‘I don’t care what you think!’

How could Javier be so cool and composed when she was all over the place? Except, of course, she knew how. Sophie 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 plughole 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 … 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 back story, they both needed to sate themselves in one another. And sooner or later it would happen …

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.

A Virgin for Vasquez

Cathy Williams

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Contents

COVER

INTRODUCTION

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

TITLE PAGE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

EXTRACT

COPYRIGHT

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...’

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