by Nancy Gideon
“He didn’t have to die, Mum.”
Because his eyes glistened, she put a tender hand to his cheek. “I know. But he did. And you can’t change that. You can’t change what happened to Antonia Castillo. And you can’t continue to blame him and yourself. What good is having a life if you’re not allowed to live it? Think about that before you shut yourself up behind your duty and your rules. Think about how she’d prefer to spend her future. As a prisoner or a participant? Which do you think she’d pick? If she’s the kind of woman you could love, I think I know the answer. Her safety won’t always be your job, but her happiness could be. Think about it, darling. And think about one more thing.”
He smiled faintly, wondering what she could rub into the wounds about his heart. “What’s that, Mum?”
“I know Mateo Chavez has a past with your young lady.”
Zach didn’t protest her wording. It would have taken too much effort to convince her that Toni was not his young lady, nor would she ever be. “Your point being?”
“I’ve heard rumors, so I checked them out. It seems he’s in desperate debt and is looking for a way out of his troubles.”
“I’ve heard that, as well. To that thug Premiero?”
She placed her hand on his arm, squeezing gently. Warning him to brace himself. He did so by cautious increments.
“No, darling. To Victor Castillo. Be careful lest your enemy be someone closer than you think.”
Chapter 14
It took Toni all of an hour to realize that she disliked Angel Premiero as much, if not more, than she distrusted his vision for Aletta.
Displayed at his side like a pretty object to be admired, she observed the way he worked the room and those in it. He was charming, then he was forceful, then, if that didn’t subdue his opponent, he played the intimidation card. He was very good and placed it down with the skill of a cold professional. And he enjoyed watching the other person squirm.
He was making a point, of course. If she didn’t toe the line he’d drawn for these others for her benefit, she would be on the receiving end of his calculating wrath. And she was sure it was terrible. Her mother had loathed her husband’s childhood friend. Though she never said so, Premiero was the reason she would never agree to travel as a family to Mexico, where they’d be on Premiero’s turf. And now Toni was beginning to believe Mercedes Castillo would want no different in regards to her company. Premiero was like a big cold-blooded jungle snake. Once he had a victim in the first loose coil, they were wrapped up and squeezed into submission before they knew they were in danger.
Toni understood danger. She could scent fear in the nervous perspiration he inspired in others as he leaned in too close and smiled too widely. He was a bully but, unlike her father, he lacked patience and finesse. The charm extended only so far before annoyance would give way to backstreet strong-arm tactics. That was the purpose of the foursome who followed him in a pack wearing expensive suits that purposely didn’t conceal the fact that they were heavily armed persuaders to Premiero’s way of thinking.
When he had finished pressing concessions from all who offered him some advantage in the hotel management field, he turned his attention to the next matter on his agenda. His smile sent a shiver to Toni’s soul.
“So, Antonia, when shall we get the preliminary paperwork signed? How would tomorrow morning at ten work for you?”
“I’m not sure it’s going to work for me at all, Señor Premiero.”
“Angie, remember.”
“Señor Premiero, I’m afraid I’m not ready to sign anything. After studying the books and projections, I think I’d like to commission another feasibility study.”
“Your father has already done all that. All that’s left for you to do is sign. Tomorrow at ten.”
“I won’t be signing anything tomorrow. In fact, I don’t think I’ll be signing anything at any foreseeable time in the future.” Time to put it plain. “I don’t think you’re what Aletta needs.”
His features darkened, growing florid as fury pumped through him. “I don’t think you understand. Your father has already put this deal in motion. Money has been invested as well as his word. You will carry out his wishes.”
“I think it’s you who doesn’t understand, señor. My father’s wishes no longer control the company. I do and I don’t wish to do business with you.”
She considered herself safe in the center of the glitzy crowd of moguls and managers. But she underestimated the volcanic heat of Premiero’s blood once it was up. He caught her arm. His fingers pinched tight, creating the beginnings of distinctive bruises. Unmindful of who might notice, he stepped in, so close his aftershave stung her nose and she could see the red spider veins of dissipation in the whites of his eyes.
“Who do you think you are talking to, little girl? You have no place in an arrangement between men. Call Victor. He will talk sense into you. He’ll tell you how much more is riding on this merger than just gym shoes and jog bras. It involves a debt long unpaid, one that will not be forgiven lightly should you decide to continue this foolishness. You have no power here. You are no more than big breasts in a skimpy shirt. A marketing tool to be exploited just as your father has done. Don’t presume to be more than that. You are very, very mistaken if you think you’ll be allowed to back out now. And very wrong if you think I would hesitate to prove it to you.”
“Prove you’re a smart man and take your hand off her.”
Russell’s quiet command rumbled in like a sudden summer storm, all sizzle and crackling ozone against a deceptive black velvet sky. At his abrupt intrusion, Premiero’s men jolted to a bristling attention as the potential for violence escalated times four.
“Tell them to heel. We’re all gentlemen here and it would be rude to create a scene.”
Premiero jerked a nod toward his men and they reluctantly stood down. For a long beat, he and Zach locked stares like two hungry beasts with a tender morsel trapped between them.
“Excuse me,” intruded a feminine voice. “Mr. Premiero, might I have a word with you about a property in Puerto Vallarta? If I’m not interrupting anything.”
Premiero’s charming facade slid back into place as he regarded the elegant woman who’d approached them. “Señora Roberts, I always have time for you. My conversation here was finished.” His glare touched upon Zach and Toni for a brief, furious instant to remind them that all was not settled, before he crooked an elbow toward the sleek and sophisticated Cecilia Roberts.
As they walked away, Toni recognized the daring back of the older woman’s silver gown. She was the one who’d slipped Zach her room key. And now she’d appeared at a fortuitous moment to temporarily remove the threat of Angel Premiero. Coincidence? She glanced at Zach, a brow raised in question, but before she could demand the woman’s identity, Veta and Mateo wound their way through the crowded room to join them.
“Have I missed something?” Veta asked, her narrowed gaze on the way Toni was rubbing her forearm.
“Mateo, could I have the use of a quiet conference room with a phone, an Internet link and a fax?”
“You can have one of the business offices.”
“You can bill—”
He waved his hand, dismissing the suggestion. “Do not worry. I’ll have coffee delivered.”
“Thank you.” Aware that they’d never had the opportunity to discuss what he’d walked in on that morning, she reached out a placating hand to touch his sleeve. “Mateo…”
His smile was thin and weary. “I’ll arrange for the room and your privacy.” He nodded stiffly to Zach and wasted no time in escaping them.
“Well?” Veta posed impatiently, looking between Toni and Zach. “What did I miss?”
“Prepare to batten down the hatches,” Toni told her somberly. “I’m pulling the plug on the Mexico move.”
“Premiero and your father aren’t going to be happy.”
Toni smiled grimly at that prophecy. “I’ll have to get used to their disappointment.”<
br />
Remaining in the background, Zach watched Toni kick back her second strawberry margarita. She’d had the darkened lobby bar area to herself for the past half hour and seemed content with her solitude. The enormity of her actions weighed in the sober lines of her face and in the slump of her shoulders. He could tell she was wondering if she’d done the right thing, for the company, for herself. He thought so. He thought she’d behaved honorably and with incredible bravery. And he would have told her so if her expression hadn’t warned him away.
She’d made a dozen overseas phone calls from the small second-floor office, circling her wagons as she contacted Aletta’s legal department, the head accountant, the marketing director and the head of the workers’ union among others. Her demeanor was serious and decisive, and though she hadn’t allowed him inside the room while she made the calls, he could read professional all over her. She was going to be great at her job, much more than boobs in a thin shirt, Premiero was going to be surprised to discover. He’d figure that out when he realized Toni had effectively stopped the merger cold.
He was going to be livid. And Zach would have to be prepared should his anger transform into an unpleasant retribution.
It was well past midnight. The conference mixer was still going strong up on the third floor. Occasional bouts of laughter and music drifted down through the open atrium. Hunched over the empty bowl of her glass, the flickering of the candle centerpiece etching a melancholy portrait as she stared sightlessly into space, Toni was the embodiment of it being lonely at the top.
“She needs you.”
Zach started at the soft summation. He glanced at his mother, then back to the solitary figure. “She doesn’t need anyone right now.”
“You’re wrong, Zachary. This is exactly when a woman needs to feel the support of those who care for her.” She waited for her son to accept that role but when he remained silent, she shook her head sadly. “What a mother won’t do to get grandchildren.”
She headed for the lone occupant, ignoring the objecting sound Zach made.
“Mind if I join you?”
Toni looked up, puzzled to see the attractive older woman who’d come to her rescue earlier. “I’m not very good company, I’m afraid.”
“I’ll be the judge of that. You should be celebrating. It’s not every day a lowly female gets the better of someone like Premiero.”
Toni’s brow furrowed. She studied the woman’s name badge. Cecilia Roberts. The name meant nothing to her. “Do we know one another?”
“We have a mutual friend.” She glanced back to where Zach was standing at his post.
“Oh. I see.”
Cecilia chuckled warmly. “I don’t think you do, dear. My name was Russell before it became Holmes then Roberts.” At Toni’s blank look, she concluded, “Zachary is my son.”
“Oh.” And finally she did see. The resemblance, the accent, the obvious affection between mother and son. “That was good of you to step in with Premiero.”
She gave a derisive snort. “A pleasure. I loathe men of that ilk. I’ve come up against their brick walls my entire professional life. Neanderthals, the lot of them.”
Suddenly it clicked. “There’s no place like Holmes.”
Cecilia laughed. “That was Archie’s favorite ad campaign. Mine was Holmes is where the heart is.”
“Home in on Holmes Inns. You’re Archibald Holmes’s widow.”
“Rest his soul. I’ve never decided whether to bless him or curse him for leaving such an expansive hotel dynasty for me to run by myself. He had no family. I always hoped that my son might show an interest in stepping in so I could enjoy…other interests, but he has too much of his father’s wanderlust and call to duty to settle behind the safety of a desk. Charles was a British diplomat. Zachary was raised in some of the most exotic and unsavory places on the planet. And dangerous. His father was killed in a car bombing when Zach was away at school.”
Toni’s heart twisted in a familiar ache. “My mother died in an auto accident when I was a teen.”
Cecilia pressed a soft palm over her hand. “I met your mother at a Women in Business seminar in Atlanta. I was very impressed by her drive and intelligence. I was saddened to hear of her passing.”
“She left me her company. Now I just have to make sure I live up to her trust in me.”
Cecilia sighed. “Why do our children always assume that they bear the burden of our expectations? All a parent wants is for a son or daughter to be happy and to live well. All the other pressures they pull onto their own shoulders until they stagger under the weight of them. The way my son does.”
Cecilia fell silent and though Toni was anxious to hear what she would say, she didn’t press for an answer until the older woman was ready to give it.
“There had been death threats made against my husband. He was under heavy protection, under guard round the clock. He was coming home to England for our anniversary and to see Zachary compete in a diving competition. He refused to take us out of the country with him once the threats began. He was late getting out of a meeting and he had a plane to catch. He was in a hurry and decided not to take the extra time to have his vehicle checked before he got in. It exploded, you see.”
Toni gripped her hand to convey her empathy and horror.
“Zach withdrew from the university and joined MI6. It was his belief that carelessness took his father’s life, that if his body men had forced him to wait, that if he hadn’t been so distracted by his desire to see us, he would have taken the necessary precautions that would have saved him.”
“But he didn’t follow the rules,” Toni concluded quietly, awfully.
“And my son has been playing by them ever since. He’s become a prisoner of them. He doesn’t understand that those rules can be bent without being broken.”
No, Toni realized. Zach wouldn’t understand that. All he knew was that when the rules weren’t followed, he suffered for it. With the loss of his father, with her abduction. Failures he felt responsible for whether logic applied to his reasoning or not.
What exactly was Cecilia Roberts expecting her to do about it?
The television over the bar had been playing a Spanish dubbed rerun of the Simpsons. Suddenly, the feed crackled and went to snow. Then another image flickered up in its place. The sound of a young woman’s weeping drew Toni’s attention and then she couldn’t look away.
The bruised and bloodied young woman, her mouth and eyes taped shut, her hands and feet bound, cowered against a rough rock wall in a dimly lit root cellar. Crude camera work zoomed in to exploit the fear in her huddled posture as she snuffled behind the thick tape and shrank from the unseen threat hovering over her. She wore a stained electric-blue pullover top. A hand reached into the frame, seizing the garment by the neckline, pulling hard as the woman struggled wildly to free herself. Seams ripped as the girl jerked away and wriggled until she was left to shiver in her lacy bra.
“Darling, are you all right? Are you ill?”
Toni heard the concern in Cecilia’s question, but she couldn’t respond to it. Her head was filled with the terrified whimperings of the girl on the screen. A terrible cold seeped through her skin to her very bones. The taste of the young woman’s fright filled her nose and mouth with a bitter bite of helplessness. She couldn’t seem to draw a breath.
“Zachary, something’s wrong.”
Zach vaulted over the planter box separating the bar from the lobby area and came quickly to crouch at Toni’s side.
“Toni, what is it?”
When she didn’t respond, he followed her fixed stare to the television screen.
Where an eighteen-year-old Antonia Castillo wept in fear of her life.
Chapter 15
Acting quickly, Zach gripped the sides of Toni’s chair and physically turned it so she was facing away from the awful image on the screen. To his mother, he said a curt, “Stay with her,” then he was up, racing toward the bar.
The single employee was in the
back folding freshly laundered bar towels. He looked up in alarm, expecting a stickup at least from Zach’s forceful approach.
“Where does the signal for the television come from?”
The bartender, deciding he wasn’t about to be robbed, pointed an unsteady finger. “From upstairs. In the main offices.”
Zach was gone before the man could finish. He raced through the bar area where his mother had wrapped a pale and shaken Toni into a snug embrace, and charged up the stairs that bridged the lobby’s central waterfall fountain. The majority of the upstairs offices were dark, the doors listing the names of various travel agencies locked for the night. One light shone at the end of the hall. The owner’s office.
Mateo Chavez was seated at his empty desk working his way through a bottle of tequila. He’d been working hard from the looks of his sloppily loosened tie and even sloppier position in the chair. He blinked blearily at Zach, not bothering to hide his resentment.
“Are you alone up here?”
Zach’s brusque tone must have cut through his stupor, for he struggled to sit up and focus. “Yes, I believe so. I was going to work on some accounts…” His voice trailed off as Zach disappeared in the adjoining rooms and he waited, perplexed, until the other man returned with a videotape carefully held by its corner by a tissue.
“Explain this.”
“It’s a tape,” was all Mateo could offer, then he flushed and blustered. “I don’t allow pornography here. I don’t know who brought it, but when I find out, they’ll be fired on the spot.”
“It’s not porn.”
Mateo sagged back in his chair, trying to make sense of Zach’s massive anger. “What, then?”
“It’s a copy of the video Toni’s kidnappers sent to her father when they demanded ransom. It was playing on the bar TV downstairs.”
He blanched. “And Antonia?”
