Читать книгу Modern Romance November 2016 Books 5-8 - Мишель Смарт, Rachael Thomas - Страница 18
ОглавлениеICE FLOODED CATALINA’S VEINS. ‘You would do that? You’d call the police?’
‘You’d better believe I would,’ he said grimly. ‘If you refuse to return with me then you leave me no choice. I don’t want to make threats...’
‘Then don’t.’
‘There’s a permanent video camera set up in my office.’
The ice in her veins solidified.
‘It’s a security measure I take as I often have large amounts of cash delivered while the banks are closed. The feed quite clearly shows you in your nightwear opening the briefcase, then less than ten minutes later shows you stuffing most of the cash into your handbag. Come back with me and you can destroy the evidence yourself.’
‘That’s blackmail.’
‘It is. I don’t want to use it but quite honestly, mon papillon, I refuse to let your family destroy everything I’ve built up. I’ve never cared about my personal reputation but my professional reputation does mean something. Your father’s accusations will hang over me until he publicly retracts them, which he won’t do until you return. I will not have my child thinking I’m a criminal.’ He flashed her a bitter glance. ‘And I want you by my side for the rest of the pregnancy because I don’t trust that the minute you’re out of my sight you won’t take off with our baby again.’
‘Does our child mean that much to you?’
‘How can you doubt that when I married you to get my legal rights?’
‘You married me to protect your development.’
‘There were a number of factors but, trust me, the development was bottom of the list. I want our child and I want to be a father.’
As he spoke, Catalina lifted the kettle and poured the boiling water into the pot. The motion pulled back the sleeve of her jumper.
‘What have you done to yourself?’ he asked, distracted as he caught sight of a surgical bandage around her wrist.
She dropped a tea cosy onto the pot. ‘I burnt it on the oven when I was taking a casserole out of it a couple of days ago.’
‘And your fingers?’
‘I cut them slicing the vegetables for the casserole.’ Her body rigid, she took milk from a fridge and poured it into two mugs.
Never in his wildest imagination could Nathaniel have pictured Catalina in such a domestic setting. His chest twisted to think of her hurting herself.
‘How do you know how to make a casserole?’
‘I can read.’ The look she fixed him with was almost, almost a glare. ‘I can follow instructions. There are shops in Benasque that sell cookbooks.’
She removed the tea cosy, swirled the pot then poured their tea. She pushed his mug towards him.
‘You haven’t spent my money stocking up on bone china?’
Without any warning, the tea cosy, which she’d been about to put back on the pot, went flying past his head. ‘Is that your entire opinion of me?’ she demanded, her voice rising an octave. ‘That I’m a useless princess who spends her time worrying about the cup she drinks from? Has it not occurred to you that I have never been given the choice over anything I do, and that includes the blasted cups I drink from?’
It was the closest he’d heard her come to raising her voice or swearing.
She took a visibly deep breath. ‘I’m in an impossible position here. Whatever threats you make, you can’t force me to return. This is Spain. The ownership rights you have over me in Monte Cleure do not apply here. I’m a free woman.’
He almost laughed. ‘You consider yourself a free woman when you’re funding your “free” lifestyle with money you stole from me?’
‘I took your money because I was desperate. I’m your wife. I may not have many rights of my own but even in Monte Cleure maintenance for my well-being and for the well-being of my child is one of them. That’s how I justified it.’ She caught his eye and sighed. ‘But I can see that you are in an impossible position too.’
‘So you will come back with me of your own free will?’ He’d known even as he’d threatened her that he would never go to the police. But he also knew he couldn’t allow her to stay here. She was carrying his child. She was his.
The proprietorial direction of his thoughts caught him off-guard.
Catalina had proven herself a woman of unknown quantities, someone who would steal...
But she stole that money because she could see no other way out. She did it to protect your child.
It didn’t change what she had done. She could make all the excuses in the world but it didn’t change anything.
Nothing could reverse what he’d done long ago either. And with Catalina he had tried to atone for those mistakes he’d made all those years ago. He’d done the right thing. He’d tried to protect her from himself and she’d run away.
She’s been trained not to speak out, trained like a pedigree puppy to perform on command.
She was speaking out now though.
As all these thoughts fought for attention in his head, she looked him straight in the eye. ‘We don’t have to divorce.’
He was taken aback.
‘The second I set foot back on Monte Cleure, you become my legal owner again,’ she continued. ‘My male ancestors have fine-tuned our constitution so female members of the House of Fernandez have very little rights, and that means I have no power of divorce. If you refuse to divorce me there is nothing my father can do about it, not unless he wants to rewrite a constitution that grants him so much power. It means I would never have to marry again and no other man would have any involvement in our child’s upbringing.’
He listened with his jaw clenched. ‘As much as I can see that your idea has merit, I don’t want to be married.’ He was better on his own. He always had been.
He didn’t want to be saved as so many women out there seemed to think he needed to be. He didn’t need to be saved. He had as much female company as a man could want and he did not want or need more. Not even from the woman he’d married and couldn’t shake from his mind. Especially not from her.
He’d thought her different from her brother but she clearly had the same gift for deception Dominic so specialised in.
Catalina had proven herself to be Trouble with a capital T.
‘I know you don’t want to be married; you’ve probably got a calendar somewhere where you’re marking off the days until you’re supposed to divorce me. But have you not been listening to me? I don’t want to be married either. Not any more. All I want is for our child to have the freedom I’ve been denied, away from my family’s influence, and to live the rest of my life free too. We won’t have to live together and you won’t have to watch someone else raise your child. Please, Nathaniel. I’d rather be a nun than the property of another man.’
‘It could work,’ he said with a slow nod.
The more he thought about it, the more he liked the idea. He didn’t want his child raised by another man. His hatred for Monte Cleure had developed to such a degree that he knew he would never conduct any further business there. He couldn’t think what had possessed him to develop there in the first place.
The stiffness of her slender frame loosened a touch, just enough to let him see her relief.
‘We’ll have to return to Monte Cleure and satisfy your father that all is well. You’ll have to show your repentance. I want my land back and my reputation restored.’
She nodded her agreement and took a sip of her tea.
‘As soon as I have my development back and the title deeds returned to me, I will start the process of selling it all.’
‘Really? But it’s not even finished yet.’
‘The buyer can finish it. I always knew there was something rotten about your country but now I know how deep the poison lies, I don’t want anything to do with it. I will talk to the Kalliakis Princes. They like diversity in the projects they invest in and they’re not men your father or brother would dare to threaten. It won’t be a quick process though,’ he warned her. He didn’t want her thinking that this could all be resolved in a couple of days.
‘As long as I know I’ll get my freedom, you can take as long as you need. But would they be interested in buying it?’ Her brow creased with doubt. ‘I thought they invested in small start-up companies.’
‘As a rule they do. Helios was the backer for my first project. Everything grew from that.’
He watched her reaction to the mention of the man she had come so close to marrying. There wasn’t even a flicker of emotion in her expression.
‘I never knew that.’ She considered it for a while longer. ‘You’re much closer than I realised.’
‘Boarding school bonds,’ he answered with a shrug.
‘How does he feel about us marrying if you’re such good friends?’
‘Have you not asked him that yourself?’
‘No. Why would I?’ Her bafflement looked genuine.
‘No reason.’ He hadn’t realised he carried angst that she might still have feelings for Helios.
He shouldn’t care if she did.
She tilted her head. ‘I never loved him. I never had any feelings for him. But I would have been a good wife.’
Something tight gripped hold of his vocal cords and he had to force them to work. ‘I am certain Helios will buy the development, not just because of our old boarding school friendship but because he’s been less than impressed at the way your father has treated Amy. But you realise that if we embark on this, it could see you permanently cut off from your family? Right now your father blames me and your pregnancy hormones for your disappearance. If I set you and our child up in another country, he will never forgive you.’
There was only the slightest tremor in her hand as she took another sip of her tea. ‘My father cares only about the House of Fernandez and tightening his grip on power. My best interests are never in his heart and my baby’s aren’t either.’
He gave a decisive nod. ‘Then that is what we will do. The sooner we can both be done with your country, the better. Finish your drink and get packing. I want to be gone from this place before it gets dark.’
She drained her cup and placed it in the sink before looking at him again. ‘I would like to stay here for one more night...’
‘No.’
‘We don’t have to show ourselves in public for almost a fortnight.’
‘We have to put on a united front immediately.’
‘What difference will one night make?’
‘It’s out of the question. Go and pack.’
Her frame rapidly tightened again and her chin lifted, her eyes spitting fire at him. ‘When you speak like this you’re as bad as my father and brother.’
‘I am nothing like them.’
‘Then don’t act like them. For the duration of our marriage—the one where we pretend to be a happy couple—you will treat me with respect and you will treat me as an equal, even when we’re back in the misogynistic land of Monte Cleure. Is that clear?’
There was something magnificent about this angry yet concise Catalina. She would make an excellent queen, he decided.
The backbone he’d always sensed she’d had was growing before his eyes. She might be a thief but he couldn’t deny his admiration for her breaking free from the box she’d been kept in for so long.
‘It was never my intention to treat you with anything but respect,’ he said stiffly. Admiration didn’t mean forgiveness. And her words didn’t mean he could trust her. If she had the same opportunity, would she run again? Would she take his child and leave him a second time?
He would never give her the chance to find out. Until their baby was safely born, he would not let her out of his sight.
‘We need to leave now. There’s a helicopter waiting to fly us to the airport.’
Her head bowed. ‘I’ll get my things together.’
* * *
Catalina pushed the keys for the cabin through the letterbox of the next cabin along, which was used exclusively by the owner, with a short letter of thanks for his hospitality.
Nathaniel stood by his car, wiping away the fresh load of snow that had been dumped on them since his arrival. From the look on his face, it was a job he found abhorrent.
‘Are you ready now?’ he asked through gritted teeth. His handsome face conveyed perfectly his true thoughts, namely that she had better be ready.
She had packed quickly enough but had refused to leave the cabin until she’d satisfied herself that everything was as it had been when she’d first been given the keys. She had also gone through the cabin removing the wads of cash she’d stuffed in all manner of places before placing it all into a rucksack she’d bought in the pretty town and handing it to him.
‘What if you’d been burgled?’ he’d said as he’d taken it from her, his face creased with anger.
‘Then I imagine it would have been like Christmas for them,’ she’d answered flippantly, although it had been the one thing that had worried her during her time there. Doing domestic things for the first time had been easy compared to living with the guilt of stealing the money and then the worry of someone else stealing it in turn.
Now his phone buzzed. He answered it and had a brief conversation before disconnecting the call and sighing.
‘That was the helicopter pilot. There’s a problem with the engine.’
She’d flown in enough helicopters to know this meant it had been grounded. ‘Any idea how long it will take to fix?’
‘Tomorrow at the earliest.’
‘It looks like we’ll be staying another night here after all, then.’ That was all she wanted. One more night in the place where she had felt so close to her mother.
‘I’ll drive us to the airport,’ he said grimly. ‘Get in the car. Please.’
Complying, she strapped herself in. Nathaniel got in beside her, made a call to Alma, telling her to notify the car hire company that he would be leaving the car at the airport, and then started the engine.
Dusk was falling as they set off. It was a sight Catalina appreciated as much as she enjoyed the sunsets here.
‘If it wasn’t to get at me, why did you choose this place to hide in?’ he asked after a good ten minutes of silence had passed.
‘My mother spoke about coming here when she was a child. She always said it felt like Christmas.’ She looked at him, taking in the concentration on his face. The roads in the mountains were extremely well maintained and the car had snow chains on but she sensed he didn’t like driving up here. She attempted some humour. ‘I thought that seeing as Christmas was ruined, I would try and capture the magic of it here.’
He answered with a monosyllabic grunt.
‘And I didn’t think my father would look here for ages. Isabella and I were never allowed to go skiing in case we crashed into a tree and smashed our pretty faces. He thought ruining our looks would ruin our marriage prospects.’
She saw his knuckles tighten their hold on the steering wheel.
‘Why do you dislike it here so much?’ she asked.
He didn’t answer.
‘You keep implying that I’m only here because I wanted to hurt you in some way,’ she probed.
His laugh was tight and bitter. ‘You cannot be so naïve to think I would be happy being forced to come to such a place?’
‘I truly don’t have the faintest idea what you’re talking about.’
‘You know my history. I was at school with your brother. Do you expect me to believe he wouldn’t have taken joy in reciting to you how I lost my family when he spent our school years pointing out every avalanche tragedy to me? As if dying like that was entertainment to him?’
Her brain caught up quickly as coldness seeped into it. ‘Is that how your parents died?’
A sharp nod. ‘In the French Alps.’
‘I didn’t know.’ She cleared her throat. ‘I knew you were an orphan but...’ She shook her head, unable to think of the words to express her horror.
How had she not known that? She racked her brains trying to remember if she’d ever heard or read about any hint about it, but Nathaniel kept his private life so close that reports on it were negligible. His school had a code of honour even her brother abided by: never speak of their school years to the press. The press had clearly never found another friend or family member willing to discuss his childhood either.
His past had remained a mystery.
She knew perfectly well why Dominic wouldn’t have mentioned it; the last thing he would have wanted was for his sister to have any sympathy for his arch enemy.
‘How old were you?’
‘Seven.’
More silence enveloped them before he said, ‘My parents had taken my sister, Melanie, to a ski bar in the mountains for some lunch while I had a skiing lesson.’
She hadn’t known he’d had a sister either. ‘Did you...?’ She couldn’t finished her question; the words lodged in her throat.
‘See it?’
She nodded.
‘Not while it was happening. But I heard it. They say it sounds like a freight train coming towards you but it doesn’t. It sounds like hell. The whole ski bar was flattened. They didn’t stand a chance. No one in there did. They all died.’
‘Nathaniel...’ She could only imagine the horror he must have gone through. Actually, she couldn’t even imagine it. She’d lost her mother when she’d been eighteen and that had felt like the end of her world. Nathaniel had lost both of his parents and his sister in horrific circumstances when he’d been only a child. A child. ‘What happened to you?’
‘The authorities called my grandmother as my next of kin but she suffers from chronic arthritis and was in no position to have me. So my uncle and his wife took me in.’
There was something hard in his tone that made her stare at him, wondering what was behind it.
‘They didn’t treat you well?’
He slowed the car as they approached a particularly tight bend. ‘Angelique disliked children. She only agreed to take me on the condition I was sent to boarding school.’
‘That’s cruel.’
He nodded grimly in agreement. ‘I was sent away as soon as I turned eight. My parents weren’t wealthy people but they had insurance policies. The funds paid out were spent on my education, which, as you know, doesn’t come cheap at that school.’
‘Why England though? Why not send you to boarding school in France?’
‘My uncle said if I was to be sent away then I should go to the best school available. Angelique didn’t care where I went so long as I was out of her hair. I would go to their home every Christmas and for summer holidays but they were the only occasions where she had to put up with me. And even then she employed help to take care of me.’
‘Did you live with them after your expulsion?’
He jerked up his chin. ‘For a time.’
‘A time?’
‘A time.’
She wanted to press the subject but could tell by the set of his jaw it would be futile.
She wished she’d known. She should have known.
No wonder he was such a lone wolf, always flitting from one woman to the next, one country to the next, always moving. He’d lost his love and stability at seven and what he’d lost had never been replaced.
If she’d known... She couldn’t honestly say she wouldn’t have taken off as she’d done but she would have called him from the start. She wouldn’t have kept him in limbo while she carried his only real family inside her.
‘How did they react to you being expelled?’ she asked quietly. ‘Were they cruel about it?’
‘My uncle was never cruel to me. He did the best he could under difficult circumstances. He was in Germany at the time on business. Angelique was there to take me in.’
‘Angelique the child hater.’
He paused for long moments, slowing the car again as they approached a small village. ‘I was no longer a child then.’
‘You were seventeen. In Monte Cleure you don’t come of age until you’re twenty-one.’
‘I thought we’d already established that your country is an archaic antiquity.’ Something dark glittered in his expression. ‘I was a teenage mass of hormones and rebellion. But I’m guessing you wouldn’t understand that.’
‘Probably not.’ She couldn’t take her eyes off him. ‘Hormones and rebellion came late to me. Just over two months ago, to be precise, when I committed the only rebellious act of my life.’
He turned his head to meet her gaze for the briefest moment, and in that moment the intensity of his stare was so real and piercing that heat crawled through her, uncurling from her navel and spreading out into her limbs and up her neck.
It was the look he’d given her right before he’d peeled her robe off her shoulders...
The beautiful memories of that rebellious night were as fresh in her mind as they had been when he’d slipped from her room.
If she could take a silver lining from having to return to her home country, it was that Nathaniel was no longer treating her like an opaque ghost. She knew he was furious with her and fully accepted she deserved it, but his anger was a hundred times better than the indifference she’d been living with. He was finally treating her like a real person again, not as the perfect Princess who was judged incapable of lifting a kettle for herself.
The Nathaniel she’d desired from afar for all those years had returned.
The fire that had swirled through her at his stare reignited as she imagined him treating her like a woman again...
