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‘Congratulations. You both provided a touchingly united front. I find that I barely know a single personal thing about either of you and it’s dawning on me that the few details you’ve imparted have probably been a tissue of lies—starting with where you live. It would have saved time and effort if I’d employed a detective to ferret out whatever background information was necessary.’
‘Maria thought that—’
‘Do me a favour. Keep my niece out of this. You live in a dump, which you rent from an unscrupulous landlord. You can barely afford the rent. Tell me, do either of you hold down jobs, or were those fabrications as well?’
‘I resent you barging into my house.’
‘Mr Cholmsey’s house—if you can call it a house.’
‘Fine! I still resent you barging in here and insulting me.’
‘Tough.’
‘In fact, I’m asking you to leave!’
At that, Luiz burst out laughing. ‘Do you really think that I’ve come all the way here so that I can leave the second the questioning gets a little too uncomfortable for you?’
‘Well, I don’t see the point of you hanging around. Mark and Maria aren’t here.’
‘I’ve come because, like I said, things have moved up a gear. It seems that there’s now talk of marriage. It’s not going to do.’
‘Talk of marriage?’ Aggie parroted incredulously. ‘There’s no talk of marriage.’
‘At least, none that your brother’s told you about. Maybe the touching united front isn’t quite as united as you’d like it to be.’
‘You…you are just the most awful human being I’ve ever met!’
‘I think you’ve made that glaringly clear on all the occasions that we’ve met,’ Luiz remarked coolly. ‘You’re entitled to your opinions.’
‘So you came here to…what? Warn my brother off? Warn Maria off? They might be young but they’re not under age.’
‘Maria comes from one of the richest families in Latin America.’
‘I beg your pardon?’ Aggie looked at him in confusion. Yes, of course she had known that Maria was not the usual hand-to-mouth starving student working the tills on the weekend to help pay for her tuition fees. But one of the richest families in Latin America? No wonder she had not been in favour of either of them letting on that they were just normal people struggling to get by on a day-to-day basis!
‘You’re kidding, right?’
‘When it comes to money, I lose my sense of humour.’ Luiz abruptly sat forward, elbows resting on his thighs, and looked at her unsmilingly. ‘I hadn’t planned on taking a hard line, but I’m beginning to do the maths and I don’t like the results I’m coming up with.’
Aggie tried and failed to meet his dark, intimidating stare. Why was it that whenever she was in this man’s company her usual unflappability was scattered to the four corners? She was reduced to feeling too tight in her skin, too defensive and too self-conscious. Which meant that she could barely think straight.
‘I have no idea what you’re talking about,’ she muttered, staring at her linked fingers while her heart rate sped up and her mouth went dry.
‘Wealthy people are often targets,’ Luiz gritted, spelling it out in clear syllables just in case she chose to miss the message. ‘My niece is extremely wealthy and will be even wealthier when she turns twenty-one. Now it appears that the dalliance I thought would peter out after a couple of months has turned into a marriage proposal.’
‘I still can’t believe that. You’ve got your facts wrong.’
‘Believe it! And what I’m seeing are a couple of fortune hunters who have lied about their circumstances to try and throw me off course.’
Aggie blanched and stared at him miserably. Those small white fibs had assumed the proportions of mountains. Her brain felt sluggish but already she could see why he would have arrived at the conclusion that he had.
Honest people didn’t lie.
‘Tell me…is your brother really a musician? Because I’ve looked him up online and, strangely enough, I can’t find him anywhere.’
‘Of course he’s a musician! He…he plays in a band.’
‘And I’m guessing this band hasn’t made it big yet…hence his lack of presence on the Internet.’
‘Okay! I give up! So we may have…have…’
‘Tampered with the truth? Stretched it? Twisted it to the point where it became unrecognisable?’
‘Maria said that you’re very black-and-white.’ Aggie stuck her chin up and met his frowning stare. Now, as had happened before, she marvelled that such sinful physical beauty, the sort of beauty that made people think of putting paint to canvas, could conceal such a cold, ruthless, brutally dispassionate streak.
‘Me? Black-and-white?’ Luiz was outraged at this preposterous assumption. ‘I’ve never heard anything so ridiculous in my entire life!’
‘She said that you form your opinions and you stick to them. You never look outside the box and allow yourself to be persuaded into another direction.’
‘That’s called strength of character!’
‘Well, that’s why we weren’t inclined to be one hundred percent truthful. Not that we lied…
‘We just didn’t reveal as much as we could have.’
‘Such as you live in a rented dump, your brother sings in pubs now and again and you are a teacher—or was that another one of those creative exaggerations?’
‘Of course I’m a teacher. I teach primary school. You can check up on me if you like!’
‘Well that’s now by the by. The fact is, I cannot allow any marriage to take place between my niece and your brother.’
‘So you’re going to do what, exactly?’ Aggie was genuinely bewildered. It was one thing to disapprove of someone else’s choices. It was quite another to force them into accepting what you chose to cram down their throat. Luiz, Maria’s mother, every single member of their super-wealthy family, for that matter, could rant, storm, wring their hands and deliver threatening lectures—but at the end of the day Maria was her own person and would make up her own mind.
She tactfully decided not to impart that point of view. He claimed that he wasn’t black-and-white but she had seen enough evidence of that to convince her that he was. He also had no knowledge whatsoever of how the other half lived. In fact, she doubted that he had ever even come into contact with people who weren’t exactly like him, until she and Mark had come along.
‘Look.’ She relented slightly as another point of view pushed its way through her self-righteous anger. ‘I can understand that you might harbour one or two reservations about my brother…’
‘Can you?’ Luiz asked with biting sarcasm.
Right now he was kicking himself for not having taken a harder look at the pair of them. He was usually as sharp as they came when other people and their motivations were involved. He had had to be. So how had they managed to slip through the net?
Her brother was disingenuous, engaging, apparently open. He looked like the kind of guy who could hold his own with anyone—tall, muscular, with the same shade of blonde hair as his sister but tied back in a ponytail; when he spoke, his voice was low and gentle.
And Agatha—so stunningly pretty that anyone could be forgiven for staring. But, alongside that, she had also been forthright and opinionated. Was that what had taken him in—the combination of two very different personalities? Had they cunningly worked off each other to throw him off-guard? Or had he just failed to take the situation seriously because he hadn’t thought the boy’s relationship with his niece would ever come to anything? Luisa was famously protective of Maria. Had he just assumed that her request for him to keep an eye out had been more of the same?
At any rate, they had now been caught out in a tangle of lies and that, to his mind, could mean only one thing.
The fact that he’d been a fool for whatever reason was something he would have to live with, but it stuck in his throat.
‘And I know how it must look…that we weren’t completely open with you. But you have to believe me when I tell you that you have nothing to fear.’
‘Point one—fear is an emotion that’s alien to me. Point two—I don’t have to believe anything you say, which brings me to your question.’
‘My question?’
‘You wondered what I intended to do about this mess.’
Aggie felt her hackles rise, as they invariably did on the occasions when she had met him, and she made a valiant effort to keep them in check.
‘So you intend to warn my brother off,’ she said on a sigh.
‘Oh, I intend to do much better than that,’ Luiz drawled, watching the faint colour in her cheeks and thinking that she was a damn good actress. ‘You look as though you could use some money, and I suspect your brother could as well. You have a landlord baying down your neck for unpaid rent.’
‘I paid!’ Aggie insisted vigorously. ‘It’s not my fault that there’s a postal strike!’
‘And whatever you earn as a teacher,’ Luiz continued, not bothering to give her protest house room, ‘It obviously isn’t enough to scrape by. Face it, if you can’t afford the rent for a dump like this, then it’s pretty obvious that neither of you has a penny to rub together. So my offer to get your brother off the scene and out of my niece’s life should put a big smile on your face. In fact, I would go so far as to say that it should make your Christmas.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
Those big blue eyes, Luiz thought sourly. They had done a damn good job of throwing him off the scent.
‘I’m going to give you and your brother enough money to clear out of this place. You’ll each be able to afford to buy somewhere of your own, live the high life, if that’s what takes your fancy. And I suspect it probably is…’
‘You’re going to pay us off? To make us disappear?’
‘Name your price. And naturally your brother can name his. No one has ever accused me of not being a generous man. And on the subject of your brother…when exactly is he due back?’ He looked pointedly at his watch and then raised his eyes to her flushed, angry face. She was perched on the very edge of her chair, ramrod-erect, and her knuckles were white where her fingers were biting into the padded seat. She was the very picture of outrage.
‘I can’t believe I’m hearing this.’
‘I’m sure you’ll find it remarkably easy to adjust to the thought.’
‘You can’t just buy people off!’
‘No? Care to take a small bet on that?’ His eyes were as hard and as cold as the frost gathering outside. ‘Doubtless your brother wishes to further his career, if he’s even interested in a career. Maybe he’d just like to blow some money on life’s little luxuries. Doubtless he ascertained my niece’s financial status early on in the relationship and between the two of you you decided that she was your passport to a more lucrative lifestyle. It now appears that he intends to marry her and thereby get his foot through the door, so to speak, but that’s not going to happen in a million years. So when you say that I can’t buy people off? Well, I think you’ll find that I can.’
Aggie stared at him open-mouthed. She felt as though she was in the presence of someone from another planet. Was this how the wealthy behaved, as though they owned everything and everyone? As though people were pieces on a chess board to be moved around on a whim and disposed of without scruple? And why was she so surprised when she had always known that he was ruthless, cold-hearted and single-minded?
‘Mark and Maria love each other! That must have been obvious to you.’
‘I’m sure Maria imagines herself in love. She’s young. She doesn’t realise that love is an illusion. And we can sit around chatting all evening, but I still need to know when he’ll be here. I want to get this situation sorted as soon as possible.’
‘He won’t.’
‘Come again?’
‘I mean,’ Aggie ventured weakly, because she knew that the bloodless, heartless man in front of her wasn’t going to warm to what she was about to tell him, ‘he and Maria decided to have a few days away. A spur-of-the-moment thing. A little pre-Christmas break…’
‘Tell me I’m not hearing this.’
‘They left yesterday morning.’
She started as he vaulted upright without warning and began pacing the room, his movements restless and menacing.
‘Left to go where?’ It was a question phrased more like a demand. ‘And don’t even think of using your looks to pull a fast one.’
‘Using my looks?’ Aggie felt hot colour crawl into her face. While she had been sitting there in those various restaurants, feeling as awkward and as colourless as a sparrow caught up in a parade of peacocks, had he been looking at her, assessing what she looked like? That thought made her feel weirdly unsteady.
‘Where have they gone?’ He paused to stand in front of her and Aggie’s eyes travelled up—up along that magnificent body sheathed in clothes that looked far too expensive and far too hand-made for their surroundings—until they settled on the forbidding angles of his face. She had never met someone who exuded threat and power the way he did, and who used that to his advantage.
‘I don’t have to give you that information,’ she said stoutly and tried not to quail as his expression darkened.
‘I really wouldn’t play that game with me if I were you, Agatha.’
‘Or else what?’
‘Or else I’ll make sure that your brother finds himself without a job in the foreseeable future. And the money angle? Off the cards.’
‘You can’t do that. I mean, you can’t do anything to ruin his musical career.’
‘Oh no? Please don’t put that to the test.’
Aggie hesitated. There was such cool certainty in his voice that she had no doubt that he really would make sure her brother lost his job if she didn’t comply and tell him what he wanted.
‘Okay. They’ve gone to a little country hotel in the Lake District,’ she imparted reluctantly. ‘They wanted a romantic, snowed-in few days, and that part of the world has a lot of sentimental significance for us.’ Her bag was on the ground next to her. She reached in, rummaged around and extracted a sheet of paper, confirmation of their booking. ‘He gave me this, because it’s got all the details in case I wanted to get in touch with him.’
‘The Lake District. They’ve gone to the Lake District.’ He raked his fingers through his hair, snatched the paper from her and wondered if things could get any worse. The Lake District was not exactly a hop and skip away. Nor was it a plane-ride away. He contemplated the prospect of spending hours behind the wheel of his car in bad driving conditions on a search-and-rescue mission for his sister—because if they were thinking of getting married on the sly, what better time or place? Or else doing battle with the public transport system which was breaking under the weight of the bad weather. He eliminated the public-transport option without hesitation. Which brought him back to the prospect of hours behind the wheel of his car.
‘You make it sound as though they’ve taken a trip to the moon. Well, I guess you’ll want to give Maria a call…I’m not sure there’s any mobile-phone service there, though. In fact, there isn’t. You’ll have to phone through to the hotel and get them to transfer you. She can reassure you that they’re not about to take a walk down the aisle.’ Aggie wondered how her brother was going to deal with Luiz when Luiz waved a wad of notes in front of him and told him to clear off or else. Mark, stupidly, actually liked the man, and stuck up for him whenever Aggie happened to mention how much he got on her nerves.
Not her problem. She struggled to squash her instinctive urge to look out for him. She and Mark had been a tight unit since they were children, when their mother had died and, in the absence of any father, or any relatives for that matter, they had been put into care. Younger by four years, he had been a sickly child, debilitated by frequent asthma attacks. Like a surrogate mother hen, she had learnt to take care of him and to put his needs ahead of her own. She had gained strength, allowing him the freedom to be the gentle, dreamy child who had matured into a gentle, dreamy adult—despite his long hair, his earring and the tattoo on his shoulder which seemed to announce a different kind of person.
‘Well, now that you know where they are, I guess you’ll be leaving.’
Luiz, looking at her down-bent head, pondered this sequence of events. Missing niece. Missing boyfriend. Long trip to locate them.
‘I don’t know why I didn’t see this coming,’ he mused. ‘Having a few days away would be the perfect opportunity for your brother to seal the deal. Maybe my presence on the scene alerted him to the fact that time wouldn’t be on his side when it came to marrying my niece. Maybe he figured that the courtship would have to be curtailed and the main event brought forward…a winter wedding. Very romantic.’
‘That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard!’
‘I’d be surprised if you didn’t say that. Well, it’s not going to happen. We’ll just have to make sure that we get to that romantic hideaway and surprise them before they have time to do anything regrettable.’
‘We?’
Luiz looked at her with raised eyebrows. ‘Well, you don’t imagine that I’m going to go there on my own and leave you behind so that you can get on the phone and warn your brother of my impending arrival, do you?’
‘You’re crazy! I’m not going anywhere with you, Luiz Montes!’
‘It’s not ideal timing, and I can’t say that I haven’t got better things to do on a Friday evening, but I can’t see a way out of it. I anticipate we’ll be there by tomorrow lunchtime, so you’ll have to pack enough for a weekend and make it quick. I’ll need to get back to my place so that I can throw some things in a bag.’
