Was it his imagination or was that panic resonating from those beautiful blue eyes?
He reached out a hand to stroke her soft cheek.
The pupils of her eyes pulsed at his touch.
‘I will find you after my conference call tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Until then, stay out of trouble.’
Chloe watched him walk away with the strangest desire to call him back.
She managed a small smile at Jalen’s mother and was relieved to receive a warm, if tired, smile back.
The villa she was shown into was charmingly beautiful if a little old-fashioned and fitted with its own kitchen and all the amenities a woman could want. The swimming pool curled past the bottom of the pretty garden her living room opened out to.
‘I hear you’ve always lived on the island,’ Chloe said when Sara was about to leave.
Chloe hated being alone at the best of times but with her head so full of the day’s events, so full of Luis, the thought of only her own company terrified her.
Sara nodded and put her hand on the door. ‘I was born here.’
‘What’s Marietta like?’ she couldn’t resist asking.
Why she couldn’t stop imagining the mystery woman she could not begin to fathom but the name had lodged itself in her head like a spike digging into it.
Luis had bought Marietta’s yacht and island off her and taken possession of them both in mere days. He’d met her socially.
Chloe knew all about Luis and his sociability. His party-loving ways were legendary. She remembered the leaked photos of his thirtieth birthday party, a joint event with his twin at which her brother had, naturally, been a guest. Someone had captured pictures of Luis dancing, beer in hand, surrounded by a hive of semi-naked women, all with their attention fixed firmly on him.
A quote in the paper by an unnamed source had described it as the party of the decade. To the question of which of the beauties Luis had ended up with, the answer had been, ‘Knowing Luis, it could have been all or any of them.’
Recalling that picture made her want to vomit.
Had Marietta been at that party? Had she been one of those beauties draped all over him?
Sara’s face lit up into a smile that momentarily transformed her tired features into beauty. ‘She’s an amazing woman.’
* * *
Later, alone on her villa’s veranda after a light supper eaten alone, Chloe sat under the starry night sky nursing a glass of water.
Other than the crickets chirruping madly to each other, the silence was absolute. There was no sign of life from the villa next door, no lights, no sound.
She could be the only person on this earth.
Luis must still be in the main villa preparing for his video conference.
She should be happy to be rid of him, not reliving their kiss for the fiftieth time.
Dieu, now she was alone with her thoughts it was all she could think about, their lips and bodies fused together and the heat that engulfed her.
She rubbed her eyes and breathed even more deeply.
Why did any of this have to happen?
If Luis and Javier had been straight with Benjamin all those years ago instead of luring him into a lie then she would...
Would what?
She would have gone on that second date with Luis. She would have accepted his offer of a nightcap. She would have let him kiss her. And then she would have let him make love to her.
And then he would have broken her heart.
In a way, he had broken it already through his treachery to her brother and all the memories that had been shattered as a result.
He had a ruthless streak in him she would never have guessed ran so deep.
But, as her memories continued to torture her, she thought back to his vehement denials of treachery.
Now she had a little distance from him and could think without his magnetic presence disturbing her equilibrium, she couldn’t help but wonder if there was some truth in his defence of himself.
As a child Luis had been her favourite visitor to their home. She had loved it when he and Javier had come to stay, had a strong memory of climbing to the top of the fifteen-foot tree at the bottom of their garden but then losing her nerve and being too scared to climb back down.
She had sat at the top of it, crying her head off, terrified of the drop, which to her five-year-old self had looked petrifying.
Luis had been the one to haul himself up and get her down. She had clung to him like a limpet but he had got them both down safely. She had hero-worshipped him for that. His steady presence when her mother had become ill had been such a comfort to all of them. His visits had brightened her mother’s mood, invigorated her brother and made her own heart lighten a little.
Had that all been a lie? Had twenty-five years’ worth of memories all been false or distorted?
And then she thought of the social media comments he had mentioned, the sick ones that had equated Freya leaving Javier out of fear of ending up like Clara Casillas. Fear of ending up murdered at Javier’s hands.
Had there been cruel comments aimed at Luis too?
The rustle of movement nearby pulled her back to the present, a door being closed softly.
Footsteps crunched and, although their individual gardens gave them privacy, she knew in her bones that Luis had stepped outside into his villa’s garden.
Chloe held her breath. Her heart beat maniacally beneath her ribs, all her senses pinging to life. The knots in her stomach had tightened to become a painful ache inside her.
Could he sense her, feet away, separated only by the hedgerow filled with an abundance of beautifully scented flowers?
A short while later she heard the distant splash of water. Luis had gone for a midnight swim.
Still holding her breath, she took that as her cue to bolt back inside.
Her head felt hot and thick when she slipped under the cool bed sheets a short while later. A riot of images flashed behind her closed eyes that no amount of trying could dispel.
Luis swimming.
Luis naked.
Luis, Luis, Luis...
CHAPTER SIX
THE IMAGE OF Luis swimming naked was the first thing Chloe saw in her mind’s eye when she awoke the next morning after a turbulent night that had not involved much in the way of sleep.
Throwing the bed sheets off, she hurried into the bathroom and took a long shower, washing the images—which weren’t even images, just something conjured by her pathetic imagination—away.
With a towel wrapped around her torso and another wrapped around her head, she opened the dressing-room door to see what clothes had been brought in for her. Inside she found a collection of beach and summer wear, all in a variety of sizes.
She supposed she should feel grateful that Luis had made sure there would be something that would fit her. She wasn’t the easiest of women to dress. At five foot eight, she was taller than average. If not for her breasts, she would be considered slender. Her breasts had been the envy of her friends when she’d been a developing teenager. She’d always considered them to be a nuisance. Dresses were a nightmare to buy, always a compromise between fitting from the waist down or the waist up. If she wanted them to fit the rest of her without looking as if she were wearing a tent, she was forced to cut the circulation of her breasts off. The times she found a dress she liked and that fitted perfectly she would buy it in all the available colours.
She’d been wearing one of those dresses in the Madrid coffee shop the day she had seen Luis through the window, she suddenly remembered, hit afresh with the liquid sensation she had experienced as their eyes had met and, for the very first time, she had seen interest in his eyes.
The date that had followed had been the best evening of her life. She hadn’t wanted it to end.
It had taken all her willpo
wer to get into the cab and return to her apartment without him.
Inhaling deeply, she selected a blue bikini and covered it with a denim skirt that fell to mid-thigh and a black T-shirt, both of which fitted well.
She left her damp hair loose, put the coffee on as Sara had shown her and opened the front door to the glorious bright Caribbean sunshine.
As she had promised, Sara had left a tray of food there for her. Sitting next to the tray and looking straight at her was a two-inch-long gecko.
Chloe crouched down to look properly at its cuteness. ‘You are adorable,’ she said, smiling at the reptile that appeared unfazed to have a strange woman making cooing noises at it.
‘Stay where you are,’ she told it, leaving the door open as she backed into the villa.
She’d left her bag on the dining table and quickly upended the contents to find her phone.
Her intention to take a picture of the cute gecko came to nothing when she stepped back out and found it gone.
With a sigh, she carried the tray in, shoving her mess to one side to fit it on the table.
About to put her phone down and pour the coffee out, she suddenly noticed the Wi-Fi icon showing itself.
Luis must have got the Wi-Fi working for her phone had logged in to it, no password needed for access.
She had no signal to make phone calls but she could communicate with the outside world.
The first thing she did, while absently chewing on a freshly baked croissant, too intent on her potential freedom to taste her food, was search the island’s co-ordinates.
A message flashed up warning her that her Internet safety settings did not allow her to search this.
She tried again but to no avail. Equally, she found herself blocked from accessing her emails and social media.
She could scream.
Foiled again.
As always, Luis was two steps ahead of her.
Luis...
Remembering his claims about malevolent comments on the Internet, she wrote his and Javier’s names into the search box.
Her search engine announced there were over two hundred thousand results.
She clicked on the first news article, a gossip piece about Freya and Benjamin’s ‘secret’ wedding. She scrolled to the comments section.
Twenty minutes later she switched her phone off and threw it onto the heap of stuff from her emptied beach bag, nauseated.
How could people write such things? And on public forums too?
She wished she could scrub her eyeballs out and cleanse them from the poison she had just subjected them to.
Had Luis read those comments?
She fervently hoped not. She hoped Javier hadn’t either.
No one deserved hateful comments like that. No one should ever have to read faceless, anonymous opinions that they had evil in their eyes, were inherently bad, were secret psychopaths, were women-beaters, that they’d inherited their father’s violence.
What the hell were the moderators of these news sites doing? she wondered angrily. How could they let such toxic bile onto their sites?
This was worse than she had imagined. A thousand times worse.
She closed her eyes as a memory hit her of when she’d been really young. It might have been the same summer she had got stuck in the tree. The Casillas twins and Benjamin had sat around her kitchen table playing a board game she’d been too young to join in with. She couldn’t remember the game itself but vividly remembered the booming laughter that had echoed through the walls of her home, remembered stealing into the kitchen in the hope of sharing the array of snacks her mother had laid out for them. One of the boys—she wished she remembered which—had ruffled her hair and slipped her some crisps.
In her mind back then, the three had been giants fully grown in comparison to her puny self, but now she knew they’d been kids in frames their brains were trying to catch up with. Two of the three had been living with a trauma her own young brain had been unable to comprehend.
That those two vulnerable boys should have such spite aimed at them now made her heart ache.
Chloe was comfortable with the world at large questioning the Casillas brothers’ business integrity but this...
This was sickening. This was personal.
She had never, would never, could never, have wanted this. Not for anyone but especially not for them.
* * *
Luis closed his laptop with an exasperated sigh.
The video conference with their Canadian partner had not gone well.
He had a bad taste in his mouth and was thankful his brother was thousands of miles away so he couldn’t give in to the urge to punch him in the face.
‘We do not have to explain ourselves to you,’ Javier had said from his home office in Madrid. ‘The litigation between ourselves and Benjamin Guillem is not a matter of gossip.’
‘I am not a man who deals with gossip,’ George had retorted, visibly affronted. ‘But I am a man who needs to feel comfortable with who I do business with. The rumours are that you ripped Benjamin Guillem off on the Tour Mont Blanc development. If you cannot refute those rumours then I cannot be expected to put my name and money to this development with you.’
‘We do not need your money,’ Javier had said coldly.
‘But you do need the access I can provide. Without my backing this project is dead in the water.’
That was when Luis had stepped in. ‘The litigation between us is sealed for confidentiality reasons. However, I can assure you Benjamin Guillem was paid every cent owed under the terms of the contract we all signed seven years ago.’
‘I’m afraid your assurances are not enough. I will need to see that contract and the full accounts for the project if I am to proceed.’
‘If our word is not good enough for you then it is us who needs to rethink this deal,’ Javier had retorted, ice seeping through every syllable. ‘We will not do business with someone who takes the salacious word of the tabloid press over ours.’
And then his brother had cut himself off from the conference.
Luis had kept the deal on the table only by apologising profusely and explaining the tremendous strain his brother was under.
A huge part of him had been tempted to tell George to take a hike and pull the plug on the project himself, write off the money they’d already spent and the hours he’d spent as point man on it, but that would mean giving in.
His brother had since turned his phone off, no doubt taking himself off to pound the hell out of a punching bag as he always did when his anger got the better of him. Living with the shadow of their father’s violence had affected them in different ways and it was in their own reactions to anger that they diverged the most. Javier closed himself off and showed his true emotions only to inanimate objects. Luis was as comfortable with anger as he was with pleasure. Harness it in the right way—a lesson learned by always doing the opposite of what his father would have done—and the anger could be used as fuel.
Javier might be prepared to throw in the towel but Luis was not. Why should they allow the business they had worked so hard for be destroyed? Was it not bad enough that their reputations were being destroyed, their names dragged through the mud?
He would not let it all go without a fight.
And from Chloe not the slightest bit of contrition.
He hadn’t seen her since he’d shown her to the villa that would be her dwelling for the immediate future.
She had been on his mind every minute of her absence, even during that damned video conference.
Fed up of the cloying walls of the room he’d turned into an office for himself, Luis left the main villa and headed over the moat to the beach.
His beach.
This whole island, bought as an insurance policy to keep Chloe tied to his side, belonged to him.
Rolling his sleeves up, he welcomed the sun’s rays onto his skin as his attention was caught by two figures on the golden beach...
Was that music he could hear?
He pulled his loafers off and stepped onto the soft sand, walking closer to the figures that revealed themselves to be Chloe and Jalen. They were dancing...or something that looked like dancing, the kind of moves the more drunken revellers at his parties would make as the night wore on, body popping, robot moves; the pair of them facing each other having some kind of dance-off, oblivious to his presence.
Not wanting to disturb them, he sat on the sand, enraptured with what was playing out before him and enjoying the beat of the hip-hop music.
The longer he watched, the thicker his blood ran, awareness spreading like syrup through him.
This was the Chloe he knew, joyous, enjoying a spontaneous moment, her beautiful face lit up and glowing, her raven hair spraying in all directions and...vaya, that body.
After a good ten minutes of frenzied dancing, Chloe stopped and doubled over to massage the side of her stomach. By the grimace on her face she was the victim of a stitch.
She twisted slightly and that was when their eyes met.
After a long moment of hesitation, she turned away and said something to Jalen, who immediately looked at Luis, grabbed what was recognisably an old-fashioned boom-box and scarpered.
Slowly she trod barefoot to him, one hand holding her flip-flops, the other still massaging her side, breathing heavily, her eyes not leaving his face until she stood before him.
For a passage of time that seemed to last for ever, they stared wordlessly at each other until she took one last inhalation and sank onto the sand, lying flat on her back beside him, clearly exhausted.
‘I didn’t know you were into hip-hop,’ he said wryly, bemusement and awareness laced together in his veins.
She gave a ragged laugh, her gaze fixed on the sky. ‘Neither did I. Sara told me you were still on your conference call so I went for a walk and found Jalen.’ She took a breath that turned into a groan. ‘I’m shattered. I’ve become so unfit.’
Marriage Made in Blackmail Page 7
