She grabbed for the heavy velvet curtains to steady herself, her heart racing giddily just as her grandmother entered the room. A small bird-like figure, stiffly postured in her usual black, her face set in the customary lines of long-suffering displeasure, she said sharply, ‘If you won’t change out of those dreadful things you’ve taken to wearing then be good enough to cover yourself up with a decent coat. And put a scarf on your head. Javier Masters will take one look at you and wash his hands of you altogether.’
Bristling at the criticism, Zoe swept out of the room, across the black and white paved hall, banging the front door behind her.
When she’d walked out of school she’d vowed never to wear the despised uniform again, or the dreary skirts and cardigans Grandmother Alice ordered from a fuddy-duddy mail-order catalogue whose only customers, Zoe was sure, were house-bound ninety-year-olds.
The monthly allowance paid by the trustees was fairly generous and she’d had little opportunity to spend it. It had mounted up. So, her defiance of stultifying authority had reached new heights one day last week when she’d taken the bus to town and spent the lot. Forbidden make-up, hair dye, lots and lots of cheap and cheerful clothes.
Trying on stuff in the communal changing room of the town’s trendiest store, she’d felt part of the young happy-go-lucky scene for the first time in her life. Really cool. It had been a great feeling.
Grandmother Alice belonged firmly in the Victorian era, she told herself as she settled herself on the front step to wait.
Javier was later than he’d expected. Apart from a couple of urgent business calls he’d found that making arrangements for the care of a teenage girl was more daunting than he’d expected it to be.
The picture-perfect Queen Anne house stood back from the village street. He indicated and turned the Jaguar into the drive and stamped on the brakes as a blur of violent colour exploded from the front step.
Zoe?
His startled gaze took in the wild transformation. Gone were the heavy grey tweed skirts and shapeless twinsets, replaced by black leather boots with six-inch heels, a frilled scarlet miniskirt with a weird asymmetric hem, a lacy gypsy top in vivid orange—and what in heaven’s name had she done to her hair?
It was bright red, looking as if it had been hacked off by a drunk wielding a pair of garden shears, gelled into tortuous spikes!
His movements slow, he unclasped his seat belt and turned off the ignition. Seeing the way she’d chosen to dress, Alice would have thrown a fit, and he didn’t blame her. Had this, coupled with her rebellious granddaughter walking out of school, been the straw that broke the unwilling camel’s back?
She was hopping from one booted foot to the other, her skinny arms clasped around her naked midriff. She had to be freezing. Venting a heavy sigh at what he appeared to be taking on, he swung out of the car and straightened his butter-soft charcoal leather jacket. He had accepted the responsibility of guiding Zoe Rothwell through the next two years and he never went back on his word.
As he approached over the immaculate length of the brick-paved drive a huge grin split Zoe’s inexpertly cosmetically enhanced features. She’s just a kid, a needy kid, he told himself, the warmth of his answering smile instinctive. All teenagers experimented, trying to find out who they were, and he had to be thankful she’d chosen wacky clothes and a violent hairstyle rather than drugs or alcohol! Knowing Alice, he guessed she would have subjected Zoe to tirades of horror and the sort of cold ridicule that would have shattered the girl’s confidence. Best keep his mouth shut right now and introduce the subject gently at a later date.
But his good intentions crumpled when he got close enough to see the butterfly tattoo on her left cheekbone. His black brows drawn into a frown, he touched the offending insect with the tip of a long finger.
‘Did you have to permanently disfigure yourself?’
She had, he noted abstractedly, an exquisitely pretty face beneath that heavy make-up, and her huge golden eyes danced with amusement. Suddenly, Javier’s lungs felt strangely constricted. He stepped back a pace.
‘It’s a transfer, silly! Don’t you know anything?’ she came back pertly as soon as she’d found her breath. Heat throbbed the spot he’d touched and spread through her entire body. Her skin might be covered with goose-bumps but she was glowing inside. Life with this gorgeous man was going to be just wonderful! He hadn’t made scathing comments about her cool new clothes or thrown a fit when her wild hairstyle had hit him in the eye. With him, away from the rigid discipline doled out by her grandmother and her teachers, she would be able to be herself and do exactly as she pleased for once. She’d always known Javier was the greatest, even when she was a small kid, he’d come through for her, and now he’d rescued her. She had never loved him more!
Half an hour into the journey to Gloucestershire Javier’s mouth was getting grimmer. Zoe’s parting from her grandmother had wrenched at his heart. The elderly lady couldn’t have made it plainer that she was glad to wash her hands of the poor kid. But the perfume she’d obviously drenched herself in was really getting to him. He’d open all the car windows to get rid of the overpowering smell but she’d freeze to death. She’d dropped the school gaberdine the ancient housekeeper had handed her and flounced out to the car, her silly skirt swinging, showing an inordinate amount of smooth thigh, tottering on those wicked spiky heels.
And he’d stopped listening to her prattles of gratitude. From what he could gather she believed she was in for the time of her life. And he’d stopped glancing at her. That lace top thing she was wearing ought to be X-rated. And she wasn’t wearing a damn thing underneath. A mixture of anger and concern impacted on his hard features. He could understand why Zoe had so wholeheartedly rebelled against the dreary school uniform and dowdy garments her grandmother had insisted she wear. But she’d gone too far the other way. She might think she looked cool and cutting edge, but in everyone else’s eyes she looked tarty.
Time to spell out a few ground rules, show her he had the upper hand and meant business.
‘There are a couple of things you ought to know before you get too hooked on the idea that your time with me is going to be a bed of roses. Firstly, I contacted your trustees to put them in the picture about the change of guardianship, only to hear that you’ve been pestering them to release large sums of money. It’s not going to happen, Zoe, so it has to stop. You need anything, you tell me, and if it’s reasonable I’ll approach the trustees. Understood?’
Reddening at the memory of the response to her request, Zoe shot Javier a fulminating sideways look. ‘I don’t want a single thing—that was the point. I made a sensible request and got treated like a silly child!’ she bristled.
Javier’s hands relaxed slightly on the steering wheel. She sounded about ten years old! ‘So run the sensible request by me,’ he invited lightly.
Zoe’s painted mouth twisted with suspicion. Was her darling Javier patronising her? Was she about to get more outright derisive rejection of her ideas? Probably. But knowing that Javier was the one person in the world who could criticise her without getting his head bitten off had her pronouncing with prickly defensiveness, ‘There’s a load of money in my name doing nothing. And there are loads of people sleeping in doorways or cardboard boxes, people with no one to care about them. The only difference between them and me is I’ve got a bed to sleep in and obscene amounts of money. I wanted to spread it around to do some good.’ She shot him a ‘so there!’ look and scrunched herself back against the leather seat, waiting for a lecture entitled Immature Profligacy.
‘There’s a third difference between you and the homeless, Zoe,’ Javier said, sympathy for the poor scrap softening his voice. ‘You do have people who care about you. Your grandmother for starters. She may not be much good at showing it, but if she didn’t care she wouldn’t have tried so hard to mould you to her idea of what a young lady should be. She’s simply a throwback to the beginning of the last century.’
Ignoring her sn
ort of disbelief, he swung into the appropriate lane for the exit to Cirencester and said firmly, ‘And I care. If I didn’t I’d have told Alice to take a running jump when she suggested handing you over to me. And getting back to your commendable concern for the homeless, there are better ways of helping than throwing handfuls of cash at every street beggar. If you’re still of the same mind when you come into your inheritance we’ll discuss it further. Agreed?’
Zoe simply nodded. She couldn’t speak without giving herself away. Tears blurred her eyes and clogged her throat. Javier had said he cared about her. He was the only person in the world who could touch her so deeply she wanted to cry!
But her bout of sentimentality took a nosedive when he announced, ‘And because I care about your future I insist you finish your education.’
Waiting at traffic lights he glanced across at her. Mutiny writ large on her expressive features, she said on a note of triumph, ‘I ran away. They won’t take me back!’
‘You’re enrolled in a sixth-form college in Gloucester. Joe Ramsay will drive you in and collect you daily. You may remember Mrs Ramsay, my housekeeper? Joe’s her husband and looks after the grounds. Mrs Ramsay will look after you when I’m not at the lodge.’
Of course she remembered Ethel Ramsay. She had let her help make the mince pies. She remembered everything about the last happy Christmas with her parents, but rarely looked back because it still hurt too much and made her feel weepy when she wanted to be tough.
‘And another thing.’ Javier hardened his heart. Someone had to tell her she looked like the trollop she wasn’t. ‘The way you’re dressed gives the wrong impression.’ How to get the message through without making her feel cheap? ‘Besides, it doesn’t do you justice. You’re a pretty kid and, as I recall, your hair was beautiful.’
Discounting the iffy ‘kid’ bit, ‘Pretty and Beautiful’ were like manna from heaven. She shot him a wide-eyed look.
‘And?’ she asked, scarcely daring to breathe, wondering if his caring was beginning to get a bit more personal.
‘You wash that ghastly colour out and let it grow again, and you and I will go shopping for clothes that strike a happy medium between someone’s ancient aunt and a slapper. Do we have a bargain?’
It wasn’t nearly as personal as she’d have liked, nothing like a declaration that he fancied her. As if! But it was all a darn sight better than being stuck with Grandmother Alice. And who knew? Living with each other for the next year and a half or so—and maybe even longer, until she was twenty-one, say—he might come to look on her as a young woman instead of a kid. And she’d do anything he asked of her but she wasn’t going to let him know that. So. ‘Let me get this straight. I go back to school.’ A theatrical groan. ‘You dictate how I look instead of Grandmother Alice. What’s in it for me?’
Javier smothered a grin. He could recognise manipulation when he saw it. The poor kid would have had a miserable eight years with Alice Rothwell and wasn’t about to agree to more of the same. ‘You do as I want and in term breaks you get grown-up treats. Winter skiing, holidays in Spain. Paris, maybe—whatever you fancy. A deal?’
Happiness threatened to choke her. All that—with him! Heaven had arrived on earth!
‘Done!’
CHAPTER ONE
Two and a half years later…
‘I’M EVER so sorry for bothering you, Mr Masters,’ Ethel Ramsay ventured as Javier slammed the car door behind him with force and strode over the gravel to where she had the main door of Wakeham Lodge open. With a quiver of apprehension the housekeeper noted the tension in his wide mouth, the rigid set of his shoulders beneath the white cotton shirt he wore.
Smouldering with anger, that was what he was, anyone could see that! And she could understand it because making sure the construction empire that straddled the world ran on oiled wheels kept him flat out, so he wouldn’t exactly thank her for dragging him back here, but she’d been so concerned, so had Joe—
‘You did exactly right, Ethel,’ Javier said, making a conscious effort to keep his tone moderate in view of the trepidation in her mild brown eyes. ‘If anyone should apologise it is I. I should have kept a closer eye on things.’
His fault entirely. He’d kept actual face-to-face contact with Zoe to a minimum for the last fourteen months, ever since that episode beside the swimming pool behind his parents’ winter home in Southern Andalucia. He’d thought it best. He now feared he’d been wrong. His lack of judgement in this case made him furious with himself.
‘So where is she?’ he questioned as something that looked like a cross between a small hairy hearthrug and a jack-in-the-box shot between his straddled legs and out onto the drive, where it sat, panting in the hot June sun, its head tipped expectantly. ‘What the hell is that?’
‘Boysie.’ Ethel relaxed a little. It would seem that the letter she’d written wasn’t responsible for that obvious annoyance, and she felt easier already. Her employer rarely lost his temper but when he did it was spectacular. She hadn’t wanted to bring his wrath down on her own head.
She gave a resigned shrug but her eyes smiled as they rested on the small dog. ‘Miss Zoe’s stray. They’re devoted to each other. He’d been wandering the village street for days so she took him in. He leaves hairs all over, I’m afraid, but we have rid him of fleas.’
Javier vented a sigh. So the menagerie had increased by one very ugly dog. At the last count she’d collected three cats from the local rescue centre and an abandoned fox cub, now thankfully half grown, fit and healthy and released back into the wild.
Emotionally starved for most of her formative years, Zoe needed something to love, so her menagerie was fine by him. At least he was no longer the recipient—
‘Where is she now?’ He repeated his query, walking further into the coolness of the wide hallway.
‘On a driving lesson.’ Ethel’s kindly face puckered with a concern Javier didn’t then understand. A few weeks ago Zoe had phoned him with the perfectly reasonable request that she have her own car. After all, she was pushing nineteen. The trustees had agreed and had coughed up. So a driving lesson gave him no problems and allowed him more time to delve deeper into his housekeeper’s worrying written request, faxed through to him on a construction site in northern France by his senior PA. ‘You are needed here,’ it had informed him. ‘Miss Zoe’s got mixed up with a wild crowd. Me and Joe do our best but it isn’t enough.’
He needed to know far more before he confronted Zoe.
‘Then you’ve time to paint a clearer picture.’ One hand cupping her plump elbow, he drew her into the sunlit drawing room, where she refused to sit, just stated with breathy agitation, ‘The driving’s part of the bigger problem. She—Miss Zoe, bless her, insisted on buying one of those flashy sports cars. Joe tried to persuade her to go for something more suited to a learner but she wouldn’t listen, she’d rather listen to the likes of that Oliver Sherman. And do you know what? He somehow persuaded her to let him keep the car, and he comes up here in it most afternoons to take her out supposedly to teach her to drive, and he’s already smashed up two of his own cars to my certain knowledge! And that’s not the worst of it.’ Her face was getting steadily redder. ‘She’s taken up with a fast crowd, at least they took up with her—mostly for what they can get out of her, is what me and Joe reckon. You’ll know, of course, how her allowance got a hefty lift upwards after she turned eighteen—well, it goes on that crowd of hangers-on and that Sherman is the worst of them. Always hanging around her. I’ve tried to warn her, so has Joe, but she takes not a bit of notice. She stays out all hours. I’ve caught her coming in at dawn often enough. And another thing—’
Her catalogue of woes was cut short by the sound of an engine at speed, the squeal of brakes and the showering of gravel. ‘That will be them—’
His mouth set in a hard, flat line, Javier strode out with long, impatient steps. The bright yellow Lotus was parked alongside his Jag and even through the windscreen he could see that Zoe lo
oked shaken. His mouth took on a grimmer line.
Ignoring her for the moment—he’d deal with her later—he wrenched open the driver’s side door and removed the ignition keys.
‘Out!’ The single word exploded with cutting arrogance.
The initial look of utter shock was replaced by sulky belligerence on Oliver Sherman’s playboy-pretty features. ‘And what if I won’t?’ he muttered.
‘I didn’t hear that,’ Javier gritted. What he knew of Sherman, spoiled only child of a local estate agent with a decidedly dubious reputation, put him firmly in the low-life category. He didn’t want him anywhere near Zoe. ‘You’ve two seconds to get out under your own steam.’ His voice carried a steely threat that the younger, shorter man wisely chose not to ignore.
‘Start walking.’
‘But—’ An ugly tide of red swept over the blond’s face, his pale blue eyes swivelling over the roof of the car to where Zoe was standing, a wriggling, face-licking Boysie high in her arms. As if his courage had been bolstered by that moment of eye contact, he drawled, ‘Zoe allows me use of her car; it’s not for you to say.’
‘No?’
Unwavering grey eyes turned to black ice. Shrivelled, Oliver Sherman took a shaky backwards step, turned, and began to walk.
For a moment or two, Zoe watched his retreat with a surge of relief. Ollie hadn’t let her behind the wheel at all today, claiming he had better things to do than sit beside a learner who didn’t know her clutch from her windscreen washer.
He’d driven them up onto Kenley Common and tried it on. She was used to his passes, his protestations of love and marriage proposals and could handle them one hand tied behind her back, no problem.
A Spanish Marriage Page 2
