Somehow she managed to say the words without her voice wobbling. She lowered her arm and stared down at the photo of her stepmother.
‘I am sorry for your loss.’
She looked up. The sentiment in his deep voice had sounded genuine. ‘Thank you.’
Her gaze meshed with his and the intensity of those sharp, intelligent eyes made her breath catch in her throat. She shifted a bit, unsettled by her escalating awareness of him. He was so handsome. So compelling. She couldn’t take her eyes off him. And that preternatural stillness in his body... It was disconcerting, making her think of the big, predatory cats in the wildlife documentaries her dad had loved to watch.
She took another deep breath, in through her nose, out through her mouth, the way Camila had taught her to do as a child to combat stress. He was waiting for her to speak—to spell out why she was here. Did he already have an inkling? She searched his face, but the chiselled features were impassive, giving nothing away.
Adopting the tone she often used at work when a mix of practicality and compassion was required, she said, ‘Camila was your birth mother.’
The statement landed between them like a burning stick of dynamite tossed into the room. Jordan braced herself for its impact, her whole body tensing, but if Xavier de la Vega was even mildly shocked he hid it well.
‘You have proof of this?’
She blinked at him. It was such a cool, controlled response—far less emotional than anything she’d expected—but she counselled herself not to read too much into it. At twenty-six years of age, and after five years of working as a trauma nurse, she’d seen people react in all kinds of ways in all sorts of life-altering situations. Often what showed on the surface belied the tumult within.
She slid the other photo from her journal across the desk to him. This one was older, its colours faded, the edges a little bit worn.
He leaned forward, gave the photo a cursory glance, then drew back. ‘This tells me nothing,’ he said dismissively.
Jordan withdrew her hand, leaving the photo on his desk. ‘It’s you,’ she said, and it gave her heart a funny little jolt to think that the tiny, innocent baby in the photo had grown into the powerful, intimidating man before her.
His frown sharpened and he flicked his hand towards the photo, the gesture faintly disdainful. ‘This child could be anyone.’
She reached forward and flipped the photo over. The blue ink on the back had faded with time, but Camila’s handwriting was still legible. ‘It says “Xavier”,’ she pointed out, and waited, sensing his reluctance to look again. When he did, she saw his eyes widen a fraction. ‘And the date of birth underneath... I believe it’s—’
‘Mine,’ he bit out, cutting her off before she could finish. He sat back, nostrils flaring, a white line of tension forming around his mouth. ‘It is no secret that I am adopted. An old photo with my forename and my birth date written on it proves nothing.’
‘Perhaps not,’ she conceded, determined to hold her nerve in the face of his denial and the hostility she sensed was gathering in him. ‘But my stepmother told me things. Details that only your adoptive parents or your birth mother could know.’
His eyes darkened, the grey irises no more than a glint of cold steel between the thick fringes of his ebony lashes. ‘Such as?’
Her lips felt bone-dry all of a sudden, and she moistened them with her tongue. ‘Thirty-five years ago Regina Martinez worked as a housekeeper for your parents,’ she began, carefully reciting the details Camila had shared with her for the first time just a month before she had died. ‘She had an eighteen-year-old unmarried niece who fell pregnant. At the time, your parents were considering adopting a child after your mother had had several miscarriages. A private adoption was arranged, and soon after you were born—at a private hospital here in Barcelona which your parents paid for—they took you home.’
And the young Camila had been devastated, even though she had done the only thing she could. The alternative—living as an unwed mother under her strict father’s roof in their small, conservative village—would have heaped as much misery and shame on her child’s life as on her own.
Knowing first-hand how it felt to be genuinely unwanted by one’s biological mother, Jordan hoped Xavier would see Camila’s decision not as an act of rejection or abandonment, but one of love.
She waited for him to say something. It was perfectly understandable that he might need a minute or two to process what she had told him. Something like this was—
‘What do you want, Ms Walsh?’
Her thoughts slammed to a halt, the question—not to mention the distinct chill in his voice—taking her by surprise. ‘Excuse me?’
‘Money?’
She stared at him. ‘Money?’ she echoed blankly.
His gaze was piercing, the colour of his eyes the dark pewter of storm clouds under his lowered brows. ‘It is common knowledge that my family is one of the wealthiest in Spain. You would not be the first to claim a tenuous connection in hopes of a hand-out.’
A hand-out? Her head snapped back as if he’d flung acid at her face. She gripped the edges of her journal, shock receding beneath a rush of indignation. ‘That is offensive,’ she choked out.
‘Quite,’ he agreed. ‘Which is why I will ask you again—what do you want, Ms Walsh?’
Jordan felt her heart begin to pound. How on earth could this arrogant, imperious man be her stepmother’s son?
Camila had been a kind, gentle soul, who’d always looked for the best in people despite the heartbreak she’d suffered early in her life.
Jordan looked at the envelope she’d placed with such reverent care between the pages of her journal. She’d carried the envelope halfway around the world and not once had she been tempted to snoop inside it. The letter it contained was private, sacred—the precious words of a dying woman to her son.
Lifting her chin, she looked him in the eye, letting him know he didn’t intimidate her—that she had nothing to feel ashamed about. She held up the envelope. ‘I came here to give you this.’
‘And what is “this”?’
‘A letter from your birth mother.’
‘Camila Walsh?’
‘Yes—your birth mother,’ she reiterated.
A muscle worked in his jaw. His gaze flicked to the photo that lay face-down on his desk, then back to her. ‘A claim which is, at present, unsubstantiated.’
Jordan let her hand fall back to her lap, her frustration so great she wanted to slap her palm against the top of his desk and demand to know why he was being so bloody-minded. Instead, she clamped her back teeth together and waited for the impulse to pass.
She was not someone who flew off the handle at the slightest provocation. She might have been saddled with her mother’s unruly flame-coloured hair but she hadn’t, thank goodness, inherited her fiery personality.
Suddenly she felt as cross with herself as she did with him. Why hadn’t she been better prepared for this kind of reaction? Had she imagined that because she and Camila had been close she would automatically feel some sort of instant kinship with this man?
Sadly, she had. She’d tucked her grief away in a safely locked compartment of her heart, donned those silly rose-coloured glasses she should have learnt to distrust years ago, and set off on her mission to deliver Camila’s letter and scatter her ashes in the homeland she’d left thirty-three years before.
It was the final thing Jordan would be able to do for her stepmom—for the woman whose love and kindness had helped to heal the wound Jordan’s mother had inflicted years earlier with her abrupt, unapologetic departure from her daughter’s life.
And, embarrassing though it was to admit it, Jordan had built up a little fantasy in her head—imagining herself striking up a friendship with Camila’s son, having a kind of stepsibling relationship with him—which, now that she was here, seemed to
tally laughable.
This was not a man she could imagine having such a relationship with. Girls did not look at their brothers and feel their skin prickle and heat or their mouths go dry.
He wasn’t even the sort of man she liked. In fact he was everything she disliked. Arrogant. Superior. Unfeeling. A self-appointed demigod in a power suit, ruling his kingdom from the top of his gilded tower.
And Jordan knew all about men with god complexes, didn’t she? She’d dated a surgeon whose ego was the size of the Sydney Opera House and then—even worse, because she should have known better—she’d moved in with him and decided she was in love.
Jamming the brakes on her runaway thoughts, she focused on the cold, handsome face of the man in front of her and made a snap decision. ‘I don’t think you’re ready for this letter, Mr de la Vega.’
And in that moment she knew she wasn’t ready to relinquish it—because what if he didn’t treat it with the respect it deserved? What if he threw it away without even reading it?
Stiffening her resolve, she tucked the envelope into her journal, then tore out a blank page from the back, pulled a pen from her tote bag and scribbled down her mobile number. ‘I’ll be staying at the Hostel Jardí across town for a few more days and then I’m travelling to Mallorca and then Madrid.’ She put the piece of paper on his desk. ‘If you want to reach me, here’s my number.’ She bundled her things back into her tote and slung the strap over her shoulder. ‘Thank you for seeing me, Mr de la Vega.’ And she turned to go.
‘Ms Walsh.’
His deep, commanding voice brought her to a standstill and her heart leapt with hope. Had he had an epiphany? Realised, perhaps, that he’d behaved abominably?
Breath held, she turned back...and her heart landed with a heavy thud of disappointment.
He was standing, arm extended, holding out the photo she’d left on his desk—the one of himself as a baby. ‘You forgot this.’
Releasing her breath, she shook her head. ‘It’s yours. Keep it—or throw it away. Up to you.’
She continued on to the door, and for a few agonising seconds her nerveless fingers fumbled with the handle while her nape prickled from the unsettling sensation of his gaze drilling into her back.
But he didn’t call her name again. Didn’t attempt to stop her.
As she walked past his assistant’s desk and the stunning Lucia half rose out of her chair, Jordan held up her palm. ‘I can see myself out, thanks.’
Her chest was so tight it wasn’t until she stepped onto the street forty-four storeys below that she felt able to draw a full, oxygen-laden breath into her lungs again.
But as she set off across the city no amount of deep breathing could lift the weight from her heart.
Damn him.
What was she supposed to do now with her stepmom’s letter?
CHAPTER TWO
‘I’VE LOCATED THE PAPERWORK,’ said Roberto Fuentes, long-time solicitor and a trusted friend to the de la Vega family for over forty years. He paused, and a ripple of disquiet ran beneath the surface of Xav’s iron-clad self-control.
Xav rose from behind his desk, his mobile pressed tightly to his ear. Three short strides brought him to a thick wall of glass—one of two floor-to-ceiling panes that afforded his office in the Vega Tower a panoramic view of the sprawling, sun-baked metropolis below.
He stared blindly out at the cityscape, his body bristling with impatience under the impeccably tailored lines of his charcoal-grey suit. ‘And?’
‘Your birth mother’s name was Camila Sanchez.’
The first cold prickles of shock needled over his scalp, even though the solicitor only confirmed what he already knew in his gut was true.
He raised his left arm and leant his palm against the window, needing to steady himself.
He didn’t suffer from vertigo, or a fear of heights, but suddenly the sheer drop on the other side of the glass to the city street over forty storeys below induced a wave of dizziness.
‘Xavier—?’
‘I heard you, Roberto.’ He backed away from the window and returned to his desk. ‘Was she related to anyone in my parents’ employ?’
Another heavy pause. ‘With the greatest respect, Xavier... I really would feel more comfortable if you had this conversation with Elena and Vittorio. They’ve always said—’
‘No.’ He cut Roberto off. He knew what his parents had always said.
‘We love you. Nothing will ever change that.’
And in thirty-five years nothing ever had. Not even the unexpected arrival of his younger brother, Ramon, the ‘miracle baby’ the doctors had told his mother she’d never have.
His parents had also told him that if one day he decided he wanted to trace his biological family they would support him in that quest. He’d never chosen that path, but he knew that if he had they would have stayed true to their word.
Because Vittorio and Elena de la Vega were good people. Good parents.
Xav had worked hard over the years to make them proud. Worked harder still to prove to those members of the extended family who’d never accepted him as one of their own that he was worthy of the de la Vega name.
As a boy, seeing how the veiled barbs and sly taunts upset his mamá had made him even more determined to prove he was just as good as, if not better than, any of them.
Years later, he still faced the same insidious prejudices—but now he had the pleasure of rubbing his detractors’ noses in his unrivalled success.
No. Despite the solicitor’s discomfort, Xav would not involve his parents at this point. He would shield them. Protect them. At least until he understood what—or rather who—he was dealing with.
He sat down at the handcrafted oak desk that had been handed down from father to son, along with the role of Chief Executive, through four generations of de la Vega menfolk over a span of more than sixty years.
‘This conversation remains strictly between you and me,’ he said. ‘Are we clear?’
‘As you wish,’ the older man said, resigned but respectful. ‘Just a moment...’
Xav heard the sounds of papers being shuffled before Roberto spoke again.
‘Ah... I remember now. Miss Sanchez was the niece of your parents’ housekeeper at the time. The adoption was private, the paperwork drawn up through this office.’
Xav was silent a moment, his mind processing. Assimilating. Finally, he said, ‘Gràcies, Roberto. I appreciate your help—and discretion,’ he emphasised, and then he ended the call and immediately made another.
The security specialist the Vega Corporation kept on retainer answered on the first ring. ‘I just emailed the dossier through to you,’ the man said without preamble.
‘Any red flags?’
‘None. A couple of parking offences, but nothing more serious. She’s single, a qualified trauma nurse currently unemployed. Presence on social media is sporadic and low-key. Mother lives in North America. Father’s dead—and, yes, he was married to a Camila Walsh, nee Sanchez, now also deceased.’ He paused. ‘Without knowing what your specific concerns are, I’d say she’s pretty harmless.’
Xav twisted his lips. Any man who believed women were harmless was a fool. He knew from experience they weren’t. It was why he’d taken exceptional care in choosing his lovers over the last decade—and why he was being equally judicious in choosing a wife.
‘And the surveillance?’ he asked.
‘We’ve still got eyes on her. She was at a dance club till one a.m. She hasn’t left the hostel yet this morning.’
Xav narrowed his eyes. Jordan Walsh was an unemployed party girl? ‘Keep me apprised of her movements.’ He tapped his keyboard to bring his computer screen to life. ‘I’ll let you know if I need anything further.’
He put his phone down, located the email in his inbox and opened the attachment. The first sect
ion of the document covered basic stats—name, age, marital status, occupation—and included a photo: a full-colour head-and-shoulders shot that had probably come from one of her social media accounts. She was smiling into the camera lens, giving the illusion that she was smiling straight at him, and just looking at the image gave him the same visceral gut-punch reaction that he’d experienced last night when she’d walked into his office.
Right before she had turned his world on its head and then stalked out.
Over the years he’d met hundreds of beautiful women, had slept with a select few, but never had he been so immediately or powerfully arrested by a woman’s looks before.
Her colouring was striking, with a head-turning combination of Titian hair and extraordinary hazel eyes which were a fascinating blend of green and gold. Her features were strong and symmetrical, with bold cheekbones, a straight nose and a wide, generous mouth.
Not pretty by conventional standards, perhaps, but stunning nevertheless.
Abruptly he sat back, irritated at his unusual lack of focus. Jordan Walsh’s looks, however remarkable, were irrelevant. She was a problem to be handled—that was all. One he needed to contain until he understood what threat, if any, she posed. Just as his feelings about his birth mother would have to be shelved and examined at a later stage. He didn’t have time for distractions. He had a global corporation to run. A multimillion-dollar acquisition to negotiate—a major deal that at least one member of the board would relish seeing him fail to close.
He opened the drawer where he’d shoved the photo and the piece of paper she’d left on his desk last night. He picked up his phone to punch in the number she’d written down, but then suddenly changed his mind, slipped the paper and his phone into his jacket pocket and stood.
In the anteroom outside his office he paused by Lucia’s desk and checked his watch. It was ten-twenty a.m. ‘I’m heading out,’ he told her.
Her heavily made-up eyes blinked as if he’d said something unintelligible. She glanced at her computer screen. ‘But...you have a ten-thirty meeting with the Marketing Director.’
A Mistress, a Scandal, a Ring Page 2
