Chloe owed him nothing but marriage.
‘You don’t have to explain yourself, bonita. I apologise for embarrassing you.’
‘You haven’t embarrassed me,’ she insisted even though her cheeks, flaming all over again, contradicted her statement.
‘Bueno.’
‘No, really, you haven’t embarrassed me.’ A sudden hint of mischief flashed in her eyes. ‘After all, I am a woman of great sexual experience.’
Her obvious and deliberate lie was so outrageous that he burst into laughter.
She caught his gaze and burst out laughing too.
It was only a minor moment but the tightness that had formed in his chest loosened and, with it, the tension between them defused.
She did not owe him a thing more than she had already pledged. Chloe had agreed to marry him. That she was now sharing a bed with him was a delicious bonus.
Very delicious.
Luis settled back in his chair and sipped his coffee, admiring how Chloe could look so fresh and ravishing after such little sleep, slouched back in her chair as she was. She had on only a white robe tied loosely around her waist, the V of it gaping enough for him to see the divine swell of her wonderful breasts.
He exhaled a long sigh. A part of him wanted to press her back on the table and make love to her, the other part content to merely sit there and soak in her rare, unblemished beauty.
His suspicions had been confirmed. He really had been her first.
He’d been as gentle as he could be the first time he’d possessed her and if she had suffered any pain from it she had covered it well. They had been amazing together.
It struck him then that if he was her first, it stood to reason that one day some other man would be her second.
‘Are you comfortable in marrying me knowing it won’t last?’ he asked curiously.
She arched a brow. ‘Are you?’
‘Very comfortable. Marriage has never been on my agenda.’
‘It’s never been on mine, either.’ Although the fresh, light stain of colour that crawled up her neck made him suspect that there was something there she was keeping from him. ‘Marriage is an outdated institution. People make those vows every day without meaning them. At least there’s an honesty in the vows we’ll make.’
‘Are you speaking of your parents’ marriage?’
‘Their marriage was never honest.’ Her eyes held his. ‘Did you know your mother and my mother deliberately planned it so they fell pregnant at the same time?’
‘That has been alluded to over the years,’ he said. He and Javier were only three months older than Benjamin. Whenever his mother had toured, Benjamin and his mother would go with them, Louise as his mother’s costume-maker, Benjamin as their playmate.
‘My father was, in essence, a sperm donor. My mother married him because she didn’t want to be a single mother but she raised Benjamin as a single mother. My father had little involvement or say in his upbringing, which was how he liked it. He got the glory of a son without any of the work.’
‘I didn’t know your father.’ He’d been nothing but a name to them. Benjamin had rarely mentioned him.
‘Their marriage was all but dead when Maman got broody again.’ She rubbed her nose and gave a sad laugh. ‘He was ready to leave her but she got him drunk and seduced him. Et voilà, nine months later I was born. He left before I was born.’
Luis ran a hand through his hair at this revelation he had known nothing about. ‘Your mother told you this?’
‘Non, my father told me the day before I left his home. He never wanted me and he hated my mother for tricking him into being a sperm donor for a second time.’
He gazed at the beautiful elfin face staring back at him with the merest hint of defiance to counteract the wobble of her chin.
‘You learned all this after your mother died?’
She gave a sharp nod.
‘That must have been a hard thing to accept.’
She shrugged but her chin wobbled again. ‘It explained why he’d never been in my life. I’d only met him three times before Maman died.’
He gave a low whistle. ‘Obviously I was aware there wasn’t much in the way of involvement from him but I didn’t realise it was that bad.’
‘It was good,’ she insisted. ‘My childhood was incredibly happy. He’s the one who chose not to be a part of it.’
‘So why did you move in with him? Couldn’t you have lived with Benjamin?’
‘It wasn’t allowed. I had only just turned seventeen, I was still at school and still a minor, so that’s how it had to be. One parent dies so you move in with the other even if he is a stranger to you. And at the time Benjamin was struggling to cope financially—it wouldn’t have been fair to burden him with me too, not then.’
Benjamin had been struggling financially because he’d taken out a huge mortgage to buy the chateau for his mother to end her days in and then neglected his business to care for her in those last days. The savings he’d had to purchase the chateau outright had been given to Luis and Javier for the Tour Mont Blanc land.
Another unintended consequence of that damned contract that Luis was becoming sure would haunt him in the afterlife.
‘But you moved in with him eventually, didn’t you?’ he asked, his brow furrowed. ‘I remember visiting the chateau once and you were there. I remember him telling me his fears about you moving to London.’
‘I stuck it out with my dad and stepmother until I completed high school then moved in with Benjamin for a while before I moved to London. When I moved back to France after I’d completed my apprenticeship I split my time between his chateau and his apartment in Paris.’
‘You never went back to your father’s home?’
‘Non.’
‘Did they treat you badly?’
She made a sound like a laugh. It was the most miserable sound Luis had ever heard from her. ‘They didn’t treat me like anything. They might as well have had a ghost move in for all the attention they paid me. My mother was dead and they couldn’t have cared less. They clothed and fed me and made sure I attended school but that was it. They were always out, seeing friends, going on holidays, but they never included me or invited me anywhere with them. I didn’t get a single embrace from either of them in the whole year I lived with them. I could understand it from my stepmother but from my father...’
Chloe blinked back the burn of tears.
She would never cry over her father again.
When she’d left her father’s home she’d sworn to forget all about him. She’d survived perfectly well for the first seventeen years of her life without him; she didn’t need him.
But it still hurt. It really, really hurt.
Whatever the circumstances of her conception, she had been innocent. Benjamin had been innocent. Their father hadn’t just walked out on their mother but his ten-year-old son and unborn child too.
The first time he had met his daughter, Chloe had been three years old. It had been another four years before she’d seen him again.
‘They didn’t want me there,’ she explained, trying her hardest to keep her voice factual and moderate. ‘I learned when I turned eighteen that my mother had saved all her child support payments from him. It wasn’t a fortune but was enough for me to live with Benjamin without being a financial burden.’
‘Your father didn’t object?’
She gave another miserable laugh. ‘He couldn’t wait to be rid of me.’
And that was what hurt the most. Deep down Chloe had wanted him to object. She’d wanted him to raise himself up and insist on being her father. She’d wanted to be important to him. She’d wanted him to love her but he didn’t. He never had and never would.
She had never spoken about any of this before. Benjamin knew she’d had a hard time living with their father but s
he’d never confided the depth of her misery there or the enormous one-sided argument she and her father had had, scared she would come across as a spoilt, needy brat. Her stepmother, in a rare moment of interaction with Chloe, had called her exactly that.
It had been a one-sided argument because it had essentially consisted of Chloe having a complete breakdown. She had screamed at her father, all her misery and pain pouring out of her in an emotional tirade that had been met by her father’s cold retelling of the past and her stepmother’s cruel words.
The closest she had come to that feeling of betrayal and helplessness and that total loss of emotional control was with the man whose arms she had found such pleasure in.
She hadn’t seen her father since the day she’d left.
A buzzing sound rang out.
‘That will be our breakfast.’ Luis jumped to his feet, grateful for the disturbance.
After defusing the tension between them things had suddenly become extremely weighty.
He admired Chloe’s spirit, her beauty, her feistiness...
Her vulnerability was not something he liked to see and there had been more than a flash of it then as she’d narrated a part of her life he’d only known the basics of.
Dios, her father’s treatment of his child had been as deplorable as his father’s, even if their methods of abuse had differed. Chloe’s father had abused her with his indifference. Luis’s father had abused him with his hands.
‘Stay there. I’ll let them in.’
Pulling a pair of shorts on first, he opened the door to find Sara and Jalen. The little boy took one look at him and hid behind his mother.
Sara rolled her tired eyes and said apologetically. ‘He was hoping to see Chloe. My son has taken quite a shine to her.’
Remembering the hip-hop dancing the boy had been doing with her, Luis quite understood why.
‘I will tell her you were asking for her,’ he said to the boy pretending to be invisible behind his mother’s legs, before taking the breakfast tray from Sara’s hands.
At some point soon he would have to employ more staff for the island. Marietta hadn’t been to the island in the three years before she’d sold it to him and had let all the other permanent staff go. Sara had proved herself to be an excellent cook but she had a hundred other jobs to get on with.
He carried the tray out onto the veranda and set it on the table.
Chloe gave him a small smile.
As she helped herself to toast, he said, ‘Your boyfriend was asking after you.’
Her brow furrowed in confusion. ‘What?’
‘The caretakers’ boy.’
He did not want to go back to tales of her childhood. Listening had had the effect of a hook being wound around his stomach.
His diversion did the trick.
‘Jalen?’ Her face lit up. ‘Oh, he’s a sweet little thing.’
‘He hides or runs away whenever he sees me.’
She shrugged with bemusement. ‘You’re three times the size of him. To his eyes you’re a big scary giant.’
‘You think?’
‘He told me that himself.’
‘It’s not men in particular that he’s fearful of?’
‘No—why do you ask?’
‘I keep thinking of his reaction when his father called him over the day we got here. He looked terrified.’
Chloe grinned. ‘That’s because his father had expressly forbidden him from speaking to us.’
‘Why would he do that?’
‘You’re the new boss. They don’t know you and they don’t know how tolerant you are to children. They’re worried for their jobs. They’re scared that if you think Jalen is a nuisance you will replace them with childless caretakers.’
‘Jalen told you all this?’
‘He’s a chatterbox without a filter.’ Her pretty white teeth flashed at him again. ‘I can understand why they’re scared of him talking to you.’
‘They have nothing to worry about. I appreciate that this is their home...you are sure that that’s the only reason Jalen was afraid of his father?’
Her eyes narrowed slightly as she tilted her head. ‘He wasn’t afraid of his father, he was afraid of the telling-off he knew he would get from him.’
He nodded slowly. It was the way Jalen had hung his head while speaking to his father that had sent the alarm bells ringing in him. It had taken him back thirty years to how he would stand when summoned to see his father.
‘I suppose all children are afraid of their father some of the time.’ Luis had been one of the unlucky ones who had been afraid of his father all of the time. The only times he’d ever fully relaxed as a child was when he and Javier had gone on tour with their mother without him.
Chloe was watching him closely. He could see the questions swirling in her head, her curiosity piqued.
The tension that had filled him when he’d discovered her contraceptive pill packet and her matter-of-fact explanation on her relationship with her father crowded back into him.
He got back to his feet and leaned over to place a hard, hungry kiss to her mouth. ‘I’m going to my villa. I’ll be back in five,’ he murmured into the silkiness of her hair before kissing her again.
When he broke away there was a dazed look in her eyes, her questions successfully driven away.
He returned to her in four minutes with his pockets stuffed with condoms and carried her to the bedroom.
CHAPTER NINE
CHLOE FINISHED HER lunch with Jalen on the beach then headed to the main villa where Luis had spent the morning working.
Butterflies rampaged through her belly, the product, she told herself, of nerves that they were going to sign their pre-nuptial agreement, not excitement at seeing him again. That was a ludicrous notion. He’d only left her bed four hours ago.
But it frightened her how much she had missed him in those four hours apart.
No, she told herself firmly, it was the sex she missed. Two days of doing nothing but making love was bound to affect her and, as a lover, although she had no one to compare him to, Luis was amazing. They were amazing together. So long as they kept things physical then everything was fine.
She still struggled to understand why she had divulged her relationship with her father to him. She’d crossed an invisible line there and had only just stopped herself from crossing it again when they had been talking about Jalen.
There had been an undercurrent running behind Luis’s questions about the boy, and she’d recalled the fleeting concern she’d seen on his face when Jalen had been scolded by his father.
Scared of being alone with her thoughts, she had sought Jalen out, assuring Sara repeatedly that he was no bother at all. She liked the little boy’s company. There was no artifice to him, everything laid out in that innocent way only a child could manage.
Sara opened the door with a welcoming smile and invited her to wait in one of the living rooms while she let Luis know she was there.
The living room in question was an enormous elegant space with a distinctly feminine touch to it. Chloe stared at all the clutter and boxes filling it with awed disbelief. How did any one person accumulate so much stuff?
A huge, elaborately framed portrait at the front of a stack of frames resting against the wall caught Chloe’s attention. It showed a young, strangely old-fashioned beautiful woman with thick curly black hair, posing elegantly with an enigmatic smile.
‘I’m sorry about the mess,’ Sara said, slipping back into the room. ‘We are packing up Marietta’s things to get them shipped to her. It’s taking us a lot longer than we thought it would.’
Chloe smiled then pointed at the portrait. ‘Is that Marietta?’ The armchair the sitter had posed in was in the corner of the room.
‘It is.’
Something sharp stabbed into Chloe’s
heart. So this was the woman who had sold her yacht and her island to Luis in the space of days.
Her stomach curdled again to imagine the incentives Luis must have brought to the table to convince her so quickly.
The ghost of Marietta had haunted her since she had arrived at this beautiful island, a phantom reminder that, to Luis, women were disposable.
‘She was only eighteen when this was painted,’ Sara explained. ‘Her father had it done to celebrate her coming of age.’
‘He must adore her,’ she said, unable to contain her wistfulness.
Chloe had been living with her father on her eighteenth birthday and he’d still managed to forget it. The huge row that had exploded between them the day before she had moved out of his emotionally cold, horrible house had resulted in Chloe being struck from his address book permanently. She doubted he knew she now lived in Madrid.
Sara laughed. ‘I don’t know about that. It was the done thing with the gentry in those days.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘That portrait is over seventy years old.’
Chloe’s jaw dropped. ‘Seriously?’
‘Marietta’s going to be ninety on her next birthday.’
She stepped over to look at the portrait in more detail and crouched down. Close up it was even more majestic.
Footsteps sounded behind her.
‘It’s incredible to think this is seventy years old,’ she murmured. ‘It’s in remarkable condition, and the detail...’
‘It’s something special, yes?’
Chloe almost fell backwards onto her bottom. She hadn’t heard Luis enter the room, had thought Sara had come to stand behind her.
He held out a hand to her.
Her legs wobbling in protest at her crouching position, she grabbed onto it and let him help her up.
‘Thank you,’ she murmured, disconcerted to find her heart racing.
His eyes sparkled. ‘Pleasure.’
She felt more unsettled than ever. Her insides were a cauldron bubbling with a thousand differing emotions, all of which boiled for him.
Marriage Made in Blackmail Page 10
