Exotic Affairs: The Mistress Bride\The Spanish Husband\The Bellini Bride (21 page)

It was an office, Caroline saw. A very elegant black and cream office.

‘What is this place?’ she asked warily.

Stepping past her, Luiz walked across the room towards the desk, then placed himself behind it. ‘My office,’ he answered, bending down to unlock and open a drawer.

‘You mean…’ Her eyes flickered around the room. ‘You mean,
you
actually
work
here?’

‘Work here. Live here…’ He placed a heavy leather-bound dossier on the desk in front of him. ‘This is
my
hotel, Caroline,’ he added levelly.

His
hotel…? Caroline gave a small shake of her head. ‘But this is an
Angel
Hotel,’ she stated. ‘Part of the
Angel
Group!’ And the Angel Group was huge. Not just because of the string of deluxe hotels it owned throughout the world, but because it had other, much more powerful interests wrapped up in its multinational package.

Lifting his dark head, Luiz just looked at her. It was all it needed for the penny to drop.
Angel
as in Luiz
Angeles
de Vazquez, she was suddenly remembering. But it was the
Angel
in the Angel Group that was slowly filling Caroline with a new sense of dismay. Because it was also the group which had very recently acquired a bank in London that the Newbury family knew very well.

‘Oh, my God,’ she breathed, as full enlightenment finally began to dawn. ‘It’s you we have been summoned here to Marbella to see about our debts, isn’t it?’

He didn’t answer. But then he didn’t really need to when confirmation was already written on his lean dark face. And she could only stand and watch as every image she had ever built in her mind to form Luiz Vazquez slowly cracked, then shattered right there in front of her until she could no longer see Luiz the exciting lover. Or even Luiz the ruthless con-man who’d fleeced her father of tens of thousands of pounds.

‘What is it you want?’ she whispered frailly as the shattered pieces that had once been Luiz settled back into their new order of things. And now she was seeing Luiz the icecool operator, whom, it seemed, had only gone up and up
in the world while she and her father had gone steadily down.

‘I want you to come and sit down,’ he said. ‘We haven’t got much time. And now that you understand just why you are here we may as well get down to business…’

Business. The word sent an icy chill chasing down her spine. As she walked across the room towards him on legs that were shaking badly Luiz sat himself down, opened the dossier, selected a piece of paper from it, then slid it towards her as she sank into the chair placed opposite him.

‘Tell me if you agree with what’s written on there,’ he invited.

Eyes flickering in an effort to get them to focus, heart slowed by the weight of what was unfolding in front of her now, Caroline pulled the piece of paper towards her, then picked it up in trembling fingers and forced herself to read.

Finely listed, tightly lined, it was a very precise inventory of every penny she already knew they owed—and a whole lot more that she actually hadn’t known about, but she couldn’t doubt their authenticity when the names of all her father’s favourite London haunts were inscribed next to them.

And the bottom figure was so utterly repellent that her skin began to crawl. ‘Could I have some water, please?’ she breathed.

Without a single word, Luiz got up and walked over to a black-lacquered sideboard. He returned in seconds to place a frosted glass of iced water down in front of her, then just as silently returned to his chair while she picked up the water and sipped at it sparingly.

‘We can’t pay you, Luiz,’ she told him, once she’d found enough voice to speak. ‘N-not all of it anyway.’

‘I know that,’ he returned.

She swallowed thickly, and took a couple more sips of
water before making herself go on. ‘If you refuse to play him at cards tonight, then the money he won in the casino plus some money I have of my own should clear a small part of this.’ But not all, she added with a silent bleakness. Not anywhere near all…

‘The planned card game and this are two separate issues,’ he informed her. ‘And I never—ever—mix business with pleasure, Caroline. Understand me?’

Understand? No she didn’t! ‘But we have the means to clear s-some of this, Luiz!’ she cried, tossing the wretched debt list back at him. ‘And you want to play card games just for the hell of it? Where is the business sense in that?’

Sitting back in his chair, Luiz didn’t even deign to watch as the piece of paper skidded across the table then floated down onto his lap. His face was inscrutable, his manner relaxed. ‘Where is your own block of money coming from?’ Smooth as silk, he kept the discussion fixed to his own agenda.

Her breath shuddered on an overwrought sigh. ‘None of your business,’ she muttered, then got up and paced tensely away from the desk.

‘It is if you borrowed from Peter to pay back Paul, so to speak,’ he pointed out. ‘Which would only make the bottom figure here worse, not better.’

‘I have money left over from my mother’s bequest,’ she told him reluctantly.

‘No you don’t.’

‘What—?’ Stung by his quiet certainty she spun to stare at him.

Instantly she felt under attack. It was his eyes, and the knowledge of truth she could see written in them.

‘Your mother’s money went on paying back debts years ago,’ he informed her. ‘After that you spent the next few years selling off the family heirlooms one by one, until there were very few left worth selling. Then came the quiet
period when your father behaved himself for a couple of years—or so you believed. When it all started up again, you resorted to selling off small plots of land on the far edges of your family estate to wealthy businessmen who were looking for somewhere to build a country retreat. But the council eventually put a stop to that, quoting the rape of country heritage law or some such thing.

‘So what’s left to sell, Caroline?’ he asked. ‘The ancestral home, which is already mortgaged to the hilt? Or the few heirlooms that are left—which probably belong to the bank already, on paper at least? Or maybe you were thinking of paying me back with the commission you earn working for those London-based interior designers who pay you peanuts for your considerable knowledge of all things aesthetic, to hunt out pieces of artwork and various
objets d’art
to decorate the homes of their wealthy clients?’

It was like being pummelled into the ground by a very large mallet. She had never felt so small in her whole life.

‘What next, Caroline?’ He pummelled her some more with the soft pound of his ruthless voice. ‘What could you possibly have left that would appease any bank holding a debt the size of yours? Yourself, maybe?’ he suggested silkily. ‘Are you thinking of prostituting yourself to the highest bidder so that Daddy can keep on feeding his addiction because he can’t help himself?’

‘Stop it!’ she choked. ‘Just shut up—
shut up!
’ She couldn’t listen to any more! White-faced, totally demolished, she stared at him in blank incomprehension as to why he was being so cruel. ‘How do you know all of this? Where did you get your information? How long have you been compiling that—’ she waved a shaky hand at the thick wad of paper sitting on the desk in front of him ‘—dossier on me?’

‘Information can be bought any time, anywhere, so long as you have the money to pay for it.’

‘And that makes it all right to pry into my life?’ she cried. ‘Why, Luiz—
why?
’ She just didn’t understand it! ‘What did I ever do to you to make you want to pursue me in this h-horrible way? It was you that once used me, remember!’ she added painfully. ‘You slaked one of your lusts with my body, night after wretched night, then went off to slake your other lust at a card table with my father!’

‘I don’t want to talk about that,’ he gritted, and he was suddenly on his feet. Tense—like her. Angry—like her. As bitter as hell—like her.

‘Oh, that’s rich!’ Caroline scorned him. ‘When it comes to
your
faults,
you
don’t want to talk about it! Yet you’ve just taken great delight in listing
my
faults and failings—and even had the gall to call me a prostitute!’

‘I made it an option, not a fact,’ he corrected. But he looked pale—pale enough for Caroline to know that she had touched a raw nerve somewhere inside his ruthless soul.

‘And we both know who sold himself for the pot of gold, Luiz,’ Caroline persisted angrily. ‘We both know that your motive for keeping me in bed with you was so I couldn’t be keeping an eye on my father!’

‘All right, let’s have that one out,’ he decided, swinging round the desk to begin striding towards her.

Caroline wanted to back off, but hell could freeze over before she would let herself do so. He arrived, big and threatening, right in front of her.

‘You think I prostituted myself for the pot of gold seven years ago.’ She
had
hit a raw nerve, Caroline confirmed. ‘So let’s just see which one of us can delve the depths this time. Here’s the deal, Caroline. Take it or leave it,’ he announced. ‘Sleep with me tonight and I won’t play your father.’

Sleep with him? He was lucky she didn’t wing her hand at his face! ‘Well, if that isn’t mixing business with pleasure—what is?’ she spat at him in disgust.

‘No—no,’ Luiz argued. ‘This is called mixing pleasure with pleasure.’ And he was even smiling, the black-hearted devil.

‘Go to hell,’ she told him, then spun on her heel with the intention of walking out of there as fast as she damn well could.

‘The offer holds only as long as it takes you to open that door,’ Luiz fed swiftly after her.

Her footsteps stilled, though her heart-rate didn’t, it raged on right out of that door and onto the next flight out of this awful place! She converted that rage into a different kind of action by wheeling back round to face him. Luiz didn’t need words to know what she was thinking. And his answering shrug spoke for itself.

‘Everyone has a price, Caroline,’ he taunted silkily. ‘I am just trying to ascertain your price, that’s all…’

‘I’ll never forgive you for this,’ she breathed.

‘By that, are you trying to tell me that it would
hurt
you to go to bed with me?’ he questioned smoothly.

From feeling chilled she went hot—hot with discomfort. Because, after what they had just almost done in the pool room, there was no way she could pretend that sleeping with Luiz would be anything but a whole lot of pleasure!

A light suddenly began winking on the desk console, saving Caroline from having to make the worst decision of her entire life.

Luiz swung back to his desk, sat down in his chair again, then reached out to flick a finger at a switch. ‘Yes?’ he prompted.

‘It’s time we were leaving,’ the same deep voice Caroline had first heard through the narrow gap in the pool room door informed him.

His eyes narrowed thoughtfully on Caroline. Quite unexpectedly she began to shake so badly that she just had to sit down. The chair she had just vacated was nearest. Almost stumbling over to it, she lowered herself down as Luiz murmured a quiet, ‘Two minutes, Vito…’ and cut the connection.

Too long spent riding a roller coaster of too many shocks and worries had shaken her insides to pieces. She stared helplessly at Luiz, and knew he was waiting for her to voice her surrender to him out loud.

On a sharp stab of pain she flicked her eyes away, because she couldn’t bear to look at him
and
give him that surrender.

It was then that she saw it. ‘Oh, good grief,’ she gasped. She had only just noticed the scorpion crawling down the wall behind him. The picture was so life-like that she actually reared back in the chair to take instinctive avoiding action. ‘Luiz—that thing is hideous!’

‘But effective,’ he smiled.

It was then she remembered that the first business he had ever owned outright had been a small nightclub in New York called, as he had informed her rather deridingly, The Scorpion, and bought from an old friend whose deteriorating health had forced him to accept a quieter way of life. Within two years Luiz had sold the club on to a big inner-city developer for the kind of money that had allowed him to give his own life new direction. ‘And I haven’t needed to look back since,’ she recalled him saying to her with quiet satisfaction.

But the scorpion itself must still linger on in his affections for him to have it hanging there on his wall. Or was there more to its being there than mere affection? Was it a warning that this lean, dark, smoothly sophisticated man had another side to him that was as lethal as the scorpion’s tail?

Glancing back at him, she found him watching her with the kind of mocking twist to his mouth that said he knew what she was thinking and was wryly amused by it.

‘A scorpion stings its victims quick and clean, Luiz,’ she murmured unsteadily. ‘What you are proposing here is neither clean nor quick.’

‘Unparallelled sex between two people who excite the hell out of each other? I should hope not.’ He smiled, picking up the dossier to replace it in its drawer.

Then he was suddenly on his feet. ‘Right,’ he said briskly. ‘Let’s go…’

Let’s go? Caroline’s skin began to prickle as a fresh burst of alarm went chasing through her. ‘But I haven’t agreed to do anything with you yet!’ she protested.

‘Decide later,’ he said as he came striding round the desk towards her. ‘We haven’t got time to deal with it right now.’

With that, Caroline found herself being lifted firmly to her feet. Her options, she realised, had dwindled to nothing. Time had seemingly run out. Without another word, Luiz was escorting her from the room and they were outside in the silky warm darkness before she realised what they were doing.

A top-of-the-range black BMW stood purring at the front entrance. Luiz opened the rear door and urged her inside before going round to climb in on the other side of the car. The moment the door shut the car was moving, driven by a man who was hidden behind a shield of smoked glass.

‘Where are we going?’

‘You’ll see,’ was the very uninformative reply she received.

It was late, but outside, beyond the car’s side window, the resort was still alive with people out to enjoy themselves with a visit to one of Marbella’s elegant night-spots
or just simply taking a late stroll along the yacht-lined waterfront.

It was years since she’d been able to do what they were doing, since she’d felt carefree enough to want to.

Years and years of self-restraint, of living under a thick grey cloud with no hint of a silver lining. Years playing watchdog to her father’s sickness, because she knew that if she didn’t look out for him then nobody else was going to do it.