Ruthless Revenge: Passionate Possession: A Virgin for Vasquez / A Marriage Fit for a Sinner / Mistress of His Revenge

Sophie had taken his eye off the ball, and here she was, doing it again.

The sooner he got her out of his system, the better.

‘So your brother stays in Paris,’ he said, with the sort of insistence that made her think of steamrollers slowly and inexorably flattening vast swathes of land. ‘I could get someone to house-sit and daily look for walls falling down...’

‘You might think it’s funny, Javier, but it’s not. You might live in your mansion now, and you might be able to get whatever you want at the snap of a finger, but it’s just not funny when you have to watch every step you take because there might just be a minefield waiting to explode if you put your foot somewhere wrong. And I’m surprised you have no sympathy at all, considering you...you were...’

‘I was broke? Penniless? A poor immigrant still trying to get a grip on the first rung of that all-important ladder? I feel it’s fair to say that our circumstances were slightly different.’

‘And, in a way, you probably have no idea how much worse it makes it for me.’ She swung her head away. Her prissy, formal clothes felt like a straitjacket and her tidy bun nestled at the nape of her neck was sticky and restricting.

Without thinking, she released it and sifted restless fingers through the length of her tumbling hair.

And Javier watched. His mouth went dry. Her hair cascaded over her shoulders and down her back, a vibrant wash of colour that took his breath away. He had to look away but he knew that he was breathing fast, imagining her naked, projecting how her body would feel were he to run his hands along its shapely contours.

‘You’re right. Oliver has always been protected,’ she told him bluntly. He might very well be the first person she was telling this to. It was a truth she had always kept to herself because to have voiced it would have felt like a little betrayal. ‘He only found out about...everything when Dad’s illness was finally revealed, and even then we didn’t tell him that the company was on its last legs. In fact, he returned to California and only came back after the...the accident when... Well, he came back for Dad’s funeral, and of course Roger’s, and by then he had to be told.

‘But his heart isn’t in getting the company up and running. His heart isn’t in the house either. Mum’s now living in Cornwall and, as far as Ollie is concerned, he would sell the family home to the highest bidder if there was anyone around who was in the slightest bit interested. He doesn’t give a hoot if it all falls down in a pile of rubble just so long as we got some money for the rubble. So, no, he wouldn’t be at all happy to leave Paris to house-sit.’

She took a deep, shaky breath. ‘The house hasn’t been maintained for years. It always looked good on the outside, not that I ever really looked, but it turned out that there were problems with the roof and subsidence that had never been sorted. There’s no money left in the pot to sort that stuff out, so I keep my eyes peeled for anything that might need urgent attention. The worse the house is, the less money we’ll get, if we ever manage to sell at all. I can’t afford for a leak to spring in the cellar and start mounting the stairs to the hallway.’ She sighed and rubbed her eyes.

‘Why did you let him get away with it?’ It was more of a flat, semi-incredulous statement than a question and Sophie knew exactly who he was talking about even though no name had been mentioned.

‘I don’t want to talk about that. It’s in the past and there’s no point stressing about the stuff you can’t change. I just have to deal with the here and now...’

‘Oliver,’ Javier ploughed on, ‘might be indifferent and clueless when it comes to business, but you clearly have the capacity to get involved, so why didn’t you? You knew what was happening.’

‘Mum wasn’t in good health. Hadn’t been for ages. And then Dad’s behaviour started getting weird...erratic... Suddenly everything seemed to be happening at the same time. We found out just how ill he was and then, hard on the heels of that, the full repercussions of...of Roger’s gambling and all the bad investments began coming to light. There was no one at the helm. All the good people were leaving. Lots had already left, although I didn’t know that at the time, because I’d never been involved in the family business. It was...chaos.’

Even in the midst of this tale of abject woe, Javier couldn’t help but notice that there was no condemnation of her scoundrel husband. Loyalties, he thought with a sour taste, were not divided.

‘So I’ll get a house-sitter,’ he repeated and she shook her head. He had already infiltrated her life enough. She wasn’t sure she could cope with more.

‘I’ll come here,’ she conceded, ‘and go home at the weekends.’ She breathed in deeply. ‘And thank you for the use of an apartment. You have to let me know... I don’t have a great deal of disposable income, as you can imagine, but please let me know how much rent I will owe you.’

Javier sat back and looked at her from under sinfully long lashes, a lazy, speculative look that felt like a caress.

‘Don’t even think of paying me rent,’ he told her silkily. ‘It’s on the house...for old times’ sake. Trust me, Sophie, I want you...’ he paused fractionally ‘...there at the helm while changes are taking place, and what I want, I usually get...whatever the cost.’

CHAPTER FIVE

SOPHIE LOOKED AROUND her and realised guiltily that, after two weeks’ living in the apartment Javier had kindly loaned her, refusing to countenance a penny in payment, she was strangely happy.

The apartment was to die for. She still found herself admiring the décor, as she was doing right now, having just returned from the office and kicked off her stupid pumps so that she could walk barefoot on the cool, wooden floor.

She had expected minimalist with lots of off-putting glossy white surfaces, like the inside of a high-tech lab. Images of aggressive black leather and chrome everywhere had sprung to mind when she had been handed the key to the apartment by his personal assistant, who had accompanied her so that the workings of the various gadgets could be explained.

She had assumed that she would be overwhelmed by an ostentatious show of wealth, would be obliged to gasp appropriately at furnishings she didn’t really like and would feel like an intruder in a foreign land.

The Javier of today was not the teasing, warm, sexy, funny guy she had once known. The today Javier was tough, rich beyond most people’s wildest dreams, ruthless and cutting edge in his hand-tailored suits and Italian shoes. And that would be reflected in any apartment he owned.

She’d been surprised—shocked, even—when she was shown the apartment.

‘It’s had a makeover,’ the personal assistant had said in a vaguely puzzled voice, but obviously far too well-trained to comment further. ‘So this is the first time I’m seeing the new version...’

Sophie hadn’t quizzed her on what it had been like previously. Tired and in need of updating, she had assumed. He’d probably bought a bunch of apartments without even seeing them, the way you do when you have tons of money, and then paid someone handsomely to turn them into the sort of triple-A, gold-plated investments that would rent for a small fortune and double in value if he ever decided to sell.

Whoever had done the interior design had done a great job.

She padded towards the kitchen, which was cool, in shades of pale grey with vintage off-white tiles on the floor and granite counters that matched the floor.

Everything was open-plan. She strolled into the living room with a cup of tea and sank into the cosy sofa, idly flicking on the television to watch the early-evening news.

It was Friday and the work clothes had been dumped in the clothes hamper. Javier had told her that it was fine to dress casually but she had ignored him.

Keep it professional; keep it businesslike... she had decided.

Jeans and tee shirts would blur the lines between them...at least for her...

Not, in all events, that it made a scrap of difference how she dressed, because, after the first day, he had done a disappearing act, only occasionally emailing her or phoning her for updates. A couple of times he had visited the branch when she had been out seeing customers, trying to drum up business, and she could only think that he had timed his arrivals cleverly to avoid bumping into her.

He didn’t give a passing thought to her, whilst she, on the other hand, couldn’t stop thinking about him.

She didn’t think that she had ever really stopped thinking about him. He’d been in her head, like the ghost of a refrain from a song that wouldn’t go away.

And now she couldn’t stop thinking about him. Worse than that, she spent every day at the office anticipating his unexpected arrival and was disproportionately disappointed when five-thirty rolled round and he’d failed to make an appearance.

Her heart skipped a beat when she opened up her emails and found a message from him waiting for her.

Her throat went dry when she heard the deep, sexy timbre of his voice on the end of the line.

She was in danger of obsessing over a guy who belonged to her past. At least, emotionally.

He’d suddenly reappeared on the scene, opening all sorts of doors in her head, making her think about choices she had made and bringing back memories of the horror story that had followed those choices.

He made her think about Roger. He was curious about her ex. She sensed that. Perhaps not curious in a personal way, but mildly curious, especially because so many things didn’t quite add up. Why, he had asked her, hadn’t she intervened when she’d known that he was blowing vast sums of money gambling? When she’d discovered the scale of the financial problems with the company? Why hadn’t she acted more decisively?

But, of course, that was the kind of person he was. Someone who was born and bred to act decisively. He could never begin to understand how easy it was just to get lost and find yourself in a fog, with no guiding lights to lead you out.

She had grown up a lot since then. She had had to. And, in the process of taking charge, she had realised just how feeble her brother was when it came to making decisions and taking difficult paths.

When she looked back at herself as she had been seven years ago, it was like staring at a stranger. The carefree girl with a life full of options was gone for ever. She was a woman now with limited options and too many bad memories to deal with.

Was that why she was now obsessing over Javier, someone she had known for such a short space of time? Was it because he reminded her of the girl she used to be? Was it obsession by association, so to speak?

He made her think things she would rather have forgotten but he also made her heart skip a beat the way it once used to when she’d been with him.

And more than that, he made her body feel alive the way it hadn’t for years. Not since him, in fact. He made her feel young again and that had a very seductive appeal.

With an impatient click of her tongue, she raised the volume of the television, determined not to waste the evening thinking about Javier and remembering what life had been like when they had been going out.

She almost didn’t hear the buzz of the doorbell, and when she did, she almost thought that she might have made a mistake because no one could possibly be calling on her.

Since she had moved to London, she had kept herself to herself. She knew a couple of people who had relocated from the northern branch but the London crew, all very able and super-efficient, were new and she had shied away from making friends with any of them.

For starters, although it wasn’t advertised and in all probability none of them knew, she was more or less their boss. And also...did she really want anyone knowing her backstory? It was just easier to maintain a healthy distance, so there was no way whoever had buzzed her from downstairs was a colleague on the hunt for a Friday night companion.

She picked up the intercom which allowed her to see her unexpected visitor and the breath left her in a whoosh.

‘You’re in.’ Javier had come to the apartment on the spur of the moment. Since she’d started at the London office, he had seen her once, had spoken to her six times and had emailed her every other day. He had purposefully kept his distance because the strength of his response to her had come as a shock. Accustomed to having absolute control over every aspect of his life, he had assumed that her sudden appearance in his highly ordered existence would prove interesting—certainly rewarding, bearing in mind he intended to finish what had been started seven years previously—and definitely nothing that he wouldn’t be able to handle.

Except that, from the very minute he had laid eyes on her, all that absolute certainty had flown through the window. The easy route he had planned to take had almost immediately bitten the dust. He’d had every intention of coolly trading his financial help for the body he had been denied, the body he discovered he still longed to touch and explore.

She’d used him and now he’d been given a golden opportunity to get his own back.

Except, he’d seen her, and that approach had seemed worse than simplistic. It had seemed crass.

There was no way he was going to pursue her and showing up at the workplace every day would have smelled a lot like pursuit, even though he had every right to be there, considering the amount of money he was sinking into the failing company.

He wanted her to come to him but staying away had been a lot more difficult than he’d dreamed possible.

Like someone dying of thirst suddenly denied the glass of ice-cold water just within his reach, he had found himself thinking about her to the point of distraction, and that had got on his nerves.

So here he was.

Sophie frantically wondered whether she could say that she was just on her way out. His unexpected appearance had brought her out in a nervous cold sweat. She had been thinking about him, and here he was, conjured up from her imagination.

‘I...I...’

‘Let me in.’

‘I was just about to...have something to eat, actually...’

‘Perfect. I’ll join you.’

That wasn’t what she’d had in mind. What she’d had in mind was a lead-up to a polite excuse and an arrangement to meet when she had some sort of defence system in place. Instead, here she was, hair all over the place, wearing jogging bottoms and an old, tight tee shirt bought at a music festival a dozen years ago and shrunk in the wash over time.

‘Come on, Sophie! I’m growing older by the minute!’

‘Fine!’ She buzzed him in, belatedly remembering that it was actually his apartment, so he had every right to be here. And not only was it his apartment, but she wasn’t paying a penny towards the rent, at his insistence.

She scrambled to the mirror by the front door, accepted that it was too late to start pinning her hair back into something sensible, and even though she was expecting him, she still started when he rapped on the door.

He’d obviously come straight from work, although, en route, he had divested himself of his tie, undone the top couple of buttons of his shirt and rolled his sleeves to his elbows. Her eyes dipped to his sinewy forearms and just as quickly back to his face.

‘You look flustered,’ Javier drawled, leaning against the door frame and somehow managing to crowd her. ‘I haven’t interrupted you in the middle of something pressing, have I?’ This was how he remembered her. Tousled and sexy and so unbelievably, breathtakingly fresh.

And innocent.

Which was a bit of a joke, all things considered.

Dark eyes drifted downwards, taking in the outline of her firm, round breasts pushing against a tee shirt that was a few sizes too small, taking in the slither of flat belly where the tee shirt ended and the shapeless jogging bottoms began. Even in an outfit that should have done her no favours, she still looked hot, and his body responded with suitable vigour.

He straightened, frowning at the sudden discomfort of an erection.

‘I haven’t managed to catch much of you over the past couple of weeks.’ He dragged his mind away from thoughts of her, a bed and a heap of hurriedly discarded clothes on the ground. ‘So I thought I’d try you at home before you disappeared up north for the weekend.’

‘Of course.’

There was a brief pause, during which he tilted his head to one side, before pointedly looking at the door handle.

‘So...’ He looked around him at his apartment with satisfaction. He’d had it redone. ‘How are you finding the apartment?’

Some might say that he’d been a little underhand in the renovating of the apartment, which had been in perfectly good order a month previously. He’d walked round it, looking at the soulless, sterile furnishings, and had been able to picture her reaction to her new surroundings: disdain. He had always been amused at her old-fashioned tastes, despite the fact that she had grown up with money.

‘I imagine your family home to be a wonder of the most up-to-the-minute furnishings money can buy,’ he had once teased, when she’d stood staring in rapt fixation at a four-poster bed strewn with a million cushions in the window of a department store. She’d waxed lyrical then about the romance of four-poster beds and had told him, sheepishly, that the family home was anything but modern.

‘My mum’s like me,’ she had confessed with a grin. ‘She likes antiques and everything that’s old and worn and full of character.’

Javier had personally made sure to insert some pieces of character in the apartment. He, himself, liked modern and minimalist. His impoverished family home had been clean but nearly everything had been bought second-hand. He’d grown up with so many items of furniture that had been just a little too full of character that he was now a fully paid-up member of all things modern and lacking in so-called character.

But he’d enjoyed hand-picking pieces for the apartment, had enjoyed picturing her reaction to the four-poster bed he had bought, the beautifully crafted floral sofa, the thick Persian rug that broke up the expanse of pale flooring.

‘The apartment’s fine.’ Sophie stepped away from him and folded her arms. ‘Better than fine,’ she admitted, eyes darting to him and then staying there because he was just so arresting. ‘I love the way it’s been done. You should congratulate your interior designer.’

‘Who said I used one?’ He looked at her with raised eyebrows and she blushed in sudden confusion, because to picture him hand-picking anything was somehow...intimate. And of course he would never have done any such thing. What über-rich single guy would ever waste time hunting down rugs and curtains? Definitely not a guy like Javier, who was macho to the very last bone in his body.

‘I’m afraid there’s not a great deal of food.’ She turned away because her heart was beating so fast she could barely breathe properly. His presence seemed to infiltrate every part of the apartment, filling it with suffocating, masculine intensity. This was how it had always been with him. In his presence, she’d felt weak and pleasurably helpless. Even as a young guy, struggling to make ends meet, he’d still managed to project an air of absolute assurance. He’d made all the other students around him seem like little boys in comparison.

The big difference was that, back then, she’d had a remit to bask and luxuriate in that powerful masculinity. She could touch, she could run her fingers through his springy, black hair and she’d had permission to melt at the feel of it.

She’d been allowed to want him and to show him how much she wanted him.

Not so now.

Furthermore, she didn’t want to want him. She didn’t want to feel herself dragged back into a past that was gone for good. Of course, foolish love was gone for good, and no longer a threat to the ivory tower she had constructed around herself that had been so vital in withstanding the years spent with her husband, but she didn’t want to feel that pressing, urgent want either...

She didn’t want to feel her heart fluttering like an adolescent’s because he happened to be sharing the same space as her. She’d grown up, gone through some hellish stuff. Her outlook on life had been changed for ever because of what she’d had to deal with. She had no illusions now and no longer believed that happiness was her right. It wasn’t and never would be. Javier Vasquez belonged to a time when unfettered optimism had been her constant companion. Now, not only was the murky past an unbreachable wall between them, but so were all the changes that had happened to her.

‘I wasn’t expecting company.’ She half turned to find him right behind her, having followed her into the kitchen.

The kitchen was big, a clever mix of old and new, and she felt utterly at home in it.

‘Smells good. What is it?’

‘Just some tomato sauce. I was going to have it with pasta.’

‘You never used to enjoy cooking.’ Yet again, he found himself referring to the past, dredging it up and bringing it into the present, where it most certainly did not belong.

‘I know.’ She shot him a fleeting smile as he sat down at the table, angling his chair so that he could extend his long legs to one side. ‘I never had to do it,’ she explained. ‘Mum loved cooking and I was always happy to let her get on with it. When she got ill, she said it used to occupy her and take her mind off her health problems, so I never interfered. I mean, I’d wash the dishes and tidy behind her, but she liked being the main chef. And then...’

She sighed and began finishing the food preparation, but horribly aware of those lazy, speculative eyes on her, following her every movement.

Javier resisted the urge to try to prise answers out of her. ‘So you learned to cook,’ he said, moving the conversation along, past the point of his curiosity.

‘And discovered that I rather enjoyed it.’ She didn’t fail to notice how swiftly he had diverted the conversation from the controversial topic of her past, the years she had spent after they had gone their separate ways. His initial curiosity was gone, and she told herself that she was very thankful that it had, because there was far too much she could never, would never, tell him.

But alongside that relief was a certain amount of disappointment, because his lack of curiosity was all wrapped up with the indifference he felt for her.

She suddenly had the strangest temptation to reach out and touch him, to stroke his wrist, feel the familiar strength of his forearm under her fingers. What would he do? How would he react? Would he recoil with horror or would he touch her back?

Appalled, she thrust a plate of food in front of him and sat down opposite him. She wanted to sit on her treacherous hands just in case they did something wildly inappropriate of their own accord and she had to remind herself shakily that she was a grown woman, fully in control of her wayward emotions. Emotions that had been stirred up, as they naturally would be, by having him invade her life out of the blue.

She heard herself babbling on like the village idiot about her culinary exploits while he ate and listened in silence, with every show of interest in what she was saying.

Which was remarkable, given she had just finished a lengthy anecdote about some slow-cooked beef she had tried to cook weeks previously, which had been disastrous.

‘So you like the apartment,’ Javier drawled, eyes not leaving her face as he sipped some wine. ‘And the job? Now that the work of trying to repair the damage done over the years has begun?’

‘It’s...awkward,’ Sophie told him truthfully.

‘Explain.’

‘You were right,’ she said bluntly, rising to begin clearing the table, her colour high. ‘Some of the people my father trusted have let the company down badly over the years. I can only think that employing friends was a luxury my father had when he started the company, and he either continued to trust that they were doing a good job or he knew that they weren’t but found it difficult to let them go. And then...’