Читать книгу Michelle Reid Collection - Michelle Reid - Страница 21

HIS hotel…? Caroline gave a small shake of her head. ‘But this is an Angel Hotel,’ she stated. ‘Part of the Angel Group!’ And the Angel Group was huge. Not just because of the string of deluxe hotels it owned throughout the world, but because it had other, much more powerful interests wrapped up in its multinational package.

Lifting his dark head, Luiz just looked at her. It was all it needed for the penny to drop. Angel as in Luiz Angeles de Vazquez, she was suddenly remembering. But it was the Angel in the Angel Group that was slowly filling Caroline with a new sense of dismay. Because it was also the group which had very recently acquired a bank in London that the Newbury family knew very well.

‘Oh, my God,’ she breathed, as full enlightenment finally began to dawn. ‘It’s you we have been summoned here to Marbella to see about our debts, isn’t it?’

He didn’t answer. But then he didn’t really need to when confirmation was already written on his lean dark face. And she could only stand and watch as every image she had ever built in her mind to form Luiz Vazquez slowly cracked, then shattered right there in front of her until she could no longer see Luiz the exciting lover. Or even Luiz the ruthless con-man who’d fleeced her father of tens of thousands of pounds.

‘What is it you want?’ she whispered frailly as the shattered pieces that had once been Luiz settled back into their new order of things. And now she was seeing Luiz the ice-cool operator, whom, it seemed, had only gone up and up in the world while she and her father had gone steadily down.

‘I want you to come and sit down,’ he said. ‘We haven’t got much time. And now that you understand just why you are here we may as well get down to business…’

Business. The word sent an icy chill chasing down her spine. As she walked across the room towards him on legs that were shaking badly Luiz sat himself down, opened the dossier, selected a piece of paper from it, then slid it towards her as she sank into the chair placed opposite him.

‘Tell me if you agree with what’s written on there,’ he invited.

Eyes flickering in an effort to get them to focus, heart slowed by the weight of what was unfolding in front of her now, Caroline pulled the piece of paper towards her, then picked it up in trembling fingers and forced herself to read.

Finely listed, tightly lined, it was a very precise inventory of every penny she already knew they owed—and a whole lot more that she actually hadn’t known about, but she couldn’t doubt their authenticity when the names of all her father’s favourite London haunts were inscribed next to them.

And the bottom figure was so utterly repellent that her skin began to crawl. ‘Could I have some water, please?’ she breathed.

Without a single word, Luiz got up and walked over to a black-lacquered sideboard. He returned in seconds to place a frosted glass of iced water down in front of her, then just as silently returned to his chair while she picked up the water and sipped at it sparingly.

‘We can’t pay you, Luiz,’ she told him, once she’d found enough voice to speak. ‘N-not all of it anyway.’

‘I know that,’ he returned.

She swallowed thickly, and took a couple more sips of water before making herself go on. ‘If you refuse to play him at cards tonight, then the money he won in the casino plus some money I have of my own should clear a small part of this.’ But not all, she added with a silent bleakness. Not anywhere near all…

‘The planned card game and this are two separate issues,’ he informed her. ‘And I never—ever—mix business with pleasure, Caroline. Understand me?’

Understand? No she didn’t! ‘But we have the means to clear s-some of this, Luiz!’ she cried, tossing the wretched debt list back at him. ‘And you want to play card games just for the hell of it? Where is the business sense in that?’

Sitting back in his chair, Luiz didn’t even deign to watch as the piece of paper skidded across the table then floated down onto his lap. His face was inscrutable, his manner relaxed. ‘Where is your own block of money coming from?’ Smooth as silk, he kept the discussion fixed to his own agenda.

Her breath shuddered on an overwrought sigh. ‘None of your business,’ she muttered, then got up and paced tensely away from the desk.

‘It is if you borrowed from Peter to pay back Paul, so to speak,’ he pointed out. ‘Which would only make the bottom figure here worse, not better.’

‘I have money left over from my mother’s bequest,’ she told him reluctantly.

‘No you don’t.’

‘What—?’ Stung by his quiet certainty she spun to stare at him.

Instantly she felt under attack. It was his eyes, and the knowledge of truth she could see written in them.

‘Your mother’s money went on paying back debts years ago,’ he informed her. ‘After that you spent the next few years selling off the family heirlooms one by one, until there were very few left worth selling. Then came the quiet period when your father behaved himself for a couple of years—or so you believed. When it all started up again, you resorted to selling off small plots of land on the far edges of your family estate to wealthy businessmen who were looking for somewhere to build a country retreat. But the council eventually put a stop to that, quoting the rape of country heritage law or some such thing.

‘So what’s left to sell, Caroline?’ he asked. ‘The ancestral home, which is already mortgaged to the hilt? Or the few heirlooms that are left—which probably belong to the bank already, on paper at least? Or maybe you were thinking of paying me back with the commission you earn working for those London-based interior designers who pay you peanuts for your considerable knowledge of all things aesthetic, to hunt out pieces of artwork and various objets d’art to decorate the homes of their wealthy clients?’

It was like being pummelled into the ground by a very large mallet. She had never felt so small in her whole life.

‘What next, Caroline?’ He pummelled her some more with the soft pound of his ruthless voice. ‘What could you possibly have left that would appease any bank holding a debt the size of yours? Yourself, maybe?’ he suggested silkily. ‘Are you thinking of prostituting yourself to the highest bidder so that Daddy can keep on feeding his addiction because he can’t help himself?’

‘Stop it!’ she choked. ‘Just shut up—shut up!’ She couldn’t listen to any more! White-faced, totally demolished, she stared at him in blank incomprehension as to why he was being so cruel. ‘How do you know all of this? Where did you get your information? How long have you been compiling that—’ she waved a shaky hand at the thick wad of paper sitting on the desk in front of him ‘—dossier on me?’

‘Information can be bought any time, anywhere, so long as you have the money to pay for it.’

‘And that makes it all right to pry into my life?’ she cried. ‘Why, Luiz—why?’ She just didn’t understand it! ‘What did I ever do to you to make you want to pursue me in this h-horrible way? It was you that once used me, remember!’ she added painfully. ‘You slaked one of your lusts with my body, night after wretched night, then went off to slake your other lust at a card table with my father!’

‘I don’t want to talk about that,’ he gritted, and he was suddenly on his feet. Tense—like her. Angry—like her. As bitter as hell—like her.

‘Oh, that’s rich!’ Caroline scorned him. ‘When it comes to your faults, you don’t want to talk about it! Yet you’ve just taken great delight in listing my faults and failings—and even had the gall to call me a prostitute!’

‘I made it an option, not a fact,’ he corrected. But he looked pale—pale enough for Caroline to know that she had touched a raw nerve somewhere inside his ruthless soul.

‘And we both know who sold himself for the pot of gold, Luiz,’ Caroline persisted angrily. ‘We both know that your motive for keeping me in bed with you was so I couldn’t be keeping an eye on my father!’

‘All right, let’s have that one out,’ he decided, swinging round the desk to begin striding towards her.

Caroline wanted to back off, but hell could freeze over before she would let herself do so. He arrived, big and threatening, right in front of her.

‘You think I prostituted myself for the pot of gold seven years ago.’ She had hit a raw nerve, Caroline confirmed. ‘So let’s just see which one of us can delve the depths this time. Here’s the deal, Caroline. Take it or leave it,’ he announced. ‘Sleep with me tonight and I won’t play your father.’

Sleep with him? He was lucky she didn’t wing her hand at his face! ‘Well, if that isn’t mixing business with pleasure—what is?’ she spat at him in disgust.

‘No—no,’ Luiz argued. ‘This is called mixing pleasure with pleasure.’ And he was even smiling, the black-hearted devil.

‘Go to hell,’ she told him, then spun on her heel with the intention of walking out of there as fast as she damn well could.

‘The offer holds only as long as it takes you to open that door,’ Luiz fed swiftly after her.

Her footsteps stilled, though her heart-rate didn’t, it raged on right out of that door and onto the next flight out of this awful place! She converted that rage into a different kind of action by wheeling back round to face him. Luiz didn’t need words to know what she was thinking. And his answering shrug spoke for itself.

‘Everyone has a price, Caroline,’ he taunted silkily. ‘I am just trying to ascertain your price, that’s all…’

‘I’ll never forgive you for this,’ she breathed.

‘By that, are you trying to tell me that it would hurt you to go to bed with me?’ he questioned smoothly.

From feeling chilled she went hot—hot with discomfort. Because, after what they had just almost done in the pool room, there was no way she could pretend that sleeping with Luiz would be anything but a whole lot of pleasure!

A light suddenly began winking on the desk console, saving Caroline from having to make the worst decision of her entire life.

Luiz swung back to his desk, sat down in his chair again, then reached out to flick a finger at a switch. ‘Yes?’ he prompted.

‘It’s time we were leaving,’ the same deep voice Caroline had first heard through the narrow gap in the pool room door informed him.

His eyes narrowed thoughtfully on Caroline. Quite unexpectedly she began to shake so badly that she just had to sit down. The chair she had just vacated was nearest. Almost stumbling over to it, she lowered herself down as Luiz murmured a quiet, ‘Two minutes, Vito…’ and cut the connection.

Too long spent riding a roller coaster of too many shocks and worries had shaken her insides to pieces. She stared helplessly at Luiz, and knew he was waiting for her to voice her surrender to him out loud.

On a sharp stab of pain she flicked her eyes away, because she couldn’t bear to look at him and give him that surrender.

It was then that she saw it. ‘Oh, good grief,’ she gasped. She had only just noticed the scorpion crawling down the wall behind him. The picture was so life-like that she actually reared back in the chair to take instinctive avoiding action. ‘Luiz—that thing is hideous!’

‘But effective,’ he smiled.

It was then she remembered that the first business he had ever owned outright had been a small nightclub in New York called, as he had informed her rather deridingly, The Scorpion, and bought from an old friend whose deteriorating health had forced him to accept a quieter way of life. Within two years Luiz had sold the club on to a big inner-city developer for the kind of money that had allowed him to give his own life new direction. ‘And I haven’t needed to look back since,’ she recalled him saying to her with quiet satisfaction.

But the scorpion itself must still linger on in his affections for him to have it hanging there on his wall. Or was there more to its being there than mere affection? Was it a warning that this lean, dark, smoothly sophisticated man had another side to him that was as lethal as the scorpion’s tail?

Glancing back at him, she found him watching her with the kind of mocking twist to his mouth that said he knew what she was thinking and was wryly amused by it.

‘A scorpion stings its victims quick and clean, Luiz,’ she murmured unsteadily. ‘What you are proposing here is neither clean nor quick.’

‘Unparallelled sex between two people who excite the hell out of each other? I should hope not.’ He smiled, picking up the dossier to replace it in its drawer.

Then he was suddenly on his feet. ‘Right,’ he said briskly. ‘Let’s go…’

Let’s go? Caroline’s skin began to prickle as a fresh burst of alarm went chasing through her. ‘But I haven’t agreed to do anything with you yet!’ she protested.

‘Decide later,’ he said as he came striding round the desk towards her. ‘We haven’t got time to deal with it right now.’

With that, Caroline found herself being lifted firmly to her feet. Her options, she realised, had dwindled to nothing. Time had seemingly run out. Without another word, Luiz was escorting her from the room and they were outside in the silky warm darkness before she realised what they were doing.

A top-of-the-range black BMW stood purring at the front entrance. Luiz opened the rear door and urged her inside before going round to climb in on the other side of the car. The moment the door shut the car was moving, driven by a man who was hidden behind a shield of smoked glass.

‘Where are we going?’

‘You’ll see,’ was the very uninformative reply she received.

It was late, but outside, beyond the car’s side window, the resort was still alive with people out to enjoy themselves with a visit to one of Marbella’s elegant night-spots or just simply taking a late stroll along the yacht-lined waterfront.

It was years since she’d been able to do what they were doing, since she’d felt carefree enough to want to.

Years and years of self-restraint, of living under a thick grey cloud with no hint of a silver lining. Years playing watchdog to her father’s sickness, because she knew that if she didn’t look out for him then nobody else was going to do it.

‘He’s fine,’ Luiz murmured huskily beside her, reading her mind as if it already belonged to him. ‘Stop worrying about him.’

Caroline heaved out a soft deriding laugh at the remark. For when had she not worried about her father? He had been a good old-fashioned rake in his heyday, and marriage hadn’t really changed him. Though she thought—hoped that he had at least remained faithful to her mother.

No, she told herself firmly. Her father had been no philanderer. A rogue and a gambler, yes, but he’d loved her mother. If anything, all his old weaknesses had only reemerged after her mother had died and he’d missed her so badly that he’d had to look for forgetfulness somewhere.

Or at least that was how it had been in the beginning. Now…? Her eyes glassed over, blocking out the need to look for the answer to that question because she already knew it.

The car began to climb out of the bay and into private villa country. Caroline recognised the area because she’d used to know so many people who owned holiday homes here. This had been her playground, a place for fun and carefree vacations away from the restrictions of boarding school during the long summer breaks. She’d used to have as many friends here as she had back home in England then. Now she could barely remember a single one of them, and could only shudder at the memory of her last disastrous visit to Marbella.

The car made a sudden turn to the right, driving through a pair of open gates and up the driveway to a private villa. Built on one level, it sprawled hacienda-style right and left of a stone-built archway which took them into a central courtyard.

As soon as the car stopped at an imposing wide framed entrance, Luiz was out of the car and coming around to her side to help her to alight.

‘What is this place?’ she asked, glancing furtively around the whitewashed vine strewn walls that were now surrounding them. But what really captured her attention was the fleet of other cars all parked up here. Cars meant people, and people meant—

‘Luiz!’ she protested in dismay when he caught hold of her hand and began pulling her in through the entrance. ‘What’s going on here?’

‘A party,’ he said.

Caroline began to wonder if she was losing her sanity. He had just put her through one of the worst evening in her entire life, and now he was casually dragging her off to a party?

‘No way,’ she refused, tugging to a standstill. ‘I don’t want to party. And I certainly don’t want to do it looking like—this!’

He turned round to look at her, and something very hot suddenly burned in his eyes. ‘You look sensational,’ he told her huskily.

Sensational? She almost laughed in his face! ‘That’s the best lie you’ve told me to date!’ she scoffed. ‘I’ve just been swimming. My hair is a mess and I have on no make-up. My skin smells of chlorine and I’m not even wearing a bra!’

He just smiled a sinfully sexy smile and murmured, ‘I know. I was there, remember?’

The smile had her floundering—floundering because it was pure old Luiz. The one who’d used to smile at her just like that when they’d been passionate lovers and so very at ease together that she would have cut out anyone’s tongue if they’d tried to tell her he was using her for a fool!

It played oddly on her defences to remember that. Made her want to relax her guard and smile back at him, be the old Caroline, from when life had been wonderful and she’d been in love and thought she didn’t have a single care in the world.

Her hand twitched in his—reacting to secret wishes. His own fingers tightened, as if he thought she was trying to get away and he was making sure that she didn’t.

‘Luiz…’ she pleaded, responding to that glimpse of the man she used to know.

It was like watching warm living tissue turn to stone. ‘If you are going to start begging, then don’t,’ he advised. ‘We went way beyond the point where it could be of any use to you to do so, a long time ago.’

When had that point been exactly? she wondered, taking his verbal slap-down with a wince she didn’t even bother to try and hide. When they’d been kissing each other into a frenzy in the pool room, perhaps? The twist to her mouth mocked the suggestion, because the man who had all but completely devoured her had recovered too quickly and too well to be vulnerable to anything—including the begging voice of the woman he’d held in his arms at the time.

In his office then, when he had cruelly and efficiently slayed her with words? No room for begging there, she thought grimly. No room for anything but bitterness and anger and pain and…

‘Negotiations are over, I take it,’ she clipped.

He gave a curt nod. ‘All I want from you now is a simple yes or no to my proposition.’

‘Your blackmail, you mean,’ she countered thinly.

‘Okay, blackmail.’ He gave an indifferent shrug to her play on words, and took her into a large white hall constructed almost entirely of marble.

A pair of narrow hallways led off to the left and the right of her, linking the separate wings of the villa, she assumed. But it was to one of the rooms directly off this main hallway that Luiz took her.

‘Who does this house belong to?’ she asked tartly. ‘Only I suppose I should know just whose hospitality I will be offending, coming to their party looking like this…’

‘Then you don’t need to think about it,’ Luiz answered pragmatically. ‘Since it is me you will be offending.’

In a night of hard shocks, this was just another one to help keep her knocked permanently out of kilter, she supposed, remembering the Luiz of seven years ago telling her smilingly that he lived out of hotels. ‘Homes are for families, and I don’t have one,’ he’d told her casually, but she’d seen the bleakness in his eyes when he’d said it, and known that inside he hadn’t been feeling casual at all.

It was a memory that brought with it another question that almost blew her mind apart. ‘You’re not married now, are you?’ she choked out.

His answering burst of laughter took them in through the door and offered no warning whatsoever of what she was about to come face to face with.

Her heart dropped with a sickening thump to the pit of her stomach. The roller coaster ride of emotion she seemed to be on swung her through yet another violently swerving dive. Admittedly, it was a beautiful room, furnished in the very best that was tasteful in Spanish architecture.

But it wasn’t the room that held her frozen. Or even the blanket awareness of a couple of dozen people turning in their direction—though their sheer elegance was enough to have her shrinking back to half hide behind Luiz, while sheer vanity sent her fingers up to self-consciously touch her tangle-dried hair.

No, being aware that she must look as if Luiz had just plucked her out of the sea like a mermaid and decided to bring her along here for her novelty value was not what was filling her with a dizzying dismay. It was the sight of a green baize table waiting at the ready, barely three feet away from where she stood, with a solemn-faced croupier standing nearby, counting different coloured gambling chips into neat stacks on a separate counter.

‘Where is he?’ she whispered, her voice thickened by the actual reality of what Luiz had set up here.

He didn’t even try to misunderstand the question. ‘In one of the bedrooms,’ he replied. ‘Taking a rest before the evening begins.’

Begins…The word played back and forth across her frozen senses, her glazed eyes barely seeing the waiting party of people now, even though they were standing there in expectant silence, obviously waiting for Luiz to introduce her.

But Caroline didn’t want to be introduced. In fact she felt positively sick with revulsion at the very idea. Because if they were here, and that table was there, then they were all no-good gamblers like her own wretched father. Like the man standing at her side.

And it was decision time, she realised starkly. Now, before this situation got any worse!

Without any further consideration of what she was about to do, she slid herself stealthily round until she was standing directly in front of Luiz. ‘All right,’ she breathed into his left shoulder.

‘All right, what?’ he quizzed, aiming a puzzled frown down at her.

‘All right. I’ll sleep with you,’ she whispered. Cold fingers took a fierce grip on his sleeve. ‘Now,’ she added tautly. ‘We’ll go and do it right now…’