Marriage Made in Blackmail

by Michelle Smart

  Only his.

  As she had rightly said, he and Chloe would be long over when this house was fit for purpose.

  He would be the one to pull the trigger to topple the structures holding them together.

  CHAPTER TEN

  ‘ARE YOU GOING to join me?’ Luis cajoled from the side of the pool.

  Chloe, who’d been admiring his strong, powerful strokes from the safety of her sun lounger, shook her head.

  Another day in paradise...

  After spending the entire morning in bed making love, Luis had suddenly declared himself in need of exercise.

  She’d raised a disbelieving eyebrow at that, which had made him laugh and plant an enormous kiss on her mouth. Then he’d strode naked from the bed, strolled through the villa and down to the bottom of the garden and dived straight into the swimming pool, still unashamedly naked.

  And with that glorious body, why should he be ashamed? she’d thought dreamily as she’d spied on him from the bedroom window before slipping a bikini on and moving outside for a better view. Luis was a man made for a physical life and the more time he spent showing that physical prowess off in the most physical way with her, the better...

  Her increasingly erotic thoughts about him were cut short when Luis hauled himself out of the water and scooped her into his arms.

  ‘Into the water with you,’ he said with a grin as he carried her effortlessly to the water’s edge despite water dripping off him.

  ‘Put me down,’ she squealed, panic setting in instantaneously as she threw her arms around his neck and clung on tightly.

  He held her over the water. ‘Scared of getting your hair wet?’ he teased.

  ‘I can’t swim!’

  He took an immediate step back and stared down at her with a combination of bemusement and concern. ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘Yes!’ she yelled. ‘Now, put me down!’

  Carrying her back to the sun lounger, he gently deposited her on it then grabbed the towel she’d brought down for him and rubbed it through his hair.

  ‘You really can’t swim?’

  She rolled her eyes. ‘I really cannot swim.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because I hate getting my hair wet.’

  He wiped his hand over the droplets of water shining on his chest and flicked it at her hair.

  ‘Behave.’

  He laughed and helped himself to a glass of the orange juice Chloe had also brought out. He drained it, wrapped the towel around his waist and sat next to her.

  ‘You’re not vain enough to care about your hair getting wet,’ he observed with a grin.

  She grinned back at him. ‘Benjamin tried to teach me when I was little but I hated the shock of the cold water and refused to go any deeper than my thighs.’

  ‘So you never learned?’

  ‘I hate the cold. And I was a stubborn thing.’

  ‘Some would say you still are.’

  She mock-glowered at him and, to better show her disdain, swung her legs round to rest on his wonderful, muscular thighs.

  He shook his head mockingly and rubbed a hand on her calf. ‘The water here is the perfect temperature. I could teach you.’

  She made a non-committal grunt. Chloe had managed perfectly well without swimming and didn’t see that she’d missed out on anything by preferring to be on land.

  ‘It’s better to be able to swim,’ he pointed out. ‘You never know when it will come useful.’

  ‘Says the man who was probably born able to swim like a world champion.’ His prowess in the water was a thing of wonder.

  Now he was the one to make a grunt-like noise. ‘Hardly. I didn’t learn until I was eight.’

  ‘That’s late, isn’t it? Benjamin had given up on teaching me by then.’

  ‘I learned on our only family sunshine holiday. Our father decided he was the man to teach us.’

  The tone of his voice sent a chill up her spine.

  The easy playfulness between them seemed to hover on a pair of scales between them as Chloe weighed up whether to ask anything about it.

  Would this be a rare happy childhood tale of his?

  It pained her to think that unlikely.

  So she went with the most neutral question she could think of. ‘Did you pick it up easily?’

  ‘No. Javier did, but like you I was a stubborn thing and did everything wrong.’

  ‘On purpose?’

  He nodded. ‘One day my father got so angry with me for not trying, he said that in the morning he would throw me in the deep end and it would be up to me to sink or swim.’

  Nausea creeping through her, Chloe shifted forward so her arched thighs were pressed against his and stroked his damp arm.

  ‘You believed him,’ she whispered, resting her chin on his shoulder. She did not doubt for a second eight-year-old Luis had believed his father would let him drown.

  His jaw clenched. ‘Javier believed it too. He dragged me to the beach with him—we’d found a cove near the resort that was really secluded and calm—and made me learn.’

  ‘You were eight?’ she clarified, stunned to think of two such small boys being allowed to go off on their own.

  ‘It was safe,’ he insisted. ‘The cove was next to the resort. My parents were having one of their good spells and had gone off for what they called a siesta. We had free rein.’

  Chloe knew better than to comment on this, did nothing but continue stroking his arm, making her way down to the palm of his hand and tracing circles around it.

  ‘Javier took me out into the sea and made me lie on my back while he held an arm under me to keep me afloat. He kept telling me that if I could float I would never drown. Chloe... I cannot tell you how scared he was, much more than I. He was crying and begging me to trust him. And I did trust him. He was my twin. Who else in the world could I trust more than the boy who was always trying to save me from myself?’

  Chloe closed her eyes, trying hard not to allow sympathy into her heart for the small boy Javier would have been, the boy terrified his father would let his beloved twin drown.

  ‘You floated,’ she said softly.

  ‘Sí. I floated for my brother’s sake. By the end of the holiday we were racing each other in the water.’

  ‘How did your father react when you floated?’

  ‘He didn’t do it. I don’t know if it was a burst of his meagre conscience or if he forgot but he never did throw me in.’

  ‘I’m glad.’

  ‘So was I.’ He took a deep breath then carefully moved her legs from over his thighs and got to his feet.

  When he looked at her she could virtually see the shutters that had come down in his eyes.

  It was the same look as when he’d told her about his father’s abuse. End of discussion.

  After the strangest pause where he gazed at her as if seeing her for the first time, he blinked.

  The shutters had gone and now he stared at her with that hungry look she knew so well.

  He grinned widely and held his hand out to her. ‘Come, bonita. If you won’t get your hair wet in the pool with me then you can get wet in the shower.’

  Her heart hurting for him, she let him help her to her feet then, when she was upright, wound her arms around his neck and kissed him deeply.

  His fingers speared her hair as he kissed her back, his arousal undeniable despite the thick cotton towel draped around his waist.

  How badly she wished she could kiss away his past and drive out the pain she knew on an instinctive level still haunted him.

  But then, when he lifted her into his arms and carried her back into the villa, the moment overtook her and all thoughts were driven from her mind as she revelled in the heady pleasure they had found together.

  * * *

  Chloe sat
on the beach digging her toes into the soft sand and stared up at the sky. There was no moon that night and the stars were in abundance, twinkling down on her like tiny dazzling jewels.

  She had been unable to fall asleep. Her mind was filled with too much for it to switch off.

  Her resolve over Luis was made of the same fine sand as this warm beach. She could laugh at her weakness but it frightened her too much to be funny.

  In two days she would marry him.

  She had lain in the bed with him breathing deeply and rhythmically beside her, her lungs getting tighter and tighter until she couldn’t draw air any more.

  There was a turbulence in her stomach that had grown stronger with each passing hour spent with him.

  She spent all her time with him, laughing and making love. She would gaze into his hazel eyes and feel all the breath leave her in a soar.

  And then she would recall their conversations about his childhood and her chest would cramp so tightly she couldn’t breathe the air back in.

  His childhood had been more violent and tempestuous than she could have imagined. The old stories about his violent father that she’d assumed had been embellished by an insatiable media had, if anything, been underplayed.

  He’d come so far, both he and Javier. What they had lived through in their formative years could have destroyed lesser men. Not them. Not Luis.

  And then he had shut her out. It had almost been a physical act; a blink of the eye and then shutters appeared in them. She understood it was his way of telling her, without words, to back off, to keep things between them on the loose footing they had agreed on, his way of telling her not to get too close.

  There was a reason Luis had reached the age of thirty-five without a single long-term relationship under his belt and she strongly suspected it had its roots in his relationship with his father.

  She shouldn’t need telling. She didn’t want their marriage to be anything other than temporary either and had no clue as to why that turbulence in her stomach felt strong enough to dislodge her heart.

  This craving for him, which had grown so much more than physical, had to stop.

  ‘Chloe?’

  She turned her head to see Luis emerge from between the palm trees lining this stretch of beach.

  ‘Hi,’ she said softly, her pulse surging just to see his silhouette.

  He walked to her wearing nothing but a pair of navy shorts and his deck shoes. ‘I wondered where you’d got to.’

  ‘I couldn’t sleep,’ she confessed.

  ‘You should have woken me. Are you okay?’

  Her heart twisted to hear the concern in his voice. In his own way, he did care about her.

  She nodded. ‘I just needed some air.’

  He sat down beside her and stretched his long legs out. ‘Something on your mind?’

  She gave a hollow laugh. ‘Right now it feels as if I have the whole world on my mind.’

  Silence bloomed between them and then stretched, a tension in it that she soon found herself desperate to break.

  ‘I keep thinking back to our childhoods,’ she said, speaking without really thinking of what she was going to say, just aware that all the stuff that had accumulated in her head as Marietta’s possessions had accumulated in the main house needed an outlet. ‘Do you remember my mother’s funeral? You found me crying and you comforted me. You let me cry in your arms and said things that really resonated and gave me the courage to hope that one day the pain would become bearable. You understood what I was going through. I always remembered that. I carried your words with me for so long... When Benjamin told me about the profit terms with Tour Mont Blanc I felt betrayed, not just for him but for myself and our mother too. I’d been with Benjamin at the hospital the day you made that call to him asking for the money. We’d been told barely an hour before that our mother was dying. I remember him telling you the news. I was holding his hand.’

  She felt his eyes burn into her but kept her gaze out on the still sea, black and sparkling under the night sky.

  Luis’s heart had clenched itself into a fist.

  He’d awoken alone in the bed to find Chloe missing. Intellectually he’d known she wouldn’t have gone far but there had been a punch of nausea to see the indentation of her head on the pillow.

  The hook that had wrapped around his stomach was now so tight it threatened to cut off his blood flow.

  If not for the starkness in the way she’d spoken, he would drag her back to bed and distract her in the only way he knew how.

  ‘Being told about your mother’s diagnosis is why I have little memory of what occurred the rest of that day,’ he said, recalling how Benjamin’s news had lanced him.

  The Guillem siblings hadn’t been the only ones hoping for a miracle.

  ‘Javier and I were fighting to save our business. To then hear your mother’s condition was terminal... Chloe, it cut me to pieces.’

  ‘Really?’

  The simple hope that rang from her voice sliced through Luis as if it had a blade attached.

  ‘When we went to Benjamin’s apartment to sign it that night I barely gave the contract a second thought. I thought Javier had told him we wanted to renegotiate the terms...’

  ‘But he hadn’t.’

  He breathed heavily. No. His brother hadn’t done. For seven years Luis had believed it to be an oversight on his brother’s part but now, as he relived that time in full, he had to wonder...

  ‘Our lawyer and his paralegal came with us to witness it. The contracts were laid out on Benjamin’s dining table. He wanted to get it signed and done with. Neither Javier nor I had any way of knowing he hadn’t read it. We all signed it, Benjamin transferred the money, Javier and the lawyers left, then Benjamin and I got drunk together.’

  ‘Didn’t Javier stay with you?’

  ‘Someone had to finalise the deal with the seller and that someone was Javier. Besides, he doesn’t drink.’

  His brother had never drunk alcohol. The healthy hell-raising that was a rite of passage for most young men had been left to Luis and Benjamin.

  ‘I drowned my sorrows with your brother because, bonita, your mother had been a part of my life from when I was in the womb.’ He breathed the salt air in deeply as even older memories hit him in a wave. ‘Did you know I was named after her?’

  ‘Non!’ she gasped, her head turning to face him. ‘You were named after my mother? No one ever told me that.’

  He smiled to see how wide her eyes had gone with her disbelief. ‘I always felt a bond with her because of it. I will never forget the way she broke the news of my mother’s death to us and the kindness and love she showed us that night. My grandparents took good care of us when we became their wards but they were old and would never talk about my mother. They found it too painful.’

  The loss of their only child had devastated his grandparents, who had been in their forties and resigned to a childless life when they had unexpectedly conceived Luis and Javier’s mother. When they had taken their twin grandsons into their home they had been in their seventies, old-fashioned and set in their ways and unprepared for the mayhem bereaved teenage boys would bring to their orderly lives. When they had tried to discipline Luis in the manner they had disciplined their daughter all those decades before, he’d stood his ground and refused to accept it.

  He’d vowed on the death of his mother that he would never again be a whipping boy for anyone. He would never let another person raise a hand to him or look at him with the contempt he’d always seen ringing from his father’s eyes.

  In Louise Guillem’s home Luis had found a modicum of peace. The Guillems’ suburban house was near to the Parisian apartment he and Javier had called home with their parents until their lives had been destroyed. Being under Louise’s roof with his brother and his best friend, speaking the language that had come more naturally to
him than his own had been the only light he had found in those years.

  ‘Your mother found it painful to talk about her too but she was always willing. She kept my mother’s memory alive for me. She became the surrogate parent my grandparents weren’t capable of being. Carrying her coffin was one of the hardest things I have ever done. Saying goodbye to her was like saying goodbye to my mother all over again.’

  A tear glistened on her cheek. She wiped it away and gave a deep sigh. ‘I’m glad you loved her. She loved you and Javier very much.’ She wiped another spilling tear. ‘Can I ask you one more question?’

  How could he refuse? ‘Anything.’

  ‘Did you ever see your father again, after...?’

  After he’d killed Luis’s mother.

  ‘Never. I never visited him in prison and I never visited him on his deathbed.’

  Their father successfully pleaded diminished responsibility and got convicted of manslaughter. He served only ten years of his sentence, nothing for extinguishing such a precious life.

  It had felt fitting that he should die of pancreatic cancer less than a year after his release, alone and unloved.

  Only as the years had gone by had regrets started to creep in.

  ‘Do you regret not seeing him?’

  Her question was astute.

  ‘My mother has been dead for over twenty years and I still miss her. My father has been dead for half that and I have never missed him but now I wish I had accepted the visiting orders he sent me from prison and taken the opportunity to look him in the eye and ask him how he could have done what he did.’

  Her voice was small. ‘He did want to see you, then?’

  He sighed heavily. ‘Yes. He asked for me in the hospice too. He died a very lonely man.’

  He pressed his head to hers.

  There didn’t seem any more need for words. In their own wildly differing ways each had suffered at the hands of their fathers. And in their own way each still suffered at them, Chloe with the indifference she lived with each day, he with the legacy of his mother’s murder, a story that would not be extinguished.