Marriage Made in Blackmail

by Michelle Smart

  She sucked in a sharp breath.

  His threat didn’t bother her because she instinctively knew Luis would never lay a finger on her in anger.

  But the mention of the kiss she owed him...

  Chloe spent her days surrounded by dancers. The male ones had the most amazing physiques and they worked hard to maintain them, the look they strove for lean and strong. To her eyes they were beautiful sculptures but not sexy.

  Luis was a hulk of a man, burly and rugged, a man for whom chest waxing would be considered a joke. If he had any vanity she’d never seen it. Even his dark hair, which he kept long on top and flopped either side of his forehead, never looked as if he did more to it than run his fingers through it when he remembered.

  Square jawed, his hazel eyes surrounded with laughter lines, his nose broad, cheekbones high, lips full but firm, the outbreak of stubble never far beneath his skin.

  In a world of metrosexual men, Luis was a man who drank testosterone for breakfast and made no apologies for it. He would be as comfortable chopping wood with an axe as he would holding a meeting in a boardroom and she found him very sexy.

  She’d dreamed of kissing him when she was seventeen years old, dreams that had faded to a hazy memory over the years but then re-awoken with a vengeance when she had started work at Compania de Ballet de Casillas. Months after she’d joined the company Luis had turned up. She had been delighted to see him, had spontaneously thrown her arms around him and been completely unprepared for the surge of heat that had bathed her upon finding herself pressed against his hard bulk in that fleeting moment.

  That heated feeling had been with her ever since. All she’d needed was one glimpse of him and her heart would pound. She would smile and try to act nonchalant but had been painfully aware of her face resembling a tomato.

  That heat was there now too, vibrating inside her. Not even the knowledge of his treachery had dimmed it. She hated herself for that.

  He looked up from the bottle of black vodka he was examining and smiled unpleasantly. ‘The insults hurt, don’t they?’

  ‘You deserve yours and more for what you did to my brother.’ And to me, she refrained from adding.

  Learning how deeply he’d betrayed her brother had cut her like a knife. The more she and Benjamin had put the pieces together, the deeper the cut had gone, all the way back to her earliest memories.

  Had Luis and Javier always had contempt for her family? Or had the damage done by their mother’s horrific murder at the hands of their father been the root cause of it?

  Their mothers had been closer than sisters. As far back as Chloe could remember Luis and Javier had been a part of their lives. They would come and stay with them for weeks at a time in the school holidays then, when she had reached eight and them eighteen and they had snubbed university to set out on their own path, they would still drop in for visits whenever they were in Paris.

  Their visits had always made her mother so happy. When she’d been diagnosed with lung cancer they had been there for all of them. Luis had visited her mother so many times in hospital the staff had assumed he was one of her children.

  Had the supposed feelings he’d had for her family all been a lie? If not, then how could he have tricked her brother into signing that contract on the day their mother’s condition was diagnosed as terminal?

  Luis replaced the bottle of vodka in his hand with a bottle of rum, twisted the cap off and sniffed it. ‘Whatever we did to your brother he has repaid with fire. He has gone too far and so have you. Thanks to you and your brother conspiring against me and my brother, our names are mud.’

  ‘Good. You deserve it.’ She hated the quiver in her voice. Hated that being so close to him evoked all those awful feelings again that should never have sprung to life in the first place.

  Her heart shouldn’t beat so wildly for this man.

  She swallowed before adding, ‘You took advantage of him when our mother was dying. I hope the journalist investigating the injunction unveils your treachery to the world and that everyone learns what lying, cheating scumbags the Casillas brothers are.’

  Hazel eyes suddenly snapped onto hers, a nitrogen-cold stare that sent a snake of ice coiling up her spine. ‘We did not cheat your brother.’

  ‘Yes, you did. I don’t care what that court said. You ripped him off and you know it.’

  His nostrils flared before he stretched out a hand to the row of cocktail mixers. ‘I am going to tell you something, bonita. I had sympathy for Benjamin’s position.’

  ‘Of course you did,’ she scorned with a shake of her hair.

  ‘The terms of profit were reduced from twenty per cent to five per cent under the advice of our lawyer. Your brother’s contribution to the project was a portion of the funding whereas Javier and I would be doing all the work.’

  Luis remembered that conversation well. It was one of only a few clear recollections from a day that had flown by at warp speed as he and Javier had battled to salvage the deal they had put so much time and money into.

  ‘You agreed on twenty per cent. That was a verbal agreement.’

  He added crushed ice to the concoction he’d put in the cocktail shaker. ‘Benjamin was sent a copy of the contract to read five hours before we all signed it. He didn’t read it.’

  Javier had been the point man on the Tour Mont Blanc project and emailed the contract to Benjamin. Luis had been unaware of his twin’s failure to mention the change in the profit terms in that email. When they had gone to his apartment to sign it, the atmosphere had been heavy, the news of Benjamin’s mother overshadowing everything.

  Luis had only discovered three months later, at Louise Guillem’s funeral of all days, that Benjamin still thought he would be receiving twenty per cent of the profit. It had been a passing comment during the wake, Benjamin nursing a bottle of Scotch and staring out of his chateau’s window saying he didn’t know how long he would have to keep the wolves from the door and ruefully adding that, if only the Tour Mont Blanc project could be speeded up and he had his twenty per cent profit now, all his money troubles would be over.

  Luis had had many arguments with his brother through the years but that had been the closest they had ever come to physical blows. Javier had been immovable: Benjamin should have read the contract.

  His twin was completely hard-nosed when it came to business. Luis was generally hard-hearted when it came to business too. They weren’t running a charity, they were in the business of making money and at the time their bank balance had been perilously close to zero.

  But Benjamin had been their oldest friend and Luis had been very much aware that Benjamin’s frame of mind on the day of the signing had been anywhere but on the contract.

  With Javier digging his heels in, Luis had decided that it would only cause bad feeling and acrimony if he told Benjamin the truth. It had been better for everyone that Luis wait for Tour Mont Blanc, a project that would take years, to be completed and for all the money to be in the bank before speaking to Benjamin man-to-man about it and forging a private agreement on the matter.

  ‘He didn’t read it because he was cut up about our mother. He trusted you. He had no idea the terms had been changed. He signed that contract in good faith.’ Chloe’s eyes were fixed on his, ringed with loathing. ‘He gave you the last of his cash savings. That investment meant he couldn’t afford to buy the chateau outright and he had to get a huge mortgage to pay for it so our mother could end her days there. He almost lost everything in the aftermath. You took his money then watched him struggle to stop himself from drowning.’

  ‘We were not in a position to help him. It gives me no pleasure to admit this but we were in as dire a financial situation as Benjamin was. We’d grown too big too soon and over-extended massively. The difference between us and Benjamin was that Benjamin saw no shame in admitting it. We did, and I am only sharing this with you so you un
derstand that I’m not the treacherous bastard you think I am. At that time we were all trying to save ourselves from drowning. I’d always had it in the back of my mind that when the Tour Mont Blanc project was complete I would come to a private agreement with Benjamin and pay him the extra profit he felt he was due...’

  ‘You didn’t do that though, did you? The first he knew of it was when he saw the final accounts!’

  ‘I’d been overseeing a project in Brazil. Javier sent the accounts before I had the chance to talk to Benjamin about it. I flew back for Javier’s engagement party and your brother came in all guns blazing firing libellous accusations at us. Call it human nature, call it bull-headedness but when someone threatens me my instinct is to fight back. I admit, ugly words were exchanged that day—we were all on the defensive, all of us, your brother included. He would not discuss things reasonably...’

  ‘Why should he have?’ She stared at him like a beautiful, proudly defiant elfin princess, arms folded belligerently across her ample chest, as sexy a creature as could be imagined.

  Luis still struggled to comprehend how he’d been oblivious to her beauty for all those months or how he could be standing there with the woman who had conspired against him and his twin and find his blood still pumping wildly for her. He didn’t know which need he wanted to satisfy the most: the need to avenge himself or the need to throw her onto the nearest soft furnishing and take that delectable body as his own.

  Soon he would do both. He would screw her over in more ways than one.

  ‘Humans respond better to reason. Fight or flight, bonita. Benjamin made threats, we dug our heels in, then he hit us with the lawsuit and we had no choice but to defend ourselves. But I still had sympathy for his position. In truth it is something that hadn’t sat well with me for many years. I’d hoped to speak to him privately and come to an agreement once the litigation was over with and tempers had cooled and we could speak as rational men. Legally, I had nothing to prove. Javier and I had done nothing wrong and that’s been vindicated in a court of law.’

  ‘If you really believed that, why take the injunction out on him?’

  ‘Because there has been enough rubbish in the past two decades about my family. Do you have any idea how hard it is being Yuri Abramova and Clara Casillas’s sons?’ Luis downed his cocktail and grimaced at the bitter taste that perfectly matched his mood.

  He tipped the glass he’d filled for Chloe down the bar’s sink and reached for a fresh cocktail shaker.

  ‘We are the sons of a famous wife killer,’ he continued as he set about making a more palatable cocktail, one that would hopefully wash away the bile lodged in his throat. ‘It is one of the most infamous murders in the past century. There have been documentaries made about it, books and endless newspaper articles. A Hollywood studio wanted to make a movie about it. Can you imagine that? They wanted to turn my mother’s death at the hands of my father into entertainment.’

  Chloe tried her hardest not to allow sympathy to creep through her but it was hard. Luis’s past was something that never failed to make her heart twist and tears burn her eyes. She blinked them back now as she imagined the vulnerable thirteen-year-old he would have been.

  She had been only three when Luis’s mother had been murdered, far too young to have any memories of it.

  But she had been there.

  Clara had been performing in London on the night of her murder in a production of Romeo & Juliet. Yuri, a ballet dancer who had defected from the old USSR in the seventies and whose career had gone into freefall, had watched the performance convinced his wife was having a real-life affair with Romeo. When the performance had ended, Yuri had locked Clara in her dressing room, preventing dancers and backstage staff from entering when the screams and shouts had first rung out.

  By the time they’d smashed the door open, Clara was dead, Yuri’s hands still around her throat.

  Luis and Javier had been in the hotel across the road from the theatre babysitting Chloe with Benjamin.

  Chloe and Benjamin’s mother, Louise, who had loved the twins fiercely, had been the one to break the terrible news to them.

  He poured the fresh cocktail into two clean glasses. ‘Imagine what it has been like for us growing up with that as our marker. We are hugely successful and rich beyond our wildest dreams but still people look at us and their first thought is our parents. You see it in their eyes, curiosity and fear.’

  He pushed one of the glasses towards her and put the other to his lips. He took a sip and pulled a musing face. ‘Not too bad. Better than the last one but I think I’ll stick to construction and property developing.’ He took another sip. ‘As I was saying. My parents. A legacy we have tried hard to escape from while still honouring our mother.’

  ‘Is that why you took her surname?’ The question came before she could hold it back. It was something she’d been intensely curious about for years.

  ‘We took it because neither of us could endure living with our father’s name. We have worked hard to disassociate ourselves from that man and to make our mother’s name synonymous with the beauty of her dance and not the horror of her death, but now everything has been dredged up again and you are partly responsible. Our lives are back under the media’s lens and again we find the world wondering how much of our father’s murderous blood lives in our veins.’ He inhaled deeply. ‘We took out the injunction to stop this very thing from happening because we knew Benjamin was an explosive primed to detonate. We are close to signing a deal to build a new shopping complex in Canada. Our partner in this venture has stopped returning our calls.’

  ‘Then he’s a smart man who knows he will be ripped off.’

  The flash of anger that rippled from Luis’s eyes was enough to make her quail.

  ‘We did not rip him off and if anyone says otherwise we will sue the clothes off their back.’

  ‘You ripped my brother off,’ she said defiantly. ‘Feel free to sue me. I would love my day in court.’

  ‘I have a much better way of dealing with you, bonita, but as for your brother, I will not say this again—we did not rip him off. I was going to get the gala out of the way and then call him but, instead, Benjamin stole Freya and tried to blackmail us. All my sympathy left me then. As far as I’m concerned, your brother can go to hell. The press speculation his actions have wrought are untenable. My assistant found comments on a newspaper website querying whether Freya ran off with Benjamin because she feared she would end up like my mother.’

  Chloe winced. She had many issues with Luis and Javier but they could no more help their parentage than she could help hers. ‘That’s disgusting.’

  ‘I’m glad you think so because you are going to help put things right. If you hadn’t called with your tale of terror I would have been at the gala before Benjamin stepped foot inside it. None of this would have happened.’

  ‘He believed you owed him two hundred and twenty-five million euros,’ she spat, her fleeting compassion overridden by anger. ‘Did you expect him to roll over and accept that? Did you expect me to? I was there with him at the hospital when you made that call begging for his help and his money.’

  She’d been there, at the first turn of the wheel of the whole mess.

  Chloe had been sitting on a bench in the hospital garden with her big brother, both of them dazed; her crying, he ashen, both struggling to comprehend the mother they loved so much was going to die. That was when Benjamin had received the call from Luis asking for his financial help.

  ‘If you felt Javier had been cheated would you sit there meekly and allow it to go unchallenged when there was something practical you could do to help?’

  ‘Probably not.’ He shrugged. ‘But would I have conspired to kidnap a woman and hold her to ransom...? No, I would not have gone that far if the first throw of the dice had not already been rolled.’

  ‘I did not conspire to kidnap Freya
! I helped whisk her away from a potential marriage made in hell and...’

  ‘Is that how you justify it to yourself? I must remember to dress my actions up in a similar fashion when I tell you that you won’t be returning to port until you have married me.’

  CHAPTER THREE

  FOR A MOMENT there was an intense buzzing in Chloe’s ears. She shook her head to clear it, being careful not to take her eyes from Luis, who was now leaning forward with his elbows on the bar.

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  His eyes were intense on hers. ‘I’ve not kidnapped you, I’ve borrowed you. Would that be how it’s said? Is that how I can justify it?’

  ‘No, what was that rubbish about marrying me?’

  ‘That? That’s the next stage. If you want to go home you have to marry me first. But let us not call it blackmail. By your logic it will be...an incentive? How does that sound?’

  ‘It sounds like your cocktail has gone straight to your head.’

  ‘And you haven’t drunk yours yet. Try it. You might surprise yourself—and me—and like it.’

  ‘Not if it makes me as drunk as you clearly are.’

  ‘Regretfully, I am not drunk but I am serious.’

  The hairs on her arms lifted, coldness creeping up her spine and into her veins. She hugged her bag closer to her. ‘Okay, this game stops now. I’m sorry for my part in the affair. Is that what you want to hear? Okay then, how about this? I was wrong, I apologise. I’m sorry...je suis desolée...lo siento...mi dispiace...’

  Amusement flickered in his hazel eyes. ‘Can you apologise in Chinese too?’

  ‘If that’s what you want I’ll teach myself it and say it to you, just let me go.’

  The spacious windowed walls of the lounge were closing in on her. Suddenly it felt imperative to get off this yacht. She needed dry land and space to run as far and as fast as she could. Luis’s defence of himself, his hulking presence, his magnetism...it was all too much.