Читать книгу The Spaniard's Blackmailed Bride - Trish Morey - Страница 6

‘IF THAT’S your idea of a joke, Mr Barrentes…’ Briar’s voice sounded strangely calm in spite of the explosions going off behind her eyes ‘…I’d say you were seriously overdue for a sense of humour transplant.’

He laughed. Or rather he rumbled, that low rolling sound that vibrated uncomfortably through her.

She bristled, trying to dispel the rush of heat that came with his proximity. ‘I’m afraid I don’t see the joke.’

His mouth quietened, his eyes stilled. On hers. ‘That’s because it is no joke. Your father has agreed that you will marry me.’

For a moment she was speechless. But only for a moment. Then it was her turn to laugh, wiping away his wild assertions with a sweep of one hand. ‘You’re crazy! Dad, tell him how ludicrous he sounds. There’s no way you’d ever expect me to do something so absurd as to marry someone like him.’ She looked at her father, inviting him to agree—imploring him to agree—but her father said nothing, his eyes more desolate than she’d ever seen them, and the laughter died on her lips just as hope died in her heart.

‘Briar,’ he said in the bare bones of a whisper, reaching for her shoulder, ‘you have to understand—’

A hitched moment of realisation passed and then, ‘No!’ She recoiled from both his touch and from what his eyes told her. ‘There’s nothing to understand.’

‘Please,’ her father pleaded, ‘before you mother hears us.’ He motioned them both into the room before closing the door behind them. ‘You must listen to me.’

Her mind a blur, she let herself be bustled inside the room before she turned on her father, blurting out just how she felt. ‘How can I listen when what you say makes no sense?’

‘And how can you say it makes no sense,’ Diablo argued from the sidelines, one arrogant eyebrow cocked, ‘if you don’t listen?’

She snapped her head around in his direction. ‘If I’d wanted your opinion, I would have asked for it.’

He didn’t look nonplussed. Far from it. In fact he looked altogether too pleased with himself as he leant back against her father’s desk, his hands planted wide either side of him, pulling his shirt taut across a muscled chest that looked far better than any man’s had a right to. The open V of his shirt revealed olive skin that was impossibly smooth, almost glossy, and a hint of dark chest hair. She forced her eyes higher, aware that she’d been staring. Her mother was right. Diablo Barrentes was one good-looking man. Why did someone so detestable have to be blessed with such good looks and such a killer body? There was clearly no justice in this world.

He smiled then, as if amused by what her face betrayed of her thoughts. ‘You are as prickly as your name suggests, my wild rose.’

‘I am not your wild rose! Don’t you understand? I don’t want to marry you. And there’s no way on earth you can make me.’

She turned her attention back to her father as another cog suddenly slipped into place. Suddenly her mother’s ‘he must have some redeeming features’ discussion made sense, though not the sudden secrecy. ‘What’s this really about? Why did you make us come into the library? Mother knows about this arrangement, doesn’t she?’

Her father looked grey. ‘She knows something of the proposal, it’s true.’

Briar’s gut churned. ‘Something of the proposal’? What more could there possibly be? What she was hearing already set her stomach roiling. And the very concept that her future had been mapped out by her own parents—the two people she’d always assumed loved her and wanted the best for her—was too much.

‘So you’ve discussed this then, between yourselves like some kind of domestic transaction. I can just imagine how the conversation went: “Shall we renovate the beach house? Maybe trade up to the new Mercedes? Oh, and while we’re at it, maybe we can marry Briar off to Diablo Barrentes.”’

She swivelled her head and firmly fixed Diablo in her sights. ‘You’ve worked out between yourselves that you’re going to marry me off to the person this family detests more than anyone in the world. How could you do that?’

Diablo didn’t flinch at her words, his eyes merely glinting menacingly. Her father, however, was getting more agitated.

‘Briar, calm down, we have no choice!’

‘There’s always a choice! Like I have a choice. Because there’s no way I’m marrying Diablo Barrentes. I wouldn’t marry him if he was the last man on earth.’ She swung around in Diablo’s direction and looked square into his dark fathomless eyes. ‘I’d rather die!’

This time the merest tic in his cheek was the only indication that her words had met their mark. ‘It’s drama you studied at university, then,’ he delivered in a tone that told her how unimpressed he was with the proceedings. ‘I was obviously under a misapprehension.’

‘I studied fine arts,’ she hissed. ‘Not that it’s any business of yours.’

He raised his eyebrows. ‘You surprise me, given you have such a flair for the dramatic.’

‘And you have such a flair for the insane! How could you possibly imagine I would marry you? What were you thinking? That you could marry your way into Sydney society? It won’t work. People aren’t going to forget how you rode roughshod over everyone in your path to get to where you are today.’

He surveyed her through half-hooded eyes that failed to hide those dark simmering depths. ‘You resent me for building my own fortune, instead of having it bestowed on me through some accident of birth like you and your kind?’

‘I resent you because you’ve built your fortune by pulling others down, my father included.’

‘Is that so? And yet now I’m offering your father a chance to get re-established. He can see the sense in the offer. And yet still you resent me.’

‘I will always resent you.’

She turned in frustration to her father. ‘Please, tell me this is all a joke. You can’t really expect me to marry this arrogant Spanish import. This is twenty-first century Sydney, after all. We don’t do arranged marriages!’

Her father shook his head sadly. ‘Briar…’ His voice choked off as he sank down into an armchair, dropping his head into his hands. ‘Oh God, I’ve been such a fool.’

She rushed to him and knelt at his side, latching both hands on to his forearm, willing him some of her strength and hope. ‘Dad, listen to me. We don’t need Diablo’s money. I’ve got it all worked out. We can survive just like we planned—with my job and by auctioning the good furniture periodically. We don’t need to go crawling to people like him. We don’t need his money.’

‘It’s not that easy,’ her father murmured, shaking his head from side to side.

‘It is that easy,’ she assured him. ‘We don’t have to make this deal. I haven’t had a chance to tell you yet—because we can survive without it. So what that we won’t have servants?—We can cope. We’ve been coping. And I’ll have a job soon.’

‘We’re not coping! Look at the state of the house—it’s killing your mother that she can’t keep up with everything.’

‘Who cares if the floors don’t get cleaned every day? Things will get better, you’ll see.’

Her father grabbed her by the shoulders, his desperate fingers clawing into her flesh so hard it hurt. With his hurt, she knew. ‘No, it’s not that easy,’ he reiterated. ‘You have to listen. We have no money left. No credit. Nothing.’

‘We do,’ she argued, wanting to stop his pain. ‘Or we will, and enough to keep us going and to get us through these times. We don’t need anyone else’s money, let alone his. Let me go and get the schedule I’ve been working on. I’ll prove it to you. I’ve worked it all out.’

‘Briar,’ was all he said as he dropped his grip to her hands, holding on to them for all he was worth, not letting her rise. ‘Thank you. You’re such a good child. I’m so proud of you.’

She looked into her father’s eyes and saw his approval beaming out at her. She relished the moment as he pulled her close, wrapping her securely in his arms, and for a moment they were the only two people in the room. Nobody else counted. Nobody else mattered. Her father thought he had been carrying the entire burden of their debt on his shoulders. Now he knew that Briar had also been searching for solutions. And everything would look different when he’d seen her calculations. She’d soon show him they didn’t need to resort to people like Diablo for the funds to ensure their future.

‘So when are you going to tell her?’ jarred a voice from outside her perfect understanding. And she stilled within the circle of her father’s arms as dread turned her blood to ice.

‘Tell me what?’ she asked huskily, drawing back to search her father’s face. What the hell else could there be?

He looked down at her with his empty eyes and it was impossible not to feel his despair drape around her, damp and pungent. ‘There’s nothing left.’

‘What do you mean?’ she asked, willing life into his eyes, searching for the merest flicker of hope. ‘“Nothing left”?’

‘It’s all gone. All of it.’

‘But we’ve still got the house and the furniture! I told you…’

But, even as she was speaking, his head was shaking from side to side.

‘Gone,’ her father said. ‘All that was left is gone. It’s Diablo’s now. Everything. The house, the furniture. Everything.’

Fury took charge of her senses. She rose up and wheeled around. ‘You bastard!’ She moved closer. Never before had she had an urge to tear someone limb from limb but tonight was becoming a night for firsts. Her first arranged marriage. Her first fiancé. Why not her first homicide? She lifted one hand, resisting the desire to lash out at his smug face, instead curling it into a fist between them.

‘You scheming bastard. Not content to obliterate four generations of work, you couldn’t let up until you had taken every last thing, even our family home, and consigned us to the gutter. What a hero. Do you feel proud of yourself now?’

In the space of a blink he’d ensnared her wrist, the heat from his grip like a brand on her arm.

‘I’m offering a way to keep you all out of that gutter. I’ve told your father—he can keep the house and everything in it along with a sizeable lump of cash every year. All you have to do is be that good daughter your father seems to think you are. All you have to do is marry me and all your family’s unfortunate financial problems will be a thing of the past.’

The grip around her wrist tightened, forcing her towards him, closer to his dark eyes and his tight body and his masculine heat. If his gaze at the door had been sizzling hot, his hold and his closeness was like an incendiary device set to slow burn. Already her skin sizzled into life; how long would it take to get to flash-point?

‘Put like that, it seems you leave me no choice,’ she said through gritted teeth, watching his eyes flare with an anticipated victory.

‘I’m glad you’re willing to see reason at last,’ he said, loosening his grip.

‘Oh, yes, I see reason. I’ll take the gutter over you any day!’

She took advantage of his shock by wrenching her arm free, massaging the burning skin as she wheeled away.

‘You don’t know what you’re letting yourself in for!’ Diablo countered. ‘You have no idea what it’s like to live in poverty, always desperate to find your next meal, never able to make ends meet, and with your pampered upbringing you won’t survive ten minutes out in the real world.’

She spun on her heel, lifted her chin determinedly. ‘Oh, we’ll survive.’

He scoffed. ‘What—you see yourself as the noble poor? Allow me to let you in on a secret—there are no noble poor. There are only the poor, the hungry and the desperate. There’s no place for nobility in that line-up. The gutter is no fairy tale romantic notion.’

She regarded him levelly. ‘What a coincidence,’ she mustered. ‘Neither, it seems, is marrying you.’ She turned to where her father still sat, looking like an empty shell of a man, a fallen ruler, vanquished and heartsick for what he’d lost, and pain for what he was feeling now encompassed her like a tide rolling in.

‘I’m sorry, Dad. I can’t do it. I just can’t marry him.’

Her father nodded his head and she knew that it was not in agreement but in resignation. He seemed to shrink before her eyes. ‘I understand,’ he croaked. ‘I should never have had to ask you. It’s all my fault—my fault. Now I just have to find a way of telling your mother that we no longer have a home.’

Briar’s heart plummeted.

‘Oh, God, you mean she doesn’t know? I thought she must have been in on this crazy idea.’

‘She doesn’t know we’ve lost Blaxlea. I didn’t want to worry her unnecessarily. But now…’

‘Oh, Dad, no…’

The grandfather clock clicked loudly in the ensuing silence as the mechanism for the chimes kicked in, the prelude for ringing out the midnight hour.

Diablo strode between them. ‘Can you do that to your mother, then? Deny her the chance to see out her days in this house rather than some doss-house? What kind of a daughter are you really?’

She said nothing, just let her eyes tell him how much she hated him while inside her heart ached for her mother. Because Diablo was right—how could she do that to her mother after what she’d been through? After losing Nat, then the business and along with it their fortune, to lose the family home would kill her.

‘I can see you need more time to think about it,’ Diablo decided. ‘So I’m prepared to give you one more chance. You have until the clock strikes twelve to decide once and for all. Marry me and your family live in comfort for the rest of their days. Turn me down and you’ll be out of this house by the end of the week.’

‘You can’t do that!’

‘Watch me,’ he said. ‘It’s not as if you have anything left to pack.’

‘Even you couldn’t be so cold-hearted!’

‘It’s not up to me any more,’ he said as the clock finished its chimes and made the first of twelve strikes. ‘It’s up to you what happens next. Luxury or poverty, it’s your call. Will you abandon your parents in their hour of need or will you restore your parents to the life they desire?’

The clock struck again. ‘That’s two,’ he said. ‘I hope you’re thinking.’

Oh, she was thinking all right. Panicked thoughts with no beginning and no end and no hope. And, between them all, the clock struck again.

Would it kill her to marry him? Maybe not, but there was no doubt it would definitely kill her mother to leave Blaxlea, her childhood home and the seat of her mother’s family for generations.

And would she ever forgive Briar for rejecting the financial lifeline that Diablo was now offering?

The clock struck again and she looked up in panic. Had she missed one? How much time was left? There was too much to consider.

Why, oh, why, did it all have to come down to her? Oh Nat, she pleaded, what should I do? But she knew without question that if her big brother had survived the crash that had cut short his life, he wouldn’t hesitate to help. He’d do whatever it took to help his parents out, even if it meant sacrificing his own career and his own future into the deal. So why did the thought of sacrificing her own chances seem so abhorrent? After all, all she had to do was to marry Diablo.

Marriage…

The clock sounded again, straining her nerves to breaking-point. It was almost time.

Marriage sounded so final. But then hadn’t she always planned on getting married one day? Indeed, she’d been groomed from the day she was born for being a society wife with a rich husband…Would it really matter if it was to Diablo? And it didn’t have to be for ever. He’d get sick of her before too long—she’d make sure of it—and then he’d have to agree to divorce her. How long would it take—one year? Two? She’d make sure there were no children to suffer in the fallout. And then she’d have her life back. It wouldn’t kill her. Marrying Diablo didn’t have to be a life sentence.

All too soon it was just an echo that rolled around the room. The clock had rung out for the last time. The witching hour was here—the time when bad things crawled out of the night and ruled supreme. Diablo, the Spanish devil, was nothing if not faithful to the old legends.

She looked across at her father, who sat there looking like the beaten man he was. He looked up at her as if he’d realised too that this was it, his eyes bearing a rare spark of defiance. ‘Don’t do it,’ he urged in a gruff entreaty as he rose to his feet, some measure of his fighting spirit renewed. ‘This is my fault—all of it. You shouldn’t have to pay for my mistakes. We’ll make it through somehow.’

She smiled and mouthed a silent thank you.

‘Well?’ demanded the Spanish devil, drawing closer, obviously impatient to seal the deal. ‘What have you decided?’

‘That I hate you,’ she snapped. ‘With all my heart and soul.’

He lifted a hand to her face quickly and she recoiled, but his touch, when it came, was surprisingly gentle as he ran the backs of his fingers along the line of her jaw. She shuddered at the sizzle of flesh against flesh as his eyes bored into hers, rendering her breathless, unable to move. ‘Hate is such a useless waste of passion.’ He sighed and turned away and she dragged in air hungrily.

‘But so be it. Under the circumstances,’ he stated coldly, ‘I want you all packed and out of here by the end of the week.’

‘No!’

He spun around. ‘What do you mean, “no”? My terms were clear.’

‘It means we won’t be leaving.’

‘Briar,’ her father implored, ‘don’t do it. You can’t—’

Diablo held up one hand that silenced her father in a heartbeat as he scrutinised her face, the barest hint of a smile returning as the dark vacuum of his bottomless eyes sucked in hers. ‘Tell me,’ he insisted.

She took a deep breath and prayed for strength. Because she needed strength if she was going to do this. And she had no choice but to do this.

For my mother, she told herself, for my family.

‘I’ll do it,’ she whispered, feeling like a swimmer out of her depth, going down for the third and final time.

‘I’ll marry you.’