Marriage Made In Blackmail

Chloe tried her hardest not to allow sympathy to creep through her but it was hard. Luis’s past was something that never failed to make her heart twist and tears burn her eyes. She blinked them back now as she imagined the vulnerable thirteen-year-old he would have been.

She had been only three when Luis’s mother had been murdered, far too young to have any memories of it.

But she had been there.

Clara had been performing in London on the night of her murder in a production of Romeo & Juliet. Yuri, a ballet dancer who had defected from the old USSR in the seventies and whose career had gone into freefall, had watched the performance convinced his wife was having a real-life affair with Romeo. When the performance had ended, Yuri had locked Clara in her dressing room, preventing dancers and backstage staff from entering when the screams and shouts had first rung out.

By the time they’d smashed the door open, Clara was dead, Yuri’s hands still around her throat.

Luis and Javier had been in the hotel across the road from the theatre babysitting Chloe with Benjamin.

Chloe and Benjamin’s mother, Louise, who had loved the twins fiercely, had been the one to break the terrible news to them.

He poured the fresh cocktail into two clean glasses. ‘Imagine what it has been like for us growing up with that as our marker. We are hugely successful and rich beyond our wildest dreams but still people look at us and their first thought is our parents. You see it in their eyes, curiosity and fear.’

He pushed one of the glasses towards her and put the other to his lips. He took a sip and pulled a musing face. ‘Not too bad. Better than the last one but I think I’ll stick to construction and property developing.’ He took another sip. ‘As I was saying. My parents. A legacy we have tried hard to escape from while still honouring our mother.’

‘Is that why you took her surname?’ The question came before she could hold it back. It was something she’d been intensely curious about for years.

‘We took it because neither of us could endure living with our father’s name. We have worked hard to disassociate ourselves from that man and to make our mother’s name synonymous with the beauty of her dance and not the horror of her death, but now everything has been dredged up again and you are partly responsible. Our lives are back under the media’s lens and again we find the world wondering how much of our father’s murderous blood lives in our veins.’ He inhaled deeply. ‘We took out the injunction to stop this very thing from happening because we knew Benjamin was an explosive primed to detonate. We are close to signing a deal to build a new shopping complex in Canada. Our partner in this venture has stopped returning our calls.’

‘Then he’s a smart man who knows he will be ripped off.’

The flash of anger that rippled from Luis’s eyes was enough to make her quail.

‘We did not rip him off and if anyone says otherwise we will sue the clothes off their back.’

‘You ripped my brother off,’ she said defiantly. ‘Feel free to sue me. I would love my day in court.’

‘I have a much better way of dealing with you, bonita, but as for your brother, I will not say this again—we did not rip him off. I was going to get the gala out of the way and then call him but, instead, Benjamin stole Freya and tried to blackmail us. All my sympathy left me then. As far as I’m concerned, your brother can go to hell. The press speculation his actions have wrought are untenable. My assistant found comments on a newspaper website querying whether Freya ran off with Benjamin because she feared she would end up like my mother.’

Chloe winced. She had many issues with Luis and Javier but they could no more help their parentage than she could help hers. ‘That’s disgusting.’

‘I’m glad you think so because you are going to help put things right. If you hadn’t called with your tale of terror I would have been at the gala before Benjamin stepped foot inside it. None of this would have happened.’

‘He believed you owed him two hundred and twenty-five million euros,’ she spat, her fleeting compassion overridden by anger. ‘Did you expect him to roll over and accept that? Did you expect me to? I was there with him at the hospital when you made that call begging for his help and his money.’

She’d been there, at the first turn of the wheel of the whole mess.

Chloe had been sitting on a bench in the hospital garden with her big brother, both of them dazed; her crying, he ashen, both struggling to comprehend the mother they loved so much was going to die. That was when Benjamin had received the call from Luis asking for his financial help.

‘If you felt Javier had been cheated would you sit there meekly and allow it to go unchallenged when there was something practical you could do to help?’

‘Probably not.’ He shrugged. ‘But would I have conspired to kidnap a woman and hold her to ransom...? No, I would not have gone that far if the first throw of the dice had not already been rolled.’

‘I did not conspire to kidnap Freya! I helped whisk her away from a potential marriage made in hell and...’

‘Is that how you justify it to yourself? I must remember to dress my actions up in a similar fashion when I tell you that you won’t be returning to port until you have married me.’

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