A Virgin For Vasquez. CATHY WILLIAMS
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.’
‘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.
This floor was a sanctum of quiet. It was occupied by CEOs and directors, most of whom were concealed behind opaque glass and thick doors. In the middle there was a huge, open-plan space in which desks were cleverly positioned to allow for maximum space utilisation and minimum scope for chatting aimlessly.
The open space was largely empty, except for a couple of diligent employees who were too absorbed in whatever they were doing to look up at them as they headed for the directors’ lift.
‘But it’s not exactly where you wanted to end up, is it?’ he asked as the lift doors quietly closed, sealing them in together.
It didn’t matter where she looked, reflections of him bounced back at her.
She shrugged and reluctantly met his dark eyes.
‘You don’t always end up where you think you’re going to,’ she said tersely.
‘You had big plans to be a university lecturer.’
‘Life got in the way of that.’
‘I’m sure your dearly departed husband wouldn’t like to be seen as someone who got in the way of your big plans.’
‘I don’t want to talk about Roger.’
Because the thought of him no longer being around was still too painful for her to bear. That thought struck Javier with dagger-like precision. The man might have been a waste of space when it came to business, and an inveterate gambler who had blown vast sums of money that should have been pumped into saving the company, yet she had loved him and now would have nothing said against him.
Javier’s lips thinned.
He noted the way she scurried out of the lift, desperate to put some physical distance between them.
‘When did you find out that the company was on the brink of going bust?’
Sophie cringed. She wanted to ask whether it was really necessary to go down that road and she knew that she had to divorce the past from the present. He wasn’t the guy she had loved to death, the guy she had been forced to give up when life as she knew it had suddenly stopped. That was in the past and right now she was in the company of someone thinking about extending credit to the company. He would want details even if she didn’t want to give them.
But there was a lot she didn’t want to tell him. She didn’t want his contempt or his pity and she knew she would have both if she presented him with the unadorned truth. That was if he believed her at all, which was doubtful.
‘I knew things weren’t too good a while back,’ she said evasively. ‘But I had no idea really of just how bad they were