And in that instant her antagonism made perfect sense. Pinching the bridge of his nose, Damián swallowed back rising guilt.
It hadn’t occurred to him how threatening being here in his territory must be for her. He was a physically imposing man and still a stranger to her. The short time he’d spent in her flat he’d been aware of external noises, of bodies walking up and down the stairs that led to the other flats in the building, of bodies moving around in the adjoining flats, of people walking past outside. Help had been on hand if she needed it. In comparison here, in his apartment, the silence within the thick walls was stark. Here, there was no sense of the community he’d felt in Mia’s building.
Damián would never take advantage of a vulnerable woman, but how was Mia supposed to know that? He was deeply attracted to her and sensed she had an attraction for him too but, attraction or not, reciprocated or not, he would never force himself on a woman. He’d rather cut his heart out.
‘Mia, look at me.’
She raised her stare to his slowly. Reluctantly.
‘I gave you my word that when we were alone things between us would be platonic and I meant it. Sex is a complication I don’t need. You are safe with me. Okay?’
Something glistened in her eyes but she blinked it away before he could read anything further in it.
‘If I haven’t already made it clear, you will sleep in the guest room. The only nights we will sleep together will be in Monte Cleure and if you choose to bring a chastity belt with you for it I will have no objection.’
Her lips quirked.
‘But if it makes you feel better for tonight, take a knife and put it under your pillow. Hell, you can take it now if you want. If I get within a foot of you, jab me with it.’
Her shoulders rose and she covered her mouth as if stifling a laugh.
‘I’m serious.’
She nodded but kept her mouth covered.
‘Are you hungry?’
Her eyes met his. She gave another nod.
‘Shall I order us something?’
‘That’s probably a good idea.’ A giggle escaped her mouth but there was none of the bitterness he’d heard in her other bursts of laughter. She swept an arm around the kitchen. ‘I’m pretty sure there’s nothing to eat in this showroom.’
‘There’s an Italian restaurant on the third floor that delivers good, freshly cooked food. How does that suit you?’
‘That’s fine by me.’
He opened the drawer he kept all the local takeaway and restaurant menus in. Mia was right, he was forced to concede. His apartment was kept like a showroom. But then, he hardly spent any time in it. On average he visited the UK every two months, rarely spending more than a working week there. He had neither the time nor the inclination to make this apartment into a home.
He passed the menu to her, making sure not to allow their fingers to touch, then stepped aside. ‘Name your poison.’
Her eyes lit up. ‘Gin and tonic.’
‘Large?’
She smiled. Like her laughter, it was the first genuine smile she’d given him. ‘Yes please.’
It was only while he fixed their drinks, leaving her to read through the menu, that he realised what an arrogant thing it was for him to assume her smile had been genuine. Or that her laughter had been. For all he knew, her display of edgy fear might have been an act too.
And yet something inside him told him none of that had been Mia acting.
All the same, there was no earthly reason her smile had made him feel that he could climb Mount Everest in a single bound.
* * *
Mia, her third gin and tonic of the night in hand, curled up on one of the white sofas. It was long past midnight, usually the time when the adrenaline from a performance had worked its way out of her system and she went to bed. Tonight, even with the lights in the apartment’s living room dimmed, energy still zapped through her veins and it had nothing to do with the performance. It was all to do with Damián.
Since their talk in the kitchen, things had been far more cordial between them. In truth, she felt like a naughty schoolgirl who’d been chastised by the headmistress. She had been deliberately antagonistic towards him. A very large part of her still wanted to be, and it disturbed her to remember the last time she’d behaved this way to a member of the opposite sex.
She’d had her first crush when she’d been nine. His name had been James. She’d daydreamed about him constantly. In her overactive imagination, she’d dreamed up adventurous scenarios where she put herself in danger in the pursuit of something marvellously worthy like rescuing a cat from a tree, and then needing James to come bounding in to rescue her. Sometimes it would be the other way round and she would rescue him. The ending of those daydreams was always the same: James would declare his love for her and kiss her cheek.
Alas, her daydreaming powers hadn’t extended to influencing James to reciprocate her feelings. Looking back, she thought the fact she’d been consistently horrible to him in the playground might have had something to do with his failure to fall in love with her. She remembered a day at school when it had snowed. She’d made the biggest, tightest snowball she could fit in her hands and lobbed it full power into his face. From only two feet away. Fully expecting him to throw snowballs back and for their snowball fight to end in declarations of love, she’d been baffled when he’d called her a witch and gone off crying.
The way she was acting towards Damián strongly reminded her of her long-ago playground behaviour towards James but she had no idea why she reacted like this around him. She certainly wasn’t trying to entice Damián into falling in love with her. The only thing she knew with any certainty was that when she’d told him she would be a fool not to be afraid she hadn’t actually meant that she was afraid of him as he’d assumed.
It was the non-physical power he had over her that frightened her. When she was with him all her nerves were set on edge, every emotion heightened. Even now, when she was making a concerted effort to drop the antagonism, her heartbeats couldn’t settle into a rhythm and all her senses were attuned to his every move. She hadn’t been this scared since she’d appeared in court for sentencing and that had been a very different kind of fear.
‘Tell me about your life,’ she said when he settled onto the sofa opposite her. They’d exchanged only basic pleasantries during their shared meal, which hadn’t helped her nerves in the slightest. She needed conversation to stop herself thinking. ‘What’s it like growing up a rich boy?’
What she really wanted to ask was why he thought his brother was watching him and accessing his electronic communications, and what those documents that were so important to him contained. She’d spent hours searching again on the internet and had her suspicions but, as Damián liked to remind her, he was paying her to do a job and not ask questions.
He had a large drink of the beer he’d poured for himself and wiped the froth on his lips away with his thumb. ‘Next time. Tonight I want you to tell me about yourself.’
‘You already know everything about me.’
He gave a faint smile. ‘Mi vida, I know very little about you. I know you’re twenty-four, that you’re an actress looking for her big break and that you have a sealed criminal record for possession of drugs with intent to supply. Nothing more.’
‘I thought you’d dug into my history?’
‘Only your recent history and only to satisfy myself that you are free of drugs.’
‘What criminal records did the other actresses on your shortlist have?’
‘I don’t remember.’
Mia might only have known Damián a short time but of one thing she was certain: he was a man who noticed everything and, more importantly, remembered everything.
Damián noted the narrowed, suspicious stare his answer provoked. ‘As soon as I saw your photo I knew you were the one I needed,’ he e
xplained evenly. His attention had been captured so completely by Mia’s picture that he couldn’t remember what the other actresses looked like. ‘As I explained last night, you had the look I was after. Once I was satisfied you were clean—there were no rumours of you taking drugs any more—I had only to satisfy myself that you were an actress of talent. But, if we are to convince everyone that we are in love, I need to know personal things about you.’
‘That works both ways.’
‘Agreed, but today I want to talk about you.’
‘Aren’t you afraid the press will dig into my background and learn about my criminal record? Your name would be associated with a drug dealer.’
‘They won’t. And, even if they did, they wouldn’t be able to do anything with it. Your record is permanently sealed. I was assured of that before I approached you.’
She had a sip of her drink, eyes wary.
Damián pinched the bridge of his nose and sighed. ‘Please, mi vida, that document...put it out of your mind.’
‘How can I?’ Knowing her criminal record was in someone else’s hands and could be used against her at any time was like having a permanent weight lodged in her chest.
What if she mucked the job up? Would he use her record as a weapon against her as punishment? While she knew zero about the documents he needed to find, she knew they were incredibly important to him. He was a man at war with his brother whereas Mia was a woman desperate to protect her sister. The way they lived and their outlooks on life were just too divergent; how could she trust someone whose mind worked in such a different way to her own?
He inhaled deeply and got to his feet. ‘One minute,’ he muttered.
He disappeared, returning shortly with a large envelope. He handed it to her. ‘Here. This is my copy of your conviction. Take it.’
CHAPTER FIVE
DAMIÁN SAW THE hesitation before Mia took the envelope from him.
‘This is proof I have no intention of using it against you.’ He sat back down and stared into her wide, disbelieving eyes. ‘I only wanted it for the information it contained. You will have to take my word that I made no copies.’
Expecting her to automatically demand proof regardless of his assurance, he was pleasantly surprised when she continued staring at him, time stretching between them, before the shadow of a smile curved her cheeks.
‘Thank you,’ she said simply, and laid the envelope on the table. Biting into her bottom lip, she said, ‘If your communications are being monitored, how can you be sure Emiliano hasn’t seen it and copied it?’
His chest filled, although whether it was because she seemed to have actually taken his word for something or her mention of his brother he couldn’t say. He still couldn’t believe he’d given her that information. ‘My security team have provided me with a state-of-the-art phone which they monitor for me. Everything concerning you has been done through it. I have used Felipe and his team for my security needs for over a decade and I trust them implicitly. It was them who discovered my communications had been hacked.’
Her eyes held his for a little longer before she nodded, seemingly accepting his assurance and, masterfully keeping her glass straight, curled back into the sofa. ‘Okay, so what do you want to know about me?’
Everything...
The wayward thought caught him off-guard, and he had another drink of his beer while he composed his thoughts. ‘Your family. Tell me about them.’
‘There’s not much to tell. We’re just normal.’
‘Define normal?’
‘Well, Amy and I never call our mum by her first name. And we don’t need to make an appointment to see her. And I don’t think she’s following me or hacking into my communications. That kind of normal.’
Damián had no idea why this obvious slight against his family and dig at his situation, something he would normally take as a heinous crime, made him laugh.
As a man who rarely found humour in life, hearing his own laughter sounded strange to his ears.
‘Is Amy older or younger than you?’
‘Two years younger.’
‘Any other siblings?’
‘No.’
‘Is Amy an actress too?’
‘She’s just qualified as a nurse.’ Mia said this with unmistakable pride. ‘Our mum works as a school teaching assistant. See? Normal. I grew up in a three-bedroom semi-detached house in an old market town where nothing much happened, all very ordinary and...’
‘Normal?’ he supplied with a quirk of his brow. Unbelievably, he found himself relaxing, something that was as alien to him as the sound of his laughter. Maybe it was the soft lighting or the way Mia had relaxed into the sofa, the two of them conversing as...well, not friends, but not foes either.
She sniggered. ‘Exactly.’
‘What about your father? What does he do?’
She had a quick drink before answering. ‘He died nine years ago.’
The lightness of their conversation darkened in an instant.
‘Oh.’ He blinked. ‘I’m sorry.’
Her smile became brittle. ‘Don’t be. It was a long time ago.’
But the pain was still there. He could see it in the way her knees pulled closer to her chest and in the sudden tautness of her features.
‘How did he...?’ He found the question flailing on his tongue.
‘Die?’ She swallowed but the brittle smile remained. ‘His car broke down on the motorway. He was trying to pull over to the hard shoulder when he was hit by a lorry.’ She had another drink. ‘He didn’t stand a chance.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he repeated. With his own father having recently died suddenly—although not unexpectedly as he’d suffered ill health—his chest twisted to imagine the devastation it had wrought.
‘The coroner said he died instantly so that’s a comfort. He didn’t suffer.’
No, he thought. The dead didn’t suffer. It was the ones left behind who bore the suffering.
‘What was he like?’ he asked.
Her tight frame loosened and her features softened. ‘He was wonderful. He was a physics teacher and mad as a box of frogs. Very loving and very funny and hugely intelligent. He doted on us.’
‘You saw a lot of him?’
‘Err...’ He caught the wry bafflement his question caused. ‘Of course I did. We all lived under the same roof. We were a family.’
He grimaced. ‘I’m sorry. My family...we were a family too but not, I think, as you experienced family. It wasn’t unusual for us all to be on separate continents when I was growing up.’
Damián and his brother had been raised by their own personal nannies and a fleet of dedicated staff, and educated in an English boarding school. An annual skiing trip in Switzerland had been the only sacrosanct family time, and even that had been full of his parents disappearing to take calls. He remembered numerous occasions when he’d flown to one of their family homes on a school holiday only to find one or both of his parents had already moved on to another country. To Damián, that had been normal. He’d grown up longing for the day he could take his place as his father’s side within the business. When that day had finally come, the day his father had appointed him head of Banco Delgado, his father had patted his back and said, ‘You’ve made an old man proud.’ After a lifetime of antipathy from his brother and being made to feel second best by his mother, those words had validated his entire existence. When, within a year, he’d increased Banco Delgado’s profits by forty per cent, his father had looked through the accounts confirming this, risen from his desk and shaken Damián’s hand. That was the moment he’d known he’d made his mark and that the respect he’d always craved from a father who was neither emotional or demonstrative had been his.
What would it have been like to be together as a family for more than a few weeks a year? To share meals every day? To go to bed every night k
nowing your parents and sibling were safe under the same roof as you?
‘His death must have been hard for you,’ he said heavily. He missed his father but their relationship had been too distant during his childhood for them to be close. As adults, they’d worked tightly together but there had always been a formality between them. The grief he felt for his father, he knew, was nothing to what Mia must have gone through with the loss of her father.
She nodded then downed the remainder of her drink and swirled it in her mouth before swallowing.
‘Another?’
She put her glass on the table. ‘One more then I’m going to have to call it a night.’
He fixed them both another drink. By the time he laid her glass on the table between them, she’d stretched her legs out and placed a cushion under her head. For a moment, he found his attention caught by her bare feet, which were resting slightly off the edge of the sofa. They were pretty feet, the toes painted a pretty coral colour. Did they ache, he wondered with a pang, after an evening spent on stage? Did they ache now? Did the rest of her ache...?
He took a deep breath and removed his gaze from her feet. These were not thoughts he should be having. Keeping his attention fixed on the conversation between them while ignoring the swell of desire that was constantly pulsing through him was proving incredibly hard.
Mia was just too damn desirable, that was the problem, and the stillness of his apartment and lack of external distraction was amplifying everything he felt. Every movement she made stirred his senses. He’d never before been in the position where his desire had to be stifled, and his weakness at overcoming it infuriated him. He’d always been able to compartmentalise. With Mia, though, he was failing to compartmentalise in a spectacular fashion.
He sat back on the sofa and hooked an ankle on his thigh, feigning nonchalance. He must not let his wayward feelings show on his face or in his body language. Mia was finally relaxed in his company and he had no wish to put her back on edge.
‘How did the daughter of a physics teacher become an actress?’ he asked. ‘Was it something you always wanted to do?’
The Billionaire's Cinderella Contract Page 5
