Billionaire's Baby of Redemption

by Michelle Smart

  She had read it thoroughly in front of him, asked for a pen and signed it. She hadn’t argued any of it. She had signed it knowing she would get nothing else from him.

  He’d been testing her. He’d been prepared to give her much more but she hadn’t asked.

  Damn Freya to hell for trying to poison her against him. He had been straight down the line with Freya and she repaid him like this?

  He had to give Sophie credit for not simply calling Freya and demanding the details.

  If she was prepared to hear him out then he could meet her halfway.

  ‘Benjamin thinks Luis and I owe him two hundred and twenty-five million euros in profit from the Tour Mont Blanc project,’ he said heavily. ‘When a judge threw his case out of court, he refused to accept it. He stole Freya from me in revenge.’

  ‘Why did he refuse to accept it?’

  ‘He won’t accept responsibility for his own actions. He didn’t read the contract. If he had read it he would have seen his share of the profit had been changed from twenty per cent to five per cent. That was on the advice of our lawyer.’

  She didn’t say anything for the longest time. ‘They say money is the root of all evil and it really is.’

  ‘They are wrong. Evil is the root of all evil.’ His father had been evil. He’d been charming when he’d wanted to be but his malevolence had never been far from the surface.

  ‘But you were friends with Benjamin since you were babies. All those years and all those memories thrown away for cash.’ She shrugged and gave a sad smile.

  ‘Sentimentality does not pay the bills,’ he told her roughly.

  His and Luis’s friendship with Benjamin had been foisted on them by their mothers. The two women had deliberately conceived their children at the same time so they could raise them together. Benjamin’s mother had been Javier’s mother’s personal costume maker; mother and son accompanying them on all Clara’s tours around the world, the boys expected to get along and play together.

  ‘I get that,’ Sophie said with a sigh, ‘but...’

  ‘If you show weakness in life then people learn they can walk all over you.’

  ‘But he was your friend. Why didn’t he read the contract? Didn’t he know the terms had been changed?’

  ‘You would have to ask him that.’

  ‘I’m asking you. You’re the one who took the injunction out.’

  ‘We took it because he’d become emotional and unpredictable and would not listen to reason. He threatened to destroy us.’

  He remembered clearly Benjamin’s shouted threats that had ricocheted like a bullet in the courtroom and the rage on his face.

  Javier and Luis had filed the injunction immediately, both certain Benjamin’s threats would be acted on and that the consequences would be disastrous for them.

  If the world believed the Casillas brothers could rip off their closest friend, who would ever trust them in business again?

  Sophie winced and drew her knees up to her chest, wrapping her arms around them. ‘Where did all his anger come from? Please, don’t think I’m not listening, I’m just trying to understand. Freya had no fears about marrying you even though you have a fearsome reputation and I’m trying to understand why her opinion towards you has shifted so completely.’

  ‘Benjamin has poisoned her towards me.’ And if he and Luis hadn’t slapped the injunction to stop him talking about the soured business deal he would have poisoned the world against them too. Benjamin’s actions in stealing Freya had almost succeeded in doing that for him but they had ridden the storm of malicious press as a united force, right until Luis had turned his back on thirty-five years of brotherhood to be with Benjamin’s sister.

  Chloe Guillem had stolen Luis’s loyalty in a way her brother had never been able to do.

  The destruction of the friendship lay not at the feet of the Casillas brothers. They hadn’t put a gun to Benjamin’s forehead and made him sign. He’d had five hours to read the contract and get back to them if the terms were not to his liking and, sure, it had been argued in court, by Benjamin, that they had known he’d been preoccupied that day but, as Javier had counter-argued, that meant Benjamin should have given the contract to his lawyer to read for him. That was what lawyers were for.

  ‘Freya knows her own mind,’ Sophie stated with certainty. ‘She never listens to gossip.’

  ‘If you think so much of her opinion then why are you still here?’ he bit back.

  ‘She’s just being protective.’

  ‘Why? Does she not think you know your own mind?’

  ‘No, it’s just the nature of our friendship. We’ve looked out for each other since ballet school.’

  Grabbing at the change of direction in a conversation that was making his brain burn and his skin feel as if it had needles poking in it, Javier sat up. ‘You two are an unlikely friendship.’

  Freya was cold and driven; Sophie warm and open.

  She tightened her hold around her knees. ‘I know, but the differences weren’t so pronounced when we were kids. She was amazingly talented, even back then, and it was obvious to everyone that she was a dancer who would set the world alight but when we first met she was incredibly shy and insecure. She comes across as cold but that’s because she had to be to get through school. She was really badly bullied, especially that first term.’

  ‘Were you a part of it?’

  But he knew the answer to that before she shook her head in denial.

  He doubted Sophie was capable of bullying a dormouse.

  ‘God no. I just felt sorry for her. She was this scared little thing, away from home for the first time, from a poor background when everyone else came from families with money. She was admitted on a full scholarship, which was incredibly rare—I mean, I only got in because my parents paid the fees.’

  ‘Your family has money?’ Her parents didn’t have the moneyed air about them that most rich people had.

  ‘Not as much as most of the other girls had but my parents would have lived in a shed if it meant me going to ballet school. Luckily it didn’t come to that,’ she added, rubbing her chin on her knee.

  ‘You weren’t scared, being away from home yourself?’

  ‘I’d already built a resilience. Freya had to build hers. She had the talent—my God, did she have the talent—but it was a tough time for her. The other girls hated her. It was jealousy, pure and simple.’

  ‘You were not jealous yourself?’

  ‘I was definitely envious but not jealous.’

  ‘Is there a difference?’ Javier remembered his mother once telling him sharply to stop being jealous of Luis and Benjamin’s friendship when she’d caught him sitting on his own, scowling as he’d watched them plot ways to put itching powder in the corps de ballet costumes.

  She hadn’t understood that he was watching over Luis, ready to step in if things went too far.

  Benjamin had brought Luis’s worst instincts out in him. They’d egged each other on in their troublemaking, leaving Javier to cover for their messes as best he could, terrified his father would hear and mete out punishment.

  Their father had needed little excuse to punish Luis.

  Had Javier been jealous of Luis and Benjamin’s friendship as his mother had accused?

  No, he assured himself. He’d been looking out for his brother.

  Every mark their father had made on Luis’s body Javier had felt as if it had been delivered on his own skin.

  ‘Sure there’s a difference,’ she answered with a rueful smile. ‘I would have loved to dance as well as Freya did but I would never hate her for it. I felt so sorry for her and the way those mean girls treated her that I wanted to protect her. I became her shadow. The poor thing couldn’t get rid of me.’

  ‘You weren’t worried they would turn their cruelty on you?’

  ‘It
didn’t cross my mind and I wouldn’t have cared if they did. I could never sit back and watch someone suffer if it was in my power to help them.’

  ‘What are you, some kind of saint?’

  Her answering laugh was as mocking as his words. ‘Hardly.’

  Maybe not a saint, he thought, gazing at her, noting for the first time that she had not met his eyes once since getting on the bed, but there was an inherent goodness about his new wife.

  His heart thumped loudly against his ribcage as the strangest impulse to gather this beautiful, compassionate creature into his arms filled him.

  He closed his eyes and breathed deeply, willing the impulse away, not knowing where it had come from, just knowing that nothing good could come from it, not for her, pampered and cosseted all her life as she had been.

  It was easy to be a good person, he thought scathingly, when you’d known nothing but love and indulgence in your life.

  What troubles had his wife had? Not being the best dancer in the school was the extent of it and that wasn’t something that had bothered her, strange though the concept of a professional dancer happy to settle for being less than the best was to him. Even their unplanned baby she considered to be a blessing.

  The harsh, cruel realities of the world had never touched Sophie on a personal level. She had only ever observed it, had no concept of what it was like to feel it and live it.

  He quite understood why Freya had felt compelled to warn her of him. Look at her, sitting there, not caring of the danger she was in just to share a bed with him.

  She wanted to know why Freya and Benjamin hated him so much? He would tell her. Let her eyes be opened by the truth.

  ‘Benjamin hates us because we approached him for the investment in the Tour Mont Blanc project on the day his mother’s cancer was diagnosed as terminal.’

  Now her eyes did rise to meet his.

  ‘He doesn’t just believe we ripped him off but believes we took advantage of him,’ he added for good measure.

  ‘And did you?’ she asked with a whisper.

  ‘We did not rip him off.’ Of that he was vehement.

  ‘What about taking advantage of him? Did you?’

  ‘Not deliberately. We’d paid the seller of the land a huge deposit. He then came to us and gave us twenty hours to pay the remainder or he would sell to another interested buyer. We didn’t have the ready cash for it, so we asked Benjamin if he wanted to invest. Neither Luis nor myself were aware that Benjamin had just received that diagnosis. He’d been minutes from calling us with the news. His mother had been best friends with our mother.’

  Their friendship had seen the two women raise their children as family. When Javier and Luis’s mother had been killed, Louise Guillem had been the one to break the news to them. Afterwards, she had taken them under her wing as much as she could.

  Javier had felt little in the way of emotion since his mother’s death but when he’d carried Louise’s coffin he’d felt the weight in his heart as on his shoulder.

  ‘He signed the contract that same day?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Thinking he would receive twenty per cent of the profit?’

  ‘Yes. I didn’t know he hadn’t read it until after it was signed.’

  ‘You didn’t warn him?’

  ‘Why should I have done? I thought he would read it or get his lawyer to.’

  ‘That’s cold.’

  ‘Just starting to realise that, are you?’ he mocked. Let her see the truth because so far she’d seemed determined to keep herself blind. ‘Business is business. He didn’t have to say yes to the investment.’

  ‘So you did take advantage of him.’

  ‘Not initially and not deliberately. When I realised he hadn’t read the contract my feelings on the matter were simple; it was his own fault. It was business, not personal.’

  ‘But Benjamin doesn’t see it like that,’ she supposed, rightly. ‘And I would guess that he wouldn’t have entertained the idea of doing any business that day if it hadn’t been you and your brother doing the asking.’

  ‘Maybe he wouldn’t have but he did. Do not forget, Benjamin made seventy-five million euros in profit on that investment. He has been handsomely rewarded.’

  ‘But not as handsomely rewarded as he’d thought he would be.’

  ‘If he’d read the contract he would have seen the terms had been changed. If he’d been unhappy about that he could have negotiated.’

  ‘If you didn’t warn him the terms had changed he didn’t know to read it. He trusted you.’

  The stab in his guts at this truth hit him hard.

  He refused to let it take hold, just as he’d resisted it for seven years.

  He allowed no room for sentimentality in his life, never mind his business, and he would not allow Sophie’s soft chastisement to breach that.

  Throwing the covers off, Javier climbed out of bed and grabbed his boxer shorts off the floor. ‘Trust should not have come into it. Not with business. I would never sign a contract without reading it first, no matter who presented it to me.’

  ‘You were not in his shoes. Couldn’t you have made an allowance on this occasion? For his state of mind about his mother? Torn the contract up and renegotiated?’

  ‘No one made allowances for me after my father killed my mother.’

  Even under the dim hue of the bedside light he saw her face drain of colour.

  Good. She needed to wake up to the truth.

  He was his father’s son, his father’s favourite, his father’s mirror image inside and out.

  Shaking his trousers out first, he pulled them up. ‘Luis and I had to fight to get the business world to take us seriously, to get credit, to get investment...we’ve had to fight for everything. We live with the legacy of our mother’s death every day of our lives and if that has made me cold and ruthless then so be it. It’s called survival, something you with your unicorn-and-rainbow-filled childhood know nothing about. I warned you of the man I am, so go ahead, judge me and condemn me, but understand your condemnation means nothing to me.’

  Turning his back on Sophie’s white, shocked face, he stormed out of the bedroom and headed down to the basement, to his gym, intent on nothing more than pounding the crap out of his punching bag.

  Dios, everything inside him felt as if it were being ripped in a hundred different directions by vicious hands.

  She had wanted the truth and he’d given it to her.

  He’d warned her before they married. He’d kept his distance since she’d moved in. He’d arranged their wedding to be as sparse as it could be. He’d made love to her with a detachment that had been brutal but none of it had been enough.

  Sophie saw the world through eyes set to a different filter from his own.

  Listening to her relate how she’d willingly put herself in the bullies’ firing line to protect and support Freya and stop her feeling alone had hit a strong nerve in him.

  She touched him in ways that were dangerous and Freya had been completely right that she needed protecting from him.

  He was his father’s son!

  He’d wanted her to see him for who he truly was, see the monster that lived inside him, never have her rest her hands on him and look at him with those eyes in the way she had again.

  He never again wanted to look into her eyes and feel as if she were reaching down into his soul...

  He sensed rather than heard movement behind him.

  Lowering his hands from the punching bag he’d been battering, he turned.

  Sophie was standing in the doorway, a glass of water in her hand and an apprehensive look on her face.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  IN THAT MOMENT, standing in the doorway of Javier’s gym, Sophie glimpsed the anger and pain resonating from his eyes and knew she had made the right
decision to come to him.

  For the second time in one night she had found courage she’d never known she possessed.

  His revelations about his treatment of Benjamin had shocked her to her core but not, she suspected, for the reasons he’d wanted her to be shocked.

  There had been fleeting remorse when she had questioned him about the contract. Only fleeting, but she had seen it.

  Javier wanted her to hate him, she’d realised as she’d sat frozen on the empty bed.

  He hated himself.

  When he’d looked at her and made the cutting comment about his father killing his mother...

  It had been a veiled warning to her that had suddenly made sense of everything: his distance, his solitary life, his brusqueness...

  Javier had built the steel heart to protect himself, believing he was protecting others from himself.

  Was it coincidence that he didn’t drink?

  His father had been a violent alcoholic whose drunken outbursts and hair-trigger temper had seen an early, ignominious end to his dance career.

  By contrast, his mother’s career had soared. Today, over twenty years after her death, she was still regarded as one the most dazzling ballerinas to have graced the world’s stages.

  Clara Casillas’s dazzling star had been snuffed out when her husband had locked her in her dressing room after she’d performed in Romeo & Juliet and strangled her with his bare hands. Javier and his twin had been thirteen.

  What kind of life had they had with a father like that, even before he’d so cruelly taken their mother’s life?

  It twisted her heart to imagine the cruelty Javier had been on the receiving end of and witness to.

  His heart had been so damaged that he’d remorselessly used his oldest friend to his own advantage and cut his own twin from his life.

  If she had any sense she would cut and run, flee from this beautiful villa and keep running as far as she could from him.

  But how could she do that and live with her conscience?

  Javier was trying to protect her from himself. That in itself proved the father of her child was not irredeemable.