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‘And you knew about that as well,’ Javier had a fleeting twinge of regret that he had mentioned any of this. It had been unnecessary. Then he remembered the way she had summarily dumped him and all fleeting regret vanished in a puff of smoke.
She nodded mutely.
‘And there was nothing you could have done about that either?’
‘I don’t suppose you’ve ever lived with someone who has a destructive addiction?’ she said tightly. ‘You can’t just sit them down for a pep talk and then expect them to change overnight.’
‘But you can send them firmly in the direction of professional help.’ Javier was curious. The picture he had built of her had been one of the happily married young wife, in love with Prince Charming, so in love that she had not been able to abide being away from him whilst at university—perhaps hoping that the distraction of an unsuitable foreigner might put things into perspective, only for that gambit to hit the rocks.
Then, when he had inspected the accounts closely, he had assumed that, blindly in love, she had been ignorant of her loser husband’s uncontrolled behaviour.
Now...
He didn’t want curiosity to mar the purity of what he wanted from her and he was taken aback that it was.
‘Roger was an adult. He didn’t want help. I wasn’t capable of manhandling him into a car and driving him to the local association for gambling addicts. And I don’t want to talk about...about my marriage. I... It’s in the past.’
‘So it is,’ Javier murmured. When he thought about the other man, he saw red, pure jealousy at being deprived of what he thought should have been his.
Crazy.
Since when had he considered any woman his possession?
‘And yet,’ he mused softly, ‘when is the past ever really behind us? Don’t you find that it dogs us like a guilty conscience, even when we would like to put it to bed for good?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You ran out on me.’
‘Javier, you don’t understand...’
‘Nor do I wish to. This isn’t about understanding what motivated you.’ And at this point in time—this very special point in time when the tables had been reversed, when she was now the one without money and he the one with the bank notes piled up in the coffers—well, she was hardly going to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth when it came to motivations, was she? Oh, no, she would concoct some pretty little tale to try to elicit as much sympathy from him as she could...
‘I’m not asking you to give me money, Javier. I... I’m just asking for a loan. I would pay it all back, every penny of it.’
Javier flung back his head and laughed, a rich, full-bodied laugh that managed to lack genuine warmth. ‘Really? I’m tickled pink at the thought of a Classics scholar, almost there but never graduated, and her sports scholarship brother running any company successfully enough to make it pay dividends, never mind a company that’s on its last legs.’
‘There are directors in the company...’
‘Looked at them. I would ditch most of them if I were you.’
‘You looked at them?’
Javier shrugged. His dark eyes never left her face. ‘I probably know more about your company than you do. Why not? If I’m to sink money into it, then I need to know exactly what I will be sinking money into.’
‘So...are you saying that you’ll help?’
‘I’ll help.’ He smiled slowly. ‘But there’s no such thing as a free lunch. There will be terms and conditions...’
‘That’s fine.’ For the first time in a very long time, a cloud seemed to be lifting. She had underestimated him. He was going to help and she wanted to sob with relief. ‘Whatever your terms and conditions, well, they won’t be a problem. I promise.’
CHAPTER THREE (#ue0f63552-a459-5336-b914-208c50f2e4bb)
‘PERHAPS WE SHOULD take this conversation somewhere else.’
‘Why?’ The suggestion of leaving with him for somewhere else sent little shivers of alarm skittering through her.
She could scarcely credit that she was sitting here, in this office, facing this man who had haunted her for years. All the things that had happened ever since that first tentative step as a young girl falling hopelessly in love with an unsuitable boy lay between them like a great, big, murky chasm.
There was just so much he didn’t know.
But none of that was relevant. What was relevant was that he was going to help them and that was enough.
‘Because,’ Javier drawled, rising to his feet and strolling to fetch his jacket from where it lay slung over the back of one of the expensive, compact sofas in the little sitting area of the office, ‘I feel that two old friends should not be discussing something as crass as a business bailout within the confines of an office.’
Two old friends?
Sophie scrutinised the harsh angles of his face for any inherent sarcasm and he returned her stare with bland politeness.
But his bland politeness made her feel unaccountably uneasy.
He’d never been polite.
At least, not in the way that English people were polite. Not in the middle-class way of clinking teacups and saying the right things, which was the way she had been brought up.
He had always spoken his mind and damned the consequences. She had occasionally seen him in action at university, once in the company of two of his lecturers, when they had been discussing economics.
He had listened to them, which had been the accepted polite way, but had then taken their arguments and ripped them to shreds. The breadth and depth of his knowledge had been so staggering that there had been no comeback.
He had never been scared of rocking the boat. Sometimes, she wondered whether he had privately relished it, although when she’d once asked him that directly, he had burst out laughing before kissing her senseless—at which point she had forgotten what she had been saying to him. Kissing him had always had that effect on her.
A surge of memories brought a hectic flush to her cheeks.
‘Is this your new way of dressing?’ he asked and Sophie blinked, dispelling disturbing images of when they had been an item.
‘What do you mean?’
‘You look like an office worker.’
‘That’s exactly what I am,’ she returned lightly, following him to the door, because what else could she do? At this point, he held all the trump cards, and if he wanted to go and have their business chat sitting on bar stools in the middle of Threadneedle Street, then so be it. There was too much at stake for her to start digging her heels in and telling him that she felt more comfortable discussing business in an office.
She had come this far and there was no turning back now.
This floor was a sanctum of quiet. It was occupied by CEOs and directors, most of whom were concealed behind opaque glass and thick doors. In the middle there was a huge, open-plan space in which desks were cleverly positioned to allow for maximum space utilisation and minimum scope for chatting aimlessly.
The open space was largely empty, except for a couple of diligent employees who were too absorbed in whatever they were doing to look up at them as they headed for the directors’ lift.
‘But it’s not exactly where you wanted to end up, is it?’ he asked as the lift doors quietly closed, sealing them in together.
It didn’t matter where she looked, reflections of him bounced back at her.
She shrugged and reluctantly met his dark eyes.
‘You don’t always end up where you think you’re going to,’ she said tersely.
‘You had big plans to be a university lecturer.’
‘Life got in the way of that.’
‘I’m sure your dearly departed husband wouldn’t like to be seen as someone who got in the way of your big plans.’
‘I don’t want to talk about Roger.’
Because the thought of him no longer being around was still too painful for her to bear. That thought struck Javier with dagger-like precision. The man might have been a waste of space when it came to business, and an inveterate gambler who had blown vast sums of money that should have been pumped into saving the company, yet she had loved him and now would have nothing said against him.
Javier’s lips thinned.
He noted the way she scurried out of the lift, desperate to put some physical distance between them.
‘When did you find out that the company was on the brink of going bust?’
Sophie cringed. She wanted to ask whether it was really necessary to go down that road and she knew that she had to divorce the past from the present. He wasn’t the guy she had loved to death, the guy she had been forced to give up when life as she knew it had suddenly stopped. That was in the past and right now she was in the company of someone thinking about extending credit to the company. He would want details even if she didn’t want to give them.
But there was a lot she didn’t want to tell him. She didn’t want his contempt or his pity and she knew she would have both if she presented him with the unadorned truth. That was if he believed her at all, which was doubtful.
‘I knew things weren’t too good a while back,’ she said evasively. ‘But I had no idea really of just how bad they were until...well, until I got married. ’
Javier felt the dull, steady beat of jealousy working its poisonous way through his body.
He was painfully reminded of the folly of his youth, the naivety of imagining that they would have a future together. The poor foreigner working his way up and the beautiful, well-spoken, impeccably bred English girl who just so happened to be the apple of her father’s adoring and protective eye.
At the time, he had thought himself to be as hard as nails and immune to distraction.
He’d set his course and he had been cocky enough to imagine that no ill winds would come along to blow him off target.
Of all the girls on the planet, he had found himself blown off target by one who had set her course on someone else and had been playing with him for a bit of fun, stringing him along while her heart belonged to someone else.
‘And then...what?’
‘What do you mean?’ She nervously played with her finger, where once upon an unhappy time there had been a wedding ring.
She hadn’t paid much attention to where they were going, but when he stood back to push open a door for her, she saw that they were at an old pub, the sort of pub that populated the heart of the City.
She shimmied past him, ducking under his outstretched arm as he held the door open for her. She was tall at five foot ten, but he was several inches taller and she had a memory of how protected he had always made her feel. The clean, masculine scent of him lingered in her nostrils, making her feel shaky as she sat down at a table in the corner, waiting tensely while he went to get them something to drink. She knew she should keep a clear head and drink water but her nerves were all over the place. They needed something a little stronger than water.
Outside it was hot and she could glimpse a packed garden but in here it was cool, dark and relatively empty.
The sun worshippers were all drinking in the evening sun.
Trying to elicit details about her past was not relevant. Javier knew that and he was furious with himself for succumbing to the desire to know more.
Just like that, in a matter of minutes, she had managed to stoke his curiosity. Just like that, she was back under his skin and he couldn’t wait to have her, to bed her, so that he could rid himself of the uncomfortable suspicion that she had been there all along, a spectre biding its time until it could resurface to catch him on the back foot.
For a man to whom absolute control was vital, this slither of susceptibility was unwelcome.
He realised that when he tried to think of the last woman he had slept with, a top-notch career woman in New York with legs to her armpits, he came up blank. He couldn’t focus on anyone but the woman sitting in front of him, looking at him as though she expected him to pounce unexpectedly at any minute.
She had the clearest violet eyes he had ever seen, fringed with long, dark lashes, and the tilt of them gave her a slightly dreamy look, as though a part of her was on another plane. He itched to unpin her neat little bun so that he could see whether that glorious hair of hers was still as long, still as unruly.
‘Well?’ Javier demanded impatiently, hooking a chair with his foot and angling it so that he could sit with his long legs extended. He had brought a wine cooler with a bottle of wine and one of the bartenders placed two glasses in front of them, then simpered for a few seconds, doe-eyed, before reluctantly walking back to the bar.
‘Well...what?’
‘What was the order of events? Heady marriage, fairy-tale honeymoon and then, lo and behold, no more money? Life can be cruel. And where was your brother when all this was happening?’
‘In America.’ She sighed.
‘By choice, even though he knew?’ With the family company haemorrhaging money, surely it would have been an indulgence for Oliver to have stayed in California, enjoying himself...
‘He didn’t know,’ Sophie said abruptly. ‘And I don’t know why...how all this is relevant.’
‘I’m fleshing out the picture,’ Javier said softly. ‘You’ve come to me with a begging bowl. What did you think I was going to do? Give you a big, comforting hug and write out a cheque?’
‘No, but...’
‘Let’s get one thing straight here, Sophie.’ He leant forward and held her gaze. She couldn’t have said a word even if she had wanted to. She could hardly breathe. ‘You’re here to ask a favour of me and, that being the case, whether you like it or not, you don’t get to choose what questions to answer and what questions to ignore. Your private life is your business. Frankly, I don’t give a damn. But I need to know your levels of capability when it comes to doing business. I need to know whether your brother is committed to working for the company, because if he was left to enjoy four years of playing sport in California, then I’m guessing he wouldn’t have returned to the sick fold with a cheerful whistle. Most of the directors of the company aren’t worth the money they’re being paid.’
‘You know how much they’re being paid!’
‘I know everything worth knowing about your crippled family company.’
‘When did you get so...so...hard?’
Roughly around the same time I discovered what sort of woman I’d been going out with, Javier thought with the sour taste of cynicism in his mouth.
He leant back and crossed his legs, lightly cradling the stem of the wine glass between his long fingers.
‘You don’t make money by being a sap for sob stories,’ he informed her coolly, keen eyes taking in the delicate bloom of colour in her cheeks. ‘You’ve come to me with a sob story.’ He shrugged. ‘And the bottom line is this—if you don’t like the direction this conversation is going, then, like I said before, you’re free to go. But of course, we both know you won’t, because you need me.’
He was enjoying this little game of going round the houses before he laid all his cards on the table, before she knew exactly what the terms and conditions of her repayment would be.
It wouldn’t hurt her to realise just how dangerously close the company was to imploding.
It wouldn’t hurt her to realise just how much she needed him...
‘If you knew about your husband’s hare-brained schemes and addiction to gambling, and you allowed it to go under the radar, then are you a trustworthy person to stand at the helm of your company?’
‘I told you that there was nothing I could do,’ she said with a dull flush.
