Читать книгу Mills & Boon Stars Collection: Passionate Bargains: The Perfect Cazorla Wife / The Russian's Ultimatum / Once a Moretti Wife - Мишель Смарт, Michelle Smart - Страница 15

CHAPTER SEVEN

‘WHEN DID YOU see my sister?’ Raul asked, as soon as he had driven clear of the house.

She made no attempt to play innocent. ‘Which time are you on about?’

So his hunch had been correct. It had been Marta’s lack of curiosity about what Charley had been doing these past few years that had roused his suspicions. Even when their mother had left the room, Marta hadn’t asked any of the questions he’d expected. It was because she’d already known the answers.

‘It has been more than once?’

She sighed. ‘I’ve seen her a handful of times since we split.’

‘Am I correct in thinking this is something my mother is unaware of?’

‘We thought it best not to tell her because we knew she’d feel obliged to tell you.’

That his mother certainly would have done.

‘Who instigated it?’

‘I did but it wasn’t deliberate.’ She turned her head to look at him. ‘I went to see my father...’

‘Your father?’

‘He moved to Spain not long after we separated. He’s living in a town on the Costa Dorado.’

‘When you say he moved to Spain, how was he able to afford a property?’ The last Raul had heard about his useless father-in-law was that he’d declared himself bankrupt after his latest get-rich scheme had failed.

‘I bought a villa for him.’ She didn’t sound contrite about it. If anything, she sounded bullish.

‘You bought a villa for him out of my money?’

‘Technically it was my money. You gave it to me.’

‘I can’t believe you spent my money on buying that man a home.’ Her father deserved nothing of the kind.

‘I know you don’t like him but he’s my father.’

Raul took a deep breath. They were going off on a tangent here and he wanted to bring them back to the original thread of their conversation. But first he needed to make something clear. ‘I do not dislike your father.’

Charley snorted her disbelief.

‘What I have an issue with is the way he treated you and your mother when you were a child.’ His fingers tightened on the steering wheel. ‘He took advantage of your mother when she was seventeen years old and left her to raise you on her own giving little money and even less support.’

It used to infuriate him to think of how Graham Hutchinson had behaved towards his young family. The man had been fourteen years older than Charley’s mother and, when he’d learned of the pregnancy, instead of doing the decent thing, had dumped her. He’d then flitted in and out of their lives as and when it had suited him, prioritising the two sons he had from a prior relationship. Charley and her mother had lived on the poverty line while Graham had taken exotic holidays and driven a sports car, thinking all his parental neglect could be made up for with expensive presents when he could afford them.

In truth, it still made him furious but he’d learned over the years that any criticism of Charley’s father would be met with fierce indignation.

‘That’s all in the past,’ she said now. Even through the darkness of the night, he could sense her eyes blazing. ‘I know he’s no angel but he’s still my dad and I love him. He needed a home and wanted to live closer to me. I had the money so I bought the villa for him.’

‘So, he just happened to get in touch when he learned you’d left me and gave you his latest hard-luck story?’

‘We’ve always kept in touch.’

There was that defensive tone again, but she made no comment about his guess that her father had gone to her cap in hand.

When they’d married, Graham had acted as though all his luck had rolled in at once, fully expecting his new son-in-law to support him. Raul had given him short shrift. After that, he’d kept his distance. As soon as Raul was out of the picture he’d swooped straight back in.

‘So how does your father moving to Spain coincide with you visiting my sister?’ he demanded to know, pulling them back on track.

‘I went to visit my dad when he moved in and I dropped by to give Marta her books back,’ she said.

‘When did you borrow books from Marta?’ He didn’t think he’d ever seen Charley with a book in her hands.

‘Lots of times. She thought it would help me learn Spanish if I read books in the language.’

‘Why did you never tell me this?’

‘I thought you’d laugh at me.’

‘Why on earth would you think that?’

‘You laughed at me whenever I tried to speak it.’

Had he? He’d always thought her attempts at speaking his language were cute. If he’d laughed it had been with pride that she was trying to master it. Had she really interpreted it as him making fun of her? ‘I wasn’t laughing at you.’

She didn’t answer.

What did it matter anyway? Those days were gone.

‘And after you dropped the books back, then what? You decided to carry on seeing each other?’

‘It wasn’t like that. I just got in the habit of meeting up with her whenever I visited my dad, that’s all. We’d have a coffee and something to eat and then I’d leave. We were hardly conducting a high-level conspiracy.’

‘Yet you kept it a secret from my mother. And from me.’

Raul shook his head, unable to believe the treachery conducted between his wife and sister. To think they’d been conspiring to see each other behind his back made his brain burn.

Where did family loyalty come into his sister’s thinking? When Fabio had ended his relationship with Marta, Raul had been ready to kill him, not suggest they share cosy lunches together.

But then, Marta hadn’t had loyalty drummed into her as he had. For Marta, childhood and life itself had been a charm; she’d been doted upon by the father who only spoke to his son to pick fault with him.

‘Marta didn’t want to upset you,’ Charley said softly. ‘She said you would think she was being disloyal.’

‘You’re damn right she was disloyal. But I’m not upset.’

‘Then what are you?’

He forced his features into neutrality and glanced at her. ‘I’m not anything.’

Silence rang out, not even a whisper of sound to be heard until Charley said, ‘Nothing changes, does it?’

‘What are you talking about?’

Her voice was sad. ‘Nothing is allowed to be less than perfect, not even your own feelings.’

The silence suddenly filled with a roaring noise. It took a moment for him to realise the sound was in his own head.

His grip on the steering wheel tightened.

‘How much did you have to drink tonight?’ he asked, his voice tighter than he would like.

‘See? Rather than confront what I’ve said, you deflect it.’

He expelled a long push of air from his lungs and flexed the tension from his fingers. He would not allow her to provoke him into an argument. All arguing did was bring about a loss of control, which solved nothing. Raul had learned that at a young age. His father had seen to that.

He remembered once sitting at the dining table while his father had read through his school report, slowly picking it apart, demanding to know why he’d only received the second highest grade on his end-of-year maths exam. Raul had argued his point that he’d spent the month leading up to that exam in bed with a bacterial infection but his reasons had been met with a fist thumped on the table and the school report had been ripped into pieces and burned. For his nerve in arguing back he’d received a two-week grounding. Nothing was mentioned about the top grades he’d received in all his other subjects.

Marta’s report had been less than glowing academically but had been received by their father as if it were the best report ever written. Raul had been incensed at this double standard and, although Marta had begged him to keep quiet, he’d asked, reasonably, why they were being treated so differently. His insolence had been rewarded with an extra fortnight’s grounding.

He’d been eleven.

‘There’s nothing to deflect,’ he said, his vocal cords loosening under the force of his will. ‘I’m perfectly in tune with my feelings.’ To compound his point he flashed her a grin. ‘Especially my baser ones.’

* * *

Charley undressed and quickly readied herself for bed while Raul made a phone call in his study.

She stared at the emperor-sized bed, at its plush seductiveness with the black sheets and plump pillows, inviting her to enter.

She wondered how many other women had been invited to enter it, before she could turn the thought away.

Turning the sheets back, she climbed in and lay down on her side of the bed. Strange to think that since leaving him she could have slept dead centre when in her own bed but had still favoured ‘her’ side.

She turned off the bedside light, flattened her pillow and burrowed herself into the sheets. The Spanish summer was hitting its stride but you wouldn’t know it in this room where Raul had set the air conditioning to arctic.

Hopefully he would be kept busy making his phone calls and she would be fast asleep when he came up.

As was the contrary nature of sleep, it wouldn’t come, her brain far too wired to switch off.

She found her mind turning over the evening’s meal with his family. Maybe it was because she knew there was a time limit to the number of times she would share a meal with them but tonight she’d observed everything like a distant spectator, the fear of doing something wrong, something less than perfect, gone.

In all the years of their marriage she’d always thought Raul lucky to have such a close family and had envied him. How had she never noticed the undercurrent of poison there, especially between Raul and his father? Polite, gracious poison for sure, but poison all the same.

Her stomach clenched when she thought of her own family, the half-brothers she so wished would accept her as one of their own. What would Raul say if he learned she’d bought them a home each too? He’d accuse her of trying to buy their love and he would be right because that was exactly what she’d done. Except, as with everything else she did, she’d failed. She was more like her father than she’d ever thought possible. But she didn’t want to be like him. She wanted to be like her mum, her sweet, naïve, hardworking mum who deserved everything good life had to offer.

She shut her eyes, trying to shake the direction of her thoughts and all the misery she’d thought she’d escaped when she’d married Raul, the man who’d made her feel like a princess even if only at the beginning...

A noise caught her attention and she heard the tread of his approach, followed by the creak of the bedroom door opening.

Squeezing her eyes together even more tightly, she concentrated on making her breathing deep and even. Hopefully he would assume she was asleep and leave her alone.

She heard him go into the bathroom, listened to the muffled sound of water running as he brushed his teeth. A slant of light came into the bedroom when he stepped back in, and she opened one eye a fraction. It took a few seconds for that eye to adjust to what it was seeing—Raul stripping off.

In the beat of a moment her mouth ran dry.

In no time at all he was down to his snug boxer shorts, his beautifully defined chest silhouetted against that tiny beam of light in all its glory; broad and hard, a smattering of dark hair running across his pecs and thickening the lower it ran...

Forget deep and even breathing. When his fingers hooked the sides of his boxers and tugged them off, pulling them past his strong thighs, all the air in her lungs went into hibernation.

His silhouette moved back to the bathroom and turned the light off, plunging the bedroom into darkness.

Too late she remembered her plan to feign sleep.

The bed dipped, the sheets rustled and a large, warm figure slid in beside her.

The dryness in her mouth became a memory as moisture filled it...and a lower part of her anatomy.

Immediately she pressed her thighs together in a futile attempt to counteract the heat filling between them and closed her eyes, anticipating the moment he reached out and pulled her to him.

Did she have the strength to even pretend lack of interest, when every part of her felt so heightened?

It felt as if she waited for ever for him to make his move, every passing minute dragging on to the next.

Nothing.

He lay on his side facing her, making her scold herself for not having faced the wall rather than the centre of the bed. She might have her eyes shut but she could feel his gaze upon her.

‘Well?’ she said, before she could stop her tongue from speaking. ‘Isn’t this the moment when you take your next payment?’

He shifted closer to her, his face near enough for her to feel the warmth of his minty breath.

‘My payment is your body, whenever and wherever I require,’ he said in a tone that washed through her skin like a caress, moving even closer so the tip of his nose pressed against hers.

Her lips parted in anticipation of his kiss.

‘But tonight I will put my payment on hiatus.’ Suddenly he twisted away and turned his back to her. ‘Unless you wish to make a payment to me of your own accord?’ he added, pulling the sheets over his shoulder and edging away from her.

‘That will never happen,’ she whispered, goosebumps covering her at the abrupt withdrawal of his warmth.

‘Never say never.’ He laughed quietly. ‘If you change your mind...’

‘Dream on.’

‘Oh, I will.’

Raul smiled into his pillow and closed his eyes. He could practically smell her frustration.

When he did make love to her, she would be desperate for his touch. All her defiance would be smothered by desire.

He let his mind run free, imagining all the ways he would take her and she would take him; imagined her tongue snaking its way down his chest...

But something else fought for space in his head, the same something that had been jarring in his throat since the journey back home.

Her words echoed within him, becoming louder the more he tried to push them away.

‘Nothing is allowed to be less than perfect—not even your own feelings.’

Was there some truth in it?

No. Of course there wasn’t. Charley was trying to needle him.

A memory flashed in his mind of one time he had allowed his emotions to get the better of him. It had been the night Charley told him she didn’t want his baby.

His anger had been bubbling at the surface, impossible to hide and, for the first time in his adult life, he’d given into it, lashing out verbally, cruelly. He’d called her a gold-digging bitch and told her to leave, not meaning it and never for a moment imagining she would.

It hadn’t been one-sided. The recriminations had flown both ways, Charley screaming back at him with furious tears streaming down her face that their marriage had no basis in reality, that he patronised her and treated her like a child, that he should find himself another wife, someone who could breed a dozen children for him, look perfect and run a multinational company and all in her sleep. That he was a cold, arrogant control freak.

By the time the anger had notched down to a simmer, both of them visibly calmer, her bags were packed.

‘This is ridiculous,’ he’d said. ‘You’re not going anywhere.’

‘You told me to leave,’ she’d replied with a face so stony it was like looking at a statue.

‘That was in the heat of the moment and now I’m telling you to stay.’

‘But I don’t want to stay.’ She’d looked straight at him with eyes that were a red, raw mess, black streaks of make-up splotched down her cheeks. At that moment she had looked exactly as he’d felt. ‘I can’t live like this any more.’

And just like that, their marriage was over.

He almost laughed at the irony. The one time in his adulthood that he’d truly given into his feelings, his wife had walked out on him.

If that didn’t tell him he was right to keep his emotions controlled and locked away, nothing did.

* * *

The grounds of the building Raul had purchased to rehome Poco Rio were filled with overgrown weeds dying in the heat and parched grass. Charley didn’t care; all she saw in her mind’s eye was how glorious it would be when the renovations were complete.

The architect, a middle-aged man with a shock of white hair called Vittore, had travelled from Barcelona with them. Other than Raul’s introduction, the two men had conversed between themselves during the short helicopter trip and even shorter car journey, discussing other business projects they were working on together. If Vittore was bothered about travelling to Valencia on a Saturday morning there was no sign of it in his relaxed demeanour.

She itched to get back inside the sprawling one-storey building; she had been dreaming of this moment for two long months. Of course, her dreams hadn’t involved Raul buying the place in his name. In her dreams it had been in her name and, when all the renovations were complete, she’d intended to sign it over to Poco Rio so they never need worry about losing their home again.

He’d said he might give her the deeds if she proved herself to him. All she could do was try.

The main thing was that so long as she kept her side of the bargain and stayed with him for four months, Raul would keep his and Poco Rio would have a new home. That much she trusted him on.

The interior of the pretty red stone building, which was so much nicer than the institutionalised building Poco Rio was currently homed in, was as ramshackle as she remembered, but that was only decoration. The rooms were large and, once new windows had been installed, would be airy.

‘I’m going to look around and see what my money has bought,’ Raul said, leaving her with Vittore.

The moment he was out of sight, Charley sat on the dusty floor, opened her briefcase and pulled out her plans. ‘Please don’t feel I am treading on your toes,’ she said, speaking in hesitant Spanish, ‘but here’s a guide to what the centre needs.’

Vittore squatted beside her and took the plans. After he’d perused them for a while, he said, ‘Is there a reason the doorways need to be so wide?’

‘A lot of the children have wheelchairs,’ she answered carefully, scared of things being lost in translation.

He nodded thoughtfully, then asked her some more questions.

They were deep in conversation, Charley pointing out where she thought a wall should be knocked down to make a large soft-play area, when Raul rejoined them.

Her Spanish died on her lips.

He regarded her for a moment, his eyes drilling into her with something that looked like cold suspicion, before turning to Vittore. ‘Has Charlotte explained the brief?’

Vittore nodded and stretched back up. ‘Her plans are very impressive.’ He turned his attention to her. ‘Be proud. You have done well.’

Charley’s cheeks flushed at the unexpected compliment.

She hadn’t expected that.

She became even more flustered when Vittore carefully refolded her plans along the seams she’d made and tucked them into his large carry-case. ‘Next time, you roll them.’

‘Sorry?’ She didn’t have the faintest idea what he was talking about.

‘Next time you create plans, roll them, don’t fold.’

She bit into her bottom lip to stop the smile that fought to spread over her face. Vittore was a renowned architect with over twenty years’ experience and he was complimenting and advising her as if she were, if not an equal, then a promising student.

So stunned was she that the rest of the conversation passed her by, right until the moment came for them to leave.

While Raul and Vittore headed outside, she gave the place one last look, imagining how bright and fabulous it would be when the renovations and subsequent decoration were complete. Her heart swelled to think of the children’s faces when they saw it for the first time.

The humidity outside hung heavy like a damp cloak and Charley was grateful to get back in the helicopter, where the air conditioning ran at full blast. She caught the tail end of the men’s conversation and Vittore saying he would bring a team over on Monday. He smiled encouragingly at Charley and added to Raul, ‘Your wife’s plans have made our job much easier.’

‘You are going to follow them?’

‘As much as we can. They make a lot of sense.’

Raul’s gaze caught hers. ‘My wife has hidden talents.’

His tone and expression were so inscrutable she didn’t know if he was being serious or mocking her.