Читать книгу The Revenge Collection 2018 - Кейт Хьюит, Эль Кеннеди - Страница 52
ОглавлениеSOPHIE 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.’
