by Julia James
She sighed, not looking at him. ‘Improving, but still weak.’ She swallowed, taking a difficult breath. ‘I...I told her about my father.’
Luke’s expression tightened. ‘It will be hard for her—hard for you, too.’ He didn’t say any more.
Talia didn’t answer, only closed her eyes. A weariness so profound she could not fight it any longer was sweeping over her.
‘Why are you still here, Luke?’ she heard herself ask tightly. ‘I told you I didn’t want to see you again.’
She heard the engine change gear and felt the car swing round to the left, heading inland. Her eyes flew open. ‘This isn’t the way to the café!’
‘I know.’ Luke’s voice was grim. ‘I need to talk to you, Talia.’
‘There’s nothing to say!’ she cried. ‘Nothing I want to hear from you!’
In the intermittent lights of the street, his expression was as grim as his voice. ‘But there’s a lot I want to hear from you, Talia. And I am not leaving Spain until I have answers.’
He pressed the accelerator and the car shot forward, picking up speed. Talia realised they were leaving town, heading up into the hills inland. A knot was forming inside her, but there was nothing she could do. Wearily, she sank back into torpor. The desolation she had felt at her mother’s warning twisted inside her like snakes writhing.
The road started to wind, gaining height, and the outline of a mirador opened up before them. Luke slewed the car towards it, cut the engine. Far below the lights of the town pierced the night. Far beyond the sea glimmered beneath the rising moon.
He turned towards Talia. She wasn’t looking at him, only straight ahead, her face unreadable in the dim light.
‘I need to know, Talia, the answer to a very simple question.’ His breath incised into his lungs. ‘And you owe me an answer.’ His jaw tightened and in his chest he felt his heart starting to thud heavily. ‘Why did you leave me?’
Her head slewed round. Her face was expressionless. ‘I didn’t care for your offer, Luke.’
A frown flashed across his eyes. ‘You prefer skivvying in a café?’ There was open derision in his voice.
She gave no answer, and his expression twisted. Emotions were churning in him and he was fighting to keep them under control. He must not let them out—not until he had the answers he needed.
‘I didn’t care for your offer.’
Her words mocked him, echoing in his head.
So what offer did she want?
‘And why waitressing?’ he pushed. ‘Why not interior design?’ He paused, then said what he knew he had to say. ‘You’re good, Talia. Really good. I was wrong to think otherwise—your designs for the hotel are stunning, and I want to use them for the refurb.’
For a second—fleetingly—he thought he saw something move in her eyes, but then it was gone. The same closed, tight expression was back. He could see that her hands were clenched by her sides.
But why? None of this made sense—none of it!
The words broke from him suddenly. ‘None of this makes sense, Talia! Waiting tables when you could be using your talents—’
Something flashed across her face as her head whipped round. ‘Which talent are you referring to, Luke? My interior design skills or being good enough in bed to be your mistress?’
‘What?’ Now the flash of black fire was in his eyes, not hers.
Her expression contorted and, like a dam shattering under impossible pressure, her self-control broke. She could take no more of this.
‘You heard me. Tossing a ruby bracelet at me...telling me there was plenty more where that came from. What else did that make me but your mistress? Payment for services rendered.’
Luke’s hands clenched over the steering wheel, an oath escaping him. ‘That is not how I was thinking of you. I was simply trying to make it clear that I would look after you. That I understood—that I still do understand—just how hard it is for you without your father to look after you the way you’re used to...the way he always did. That I would take his place—’
A noise came from her—a harsh, ugly sound that had shock in it and something more, too.
Horror.
Her eyes were sparking fury, her cheekbones stark against suddenly hollow cheeks as the breath was sucked out of her.
Emotion was running like a black tide in him now, and it was unstoppable. He heard himself speaking again. The words bitten from him, each one as sharp as a dagger.
‘It’s taken me a long time, Talia, to forgive you for walking out on me after that first night without a word of explanation. Not until I discovered whose daughter you were did I understand why you’d walked. It took me a while to work out what I had to offer you to get you to be mine—the same luxury lifestyle you got from your father. That’s what you went running back to—why you left me. That was the choice you made, wasn’t it?’
She slewed round towards him, the suddenness of her movement cutting across him, and in her face was a fury that was like a blow across his cheek.
‘No, it was not! It was not the choice I made! The choice I made, Luke, was the choice I have had to make all my life!’
Her features convulsed, and her eyes were pinpoints of anger. They skewered him like daggers. Her hands were fisted and he saw her lift them and bring them down sharply, vehemently, on the dashboard.
‘You keep talking on and on about how I was a pampered princess, Daddy’s doted-on darling! Showered with designer clothes and jewellery, given some toy job to preen my inflated ego, given a free deluxe apartment to live in, a flash car to drive. Everything a spoiled little brat could ever want. Well, I was, Luke. Yes, I was a pampered princess. But I lived in a cage, Luke.’ Suddenly her voice was not vehement, but hollow, bleak. ‘In a cage that had bars of gold that my father had welded around me. And I hated it.’
His lips thinned. The black tide was still running.
‘You could have walked out, Talia, at any time. Made your own way in the world. You’re a talented designer—you could have done real work...work you could have been proud of. You’ve shown you can with your designs for the hotel. Why didn’t you have the guts to leave your gilded cage?’
She could hear the condemnation in his voice and a deadly familiar hollowness opened inside her. She let her hands fall limply to her lap again and slumped back in the seat. She ran a weary hand over her eyes. Tiredness ate at her. It broke her heart to be here with Luke, who was as harsh and as utterly uncomprehending as everyone else. He saw her the same way everyone else did.
Right from the very moment she’d walked into his office—when they’d both realised the coincidental connection between them—he had treated her as so much less than the person she knew she could be. The person she was in her heart—the one she wanted to be, tried to be. The person she thought he had seen that one incredible night when they had first met and again in their Caribbean paradise.
But all that time on the island this is what he thought of me. I worked so hard on my designs and he didn’t even look at them. He was just working out how to buy me, how to drape me in jewels and fly me in jets to exotic places so he could own me, control me, just like my father. I thought he was offering me freedom, but he was just building his own gilded cage around me.
He would not understand, and she hardly knew why she was bothering to say it—knew only that she might as well, because she was here, now, in this car with him, high above the Costas, looking down from afar. Below, in the town, her mother was in the hospital. In a day or so she would move her out to a nursing home, and then back to the tiny apartment above the café. And she would go on working—waiting on tables, mopping floors, and getting by.
Luke would be gone. Back to his own life—a rich man’s life that had nothing to do with her—and she would never see him again.
‘No, Luke, I didn’t have the guts to leave—just as you say.�
� She heard herself sigh, defeat in every word. ‘I only had the guts to stay.’
She didn’t bother looking at him. What would be the point of that?
‘I don’t understand...’
There was an audible frown in his voice so now she did turn her head to look at him. A great weariness of spirit weighed her down.
She heard her voice answering him...weary, defeated. ‘Luke, my father gave me everything, just like you said, but he made me pay for it. He made my mother pay, too. Oh, not in ways that anyone would notice, but we paid, all the same. We had to live our lives exactly as he wanted us to. We had to wear the clothes he wanted us to, live where he wanted, entertain the guests he wanted us to—had to be the ornaments in his hugely successful life that he wanted us to be. That was our purpose. To be his trophy wife and his trophy daughter.’
‘And you were happy to do that.’ Luke’s voice was flat. Condemning still.
She could not make out his face, not in the dim light of the car’s interior, but she knew it would have a closed, shuttered look on it. She should stop talking now, she knew, because he would not understand—could not understand. But she went on anyway.
‘No.’ A single word. And then. ‘But my mother was.’ She shut her eyes. ‘No one will ever understand, Luke, what goes on in the head of someone who is in thrall to a man who wants only to control every aspect of her life. I tried so hard, so often, to get her to see what my father was, but she kept blinding herself to it. My father knew it—knew I would never succeed, however much I longed to.’ Her voice became bitter. ‘And that became his way of controlling me, too. Because if I ever did anything that displeased him he would take it out on my mother. And then tell me that was what he had done. Any anger he had at her, from which she would flinch, and then make up endless pathetic justifications to excuse it, would be my fault! And if there was any attempt by me to break free of my cage, to exert my own will, my mother would suffer. My life was spent trying to reassure her, to soothe her jagged nerves, to calm her and support her—to protect her. I could never break free while she would be the one to suffer for it. And it takes courage to bear that, Luke. More than you know.’
Her eyes flashed open suddenly.
‘And then that one night, at that party, I dared to take a risk that I had taken only once before.’ Her face hardened now, with bitter memory. ‘The only time before I had ever dared have a romance of my own, my father meted out punishment for it. Oh, not to me—to the man. My father got him sacked from his job and ruined his reputation so he would never get another in the industry. And then he told me exactly what he’d done. So that I would never do it again. It was his way of controlling me.’
Her face was stark, her eyes bleak.
‘Even as you talked of escaping to the Caribbean I knew I could never take off with you, Luke. I couldn’t abandon my poor, helpless mother, and I couldn’t risk my father doing to you what he’d done to that young man. I knew nothing about you. I had no idea who you were. I knew only that you sported a fancy watch and stayed in an expensive hotel. But that would not have been enough to protect you from my father. His reach was long—he was a powerful man, and very, very rich.’
She gave a laugh—a hollow laugh that had no humour in it.
‘And all along—’ She took a ragged breath. ‘All along you were poised to take over Grantham Land. That was why I was deluged with desperate texts from my mother that morning! My father had disappeared off the face of the earth, and now, of course, I know why. Because you were about to finalise the acquisition of everything he possessed, reducing my mother and me to absolute penury. Penury that made me go begging to you, that made you think of me as you do.’ Her voice twisted with a savage bite. ‘That made you think that all I craved was to be your bejewelled and pampered bird in a cage.’
That hollow half-laugh broke from her again, then stopped abruptly. ‘How ironic does life get, Luke? Tell me that. You’ve turned out to be just another rich, ruthless bastard like my father!’
She heard an oath escape him in his native Greek. Its tone was harsh, crude, and ugly, though she could not understand its meaning. Then he was hurling words at her, in Greek and then in English, his eyes burning with a savage fire.
‘I am nothing like your father! Nothing like the man who killed my father!’
A razored intake of air seared Luke’s lungs like a heated blade. Emotion convulsed in him. He rounded on her, staring at her, but it was not Talia he was seeing. His gaze was into the past.
He began to talk.
‘My father owned a hotel—small, but beautiful. It had been his grandfather’s house, right by the sea, a haven of peace and tranquillity set in olive groves on an island in the Aegean. To my parents it was everything and they loved it dearly, dedicated their lives to it. But...’
His voice grew shadowed. ‘When I was a student, an earthquake hit and the hotel was badly damaged. They could not afford to restore it. So...’ He paused. ‘So when a wealthy investor—an Englishman—offered them financial help, they could not believe their good fortune.’
He paused again.
‘My parents were simple people. Naive in many ways. Dangerously so, you could say. They trusted this eager, enthusiastic Englishman and signed the paperwork he set in front of them, believing they had years to repay their debt out of future hotel profits. It seemed a fair deal.’
He could see Talia’s expression changing. He went on remorselessly.
‘But your father did not believe in fair dealing. What he believed in was profit—made any way he could. And what he saw in my parents’ place was not a small boutique hotel but the valuable land it stood on—shoreline, beachfront.’ He paused yet again. ‘Ripe for development.’
Luke’s mouth twisted.
‘You won’t need me to spell out what was on the paperwork that my parents so gratefully signed—a contract giving your father total control over the rest of the land. It let him bring in chainsaws to demolish the olive groves, bulldozers to flatten the terrain, teams of construction workers to build a massive high-rise monstrosity of a hotel right beside my parents’ hotel, dwarfing it, destroying all its charm, its beauty. It was ruined financially for ever. And then, when my parents were unable to repay any of the money he’d lent them, he simply foreclosed on them. He took everything from them. Everything.’
He realised his hands were still clenched around the wheel, as if moulded to it. Forcibly, he lifted his fingers away, flexing them. He looked away from her, out at the coastline far below.
‘Do you know the reason I knew how to do CPR on your mother? Because I made myself learn.’
His voice had changed again, and in it was something that struck fear into Talia,
‘I had to watch my own father collapse and die of a heart attack in front of my eyes because of what your father had done to him. Your father caused his death as surely as if he’d plunged a knife into his chest himself.’
His head snaked to face Talia.
‘Your father was doomed the day I buried mine. I vowed to ruin him, to bring him down. And, yes, the night of that party was the very night I’d finally acquired the means to do so. After ten gruelling years of turning myself from student to tycoon, forcing myself to build the fortune I knew I’d need to destroy him, I finally acquired a sufficient shareholding to take over Grantham Land.’
For a long moment Talia was silent. Then she spoke with a heaviness that was crushing her. ‘I walked back that morning into a cage that was no longer there. But I did not know it.’
He didn’t answer. The silence between them stretched. Then, ‘And if you had known it?’
His voice was so low she could scarcely hear it. She shut her eyes. They were hot suddenly, and burning, and she could not bear that either.
‘What does it matter, Luke?’
The weariness was in her bones. To know that Luke had been as much
a victim of her father as she had been, that he had wreaked havoc on his parents’ lives as he had on so many other lives, could make no difference.
‘What does it matter?’ she said again. ‘Any more than it matters why I walked out of the gilded cage you offered me in the Caribbean!’
Her hands convulsed in her lap.
‘I thought I had been given a second chance out there on the island with you. I knew that wherever my father was he would not be coming back—and that meant my mother and I were penniless. But it also meant that I could take my chance of finding happiness.’ Her voice was sad as she stared down at her hands. ‘Discovering what you thought of me ripped that stupid illusion from me.’
She made herself look at him. Forced herself. It hurt to do so, and not just because of the pain that she was fighting to ignore pricking behind her eyes. It hurt to see the planes of his face, the hard edge of his jaw, the deep darkness of his eyes that had no expression in them at all as he met her gaze.
Something cried out inside her, but she tamped it down. ‘I’m sorry, Luke,’ she said, her voice still heavy. ‘I’m sorry that I am the daughter of the man who did so much harm to you. I’m sorry I abandoned you that first morning after the party. I’m sorry I don’t want to be your mistress. I’m sorry—’
She broke off. His hand had shot out and crushed down on hers, silencing her. Greek broke from him again, vehement and urgent.
‘Thee mou, do you think I wanted you to be a pampered princess who expected a life of luxury? Corrupted by your father’s wealth so that you’d crave it in any man you might choose to replace him with?’ He took a ragged, scissored breath. ‘Don’t you know what I want? What I have wanted from the moment I set eyes on you?’
He closed his other hand around hers, lifting it to his cheek. His fingers were warm around hers but her hand lay still, as if paralysed. The same paralysis held her motionless, stilling the breath in her lungs, the set of her gaze on his face.
‘I knew I shouldn’t want you—not after you walked out on me that morning. Not after you revealed yourself as the daughter of my enemy. Not after you begged me to let you keep the villa in Marbella that I thought you felt entitled to. Not after I succumbed to the temptation to take you to the Caribbean, telling myself it was to make you work and earn the right to stay on in the villa.’
