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She gazed out of one of the many windows, imagining the spectacular view of the stars at night from this wonderful vantage point, and hoped she would be lucky enough to experience it for herself. The estimated finish time of the day’s excursion had been vague.
Which reminded her that she still seemed to be the only guest.
And where had the barwoman gone?
Unease crawling through her, Chloe opened her beach bag to search for her phone.
Just as her fingers closed on it, a tall figure stepped into the lounge.
Although the figure was only in the periphery of her vision, it was enough for her stomach to roil and ice to plunge into her veins.
Feeling very much like a teenager watching a horror movie and wishing she could cover her eyes to hide from the scary bit, she slowly turned her head.
And there he stood, filling the space around him like a dark, menacing shadow, a grim smile on his face.
Luis.
‘Hello, bonita. It is a pleasure to see you again.’
CHAPTER TWO (#ub13f7c78-3983-5e82-ba0a-fbdbc8f07f54)
LUIS FELT IMMENSE satisfaction to read the horror in Chloe’s baby-blue eyes.
‘Nothing to say?’ he taunted. ‘I have travelled a long way to see you, bonita. I would have thought that deserved an enthusiastic welcome.’
Those wonderful pillowy lips he’d fantasised about kissing parted then snapped shut as she swallowed, shock clearly rendering her dumb.
‘You’re not normally this shy.’ He folded his arms across his chest and stroked his jaw. ‘Is it delight at seeing me that has struck you mute?’
Her wonderfully graceful throat moved, colour creeping over her cheeks. ‘What...? How...?’
‘Is that the best you can come up with?’ He shook his head with mock incredulity.
She blinked rapidly and blew in and out. ‘I’ve been set up.’
‘The sun hasn’t damaged your observation skills, I see.’
The baby-blue eyes stared straight into his. ‘You bastard.’
‘If we are moving straight to the name-calling, I have a select number of insults I can apply to you. Which shall I start with?’
‘Forget it.’ Hooking her large bag over her shoulder, she got to her feet. ‘Let’s not waste time. Say what you need to say. I have a holiday to enjoy.’
He gazed at the long legs now fully on display, only the top half of her supple thighs covered by the tight blue denim shorts she wore. Dios, for a She-Devil she had the most amazing body. Beauty, heavy breasts covered in a red T-shirt, a slim waist and a pert bottom...he defied any red-blooded heterosexual man out there not to fantasise about bedding her.
‘My apologies,’ he said sardonically. ‘I didn’t realise you were on a holiday. I thought you had run away.’
‘No, it’s definitely a holiday. Sun, sea, pina coladas and hot men.’ She smiled as she listed the latter, a jibe he knew perfectly well was intended to cut at him. ‘Getting far away from you was an added incentive but not the main consideration.’
‘Would your brother have paid for you to holiday in the Bahamas if you hadn’t agreed to do his dirty work?’ The booking for her flights and villa had been paid for personally by Benjamin.
‘Au contraire,’ she said, switching from English to her native French. Between them they spoke each other’s languages and English fluently. ‘I didn’t agree to do his dirty work. I insisted on it.’ The smile she now cast him was pure beatific. ‘Your gallantry at rescuing a damsel in distress does you credit. Knowing you were on those mountain roads searching for me is a thought I will cherish for ever.’
The rage that had simmered in his veins since he and Javier had pieced all the parts of the jigsaw together flashed through his skin.
Luis hadn’t expected contrition from her but her triumph was something else.
Chloe had sent him on a wild goose chase so he would be late for the gala. Her brother had conspired to ground Javier’s flight to Madrid so he too would be late for the gala. With both Casillas brothers out of the way and the world’s media present, Benjamin had pounced, stealing Javier’s fiancée away and taking her to his secure chateau in Provence. And then he had proceeded to blackmail them: Javier’s fiancée in exchange for the money he claimed they owed him. If the money wasn’t forthcoming he would marry her himself.
Luis could not remember the last time his brother had been so coldly furious. Javier had dug his heels in and refused to pay. For Javier it was a matter of principle. They had done nothing illegal and a court of law agreed with them. They didn’t owe Benjamin a cent.
For Luis, Benjamin’s actions were a declaration of war. All the guilt he’d felt and his plans to put things right between them had been discarded in an instant.
The press photographs of Freya leaving the gala hand in hand with Benjamin had captured a certain something between the pair of them that had made Luis wince for his brother. Whether Javier’s fiancée was an unwitting tool in the plot or a willing supplicant was irrelevant. Those pictures had shown his brother’s fiancée gazing into his enemy’s eyes with a look of rapture on her face. Javier would rather starve than take her back.
His brother had been right not to take her back. Their enemy had married Freya two days ago, barely five days after stealing her away. The fallout against the Casillas brothers had accelerated.
Chloe had willingly played her part in this. She would find herself playing a role to end it and whether that was willingly, he could not care less.
‘Cherish those memories, bonita,’ he said, hiding his anger with a beatific smile of his own. ‘You earned them. You have proven yourself to be a fabulous actress.’
She fluttered her long black eyelashes at him. ‘Were you worried about me? How touching.’
Remembering the burst of raw panic that had grabbed him to find her car missing from the place he had expected it to be... Worried, Luis concluded grimly, did not begin to cover it.
It was only because he had known her since she was in her mother’s stomach, he told himself. For the first three years of Chloe’s life he, Javier and Benjamin, all ten years older, had been her chief babysitters. None of them had been enthusiastic about the job, especially when she’d entered toddlerhood and turned into a pint-sized She-Devil.
More fool him for being so blown away by her adult beauty that he’d failed to see behind the fun-loving façade to the fully grown She-Devil beneath the milky skin.
‘I would not be human if I hadn’t been concerned,’ he said blithely.
‘I think it’s debatable whether you and your brother are human at all.’
He spread his arms out and winked. ‘Oh, I am very human, bonita, as I am more than happy for you to discover for yourself.’
A tinge of colour slashed her pretty rounded cheeks. She scowled at him and pulled her bag even closer into her side. ‘Are we done yet? Have you finished with your fun?’
‘Finished? Bonita, my fun with you has only just begun.’
Indeed, this was already much more fun than he had envisaged. Chloe’s belligerent discomfort and outrage were things of beauty, acting like salve to his rabid anger.
‘Yes, well, my fun is over. I’m going.’
‘Going where?’ he asked as she stomped to the door, giving him an extremely wide berth as she moved.
‘Back to my villa.’
‘How?’
It was the way he said that one word that made Chloe pause and her heart accelerate even faster and the sick feeling in her stomach swirl harder.
It didn’t matter that Luis had found her, she kept telling herself. It had been inevitable that their paths would cross again one day. At least it was done with and she could stop worrying about it.
‘Have you been so enraptured by my presence that you failed to notice we’re no longer at port?’ he mocked.
She turned her head to look out of the window to her left. Then she turned it to the right.
Then she spun round to face the front, curses flying through her head.
The captain had set the Marietta to sail and she hadn’t even noticed.
‘Get this thing turned around right now!’ she demanded, eying him squarely.
He rubbed his chin. ‘No, I don’t think I will.’
‘The captain will turn it round.’ She took three quick paces to the door and pressed the green button beside it.
‘That won’t work,’ he commented idly. ‘The crew have been instructed to leave us alone until further notice.’
‘Take me back to port right now or I’m calling the police.’
He strode to the bar and laughed. It had a cruel, mocking tinge to it. ‘Why ruin this wonderful reunion with talk of the police?’
She could have easily stamped her feet. ‘Because you’re holding me here against my will.’
He turned his back on her to study the rows of spirits, liqueurs and mixers lined up on the bar. ‘Drink?’
‘What?’
‘I need a drink. Do you want one?’
‘I want you to take me back to port. This game has gone on long enough.’
‘This is no game, bonita.’
‘Stop calling me that.’
He looked at her and winked. ‘I remember when it made you blush.’
‘That was before I knew what kind of a man you really are, you unscrupulous jerk. And stop winking at me. If this isn’t a game, stop acting like it is.’
‘If I am acting like it’s a game, you conniving witch, it’s to stop myself from grabbing you by the shoulders and shaking you until your teeth fall out.’ He flashed his perfectly white and perfectly straight teeth at her. ‘Or from taking the kiss you owe me.’
She sucked in a sharp breath.
His threat didn’t bother her because she instinctively knew Luis would never lay a finger on her in anger.
But the mention of the kiss she owed him...
Chloe spent her days surrounded by dancers. The male ones had the most amazing physiques and they worked hard to maintain them, the look they strove for lean and strong. To her eyes they were beautiful sculptures but not sexy.
Luis was a hulk of a man, burly and rugged, a man for whom chest waxing would be considered a joke. If he had any vanity she’d never seen it. Even his dark hair, which he kept long on top and flopped either side of his forehead, never looked as if he did more to it than run his fingers through it when he remembered.
Square jawed, his hazel eyes surrounded with laughter lines, his nose broad, cheekbones high, lips full but firm, the outbreak of stubble never far beneath his skin.
In a world of metrosexual men, Luis was a man who drank testosterone for breakfast and made no apologies for it. He would be as comfortable chopping wood with an axe as he would holding a meeting in a boardroom and she found him very sexy.
She’d dreamed of kissing him when she was seventeen years old, dreams that had faded to a hazy memory over the years but then re-awoken with a vengeance when she had started work at Compania de Ballet de Casillas. Months after she’d joined the company Luis had turned up. She had been delighted to see him, had spontaneously thrown her arms around him and been completely unprepared for the surge of heat that had bathed her upon finding herself pressed against his hard bulk in that fleeting moment.
That heated feeling had been with her ever since. All she’d needed was one glimpse of him and her heart would pound. She would smile and try to act nonchalant but had been painfully aware of her face resembling a tomato.
That heat was there now too, vibrating inside her. Not even the knowledge of his treachery had dimmed it. She hated herself for that.
He looked up from the bottle of black vodka he was examining and smiled unpleasantly. ‘The insults hurt, don’t they?’
‘You deserve yours and more for what you did to my brother.’ And to me, she refrained from adding.
Learning how deeply he’d betrayed her brother had cut her like a knife. The more she and Benjamin had put the pieces together, the deeper the cut had gone, all the way back to her earliest memories.
Had Luis and Javier always had contempt for her family? Or had the damage done by their mother’s horrific murder at the hands of their father been the root cause of it?
Their mothers had been closer than sisters. As far back as Chloe could remember Luis and Javier had been a part of their lives. They would come and stay with them for weeks at a time in the school holidays then, when she had reached eight and them eighteen and they had snubbed university to set out on their own path, they would still drop in for visits whenever they were in Paris.
Their visits had always made her mother so happy. When she’d been diagnosed with lung cancer they had been there for all of them. Luis had visited her mother so many times in hospital the staff had assumed he was one of her children.
Had the supposed feelings he’d had for her family all been a lie? If not, then how could he have tricked her brother into signing that contract on the day their mother’s condition was diagnosed as terminal?
Luis replaced the bottle of vodka in his hand with a bottle of rum, twisted the cap off and sniffed it. ‘Whatever we did to your brother he has repaid with fire. He has gone too far and so have you. Thanks to you and your brother conspiring against me and my brother, our names are mud.’
‘Good. You deserve it.’ She hated the quiver in her voice. Hated that being so close to him evoked all those awful feelings again that should never have sprung to life in the first place.
Her heart shouldn’t beat so wildly for this man.
She swallowed before adding, ‘You took advantage of him when our mother was dying. I hope the journalist investigating the injunction unveils your treachery to the world and that everyone learns what lying, cheating scumbags the Casillas brothers are.’
Hazel eyes suddenly snapped onto hers, a nitrogen-cold stare that sent a snake of ice coiling up her spine. ‘We did not cheat your brother.’
‘Yes, you did. I don’t care what that court said. You ripped him off and you know it.’
His nostrils flared before he stretched out a hand to the row of cocktail mixers. ‘I am going to tell you something, bonita. I had sympathy for Benjamin’s position.’
‘Of course you did,’ she scorned with a shake of her hair.
‘The terms of profit were reduced from twenty per cent to five per cent under the advice of our lawyer. Your brother’s contribution to the project was a portion of the funding whereas Javier and I would be doing all the work.’
Luis remembered that conversation well. It was one of only a few clear recollections from a day that had flown by at warp speed as he and Javier had battled to salvage the deal they had put so much time and money into.
‘You agreed on twenty per cent. That was a verbal agreement.’
