‘Many models have opinions—admittedly not of the intellectual variety. They have very strong opinions on, oh, shoes...bags...other models...’

Sophie felt her mouth twitch. She’d missed his sense of humour. In fact, thinking about it, he’d been the benchmark against which Roger had never stood a chance. Not that he had ever been in the running...

In fact, thinking about it, wasn’t he the benchmark against which every other man had always been set and always would be? When would that end? How could she resign herself to a half-life because she was still wrapped up in the man in front of her? Because that intense physical reaction just hadn’t died and could still make itself felt through all the layers of sadness and despair that had shaped the woman she was now.

She hadn’t looked twice at any guy since she’d been on her own. Hadn’t even been tempted!

Yet here she was, not only wanting to look but wanting to touch...

Why kid herself? Telling herself to pretend that that kiss had never happened didn’t actually mean that it had disappeared from her head.

And telling herself that she should feel nothing for a guy who belonged to her past, a guy who wasn’t even interested in her, didn’t actually mean that she felt nothing for him.

Lust—that was what it was—and the harder she tried to deny its existence, the more powerful a grip it seemed to have over her.

And part of the reason was because...he wasn’t indifferent, was he?

Heart racing, she looked down and gave proper house room in her head to all those barely discernible signals she had felt emanating from him over the past few weeks.

For starters, there had been that kiss.

She’d felt the way his mouth had explored hers, hungry and greedy and wanting more.

And then, working in the same space, she’d lodged somewhere in the back of her head those accidental brushes when he had leant over her, caging her in in front of her computer so that he could explain some detail on the screen.

She’d committed to memory the way she had occasionally surprised his lazy dark eyes resting on her just a fraction longer than necessary.

And sometimes...didn’t he stand just a little too close? Close enough for her to feel the heat from his body? To smell his clean, masculine scent?

Didn’t all of that add up to something?

She didn’t know whether he was even aware of the dangerous current running between them just beneath the surface. If he was, then it was obvious that he had no intention of doing anything about it.

And then, one day, he would no longer be around.

Right now, he was making sure that his investment paid off. He had sunk money into a bailout, and he wasn’t going to see that money flushed down the drain, so he was taking an active part in progressing the company.

But soon enough the company would be on firmer ground and he would be able to retreat and hand over the running of it to other people, herself included.

He would resume his hectic life running his own empire.

And she, likewise, would return to Yorkshire to take up full-time residence in the family home, which she would be able to renovate at least enough to make it a viable selling proposition.

They would part company.

And she would be left with this strange, empty feeling for the rest of her life.

She felt guilty enough about the way they had broken up. On top of that, he would remain the benchmark against which no other man would ever stand a chance of competing for ever.

She should have slept with him.

She knew that now. She should have slept with him instead of holding on to all those girlish fantasies about saving herself for when that time came and she knew that they would be a permanent item, for when she was convinced that their relationship was made to stand the test of time.

If she’d slept with him, he would never have achieved the impossible status of being the only guy capable of turning her on. If she’d slept with him, she might not feel so guilty about the way everything had crashed and burned.

Was it selfish now to think that, if she righted that oversight, she might be free to get on with her life? Things were being sorted financially but what was the good of that if, emotionally, she remained in some kind of dreadful, self-inflicted limbo?

She wasn’t the selfish sort. She had never thought of herself as the kind of pushy, independent type who took what she wanted from a man to satisfy her own needs.

The opposite!

But she knew, with a certain amount of desperation, that if she didn’t take what she wanted now she would create all sorts of problems for herself down the line.

She wondered whether she could talk to her mother about it and immediately dismissed that thought because, as far as Evelyn Griffin-Watt was concerned, Javier was a youthful blip who had been cut out of her life a long time ago, leaving no nasty scars behind.

Besides, her mother was leading an uncomplicated and contented life in Cornwall; was it really fair to bring back unpleasant memories by resurrecting a long, involved conversation about the past?

‘Okay.’

‘Come again?’

‘I’ll do it.’

Javier smiled slowly. In truth, the whole modelling idea had sprung to mind only the day before, and he had anticipated defeat, but here she was...agreeing after a pretty half-hearted battle. At least, half-hearted for her.

‘Brilliant decision!’

‘I was railroaded into it.’

‘Strong word. I prefer persuaded. Now, I have a few ideas...’

* * *

Sophie peeped through a crack in the curtains and looked down into the courtyard which had been tarted up for the day into a vision of genteel respectability.

The shoot had been arranged in the space of a week, during which time Sophie had spoken to various media types and also to various stylists. She imagined that they were being paid a phenomenal amount for the day because they had all bent over backwards to pay attention to what she had said.

Which hadn’t been very much because she had no idea what questions to ask other than the obvious one: How long is it all going to take?

Javier hadn’t been at any of those meetings, choosing instead to delegate to one of the people in his PR department, but that hadn’t bothered Sophie.

In a way, she’d been glad, because she had a plan and the element of surprise was a big part of the plan.

Except, the day had now arrived and the courtyard was buzzing with cameramen, the make-up crew, the director, producer and all the other people whose roles were, quite frankly, bewildering. And where was Javier? Nowhere to be seen.

It was today or it was not at all.

She dropped the curtain and turned to the full-length mirror which the stylist had installed in the bedroom because the small one on the dressing table ‘just won’t do, darling!’

The brief which she had agreed on with Javier would have her standing next to a gleaming articulated lorry bearing the company logo, in dungarees, a checked shirt and a jaunty cowboy hat on her head.

Sophie had decided to take it up a notch and the reflection staring back at her had dumped the dungarees in favour of a pair of shorts with a frayed hem. The checked shirt remained the same, but it was tied under her breasts so that her flat stomach was exposed, and there was no jaunty cowboy hat on her head. Instead, she had slung it on her back so that her hair was wild and loose.

Javier had vaguely aimed for something wholesome and appealing, a throwback to the good old days of home-baked bread and jam, which was some of the cargo transported in the lorries. He’d suggested that it would be a nice contrast to the new face of the business, which was streamlined and fully up to spec on the technological front, which it hadn’t been before. Something along the lines of the home-baked bread getting from A to B before it had time to cool from the oven and Sophie’s image was going to sell the absolute truth of that.

She had taken it up a notch from wholesome to wholesome and sexy.

It had been her brainwave when she had sat there, numbly recognising that she would never, ever get over him if she didn’t sleep with him, if she didn’t seduce him into bed. He’d been in her head for years and she couldn’t think of another way to make sure that he was knocked off the position he occupied there.

She’d never seduced anyone in her life before. Just thinking about doing something like that was terrifying, but when it came to her emotions, she had to be proactive. As proactive as she had been dealing with the mess she’d been left to clear up in the company.

She wasn’t a simpering teenager any more, seeing the future through rose-tinted specs and believing in happy-ever-after endings.

She was an adult, jaded by experience, who would be left nursing regret for the rest of her life if she didn’t give this a shot. And so what if she failed? What if he looked at her get-up and burst out laughing? So, she might have a moment’s humiliation, but that would be worth the lifetime she would have had thinking about an opportunity that had passed her by, an opportunity to claim what she knew could have been hers all those years ago.

The time had come to take a chance.

Except, it didn’t look as though the wretched man was going to show up!

Her nerves were shot, her pulses were racing and she hadn’t eaten since lunchtime the previous day because of the shot nerves and the racing pulses...

She was a mess and it was all going to be for nothing because Javier had obviously had his brainwave and then allowed his minions to realise it while he stepped back from the scene of the action.

She slunk down to the courtyard with a white bathrobe over her screamingly uncomfortable outfit and was immediately appropriated by a host of people whose only function seemed to be to get her ready for the shoot.

She allowed herself to be manoeuvred while disappointment cascaded through her in waves.

No Javier. No big seduction. It had taken absolutely everything out of her. And there was no way she was going to do this again. She wasn’t going to set herself the task of staging seductive scenes in the hope of igniting something that probably wasn’t there for him anyway, whatever stupid signals she thought she’d read!

A mirror was brought for her to inspect herself. Sophie barely glanced at the fully made-up face staring back at her. After the tension of the past couple of days, and the nervous excitement of earlier this morning as she had got dressed, she now felt like a balloon that had been deflated before it had made it to the party.

She was aware of orders being shouted and poses she was being instructed to adopt.

No one had questioned the slight change in outfit. She was Javier’s personal pet project and no one dared question her for fear that she would report unfavourably back to their boss.

She was supposed to turn up in denim and a checked top with a cowboy hat and they knew what the direction of the shoot should be. The outfit was daring, though, and the poses were therefore slightly more daring than perhaps originally choreographed.

She had her back to the camera team, one hand resting lightly on the shining lorry, looking over her shoulder with a smile, when she heard his roar from behind her.

She’d given up on Javier coming.

But before she’d clocked his absence, she had somehow imagined him standing amongst the crew, goggle-eyed as he looked at her, wanting her as much as she wanted him and knowing that he had to have her. She’d pictured him waiting impatiently until the crew had packed up and gone and then...

Her wanton thoughts had not formulated much beyond that point. There would be a lot of ground to cover before the scene shifted from impatient seduction to the satisfied aftermath.

‘What the hell is going on here?’

Sophie stumbled back against the lorry and the entire assembled crew stared at Javier in growing confusion, aware that they had done something wrong but not quite sure what.

Javier strode forward through them like a charging bull, face as black as thunder.

‘You!’ He pointed to the director of the shoot, who jumped to attention and began stammering out his consternation, puzzled as to what the problem was. The shoot was going very well. Indeed, if Javier wanted, he could see what was already in the bag. It was going to do the job and sell the business like hot cakes straight from the oven. Sophie was a brilliant model. No temper tantrums and no diva pouting. She was perfect for the job and the fact that she was part-owner of the company was going to be a nice touch. They’d make sure they got that in in the backdrop...

Javier held up one cold, imperious hand. ‘This was not what I wanted!’ he snapped. He looked across to Sophie with a scowl and she folded her arms defensively.

‘They have no idea what you’re going on about, Javier,’ she said sweetly, strolling towards him although she was quaking inside, unable to tear her eyes away from his strident masculinity. He dominated the space around him, a towering, forbidding figure who clearly inspired awe, fear and respect in equal measure.

It was an incredible turn-on to think that this was the guy who had once teased her, told her that she made him weak, the guy whose eyes had flared with desire whenever they had rested on her.

The guy she wanted so much that it hurt.

The guy she was prepared to risk humiliation for.

‘Consider this shoot over for the day.’ He directed the command at the director but his eyes were focused on Sophie as she moved to stand right in front of him.

He cursed the overseas phone call that had held him up and then the traffic on the motorways and B-roads that wound their way to her family home. If he’d arrived when he had originally planned, he would have...

Made sure that she didn’t step one delicate foot out of the house dressed in next to nothing.

He was shocked by his sudden regression to a Neanderthal, which was the very opposite of the cool composure he prided himself on having.

Hands thrust deep into his pockets, he continued to stare at her with ferocious intent while the entire assembled crew hurriedly began packing their equipment and disappearing fast.

Sophie heard the gravelly chaos of reversing cars and SUVs but she was locked into a little bubble in which the only two people who existed were herself and Javier.

‘That wasn’t the outfit we agreed on.’ His voice was a low, driven snarl and she tilted her chin at a mutinous angle.

‘Checked shirt...tick. Denim...tick. Stupid cowboy hat...tick. Trainers...tick...’

‘You know what I mean,’ Javier gritted, unable to take his eyes off her.

‘Do I?’ She hadn’t realised how chilly it was and she hugged herself.

‘You’re cold,’ he said gruffly, removing his jacket and settling it around her shoulders. For a second, she just wanted to close her eyes and breathe in the scent from it.

And this was what it was all about. This hunger that had never gone away, but which had to go away, because if it didn’t it would eat away at her for ever. And there was only one way of it just going away and leaving her alone.

‘Tell me,’ she pressed huskily. ‘Why are you so furious? It wasn’t fair of you to send all those poor people packing. They were only doing their job.’

‘That’s not the way I see it,’ Javier growled. The jacket, way too big, drowned her and it was really weird the way that just made her look even sexier. He shifted in an attempt to ease the discomfort of his erection. Was she wearing a bra? He didn’t think so and that made him angry all over again.

‘How do you see it?’

‘The brief was for you to look wholesome!’ He raked his fingers through his hair and shook his head. This was the first time he had ventured to her family home but he hadn’t noticed a single brick. His entire focus was on her. She consumed him. ‘The attractive girl next door! Not a sex siren out to snag a man! How the hell is that supposed to sell the company?’

‘I thought that sex sold everything?’

‘Is that why you did it? Was that your concept of positive input? Dressing up in next to nothing and draping yourself over that lorry like a hooker posing in a motorbike shot?’

‘How dare you?’ But she flushed and cringed and knew that there was some justification for that horrible slur. She barely stopped to think that in summer there were many, many girls her age who went out dressed like this and thought nothing of it. She just knew that it wasn’t her.

‘The entire crew,’ he delineated coldly, ‘must have had a field day ogling you. Or maybe that was what you had in mind. Is that it? Has living in London kick-started an urge to push the limits? Have you realised how much tamer your life up here was?’

‘I didn’t do this so that any of the crew could ogle me.’ She fought to maintain his cool, disapproving stare and took a deep breath. ‘I did this so that...’ Her voice faltered. Her hands were clammy and she licked her lips as the tension stretched and stretched between them.

‘So that...?’ Javier prompted softly.

‘So that you could ogle me...’

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