‘Does that make you react?’ Rafael asked softly. His posture was relaxed but his gaze, fixed on her flushed face, was intent and watchful.
‘What? I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘Oh, yes, you do. The memory of us…in bed…don’t you want to know why I’ve come over to London?’
‘No. And I don’t care.’
‘I couldn’t get you out of my head,’ Rafael confessed.
Amy snorted. ‘You mean after you dismissed me without a backward glance?’ She had an embarrassing recollection of asking him, on her point of departure, whether they might try and prolong their relationship. Remembered just as clearly his immediate, negative response.
‘I wasn’t on the lookout for a relationship with someone from this country.’ He thought of Elizabeth. ‘Or any country, for that matter,’ he added.
‘Oh, stop pretending, Rafael. You weren’t on the lookout for a relationship with me. Do you remember telling me that I was out of James’s league? Well, face it, you could have added your name to the category.’ She heard the hard edge in her voice with dismay. Never before had she been bitter. She just wasn’t a bitter person. At least, not until now.
She badly wanted to talk to someone in her family. One of her sisters. Or brothers.
She needed a familiar voice to tell her that she was going to be just fine.
‘You were out of his league because James only looks at a certain type of woman. Call it lack of imagination on his part.’
‘And you were imaginative enough to seduce me even though I wasn’t your type.’
Too much talking. That had been the problem. Conversation with past girlfriends had been skin deep and work related. It seemed that he had done way too much talking with Amy. Had he really told her that she wasn’t his type? Unfortunately it sounded horribly probable. One of those passing remarks to establish that he wasn’t in the market for commitment. And she had listened and filed away the remark for future reference. She was a very good listener, he realised belatedly. He wondered what else might be brought up in evidence of his exploitative, horrible character.
‘Obviously I don’t…’ Rafael, caught fully on the back foot for the first time in his life, was literally stuck for words. He scowled and stood up so that he could prowl the room. He needed movement.
‘Don’t what?’
‘Don’t date women who are clones of one another.’ Well, actually, he did.
‘I don’t believe you. I think…do you know what I think?’
‘I think we should put the past behind us and focus on the now. The now that brought me over here. Because you’ve been on my mind night and day since you left. Do you think I would have come over if you hadn’t been? Do you think I would have put myself through this if I hadn’t realised how much I still want you?’
Interrupted in mid-sentence, Amy could only stare at him. Yes, he wanted her and want was a very powerful thing, but what she heard wasn’t a man who was open to the possibility of a relationship. What she heard was a man who had found himself denied a possession he desired and had decided to do something about it. Rafael Vives, even in his role of so-called gardener, was a man who would always do something about getting what he wanted.
‘And what are you expecting now?’ Amy asked quietly. ‘Now that you’ve put yourself through all this?’
‘I don’t know what I expect…’He had known up until she had laid into him like a ton of bricks. Now he just knew what he wanted. ‘But what I want is for you to give this a chance…’
‘By which I guess you mean we should head up to the nearest bedroom, rip each other’s clothes off and make love. If you were so desperate for my wonderful company, why did it take you so long to work your way over to England?’
‘I needed to try…to get you out of my system…’ For Rafael, that was an almighty admission. Since he had never had any woman in his system, he had never had to try to get any woman out of it. Just confessing to the weakness made him feel exposed.
What Amy heard was the statement of a man who had tried all right…tried to do what he sensibly wanted to do, which would have been to forget her because she was, face it, inappropriate. As inappropriate for him as she had been for his brother. His half- brother, as he kept pointing out, as though it made the slightest bit of difference. She had listened to his brief life history just then, which he had offered to explain, she supposed, the marked difference in their appearances, the difference in their surnames, Rafael having kept the one he was born with. The only thing she had been capable of thinking was that he had lied to her.
‘But I couldn’t.’
‘Too bad,’ Amy said sarcastically. ‘Bit of a nuisance having to traipse over here to work this out of your system.’ He made her sound like an infectious disease that had to be cleared up as quickly as possible. ‘Did you set aside some time for the purpose? Say a couple of weeks? That should just about get your life back to normal and you can disappear back to New York to pick up where you left off before I came along. And where, incidentally, would that place be?’
‘Look, Amy…’
‘No, don’t!’ She stood up. There were bright patches of colour in her cheeks. The anger was building up inside her again, like a volcano working itself up to another eruption. ‘I told you everything about myself! And you sat there, listening, pretending to be interested, when in fact you were only interested in picking up clues so that you could protect your bank balance! Is that why you slept with me, Rafael? To try and drive James out of my head?’
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ Rafael flushed darkly. Every accusation had just a shameful tinge of truth behind it. Somewhere in the recesses of his mind, he remembered having thought just that, but that had been before he had lost control of the situation had and the situation started to control him.
‘Don’t you dare tell me that I’m being ridiculous!’
‘You are the most frustrating woman on the face of the earth!’
‘Would that be because I’m not afraid to have a point of view? Especially when I’m at the receiving end of a raw deal? I can just imagine why you would have told me that I wasn’t your type! I bet the women you like never raise their voices because who would dare raise their voice to a tycoon like you? You must have had a good laugh at my expense with your brother,’ Amy finished wearily. ‘Did you call him every night with updates on how it was going?’
‘That is an insult.’
‘No, it’s not.’ Yes, it was. ‘You lied to me. I don’t even know who you are now. Who are you? The man who owns all this…’ She spread her arms to encompass the luxurious house, just one, she supposed, of many scattered across the globe. ‘Or the man with nothing?’
‘Same man,’ Rafael told her grimly. This, he thought, was not going to work. He shouldn’t have pursued this woman in the first place. She was right. He wasn’t going to commit to her so what had been the point of the chase? ‘I lied to you. Whether you accept the apology or not is incidental because you were damned right on one score. Neither of us needs this. I shouldn’t have come over here. It was a mistake. I won’t drop you home. There’s no point prolonging the inevitable. I’ll get my driver to take you back and, before you launch into another outraged monologue on yet more things I possess, yes, I have a driver. Or, should I say, I use the guy who works for the company directors but my priorities take precedence over theirs. Also this magnificent house is mine even though I rarely use it. I also have houses in Paris and the Caribbean. If I’m an unforgivable liar to be defined by the possessions I didn’t tell you about, then you might as well know them all. You can go away then and stew over the narrow escape you had from getting involved with a man like me.’
Yes! That should have made her feel a lot better! It didn’t. There was no more arguing to be done and she realised that he now wanted to get rid of her. She had shrieked once too often. Not that she didn’t have a point, she thought bitterly. But then why did she feel so empty as she was bundled into the b
ack of the Jag? She wanted to turn back for one last glimpse, but when she did he had disappeared back into the house.
CHAPTER NINE
AMY expected Rafael to be on the first plane back to America. She wouldn’t have dreamed of actually making an effort to find out, of phoning James and casually dropping the question into the conversation, even though she was racked with misery and barely functioning. The only reason she found out was because, three weeks after she had been ejected from his house, she happened to open the newspaper and there, wedged at the back in those boring financial pages she usually avoided like the plague, was a picture of him smiling, with a tall, dark-haired woman lightly leaning into him, also smiling.
She read the article over and over, stared at the picture repeatedly, even holding it up to the light and squinting to see if she could decipher any expression on his face that might give her an inkling of what was going through his head. She scrutinised his well-groomed partner and tried to pretend that she was fine with the idea of him with another woman. He was footloose and fancy-free, after all, and how could she complain when she had been the one to send him on his merry way?
It seemed that Rafael Vives, as the chairman and major shareholder of his vast, listed company, had decided to relocate to London for a six-month tenure, during which he intended to sell off certain bits of the company so that he could extend his fledgling venture into the leisure industry. There were all sorts of sums and figures and detailed analysis, which Amy assumed other financial people were interested in, but the only other fact she wanted to know was the identity of the brunette.
She binned the newspaper article, only to retrieve it from underneath the potato peelings three hours later. Then she proceeded to stew over it for three days.
Her lethargy gave way to furious activity. That feeling of being half dead disappeared. In its place was a frantic, restless energy that left her exhausted at the end of the day.
She had stuck the article on her fridge with a magnet. In the mornings, before she left for her course, she had a bowl of cereal and glowered at it from the kitchen table. In the evenings, over elaborate meals that she cooked for practice only to nibble her way through half, she did the same.
Two weeks of this saw her teetering on the edge of complete meltdown before she did the unthinkable. She picked up the phone and called James.
She said all the usual things to him, told him that she was making sure he didn’t forget her name because, when she began her apprenticeship at one of the leading London hotels, she just wanted to know that he would come along and sample her offerings. She whittered on about wanting to open her own restaurant and was chuffed when he told her that he would happily sink some money in the venture, to just let him know where and when. Which actually made her stop and think that perhaps she would indeed do that, open a restaurant, instead of just hanging on to a pipedream that would never materialise in a month of Sundays.
Then, almost as an afterthought, she mentioned that she had read in the newspapers that his brother had decided to relocate to London for a few weeks to work.
‘About time he used that house of his,’ James joked. ‘’ve been there a couple of times and it’s like a mausoleum—not that it’ll stay like that for very long. Elizabeth will soon put that right.’
‘Elizabeth?’ Amy felt the blood rush to her head and thanked the Lord that she wasn’t having this conversation with him face to face.
‘Oh, sorry. Have I been tactless? I knew you and he were involved…had something going on…’
‘Oh, good heavens! Brief fling, James. Very brief! In fact, I haven’t given your brother a passing thought until I saw that article in the newspapers about him the other day.’
‘Which article? There’ve been a few. When Rafael puts his mind to it, the whole world stops and listens and right now they’re listening hard because his next step might have a big impact on the stock markets.’
‘Oh, right, sure.’ Amy wondered how to steer the conversation away from the deadly subject of stock markets and back to the more pressing topic of Elizabeth. Who the heck was Elizabeth? How on earth could Rafael have met a woman in such a short space of time?
Then she remembered his vast millions. The sort of vast millions that could pull any woman from any distance in any country. Add his killer looks to the equation and what did you have? An Elizabeth.
‘He used to go out with Elizabeth in New York,’ James was saying. Amy tuned into the conversation and held her breath.
‘Really?’ She tried to maintain just the right level of polite interest that would get him to expand on the subject, but he didn’t. He wound up their conversation, just, she thought regretfully, when it was getting interesting, by telling her to keep in touch and to call him as soon as she decided on that restaurant of hers. If they decided to really expand in the leisure industry, there would be an opening for a fresh new chef to head up their restaurants.
‘Brilliant!’ Of course she knew where the mysterious Elizabeth would be staying. Where else but Rafael’s luxurious house in the heart of the city? And she wasn’t going to give him up, not without a fight.
Yes, the sensible side of her was telling her that it would be a pointless fight. Yes, every single member of her family, with whom she had shared her problem, had advised her to focus on her career and save the heartbreak for later.
Unfortunately, another less well-behaved side of her was telling her that her life had been miserable for the past few weeks and what the heck? Either she tried to be the stoic person she had never in her life been or else she just gave in and tried her damnedest to win him back. Her pride would take a beating, but suffering for the sake of pride seemed a painful, uphill struggle.
She came off the phone with just the vaguest skeleton of a plan forming in her head.
It might take a bit of sneaking around and calling in favours owed and, when she thought about it, she felt sick inside, but then when she thought about the endless empty days stretching in front of her, she felt even sicker.
Claire still worked at the company. So far, Amy had tried to keep a lid on her curiosity. She had avoided asking her friend any questions about Rafael. Her reasons for this were twofold. Firstly, she had been desperate not to appear desperate, and secondly, she knew that just one whiff of interest and Claire would unleash a torrent of questions. She knew the basic facts of the fated affair but Amy’s silence on the subject had made it difficult to get down to the nitty gritty.
She resolved to at least think things over for a day or two but in the end that noble resolution lasted just as long as it took her to have a bath. Then, with her towel still wrapped around her, she was on the phone to Claire, bypassing the usual pleasant gossip and getting straight to the point.
‘So let me get this straight,’ Claire rounded up, when she was finally satisfied with Amy’s thrilling agenda, ‘you want me to find out his movements and let you know.’
‘Shouldn’t be too hard,’ Amy said airily. She started thinking about Rafael’s possible reaction to her cunning plan, but didn’t spend too much time dwelling on that particular thought. It was a little too scary. ‘You can potter around that directors’ floor with a tray of sandwiches in your hand and ferret out the information from Jules.’
‘Jules doesn’t work for him. Some new woman does and she looks the sort that eats small children for breakfast.’
‘Well, I’ll leave it to you. Honestly, Claire, it’s not as though you haven’t done the odd underhand thing in your time!’
‘I’ll try my best. But there’s a price to pay. You’ll have to tell me everything that goes on, leaving nothing out, and also invite me to the wedding.’
‘Yes to the first two and, ha, ha, what a good joke to the last.’ Amy wasn’t born yesterday. She wasn’t looking for love and marriage. She was just looking for a way to get the man out of her system. She had fallen hopelessly in love with him and had turned him away because she had wanted so much more than he was offering. She ha
d now had ample opportunity to experience that vicious little emotion called regret. It was the thing that woke her up early on a Sunday morning and filled her head so that relaxing and having fun was a distant memory.
‘You can never tell,’ Claire said, but she sounded doubtful. But she did it. She came up trumps after two nail-biting days for Amy as she tossed up in her mind the pros and cons of what she intended to do.
Wednesday. He would be working late. She knew that because he was chairing a meeting for all the directors, which wasn’t due to finish until eight-thirty, but instead of leaving with them he would be continuing work at his desk. He had asked her, via his battleaxe of a personal assistant, to make sure that something was prepared for him to snack on if he felt so inclined.
Like a Lord giving his orders, Amy thought. Get me a snack and so it shall be done!
When she joked about it in her head, she could almost believe that she couldn’t possibly have fallen for him. How could she have when she was so different? But she always ended up with the same realisation—that love didn’t always obey the rules your head laid down. Sometimes it broke its leash and galloped all over the place until there was nothing to do but go along for the ride, just as she was doing, never mind the broken bones later.
Which was why she was swallowing back good old common sense and doing something that went totally against the grain.
She only hoped, as Wednesday dawned, that there would be no change of plan.
She didn’t need the trauma of bumping into anyone, all of whom would recognise her, and Claire, having delivered on her promise, had refused to go that one step further and act as lookout.
So nine o’clock saw Amy chatting to the guy on Reception, who recognised her and helpfully asked no awkward questions.
Kept by the Spanish Billionaire Page 14
