The Latin Affair

Behind her Ben said, ‘So that’s Esteban Tremain.’ He sounded as if he was committing him to memory.

The man left Martin’s office and came swiftly across to her. His eyes never left her face. Nicky thought, He knows me too. She felt as if the earth’s crust was suddenly gaping, leaving Ben and Caroline on the far side of the gulf, and Nicky and Esteban Tremain alone.

She blinked. Ben muttered something. She hardly heard him. Esteban Tremain paid no attention to anyone but Nicky. She shuddered under the intensity of those dark eyes.

I am not afraid, Nicky told herself.

Esteban Tremain said, ‘So we meet at last, Nicola Piper.’

It broke the spell. She shook her head and the world came back into its proper focus.

At her shoulder, Ben said warningly, ‘Nick?’

Esteban transferred his dark gaze. His eyes narrowed. He sized Ben up in silence.

They were a total contrast. In his well-cut suit, dark brows knit in frowning concentration, Esteban Tremain gave an impression of overwhelming power, only just contained. Ben meanwhile lounged against a pillar like a Greek god, all streaked blond hair and tanned forearms. Esteban Tremain stiffened.

Sheer panic found Nicky’s tongue for her. ‘Mr Tremain,’ she said breathlessly. She held out her hand to him with more friendliness than she would have believed possible an hour ago.

He ignored her hand.

‘I wouldn’t want to interrupt your social life,’ he said with awful courtesy.

Nicky frowned. She turned back to her brother.

‘See you soon, Ben,’ she said meaningfully.

‘What?’

Nicky resisted the urge to tread heavily on his foot.

‘I will be in touch,’ she said between her teeth. She backed him to the door and opened it pointedly. ‘Goodbye.’

Ben went reluctantly, with a long look over his shoulder at Esteban Tremain. It was almost menacing and totally out of character.

But Nicky had no time to think about that. Squaring her shoulders, she turned to deal with the most difficult client of her career to date.

Esteban Tremain did not acknowledge Ben’s departure. But his displeasure was dissolving, she saw. It was replaced by sheer interest. He looked her up and down.

‘So I was right,’ he said softly. And smiled. Not kindly.

Nicky watched the curve of the sensual mouth and felt a hollow open up in the pit of her stomach. She moistened suddenly dry lips. He was looking at her the way she imagined Victorian naturalists looked at a new species of penguin, she thought. Delighted, amused—and quite unconcerned about the feelings of the penguin.

How could a man make you want to run and hide from him just by looking at you?

Nicky cleared her throat. ‘Right about what?’

‘Blonde,’ Esteban said.

And smiled right into her eyes.

It caught her on the raw. But Nicky was not going to let him see that. She gave what was meant to be a light laugh. Then wished she hadn’t, as the dark gaze transferred, pleasurably, to her breasts.

Nicky resisted the desire to hold the lapels of her jacket tight up to her throat. She pulled herself together with an effort

‘I can’t deny it,’ she said lightly.

She realised that they were attracting an interested audience. Once again Esteban Tremain had proved an irresistible draw to every girl in the place. They had all found jobs which brought them into the main showroom and were now busily engaged in them, ears flapping. Sally was gaping unashamedly.

Hurriedly Nicky said, ‘Why don’t we go into Martin’s office?’

Esteban Tremain took in the audience with one comprehensive glance. He looked amused.

‘By all means, if it makes you feel safer.’

Nicky set her teeth and reminded herself that her management course had taught her how to deal with all sorts of difficult clients, even sexy and amused ones. She led the way, trying to ignore the fact that it felt as if every eye in the showroom was burning between her shoulder blades. She decided she loathed Esteban Tremain heartily.

He followed close on her heels. Too close. As she stood aside to let him precede her, she breathed in his cologne. A shocking wave of something like memory hit her. The sea, she thought. He smells of the sea.

She swallowed and shut the door of Martin’s glass case of an office with a bang that made the walls tremble.

Esteban Tremain frowned. He looked intrigued and annoyed in equal measure. But there was a simmering attraction there as well.

Out of nowhere the thought came: He’s going to touch me.

And, for no reason, the memory of Andrew’s words last night came back to her, disastrous in their clarity. ‘You’ll never be free.’

Nicky had a moment of pure unreasoning panic. He saw it. Startled awareness leaped into Esteban’s eyes. He seemed on the point of stepping towards her and her breath stopped in her throat.

Then steep eyelids hid his expression. He shoved his hands hard in his pockets. And Nicky’s famous common sense kicked in.

She said rapidly, ‘I’m afraid I haven’t had the chance to talk to Mr de Vries yet. You can’t expect—’

He said abruptly, almost as if the subject now bored him, ‘None of those damned machines work. Sort it.’

Nicky clenched her hands. In her previous dealings with dissatisfied clients she was used to complaints about builders who did not work fast enough or colour schemes that their originators were now regretting. This sort of complaint about the appliances was a new one. She had not understood it when she’d read the file and she did not understand it now. Until she talked to Martin she did not know what to do about it.

Frowning, she said, ‘Did you read the instructions properly?’

Esteban Tremain looked at her for an incredulous moment. Nicky realised she had made a mistake. She added hurriedly, ‘I mean all the appliances going wrong. The statistical chances of that must be off the graph. Surely you can see that’

He gave her a sweet, poisonous smile.

‘Oh, I do. I can only conclude that it is not chance.’

Nicky was so bewildered by that, she did not even take offence at his tone.

‘No one else has had a problem. Martin uses only the very best suppliers,’ she said, thinking aloud. ‘And even if one supplier has suddenly lost the plot on quality control we didn’t get everything in your kitchen from just one company. There were too many machines.’ She looked up. ‘You’re sure every one of them was bad?’

Esteban Tremain looked down his nose. It was a thin, aquiline nose and it made her think of a particularly dictatorial Roman Emperor.

‘I have not test-driven every waste-disposal unit and coffee-grinder, if that’s what you mean.’

Nicky began to feel a little better.

‘Well, which have you test-driven?’ she demanded. That did not come out quite as she intended either. It sounded downright truculent

His eyebrows, she noted irrelevantly, were very dark and fine. Just at the moment they were locked together across the bridge of his nose in a mighty frown. A Roman Emperor in a mood to condemn a gladiator.

‘I am informed,’ he said with precision, ‘that neither the dishwasher nor the fridge/freezer are in working order. As a result my companion did not have the opportunity to test the oven to its fullest However, her observation and my own lead us both to the conclusion that the oven is not working either.’

Nicky was not going to admit it but she was impressed. She also noted that Esteban Tremain delegated investigations of the fridge and the dishwasher to a female companion. She suspected that he shared Ben’s ideas about the relationship between women, laundry and sex. Though Mr Tremain would undoubtedly present it in a more sophisticated manner. She did her best not to glower at him.

‘Well, that is of course very serious.’ She riffled through Martin’s desk drawer for a notepad. ‘Let me make a note—’

Esteban Tremain strolled forward.

‘No more notes.’

He sounded quite pleasant But, looking up, Nicky realised that he was a lot closer than she wanted him to be. And that he was in a cold rage. It must have been that rage which made her heart lurch, then start pounding so hard she was sure he must hear it.

He said gently, ‘I didn’t take the time out to come here so you could take more notes. This kitchen has taken four months longer than de Vries estimated. Hasn’t it?’

The question somehow demanded an answer. Nicky could not help but nod. She knew from her reading of the file that he was right.

She could feel sweat breaking out along her spine. It was not fear. It was not, God help her, attraction. But it had some of the symptoms of both. She breathed carefully, praying that he would not notice.

‘So what do you want?’ she asked.

Esteban Tremain smiled dangerously and Nicky hung on to her pleasant expression, but it was an effort.

‘I want action,’ he said softly.

There was a sharp silence which Nicky did not entirely understand.

Struggling for normality, she said in a placating tone, ‘So do we all. But there has to be some planning—’

True to form, Esteban Tremain did not waste time listening to her.

‘I don’t just mean as a general principle, some time in the future,’ he explained, still in that chillingly friendly tone. ‘I mean here and now. Today.’

He sounded cool and amused and as if he did not care one way or the other. Which was odd, considering the trouble he had caused. And her own instinctive feeling that he was so angry he could barely contain himself.

It took real courage to say drily, ‘I don’t do magic.’

For a moment his eyes flickered. Then he gave her a charming smile. It really was chilling.

‘Then I won’t ask for magic,’ he said softly. ‘Just my kitchen working like it’s supposed to. Now, I suggest you personally get into your car and go—and—put—it—right.’

She was not deceived by the gentle tone.

‘I can’t do that at a moment’s notice,’ she protested. Esteban Tremain looked her up and down. Slowly. It was a deliberate put-down and they both knew it. Nicky felt the shamed heat rise in her cheeks. She hated him.

Her chin came up and she glared back at him, right into those dark, dark eyes. It amused him. One eyebrow rose enquiringly.

‘Do you mend machinery by remote control, then?’ he asked pleasantly.

Horribly conscious of her blazing cheeks, Nicky said curtly, ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

‘Then I suggest you do as I ask. And sooner rather than later. My secretary will sort out the arrangements.’

He paused, waiting. But Nicky was speechless. With a faint triumphant smile, Esteban Tremain walked out of the office.

On a surge of fury she had never felt before, Nicky picked up the Waterford ornament and threw it. Hard. It did not break but it brought in the watchers hot foot.

‘What did he say?’ demanded Sally, half shocked, half thrilled.

‘What are you going to do?’ asked the more practical Caroline, returning the small glass sculpture to Martin’s desk.

‘Is it damaged?’ asked Nicky. Restored to herself, she was a little conscience-stricken.

‘It bounced,’ Caroline reassured her cheerfully. ‘Tremain really got you wound up, didn’t he? Tea, that’s what you need.’

And while Sally went to get it Caroline produced a photocopied sheet from behind her back.

‘Read this,’ she said with relish.

It was a copy of a gossip column piece, dated nearly a year earlier. Headed ‘Heart Throb Wins Again’, it described a yacht race in the Mediterranean. Nicky read it aloud.

‘Brilliant bachelor barrister Esteban Tremain’s winning streak continues. After recent notable victories in court, he and his crew on Glen Tandy have won the Sapphire Cup. Famously elusive, these days the Latin Lover, as the Law Courts call him, is spending time with very good friend Francesca, the popular daughter of Lord Moran. Friends say that Esteban does not tolerate criticism but he will have to smarten up his client list if he is going to tie the knot with a judge’s daughter.’

Nicky looked up. ‘What does that mean?’

‘It means he’s made mincemeat of better adversaries than you. Let Martin deal with him.’

‘Do you know him, then?’ said Nicky suspiciously.

Caroline had been brought in by Martin when the business had begun to expand and she was older than the others by several years. As a result, she had become the office guru. She did not disappoint now.

‘Friends in common,’ she said airily. ‘He is some sort of Latin American by birth but he was quite young when his mother remarried so he was brought up in England and took his stepfather’s name. He’s as tough as they come. Always has to be in control.’

Nicky thought of those unfathomable eyes, so dark, so guarded. She shivered.

‘I can believe it.’

‘Don’t try and handle this one yourself,’ Caroline advised shrewdly. ‘It’s Martin’s baby. Make him come back and deal with it.’

Nicky tried. It got her nowhere. Oh, Martin came back from the exhibition hall, all right. But by the time Nicky got in to see him he had already returned Esteban’s calls and his expression was sober.

‘Do what the man wants, Nick,’ Martin said, before she had managed more than a couple of sentences.

Nicky stared.

‘Have you listened to a word I’ve said?’ she demanded.

‘All of them.’ Martin had had a hard day and it showed. He pushed a weary hand through untidy grey hair. ‘You don’t like Tremain and you think I should run him off the territory. Well, tough. For one thing, I haven’t got the time. For another—we agreed when I took you on that that was your job. You do the trouble-shooting.’

‘Not this sort of trouble-shooting.’

‘Any sort of trouble-shooting,’ Martin said firmly.

‘You said yourself, I’m no good with clients,’ Nicky pointed out.

This was true. On at least one occasion, Nicky had been so forthright that the client in question had banged out of the showroom, slamming the door so hard behind her that its handsome glass insets had cracked. Martin had laughed. But he had also said, ‘It’s safer to keep you away from the paying customers, isn’t it?’ Watching him woo back the offended client afterwards, Nicky could only agree.

Now she decided to remind him. ‘Remember Mrs Lazenby?’

Martin remained infuriatingly unmoved.

‘Jennifer Lazenby is a woman with too much time on her hands and not enough brain cells to know what to do with it. Add to that a millionaire husband and the fact that she is a trophy wife with ten years on the clock, and you’ve got someone who doesn’t want anything to do with a younger woman. Especially not a blonde with attitude.’ He paused before adding deliberately, ‘Not to mention a figure that stops traffic.’

Nicky winced, just as he had expected. Just as she always did when anyone mentioned her looks. Martin pushed home his advantage.

‘Compared with Mrs Lazenby, Esteban is a pussy cat.’

Nicky gave him an incredulous look. He laughed.

‘Well, OK, maybe not a pussy cat. But he’s not stupid and he’s not jealous of you. And he has got a genuine problem.’ He added in a wheedling tone, ‘Just your sort of problem, in fact.’

Nicky could hardly deny that.

‘And he wants you to deal with it personally.’

Nicky grimaced.

‘You and no one else. You obviously impressed him.’

‘I made him spitting mad,’ corrected Nicky.

‘Well, that makes two of you, doesn’t it?’

Before she could answer, Martin leaned forward and studied her earnestly.

‘Look, Nick, you know how I’m placed, with the exhibition and everything. I can’t afford the time to go haring off to Cornwall. I’m sorry Esteban Tremain rubs your fur up the wrong way but you’ve just got to be professional about it.’

Nicky’s jaw jutted dangerously. ‘Or?’ she said in a soft voice.

Martin closed his eyes. ‘Nick, don’t be difficult—’

‘Will you give me the sack if I refuse to go?’

His eyes flew open. ‘Of course not’

‘Then I refuse,’ she said triumphantly.

Martin did not laugh. ‘I won’t need to give you the sack,’ he said grimly. ‘If Tremain doesn’t pay his account by the end of the month the bank will probably foreclose. Then we’re all out of a job.’

Nicky sat down hard. ‘What?’

‘I’ve let it get out of hand,’ Martin admitted.

He stood up and thrust his hands into his pockets. He began to prowl round the room.

‘My accountant tells me I’ve spent too much time marketing and not enough collecting the debts. To be honest, we probably shouldn’t have taken a stand at the exhibition. But by the time I realised how bad things were it was too late to cancel without paying up. So I thought, What the hell?’

Nicky shut her eyes. It was all too horribly familiar. It was what her father had said all through her hand-to-mouth childhood. She had never thought to hear it from steady, sensible Martin, even though he was a long-standing friend of her ramshackle family.

‘You’re more like my father than I thought,’ she said involuntarily.

Martin had the grace to look ashamed. But he did not back down.

Nicky watched him. She felt numb. ‘I knew there was something wrong. But I had no idea it was this bad.’

‘It wasn’t. It’s all gone wrong in the last six weeks. To be honest, I was relying on Tremain settling his account to keep going until I can put in a bill to Hambeldons.’ He looked at her helplessly.

Nicky knew that look. It was just how her mother used to look when they landed on the next Caribbean island without money or stores and her father began declaring loudly that nothing would induce him to take another tourist out fishing. And Nicky knew she would do just the same now as she had then.

She swallowed. She could feel the volcano heaving under her feet, she thought.

‘All right,’ she said with deep reluctance. ‘Leave it to me.’

Martin cheered up at once. The others were unsurprised by Nicky’s decision when she was heard to telephone Esteban’s secretary for route instructions and a key. They were even envious.

‘He looks lonely,’ sighed Sally.

‘Lonely!’ muttered Nicky, scornful.

‘He has never met a woman to thaw his heart,’ Sally went on, oblivious. She spent a lot of her time reading the stories in the magazines where Springdown Kitchens advertised. ‘Don’t you agree, Nicky?’

Nicky was cynical. ‘I should think he’s found several and returned them all to store,’ she said unwisely.

Caroline laughed. ‘You are so right,’ she agreed. ‘The shelf life of an Esteban Tremain squeeze is about six months, they say.’ She added wickedly, ‘That should give you a fun Christmas, Nicky.’

‘He won’t be there,’ Nicky said hurriedly. ‘I double-checked with his secretary. She says he’s in London all week. As long as I’m away before Friday night, I don’t have to see Esteban Tremain at all.’

It was a long drive. Normally Nicky liked driving but on this occasion it gave her too much time to think. Alone in the car with a ribbon of motorway unfolding in front of her and recipes for a bonfire-night party on the radio, her mind slipped treacherously sideways.

Why did Esteban Tremain have this effect on her? She knew nothing about the man, after all. Just that slightly spiky article, a couple of personal encounters—that slow, dispassionate assessment—the note in his voice when he’d called her a blonde. And he smelled like the sea.

She could not suppress her involuntary shiver of awareness as she remembered that. There was something about him that set all her warning antennae on full alert.

Impatiently she leaned forward and twiddled the radio dial until she found some music with a cheerful beat. She moved her shoulders to it, trying to relax. Trying to remember how to relax. Trying to remember that some people actually wanted to be blonde.

She flicked her hand through her hair. For once, knowing she was going to be alone, she had left it loose.

‘Why don’t you dye your hair, if you hate it so much?’ one of her friends had said impatiently, when she was complaining about the blonde image.

Well, you could dye out the golden fairness, Nicky thought now. There was not much you could do about an hourglass figure and long, slim legs, unless you wanted to diet yourself into ill health. Her dislike of her looks had not yet taken her that far.

So she contented herself with wearing dark long-line jackets that disguised her remarkable figure and pulling her hair back into severe styles. Even so, it did not always work. She had learned to dread that speculative stare, as a man suddenly discovered her looks under the businesslike surface. It was too horribly reminiscent…

The car had speeded up as the memories approached. Nicky shook herself and made herself slow down.

These days she had almost forgotten that crippling sense of wanting to run until she disappeared into the horizon. Almost. Until someone like Esteban Tremain called her a blonde in that tone of voice.

Again Andrew’s words came back to her. ‘Find the guy. Get him out of your system. Or you’ll never be free.’

It was getting dark. Nicky shivered. The memories of the dark were worst of all.

She left the motorway at the next exit. She found a small inn and a fire and company. For a while the memories receded.

But in the end she had to leave the friendly landlord and his wife and go up to the pretty chintz hung bedroom alone. After getting ready for bed Nicky went to the window and looked out. In this country village you could see the stars. They were more brilliant than they were in London but even so they did not compare with the jewelled coverlet of the Caribbean.

Nicky closed her eyes in anguish. No, she was not going to banish the memory tonight She knew what that meant. No sleep until she faced it.

She sank into an armchair and tipped her head back. She let memory do its work…

CHAPTER THREE

IT WAS one of the worst times on the ramshackle Piper boat.

Oh, they were always short of money, of course, but Margaret Piper usually kept a small secret store for emergencies. This time, when she went to it, there was nothing there. Leon had found it and spent the contents. He did not even know where it had gone. Money, as he said charmingly when she challenged him, just trickled through his fingers. Money, he added, was not important.

It was one of the few times Nicky remembered seeing her mother angry with him. Not only angry but hopeless.

‘I was saving that to buy Nicky a birthday present,’ she heard her mother shout. ‘She’s sixteen next month and she hasn’t even got a skirt.’

There was not enough money to pay the mooring fee in the small island harbour, of course. They had to drop anchor off an isolated beach, out of town, and forage for food and water. Margaret tore her arm on an acacia bush and began to cry. When Leon put his arm round her, she twitched him away, turning her shoulder so that Ben and Nicky should not see her tears.

Ben did not. But Nicky, maturing fast and increasingly aware of the strains that their itinerant life imposed on her mother, saw all too clearly. It was then that she decided to go to town.

She ignored the scratches on her bare brown legs. She ignored the fact that her old shorts and shirt had shrunk as well as faded in the wash. If, as her very own Nemesis later accused, she looked like a voluptuous Cleopatra in urchin’s clothing, Nicky did not know it. All she knew was that she must do something to take that look of despair off her mother’s face. Anything.

There would be work at one of the cafés on the main drag or the marina, Nicky thought. She had grown experienced in the finding of casual work on the islands. Even if they did not pay her until the end of the week—which was all too likely—she should be able to beg some food from them at the end of the evening.