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He knew what he wanted, naturally.
That had come as a bit of a surprise because he had truly thought that he had put that unfortunate slice of his past behind him, but apparently he hadn’t.
Because the very second Oliver had opened his mouth to launch into his plaintive, begging speech, Javier had known what he wanted and how he would get it.
He wanted her.
She was the only unfinished business in his life and he hadn’t realised how much that had preyed on his mind until now, until the opportunity to finish that business had been presented to him on a silver platter.
He’d never slept with her.
She’d strung him along for a bit of fun, maybe because she’d liked having those tittering, upper-class friends of hers oohing and aahing with envy because she’d managed to attract the attention of the good-looking bad boy.
Didn’t they say that about rich, spoilt girls—that they were always drawn to a bit of rough because it gave them an illicit thrill?
Naturally, they would never marry the bit of rough. That would be unthinkable!
Javier’s lips thinned as he recalled the narrative of their brief relationship.
He remembered the way she had played with him, teasing him with a beguiling mixture of innocence and guileless, sensual temptation. She had let him touch but he hadn’t been able to relish the full meal. He’d been confined to starters when he had wanted to devour all courses, including dessert.
He’d reached the point of wanting to ask her to marry him. He’d been offered the New York posting and he’d wanted her by his side. He’d hinted, saying a bit, dancing around the subject, but strangely for him had been too awkward to put all his cards on the table. Yet she must have suspected that a marriage proposal was on the cards.
Just thinking about it now, his insane stupidity, made him clench his teeth together with barely suppressed anger.
She was the only woman who had got to him and the only one who had escaped him.
He forced himself to relax, to breathe slowly, to release the cold bitterness that had very quickly risen to the surface now that he knew that he would be seeing her in a matter of minutes.
The woman who had...yes...hurt him.
The woman who had used him as a bit of fun, making sure that she didn’t get involved, saving herself for one of those posh, upper-class idiots who formed part of her tight little circle.
He was immune to being hurt now because he was older and more experienced. His life was rigidly controlled. He knew what he wanted and he got what he wanted, and what he wanted was the sort of financial security that would be immune to the winds of change. It was all that mattered and the only thing that mattered.
Women were a necessary outlet and he enjoyed them but they didn’t interrupt the focus of his unwavering ambition. They were like satellites bobbing around the main planet.
Had he only had this level of control within his grasp when he’d met Sophie all those years ago, he might not have fallen for her, but there was no point in crying over spilt milk. The past could not be altered.
Which wasn’t to say that there couldn’t be retribution...
He sensed her even before he was aware of the hesitant knock on the door.
He had given his secretary the afternoon off. He’d been in meetings all afternoon, had returned to his offices only an hour previously, and something in him wanted to see Sophie without the presence of his secretary around.
He had brought Eva back with him from New York. A widow in her sixties, originally from the UK anyway with all her family living here, she had been only too glad to accompany him back to London. She could be trusted not to gossip, but even so...
Seeing Sophie after all this time felt curiously intimate.
Which was something of a joke because intimacy implied some level of romance, of two people actually wanting to be in one another’s company...
Hardly the case here.
Although, if truth be told, he was almost looking forward to seeing the woman again, whilst she...
He settled back in his leather chair and mused that he was probably the last person in the world she wanted to see.
But needs must...
‘Enter.’
The deep, controlled tenor of that familiar voice chilled Sophie to the bone. She took a deep breath and nervously turned the handle before pushing open the door to the splendid office which, in her peripheral vision, was as dauntingly sophisticated as she had mentally predicted.
She had hoped that the years might have wrought changes in him, maybe even that her memory might have played tricks on her. She had prayed that he was no longer the hard-edged, proud, dangerous guy she had once known but, instead, a mellow man with room in his heart for forgiveness.
She’d been an idiot.
He was as dangerous as she remembered. More so. She stared and kept on staring at the familiar yet unfamiliar angles of his sinfully beautiful face. He’d always been incredibly good-looking, staggeringly exotic with finely chiselled features and lazy dark eyes with the longest eyelashes she had ever seen on a guy.
He was as sinfully good-looking as he had been then, but now there was a cool self-possession about him that spoke of the tough road he had walked to get to the very top. His dark, dark eyes were watchful and inscrutable as she finally dragged her mesmerised gaze away from him and made her way forward with the grace and suppleness of a broken puppet.
And then, when she reached the chair in front of his desk, it dawned on her that she hadn’t been invited to sit down, so she remained hovering with one hand on the back of the chair, waiting in tense, electric silence...
‘Why don’t you sit down, Sophie?’
He looked at her, enjoying the hectic colour in her cheeks, enjoying the fact that she was standing on shaky legs in front of him, in the role of supplicant.
And he was enjoying a hell of a lot more than that, he freely admitted to himself...
She was even more beautiful than the image he had stored in his mind carefully, as he had discovered, wrapped in tissue paper, waiting for the day when the tissue paper would be removed.
He couldn’t see how long or short her hair was but it was still the vibrant tangle of colour it had been when he had first met her. Chestnut interweaved with copper with strands of strawberry blonde threaded through in a colourful display of natural highlights.
And she hadn’t put on an ounce over the years. Indeed, she looked slimmer than ever. Gaunt, even, with smudges of strain showing under her violet eyes.
Financial stress would do that to a person, he thought, especially a person who had been brought up to expect the finest things in life.
But for all that she was as beautiful as he remembered, with that elusive quality of hesitancy that had first attracted him to her. She looked like a model, leggy, rangy and startlingly pretty, but she lacked the hard edges of someone with model looks and that was a powerful source of attraction. She had always seemed to be ever so slightly puzzled when guys spun round to stare at her.
Complete act, he now realised. Just one of the many things about her that had roped him in, one of the many things that had been fake.
‘So...’ he drawled, relaxing back in his chair. ‘Where to begin? Such a long time since we last saw one another...’
Sophie was fast realising that there was going to be no loan. He had requested an audience with her because he could, because he had known that she would be unable to refuse. He had asked to see her so that he could send her away with a flea in her ear over how he thought he had been treated by her the last time they had been together.
She was sitting here in front of him simply because revenge was a dish best served cold.
She cleared her throat, back ramrod-straight, hands clutching the bag on her lap, a leftover designer relic back from the good old days when money, apparently, had been no object.
‘My brother informs me that you might be amenable to providing us with a loan.’ She didn’t want to go down memory lane and, since this was a business meeting, why not cut to the chase? He wasn’t going to lend them the money anyway, so what was the point of prolonging the agony?
Though there was some rebellious part of her that was compelled to steal glances at the man who had once held her heart captive in his hand.
He was still so beautiful. A wave of memories washed over her and she seemed to see, in front of her, the guy who could make her laugh, who could make her tingle all over whenever he rested his eyes on her; the guy who had lusted after her and had pursued her with the sort of intent and passion she had never experienced in her life before.
She blinked; the image was gone and she was back in the present, cringing as he continued to assess her with utterly cool detachment.
‘Tut-tut-tut, Sophie. Don’t tell me that you seriously expected to walk into my office and find yourself presented with a loan arrangement all ready and waiting for you to sign, before disappearing back to...remind where it is...the wilds of Yorkshire?’ He shook his head with rueful incredulity, as though chastising her for being a complete moron. ‘I think we should at least relax and chat a bit before we begin discussing...money...’
Sophie wondered whether this meant that he would actually agree to lend them the money they so desperately needed.
‘I would offer you coffee or tea, but my secretary has gone for the day. I can, of course...’ He levered himself out of the chair and Sophie noted the length and muscularity of his body.
He had been lean and menacing years ago, with the sort of physical strength that can only be thinly hidden behind clothes. He was just as menacing now, more so because he now wielded power, and a great deal of it.
She watched as he made his way over to a bar, which she now noticed at the far side of his office, in a separate, airy room which overlooked the streets below on two sides.
It was an obscenely luxurious office suite. All that was missing was a bed.
Heat stung her cheeks and she licked her lips nervously. For all she knew, he was married with a couple of kids, even though he didn’t look it. He certainly would have a woman tucked away somewhere.
‘Have a drink with me, Sophie...’
‘I’d rather not.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because...’ Her voice trailed off and she noted that he had ignored her completely and was now strolling towards her with a glass of wine in his hand.
‘Because...what?’ Instead of returning to his chair, he perched on the edge of his desk and looked down at her with his head tilted to one side.
‘Why don’t you just lay into me and get it over and done with?’ she muttered, taking the drink from him and nursing the glass. She stared up at him defiantly, her violet eyes clashing with his unreadable, dark-as-night ones. ‘I knew I shouldn’t have come here.’
‘Lay into you?’ Javier queried smoothly. He shrugged. ‘Things happen and relationships bite the dust. We were young. It’s no big deal.’
‘Yes,’ Sophie agreed uneasily.
‘So your brother tells me that you are now a widow...’
‘Roger died in an accident three years ago.’
‘Tragic. You must have been heartbroken.’
‘It’s always tragic when someone is snatched away in the prime of their life.’ She ignored the sarcasm in his voice; she certainly wasn’t going to pretend to play the part of heartbroken widow when her marriage had been a sham from beginning to end. ‘And perhaps you don’t know but my father is also no longer with us. I’m not sure if Ollie told you, but he suffered a brain tumour towards the end. So life, you see, has been very challenging, for me and my brother, but I’m sure you must have guessed that the minute he showed up here.’ She lowered her eyes and then nervously sipped some of the wine before resting the glass on the desk.
She wanted to ask whether it was okay to do that or whether he should get a coaster or something.
But then, really rich people never worried about silly little things like wine glass ring-marks on their expensive wooden desks, did they?
‘You have my sympathies.’ Less sincere condolences had seldom been spoken. ‘And your mother?’
‘She lives in Cornwall now. We...we bought her a little cottage there so that she could be far from... Well, her health has been poor and the sea air does her good... And you?’
‘What about me?’ Javier frowned, eased himself off the desk and returned to where he had been sitting.
‘Have you married? Got children?’ The artificiality of the situation threatened to bring on a bout of manic laughter. It was surreal, sitting here making small talk with a guy who probably hated her guts, even though, thankfully, she had not been subjected to the sort of blistering attack she had been fearing.
At least, not yet.
At any rate, she could always walk out...although he had dangled that carrot in front of her, intimated that he would indeed be willing to discuss the terms and conditions of helping them. Could she seriously afford to let her pride come in the way of some sort of solution to their problems?
If she had been the only one affected, then yes, but there was her brother, her mother, those faithful employees left working, through loyalty, for poor salaries in the ever-shrinking family business.
‘This isn’t about me,’ Javier fielded silkily. ‘Although, in answer to your question, I have reached the conclusion that women, as a long-term proposition, have no place in my life at this point in time. So, times have changed for you,’ he murmured, moving on with the conversation. He reached into his drawer and extracted a sheet of paper, which he swivelled so that it was facing her.
‘Your company accounts. From riches to rags in the space of a few years, although, if you look carefully, you’ll see that the company has been mismanaged for somewhat longer than a handful of years. Your dearly departed husband seems to have failed to live up to whatever promise there was that an injection of cash would rescue your family’s business. I take it you were too busy playing the good little wife to notice that he had been blowing vast sums of money on pointless ventures that all crashed and burned?’
Sophie stared at the paper, feeling as though she had been stripped naked and made to stand in front of him for inspection.
‘I knew,’ she said abruptly. Playing the good little wife? How wrong could he have been?
‘You ditched your degree course to rush into marriage with a man who blew the money on...oh, let’s have a look...transport options for sustainable farmers...a wind farm that came to nothing...several aborted ventures into the property market...a sports centre which was built and then left to rot because the appropriate planning permission hadn’t been provided... All the time your father’s once profitable transport business was haemorrhaging money by the bucketload. And you knew...’
‘There was nothing I could do,’ Sophie said tightly, loathing him even though she knew that, if he were to lend them any money, he would obviously have to know exactly what he was getting into.
‘Did you know where else your husband was blowing his money, to the tune of several hundred thousand?’
Perspiration broke out in a fine, prickly film and she stared at him mutinously.
‘Why are you doing this?’
‘Doing what?’
‘Hanging me out to dry? If you don’t want to help, then please just say so and I’ll leave and you’ll never see me again.’
‘Fine.’ Javier sat back and watched her.
She had never lain spread across his bed. He had never seen that hair in all its glory across his pillows. He had felt those ripe, firm breasts, but through prudish layers of clothes. He had never tasted them. Had never even seen them. Before he’d been able to do any of that, before he’d been able to realise the powerful thrust of his passion and his yearning, she had walked away from him. Walked straight up to the altar and into the arms of some little twerp whose very existence she had failed to mention in the months that they had been supposedly going out.
He had a sudden vision of her lying on his bed in the penthouse apartment, just one of several he owned in the capital. It was a blindingly clear vision and his erection was as fast as it was shocking. He had to breathe deeply and evenly in an attempt to dispel the unsettling and unwelcome image that had taken up residence in his head.
‘Not going to walk out?’ Javier barely recognised the raw lack of self-control that seemed to be guiding his responses.
He’d wanted to see her squirm but the force of his antipathy took him by surprise because he was realising just how fast and tight she had stuck to him over the years.
Unfinished business. That was why. Well, he would make sure he finished it if it was the last thing he did and then he would be free of the woman and whatever useless part of his make-up she still appeared to occupy.
‘He gambled.’ Sophie raised her eyes to his and held his stare in silence before looking away, offering him her averted profile.
