A Virgin For Vasquez

He’d wanted to see her squirm but the force of his antipathy took him by surprise because he was realising just how fast and tight she had stuck to him over the years.

Unfinished business. That was why. Well, he would make sure he finished it if it was the last thing he did and then he would be free of the woman and whatever useless part of his make-up she still appeared to occupy.

‘He gambled.’ Sophie raised her eyes to his and held his stare in silence before looking away, offering him her averted profile.

‘And you knew about that as well,’ Javier had a fleeting twinge of regret that he had mentioned any of this. It had been unnecessary. Then he remembered the way she had summarily dumped him and all fleeting regret vanished in a puff of smoke.

She nodded mutely.

‘And there was nothing you could have done about that either?’

‘I don’t suppose you’ve ever lived with someone who has a destructive addiction?’ she said tightly. ‘You can’t just sit them down for a pep talk and then expect them to change overnight.’

‘But you can send them firmly in the direction of professional help.’ Javier was curious. The picture he had built of her had been one of the happily married young wife, in love with Prince Charming, so in love that she had not been able to abide being away from him whilst at university—perhaps hoping that the distraction of an unsuitable foreigner might put things into perspective, only for that gambit to hit the rocks.

Then, when he had inspected the accounts closely, he had assumed that, blindly in love, she had been ignorant of her loser husband’s uncontrolled behaviour.

Now...

He didn’t want curiosity to mar the purity of what he wanted from her and he was taken aback that it was.

‘Roger was an adult. He didn’t want help. I wasn’t capable of manhandling him into a car and driving him to the local association for gambling addicts. And I don’t want to talk about...about my marriage. I... It’s in the past.’

‘So it is,’ Javier murmured. When he thought about the other man, he saw red, pure jealousy at being deprived of what he thought should have been his.

Crazy.

Since when had he considered any woman his possession?

‘And yet,’ he mused softly, ‘when is the past ever really behind us? Don’t you find that it dogs us like a guilty conscience, even when we would like to put it to bed for good?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You ran out on me.’

‘Javier, you don’t understand...’

‘Nor do I wish to. This isn’t about understanding what motivated you.’ And at this point in time—this very special point in time when the tables had been reversed, when she was now the one without money and he the one with the bank notes piled up in the coffers—well, she was hardly going to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth when it came to motivations, was she? Oh, no, she would concoct some pretty little tale to try to elicit as much sympathy from him as she could...

‘I’m not asking you to give me money, Javier. I... I’m just asking for a loan. I would pay it all back, every penny of it.’

Javier flung back his head and laughed, a rich, full-bodied laugh that managed to lack genuine warmth. ‘Really? I’m tickled pink at the thought of a Classics scholar, almost there but never graduated, and her sports scholarship brother running any company successfully enough to make it pay dividends, never mind a company that’s on its last legs.’

‘There are directors in the company...’

‘Looked at them. I would ditch most of them if I were you.’

‘You looked at them?’

Javier shrugged. His dark eyes never left her face. ‘I probably know more about your company than you do. Why not? If I’m to sink money into it, then I need to know exactly what I will be sinking money into.’

‘So...are you saying that you’ll help?’

‘I’ll help.’ He smiled slowly. ‘But there’s no such thing as a free lunch. There will be terms and conditions...’

‘That’s fine.’ For the first time in a very long time, a cloud seemed to be lifting. She had underestimated him. He was going to help and she wanted to sob with relief. ‘Whatever your terms and conditions, well, they won’t be a problem. I promise.’

CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_c74f1fe7-37e8-567d-9398-11cab07a4443)

‘PERHAPS WE SHOULD take this conversation somewhere else.’

‘Why?’ The suggestion of leaving with him for somewhere else sent little shivers of alarm skittering through her.

She could scarcely credit that she was sitting here, in this office, facing this man who had haunted her for years. All the things that had happened ever since that first tentative step as a young girl falling hopelessly in love with an unsuitable boy lay between them like a great, big, murky chasm.

There was just so much he didn’t know.

But none of that was relevant. What was relevant was that he was going to help them and that was enough.

‘Because,’ Javier drawled, rising to his feet and strolling to fetch his jacket from where it lay slung over the back of one of the expensive, compact sofas in the little sitting area of the office, ‘I feel that two old friends should not be discussing something as crass as a business bailout within the confines of an office.’

Two old friends?

Sophie scrutinised the harsh angles of his face for any inherent sarcasm and he returned her stare with bland politeness.

But his bland politeness made her feel unaccountably uneasy.

He’d never been polite.

At least, not in the way that English people were polite. Not in the middle-class way of clinking teacups and saying the right things, which was the way she had been brought up.

He had always spoken his mind and damned the consequences. She had occasionally seen him in action at university, once in the company of two of his lecturers, when they had been discussing economics.

He had listened to them, which had been the accepted polite way, but had then taken their arguments and ripped them to shreds. The breadth and depth of his knowledge had been so staggering that there had been no comeback.

He had never been scared of rocking the boat. Sometimes, she wondered whether he had privately relished it, although when she’d once asked him that directly, he had burst out laughing before kissing her senseless—at which point she had forgotten what she had been saying to him. Kissing him had always had that effect on her.

A surge of memories brought a hectic flush to her cheeks.

‘Is this your new way of dressing?’ he asked and Sophie blinked, dispelling disturbing images of when they had been an item.

‘What do you mean?’

‘You look like an office worker.’

‘That’s exactly what I am,’ she returned lightly, following him to the door, because what else could she do? At this point, he held all the trump cards, and if he wanted to go and have their business chat sitting on bar stools in the middle of Threadneedle Street, then so be it. There was too much at stake for her to start digging her heels in and telling him that she felt more comfortable discussing business in an office.

She had come this far and there was no turning back now.