Книга - A Tempestuous Temptation

A Tempestuous Temptation
CATHY WILLIAMS


When you’re caught in a snowstorm, there’s only one way to warm up… An outrageous accusation of being a fortune-hunter is Aggie’s excruciating introduction to billionaire Luiz Diaz. And things take a turn for the worse when she finds herself snowbound with the arrogant Brazilian! They are forced to seek shelter whilst the snowstorm swirls around them, and Luiz does nothing to dismiss Aggie’s initial opinion of him.Yes, he’s unbearably arrogant. Yes, he’s just as irresistible as he thinks he is! And, infuriatingly, however merciless his reputation, it seems she’s not as immune to his legendary lethal charm as she’d hoped…‘This is fantastic! Beautifully written. You have to experience this book.’ – Fariza, Lawyer, Liverpool










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‘This house looks wonderful,’ Aggie breathed, taken with the creamy yellow stone and the perfectly proportioned leaded windows.

‘Sorry?’ Luiz wondered whether they were looking at the same building.

‘I would rather not be here with you,’ Aggie emphasised, ‘but it’s beautiful. Especially with the snow on the ground and on the roof … Gosh, the snow is really deep as well!’

On that tantalising statement she flung open the car door and stepped outside, holding her arms out wide and her head tilted up so that the snow could fall directly onto her face.

In the act of reaching behind him to extract their cases, Luiz paused to stare at her. She had pulled some fingerless gloves out of her coat pocket and stuck them on, and standing like that, arms outstretched, she looked young and vulnerable and achingly innocent—like a child reacting to the thrill of being out in the snow.

What she looks like, he told himself, breaking the momentary spell to get their bags, is beside the point. He had a job to do, and he had no intention of having his attention diverted—least of all by a woman about whose gold-digging intentions he had still to reach a conclusion.




About the Author


CATHY WILLIAMS is originally from Trinidad, but has lived in England for a number of years. She currently has a house in Warwickshire, which she shares with her husband Richard, her three daughters, Charlotte, Olivia and Emma, and their pet cat, Salem. She adores writing romantic fiction, and would love one of her girls to become a writer—although at the moment she is happy enough if they do their homework and agree not to bicker with one another!

Recent titles by the same author:

THE GIRL HE’D OVERLOOKED

THE TRUTH BEHIND HIS TOUCH

THE SECRET SINCLAIR

HER IMPOSSIBLE BOSS



Did you know these are also available as eBooks? Visit www.millsandboon.co.uk




A Tempestuous

Temptation

Cathy Williams













www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)




CHAPTER ONE


LUIZ Carlos Montes looked down at the slip of paper in his hand, reconfirmed that he was at the correct address and then, from the comfort of his sleek, black sports car, he briefly scanned the house and its surroundings. His immediate thought was that this was not what he had been expecting. His second thought was that it had been a mistake to drive his car here. The impression he was getting was that this was the sort of place where anything of any value that could be stolen, damaged or vandalised just for the hell of it would be.

The small terraced house, lit by the street lamp, fought a losing battle to maintain some level of attractiveness next to its less palatable neighbours. The tidy pocket-sized front garden was flanked on its left side by a cement square on which dustbins were laid out in no particular order, and on its right by a similar cement square where a rusted car languished on blocks, awaiting attention. Further along was a parade of shops comprised of a Chinese takeaway, a sub-post office, a hairdresser, an off-licence and a newsagent which seemed to be a meeting point for just the sort of youths whom Luiz suspected would not hesitate to zero in on his car the second he left it.

Fortunately he felt no apprehension as he glanced at the group of hooded teenagers smoking in a group outside the off-licence. He was six-foot-three with a muscled body that was honed to perfection thanks to a rigorous routine of exercise and sport when he could find the time. He was more than capable of putting the fear of God into any group of indolent cigarette-smoking teenagers.

But, hell, this was still the last thing he needed. On a Friday evening. In December. With the threat of snow in the air and a shedload of emails needing his attention before the whole world went to sleep for the Christmas period.

But family duty was, in the end, family duty and what choice had he had? Having seen this dump for himself, he also had to concede that his mission, inconvenient though it might be, was a necessary one.

He exhaled impatiently and swung out of the car. It was a bitterly cold night, even in London. The past week had been characterised by hard overnight frosts that had barely thawed during the day. There was a glittery coating over the rusting car in the garden next to the house and on the lids of the bins in the garden to the other side. The smell of Chinese food wafted towards him and he frowned with distaste.

This was the sort of district into which Luiz never ventured. He had no need to. The faster he could sort this whole mess out and clear out of the place, the better, as far as he was concerned.

With that in mind, he pressed the doorbell and kept his finger on it until he could hear the sound of footsteps scurrying towards the front door.

On the verge of digging into her dinner, Aggie heard the sound of the doorbell and was tempted to ignore it, not least because she had an inkling of an idea as to whose finger was on it. Mr Cholmsey, her landlord, had been making warning noises about the rent, which was overdue.

‘But I always pay on time!’ Aggie had protested when he had telephoned her the day before. ‘And I’m only overdue by two days. It’s not my fault that there’s a postal strike!’

Apparently, though, it was. He had been kind enough to ‘do her the favour’ of letting her pay by cheque when all his other tenants paid by direct debit … And look where it got him … it just wasn’t good enough … People were queuing for that house … he could rent it to a more reliable tenant in a minute …

If the cheque wasn’t with him by the following day, he would have to have cash from her.

She had never actually met Mr Cholmsey. Eighteen months ago, she had found the house through an agency and everything had been absolutely fine—until Mr Cholmsey had decided that he could cut out the middle man and handle his own properties. Since then, Alfred Cholmsey had been an ongoing headache, prone to ignoring requests for things to be fixed and fond of reminding her how scarce rentable properties were in London.

If she ignored the summons at the door, she had no doubt that he would find some way of breaking the lease and chucking her out.

Keeping the latch on, she cautiously opened the door a crack and peered out into the darkness.

‘I’m really sorry, Mr Cholmsey …’ She burst into speech, determined to get her point of view across before her disagreeable, hateful landlord could launch his verbal attack. ‘The cheque should have arrived by now. I’ll cancel it and make sure that I have the cash for you tomorrow. I promise.’ She wished the wretched man would do her the courtesy of at least standing in her very reduced line of vision instead of skulking to the side, but there was no way that she was going to pull open the door. You could never be too careful in this neighbourhood.

‘Who the hell is Mr Cholmsey, and what are you talking about? Just open the door, Agatha!’

That voice, that distinctive, loathsome voice, was so unexpected that Aggie suddenly felt the need to pass out. What was Luiz Montes doing here? On her doorstep? Invading her privacy? Wasn’t it bad enough that she and her brother had been held up for inspection by him over the past eight months? Verbally poked and prodded under the very thin guise of hospitality and ‘just getting to know my niece’s boyfriend and his family’. Asked intrusive questions which they had been forced to skirt around and generally treated with the sort of suspicion reserved for criminals out on parole.

‘What are you doing here?’

‘Just open the door! I’m not having a conversation with you on your doorstep!’ Luiz didn’t have to struggle to imagine what her expression would be. He had met her sufficient times with her brother and his niece to realise that she disapproved of everything he stood for and everything he said. She’d challenged him on every point he made. She was defensive, argumentative and pretty much everything he would have made an effort to avoid in a woman.

As he had told himself on numerous occasions, there was no way he would ever have subjected himself to her company had he not been placed, by his sister who lived in Brazil, in the unenviable position of having to take an interest in his niece and the man she had decided to take up with. The Montes family was worth an untold fortune. Checking out the guy his niece was dating was a simple precaution, Luisa had stressed. And, while Luiz couldn’t see the point because the relationship was certain to crash and burn in due course, his sister had insisted. Knowing his sister as well as he did, he had taken the path of least resistance and agreed to keep a watchful eye on Mark Collins, and his sister, who appeared to come as part of the package.

‘So who’s Mr Cholmsey?’ was the first thing he said as he strode past her into the house.

Aggie folded her arms and glared resentfully at him as he looked around at his surroundings with the sort of cool contempt she had come to associate with him.

Yes, he was good-looking, all tall and powerful and darkly sexy. But from the very second she had met him, she had been chilled to the bone by his arrogance, his casual contempt for both her and Mark—which he barely bothered to hide—and his thinly veiled threat that he was watching them both and they’d better not overstep the mark.

‘Mr Cholmsey’s the landlord—and how did you get this address? Why are you here?’

‘I had no idea you rented. Stupid me. I was under the impression that you owned your own house jointly. Now, where did I get that from, I wonder?’

He rested cool, dark eyes on Aggie. ‘I was also under the impression that you lived somewhere … slightly less unsavoury. A crashing misconception on my part as well.’ However far removed Agatha Collins was from the sort of women Luiz preferred—tall brunettes with legs up to their armpits and amenable, yielding natures—he couldn’t deny that she was startlingly pretty. Five-four tops, with pale, curly hair the colour of buttermilk and skin that was satiny smooth. Her eyes were purest aquamarine, offset by dark lashes, as though her creator had been determined to make sure that she stood out from the crowd and had taken one little detail and made it strikingly different.

Aggie flushed and mentally cursed herself for falling in with her brother and Maria. When Luiz had made his first, unwelcome appearance in their lives, she had agreed that she would downplay their financial circumstances, that she would economise harmlessly on the unadorned truth.

‘My mum’s insisted that Uncle Luiz check Mark out,’ Maria had explained tightly. ‘And Uncle Luiz is horribly black-and-white. It’d be better if he thinks that you’re … okay … Not exactly rich, but not completely broke either.’

‘You still haven’t told me what you’re doing here,’ Aggie dodged.

‘Where’s your brother?’

‘He isn’t here and neither is Maria. And when are you going to stop spying on us?’

‘I’m beginning to think that my spying is starting to pay dividends,’ Luiz murmured. ‘Which one of you told me that you lived in Richmond?’ He leaned against the wall and looked down at her with those bottomless dark eyes that always managed to send her nervous system into instant freefall.

‘I didn’t say that we lived in Richmond,’ Aggie prevaricated guiltily. ‘I probably told you that we go cycling there quite a bit. In the park. It’s not my fault that you might have got hold of the wrong end of the stick.’

‘I never get hold of the wrong end of the stick.’ The casual interest which he had seen as an unnecessary chore now blossomed into rampant suspicion. She and her brother had lied about their financial circumstances and had probably persuaded his niece to go along for the ride and back them up. And that, to Luiz, was pointing in only one direction. ‘When I got the address of this place, I had to double check because it didn’t tally with what I’d been told.’ He began removing his coat while Aggie watched in growing dismay.

Every single time she had met Luiz, it had been in one of London’s upmarket restaurants. She, Mark and Maria had been treated over time to the finest Italian food money could buy, the best Thai to be found in the country, the most expensive French in the most exclusive area. Pre-warned by Maria that it was her uncle’s way of keeping tabs on them, they had been unforthcoming on personal detail and expansive on polite chitchat.

Aggie had bristled at the mere thought that they were being sized up, and she had bristled even more at the nagging suspicion that they had both been found wanting. But restaurants were one thing. Descending on them here was taking it one step too far.

And now his coat was off, which implied that he wasn’t about to do the disappearing act she desperately wanted. Something about him unsettled her and here, in this small space, she was even more unsettled.

‘Maybe you could get me something to drink,’ he inserted smoothly. ‘And we can explore what other little lies might come out in the wash while I wait for your brother to show up.’

‘Why is it suddenly so important that you talk to Mark?’ Aggie asked uneasily. ‘I mean, couldn’t you have waited? Maybe invited him out for dinner with Maria so that you could try and get to the bottom of his intentions? Again?’

‘Things have moved up a gear, regrettably. But I’ll come back to that.’ He strolled past her through the open door and into the sitting room. The decor here was no more tasteful than it was in the hall. The walls were the colour of off-cheese, depressing despite the old movie posters that had been tacked on. The furniture was an unappealing mix of old and used and tacky, snap-together modern. In one corner, an old television set was propped on a cheap pine unit.

‘What do you mean that things have moved up a gear?’ Aggie demanded as he sat on one of the chairs and looked at her with unhurried thoroughness.

‘I guess you know why I’ve been keeping tabs on your brother.’

‘Maria mentioned that her mother can be a little over-protective,’ Aggie mumbled. She resigned herself to the fact that Luiz wasn’t leaving in a hurry and reluctantly sat down on the chair facing him.

As always, she felt dowdy and underdressed. On the occasions when she had been dragged along to those fancy restaurants—none of which she would ever have sampled had it not been for him—she had rooted out the dressiest clothes in her wardrobe and had still managed to feel cheap and mousey. Now, in baggy, thick jogging bottoms and Mark’s jumper, several sizes too big, she felt screamingly, ridiculously frumpy. Which made her resent him even more.

Luiz gave an elegant shrug. ‘It pays to be careful. Naturally, when my sister asked me to check your brother out, I tried to talk her out of it.’

‘You did?’

‘Sure. Maria’s a kid and kids have relationships that fall by the wayside. It’s life. I was convinced that this relationship would be no different but I eventually agreed that I would keep an eye on things.’

‘By which,’ Aggie inserted bitterly, ‘you meant that you would quiz us on every aspect of our lives and try and trip us up.’

‘Congratulations. You both provided a touchingly united front. I find that I barely know a single personal thing about either of you and it’s dawning on me that the few details you’ve imparted have probably been a tissue of lies—starting with where you live. It would have saved time and effort if I’d employed a detective to ferret out whatever background information was necessary.’

‘Maria thought that—’

‘Do me a favour. Keep my niece out of this. You live in a dump, which you rent from an unscrupulous landlord. You can barely afford the rent. Tell me, do either of you hold down jobs, or were those fabrications as well?’

‘I resent you barging into my house.’

‘Mr Cholmsey’s house—if you can call it a house.’

‘Fine! I still resent you barging in here and insulting me.’

‘Tough.’

‘In fact, I’m asking you to leave!’

At that, Luiz burst out laughing. ‘Do you really think that I’ve come all the way here so that I can leave the second the questioning gets a little too uncomfortable for you?’

‘Well, I don’t see the point of you hanging around. Mark and Maria aren’t here.’

‘I’ve come because, like I said, things have moved up a gear. It seems that there’s now talk of marriage. It’s not going to do.’

‘Talk of marriage?’ Aggie parroted incredulously. ‘There’s no talk of marriage.’

‘At least, none that your brother’s told you about. Maybe the touching united front isn’t quite as united as you’d like it to be.’

‘You … you are just the most awful human being I’ve ever met!’

‘I think you’ve made that glaringly clear on all the occasions that we’ve met,’ Luiz remarked coolly. ‘You’re entitled to your opinions.’

‘So you came here to … what? Warn my brother off? Warn Maria off? They might be young but they’re not under age.’

‘Maria comes from one of the richest families in Latin America.’

‘I beg your pardon?’ Aggie looked at him in confusion. Yes, of course she had known that Maria was not the usual hand-to-mouth starving student working the tills on the weekend to help pay for her tuition fees. But one of the richest families in Latin America? No wonder she had not been in favour of either of them letting on that they were just normal people struggling to get by on a day-to-day basis!

‘You’re kidding, right?’

‘When it comes to money, I lose my sense of humour.’ Luiz abruptly sat forward, elbows resting on his thighs, and looked at her unsmilingly. ‘I hadn’t planned on taking a hard line, but I’m beginning to do the maths and I don’t like the results I’m coming up with.’

Aggie tried and failed to meet his dark, intimidating stare. Why was it that whenever she was in this man’s company her usual unflappability was scattered to the four corners? She was reduced to feeling too tight in her skin, too defensive and too self-conscious. Which meant that she could barely think straight.

‘I have no idea what you’re talking about,’ she muttered, staring at her linked fingers while her heart rate sped up and her mouth went dry.

‘Wealthy people are often targets,’ Luiz gritted, spelling it out in clear syllables just in case she chose to miss the message. ‘My niece is extremely wealthy and will be even wealthier when she turns twenty-one. Now it appears that the dalliance I thought would peter out after a couple of months has turned into a marriage proposal.’

‘I still can’t believe that. You’ve got your facts wrong.’

‘Believe it! And what I’m seeing are a couple of fortune hunters who have lied about their circumstances to try and throw me off course.’

Aggie blanched and stared at him miserably. Those small white fibs had assumed the proportions of mountains. Her brain felt sluggish but already she could see why he would have arrived at the conclusion that he had.

Honest people didn’t lie.

‘Tell me … is your brother really a musician? Because I’ve looked him up online and, strangely enough, I can’t find him anywhere.’

‘Of course he’s a musician! He … he plays in a band.’

‘And I’m guessing this band hasn’t made it big yet … hence his lack of presence on the Internet.’

‘Okay! I give up! So we may have … have …’

‘Tampered with the truth? Stretched it? Twisted it to the point where it became unrecognisable?’

‘Maria said that you’re very black-and-white.’ Aggie stuck her chin up and met his frowning stare. Now, as had happened before, she marvelled that such sinful physical beauty, the sort of beauty that made people think of putting paint to canvas, could conceal such a cold, ruthless, brutally dispassionate streak.

‘Me? Black-and-white?’ Luiz was outraged at this preposterous assumption. ‘I’ve never heard anything so ridiculous in my entire life!’

‘She said that you form your opinions and you stick to them. You never look outside the box and allow yourself to be persuaded into another direction.’

‘That’s called strength of character!’

‘Well, that’s why we weren’t inclined to be one hundred percent truthful. Not that we lied …

‘We just didn’t reveal as much as we could have.’

‘Such as you live in a rented dump, your brother sings in pubs now and again and you are a teacher—or was that another one of those creative exaggerations?’

‘Of course I’m a teacher. I teach primary school. You can check up on me if you like!’

‘Well that’s now by the by. The fact is, I cannot allow any marriage to take place between my niece and your brother.’

‘So you’re going to do what, exactly?’ Aggie was genuinely bewildered. It was one thing to disapprove of someone else’s choices. It was quite another to force them into accepting what you chose to cram down their throat. Luiz, Maria’s mother, every single member of their super-wealthy family, for that matter, could rant, storm, wring their hands and deliver threatening lectures—but at the end of the day Maria was her own person and would make up her own mind.

She tactfully decided not to impart that point of view. He claimed that he wasn’t black-and-white but she had seen enough evidence of that to convince her that he was. He also had no knowledge whatsoever of how the other half lived. In fact, she doubted that he had ever even come into contact with people who weren’t exactly like him, until she and Mark had come along.

‘Look.’ She relented slightly as another point of view pushed its way through her self-righteous anger. ‘I can understand that you might harbour one or two reservations about my brother …’

‘Can you?’ Luiz asked with biting sarcasm.

Right now he was kicking himself for not having taken a harder look at the pair of them. He was usually as sharp as they came when other people and their motivations were involved. He had had to be. So how had they managed to slip through the net?

Her brother was disingenuous, engaging, apparently open. He looked like the kind of guy who could hold his own with anyone—tall, muscular, with the same shade of blonde hair as his sister but tied back in a ponytail; when he spoke, his voice was low and gentle.

And Agatha—so stunningly pretty that anyone could be forgiven for staring. But, alongside that, she had also been forthright and opinionated. Was that what had taken him in—the combination of two very different personalities? Had they cunningly worked off each other to throw him off-guard? Or had he just failed to take the situation seriously because he hadn’t thought the boy’s relationship with his niece would ever come to anything? Luisa was famously protective of Maria. Had he just assumed that her request for him to keep an eye out had been more of the same?

At any rate, they had now been caught out in a tangle of lies and that, to his mind, could mean only one thing.

The fact that he’d been a fool for whatever reason was something he would have to live with, but it stuck in his throat.

‘And I know how it must look … that we weren’t completely open with you. But you have to believe me when I tell you that you have nothing to fear.’

‘Point one—fear is an emotion that’s alien to me. Point two—I don’t have to believe anything you say, which brings me to your question.’

‘My question?’

‘You wondered what I intended to do about this mess.’

Aggie felt her hackles rise, as they invariably did on the occasions when she had met him, and she made a valiant effort to keep them in check.

‘So you intend to warn my brother off,’ she said on a sigh.

‘Oh, I intend to do much better than that,’ Luiz drawled, watching the faint colour in her cheeks and thinking that she was a damn good actress. ‘You look as though you could use some money, and I suspect your brother could as well. You have a landlord baying down your neck for unpaid rent.’

‘I paid!’ Aggie insisted vigorously. ‘It’s not my fault that there’s a postal strike!’

‘And whatever you earn as a teacher,’ Luiz continued, not bothering to give her protest house room, ‘It obviously isn’t enough to scrape by. Face it, if you can’t afford the rent for a dump like this, then it’s pretty obvious that neither of you has a penny to rub together. So my offer to get your brother off the scene and out of my niece’s life should put a big smile on your face. In fact, I would go so far as to say that it should make your Christmas.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

Those big blue eyes, Luiz thought sourly. They had done a damn good job of throwing him off the scent.

‘I’m going to give you and your brother enough money to clear out of this place. You’ll each be able to afford to buy somewhere of your own, live the high life, if that’s what takes your fancy. And I suspect it probably is …’

‘You’re going to pay us off? To make us disappear?’

‘Name your price. And naturally your brother can name his. No one has ever accused me of not being a generous man. And on the subject of your brother … when exactly is he due back?’ He looked pointedly at his watch and then raised his eyes to her flushed, angry face. She was perched on the very edge of her chair, ramrod-erect, and her knuckles were white where her fingers were biting into the padded seat. She was the very picture of outrage.

‘I can’t believe I’m hearing this.’

‘I’m sure you’ll find it remarkably easy to adjust to the thought.’

‘You can’t just buy people off!’

‘No? Care to take a small bet on that?’ His eyes were as hard and as cold as the frost gathering outside. ‘Doubtless your brother wishes to further his career, if he’s even interested in a career. Maybe he’d just like to blow some money on life’s little luxuries. Doubtless he ascertained my niece’s financial status early on in the relationship and between the two of you you decided that she was your passport to a more lucrative lifestyle. It now appears that he intends to marry her and thereby get his foot through the door, so to speak, but that’s not going to happen in a million years. So when you say that I can’t buy people off? Well, I think you’ll find that I can.’

Aggie stared at him open-mouthed. She felt as though she was in the presence of someone from another planet. Was this how the wealthy behaved, as though they owned everything and everyone? As though people were pieces on a chess board to be moved around on a whim and disposed of without scruple? And why was she so surprised when she had always known that he was ruthless, cold-hearted and single-minded?

‘Mark and Maria love each other! That must have been obvious to you.’

‘I’m sure Maria imagines herself in love. She’s young. She doesn’t realise that love is an illusion. And we can sit around chatting all evening, but I still need to know when he’ll be here. I want to get this situation sorted as soon as possible.’

‘He won’t.’

‘Come again?’

‘I mean,’ Aggie ventured weakly, because she knew that the bloodless, heartless man in front of her wasn’t going to warm to what she was about to tell him, ‘he and Maria decided to have a few days away. A spur-of-the-moment thing. A little pre-Christmas break …’

‘Tell me I’m not hearing this.’

‘They left yesterday morning.’

She started as he vaulted upright without warning and began pacing the room, his movements restless and menacing.

‘Left to go where?’ It was a question phrased more like a demand. ‘And don’t even think of using your looks to pull a fast one.’

‘Using my looks?’ Aggie felt hot colour crawl into her face. While she had been sitting there in those various restaurants, feeling as awkward and as colourless as a sparrow caught up in a parade of peacocks, had he been looking at her, assessing what she looked like? That thought made her feel weirdly unsteady.

‘Where have they gone?’ He paused to stand in front of her and Aggie’s eyes travelled up—up along that magnificent body sheathed in clothes that looked far too expensive and far too hand-made for their surroundings—until they settled on the forbidding angles of his face. She had never met someone who exuded threat and power the way he did, and who used that to his advantage.

‘I don’t have to give you that information,’ she said stoutly and tried not to quail as his expression darkened.

‘I really wouldn’t play that game with me if I were you, Agatha.’

‘Or else what?’

‘Or else I’ll make sure that your brother finds himself without a job in the foreseeable future. And the money angle? Off the cards.’

‘You can’t do that. I mean, you can’t do anything to ruin his musical career.’

‘Oh no? Please don’t put that to the test.’

Aggie hesitated. There was such cool certainty in his voice that she had no doubt that he really would make sure her brother lost his job if she didn’t comply and tell him what he wanted.

‘Okay. They’ve gone to a little country hotel in the Lake District,’ she imparted reluctantly. ‘They wanted a romantic, snowed-in few days, and that part of the world has a lot of sentimental significance for us.’ Her bag was on the ground next to her. She reached in, rummaged around and extracted a sheet of paper, confirmation of their booking. ‘He gave me this, because it’s got all the details in case I wanted to get in touch with him.’

‘The Lake District. They’ve gone to the Lake District.’ He raked his fingers through his hair, snatched the paper from her and wondered if things could get any worse. The Lake District was not exactly a hop and skip away. Nor was it a plane-ride away. He contemplated the prospect of spending hours behind the wheel of his car in bad driving conditions on a search-and-rescue mission for his sister—because if they were thinking of getting married on the sly, what better time or place? Or else doing battle with the public transport system which was breaking under the weight of the bad weather. He eliminated the public-transport option without hesitation. Which brought him back to the prospect of hours behind the wheel of his car.

‘You make it sound as though they’ve taken a trip to the moon. Well, I guess you’ll want to give Maria a call … I’m not sure there’s any mobile-phone service there, though. In fact, there isn’t. You’ll have to phone through to the hotel and get them to transfer you. She can reassure you that they’re not about to take a walk down the aisle.’ Aggie wondered how her brother was going to deal with Luiz when Luiz waved a wad of notes in front of him and told him to clear off or else. Mark, stupidly, actually liked the man, and stuck up for him whenever Aggie happened to mention how much he got on her nerves.

Not her problem. She struggled to squash her instinctive urge to look out for him. She and Mark had been a tight unit since they were children, when their mother had died and, in the absence of any father, or any relatives for that matter, they had been put into care. Younger by four years, he had been a sickly child, debilitated by frequent asthma attacks. Like a surrogate mother hen, she had learnt to take care of him and to put his needs ahead of her own. She had gained strength, allowing him the freedom to be the gentle, dreamy child who had matured into a gentle, dreamy adult—despite his long hair, his earring and the tattoo on his shoulder which seemed to announce a different kind of person.

‘Well, now that you know where they are, I guess you’ll be leaving.’

Luiz, looking at her down-bent head, pondered this sequence of events. Missing niece. Missing boyfriend. Long trip to locate them.

‘I don’t know why I didn’t see this coming,’ he mused. ‘Having a few days away would be the perfect opportunity for your brother to seal the deal. Maybe my presence on the scene alerted him to the fact that time wouldn’t be on his side when it came to marrying my niece. Maybe he figured that the courtship would have to be curtailed and the main event brought forward … a winter wedding. Very romantic.’

‘That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard!’

‘I’d be surprised if you didn’t say that. Well, it’s not going to happen. We’ll just have to make sure that we get to that romantic hideaway and surprise them before they have time to do anything regrettable.’

‘We?’

Luiz looked at her with raised eyebrows. ‘Well, you don’t imagine that I’m going to go there on my own and leave you behind so that you can get on the phone and warn your brother of my impending arrival, do you?’

‘You’re crazy! I’m not going anywhere with you, Luiz Montes!’

‘It’s not ideal timing, and I can’t say that I haven’t got better things to do on a Friday evening, but I can’t see a way out of it. I anticipate we’ll be there by tomorrow lunchtime, so you’ll have to pack enough for a weekend and make it quick. I’ll need to get back to my place so that I can throw some things in a bag.’

‘You’re not hearing what I’m saying!’

‘Correction. I am hearing. I’m just choosing to ignore what you’re saying because none of it will make any difference to what I intend to do.’

‘I refuse to go along with this!’

‘Here’s the choice. We go, I chat to your brother, I dangle my financial inducement in front of him … A few tears all round to start with but in the end everyone’s happy. Plan B is I send my men up to physically bring him back to London, where he’ll find that life can be very uncomfortable when all avenues of work are dried up. I’ll put the word out in the music industry that he’s not to be touched with a barge pole. You’d be surprised if you knew the extent of my connections. One word—vast. I’m guessing that as his loyal, devoted sister, option two might be tough to swallow.’

‘You are … are …’

‘Yes, yes, yes. I know what you think of me. I’ll give you ten minutes to be at the front door. If you’re not there, I’m coming in to get you. And look on the bright side, Agatha. I’m not even asking you to take time off from your job. You’ll be delivered safely back here by Monday morning, in one piece and with a bank account that’s stuffed to the rafters. And we’ll never have to lay eyes on each other again!’




CHAPTER TWO


‘I JUST can’t believe that you would blackmail me into this,’ was the first thing she said as she joined him at the front door, bag reluctantly in hand.

‘Blackmail? I prefer to call it persuasion.’ Luiz pushed himself off the wall against which he had been lounging, calculating how much work he would be missing and also working out that his date for the following night wasn’t going to be overjoyed at this sudden road trip. Not that that unduly bothered him. In fact, to call it a date was wildly inappropriate. He had had four dates with Chloe Bern and on the fifth he had broken it gently to her that things between them weren’t working out. She hadn’t taken it well. This was the sixth time he would be seeing her and it would be to repeat what he had already told her on date five.

Aggie snorted derisively. She had feverishly tried to find a way of backing out, but all exits seemed to have been barred. Luiz was in hunting mode and she knew that the threats he had made hadn’t been empty ones. For the sake of her brother, she had no choice but to agree to this trip and she felt like exploding with anger.

Outside, the weather was grimly uninviting, freezing cold and with an ominous stillness in the atmosphere.

She followed him to his fancy car, incongruous between the battered, old run-arounds on either side, and made another inarticulate noise as he beeped it open.

‘You’re going to tell me,’ Luiz said, settling into the driver’s seat and waiting for her as she strapped herself in, ‘that this is a pointless toy belonging to someone with more money than sense. Am I right?’

‘You must be a mind reader,’ Aggie said acidly.

‘Not a mind reader. Just astute when it comes to remembering conversations we’ve had in the past.’ He started the engine and the sports car purred to life.

‘You can’t have remembered everything I’ve said to you,’ Aggie muttered uncomfortably.

‘Everything. How do you think I’m so sure that you never mentioned renting this dump here?’ He threw her a sidelong glance. ‘I’m thinking that your brother doesn’t contribute greatly to the family finances?’ Which in turn made him wonder who would be footing the bill for the romantic getaway. If Aggie barely earned enough to keep the roof over her head, then it stood to reason that Mark earned even less, singing songs in a pub. His jaw tightened at the certainty that Maria was already the goose laying the golden eggs.

‘He can’t,’ Aggie admitted reluctantly. ‘Not that I mind, because I don’t.’

‘That’s big of you. Most people would resent having to take care of their kid brother when he’s capable of taking care of himself.’ They had both been sketchy on the details of Mark’s job and Luiz, impatient with a task that had been foisted onto his shoulders, had not delved deeply enough. He had been content enough to ascertain that his niece wasn’t going out with a potential axe-murderer, junkie or criminal on the run. ‘So … he works in a bar and plays now and then in a band. You might as well tell me the truth, Agatha. Considering there’s no longer any point in keeping secrets.’

Aggie shrugged. ‘Yes, he works in a bar and gets a gig once every few weeks. But his talent is really with songwriting. You’ll probably think that I’m spinning you a fairy story, because you’re suspicious of everything I say …’

‘With good reason, as it turns out.’

‘But he’s pretty amazing at composing. Often in the evenings, while I’m reading or else going through some of the homework from the kids or preparing for classes, he’ll sit on the sofa playing his guitar and working on his latest song over and over until he thinks he’s got it just right.’

‘And you never thought to mention that to me because …?’

‘I’m sure Mark told you that he enjoyed songwriting.’

‘He told me that he was a musician. He may have mentioned that he knew people in the entertainment business. The general impression was that he was an established musician with an established career. I don’t believe I ever heard you contradict him.’

The guy was charming but broke, and his state of penury was no passing inconvenience. He was broke because he lived in a dreamworld of strumming guitars and dabbling about with music sheets.

Thinking about it now, Luiz could see why Maria had fallen for the guy. She was the product of a fabulously wealthy background. The boys she had met had always had plentiful supplies of money. Many of them either worked in family businesses or were destined to. A musician, with a notebook and a guitar slung over his shoulder, rustling up cocktails in a bar by night? On every level he had been her accident waiting to happen. No wonder they had all seen fit to play around with the truth! Maria was sharp enough to have known that a whiff of the truth would have had alarm bells ringing in his head.

‘I happen to be very proud of my brother,’ Aggie said stiffly. ‘It’s important that people find their own way. I know you probably don’t have much time for that.’

‘I have a lot of time for that, provided it doesn’t impact my family.’

The traffic was horrendous but eventually they cleared it and, after a series of back roads, emerged at a square of elegant red-bricked Victorian houses in the centre of which was a gated, private park.

There had been meals out but neither she nor her brother had ever actually been asked over to Luiz’s house.

This was evidence of wealth on a shocking scale. Aside from Maria’s expensive bags, which she’d laughingly claimed she couldn’t resist and could afford because her family was ‘not badly off’, there had been nothing to suggest that not badly off had actually meant staggeringly rich.

Even though the restaurants had been grand and expensive, Aggie had never envisioned the actual lifestyle that Luiz enjoyed to accompany them. She had no passing acquaintance with money. Lifestyles of the rich and famous were things she occasionally read about in magazines and dismissed without giving it much thought. Getting out of the car, she realised that, between her and her brother and Luiz and his family, there was a chasm so vast that the thought of even daring to cross it gave her a headache.

Once again she was reluctantly forced to see why Maria’s mother had asked Luiz to watch the situation.

Once again she backtracked over their glossing over of their circumstances and understood why Luiz was now reacting the way he was. He was so wrong about them both but he was trapped in his own circumstances and had probably been weaned on suspicion from a very young age.

‘Are you going to come out?’ Luiz bent down to peer at her through the open car door. ‘Or are you going to stay there all night gawping?’

‘I wasn’t gawping!’ Aggie slammed the car door behind her and followed him into a house, a four-storey house that took her breath away, from the pale marble flooring to the dramatic paintings on the walls to the sweeping banister that led up to yet more impeccable elegance.

He strode into a room to the right and after a few seconds of dithering Aggie followed him inside. He hadn’t glanced at her once. Just shed his coat and headed straight for his answer machine, which he flicked on while loosening his tie.

She took the opportunity to look round her: stately proportions and the same pale marbled flooring, with softly faded silk rugs to break the expanse. The furniture was light leather and the floor-to-ceiling curtains thick velvet, a shade deeper in colour than the light pinks of the rugs.

She was vaguely aware that he was listening to what seemed to be an interminable series of business calls, until the last message, when the breathy voice of a woman reminded him that she would be seeing him tomorrow and that she couldn’t wait.

At that, Aggie’s ears pricked up. He might very well have accused her of being shady when it came to her and her brother’s private lives. She now realised that she actually knew precious little about him.

He wasn’t married; that much she knew for sure because Maria had confided that the whole family was waiting for him to tie the knot and settle down. Beyond that, of course, he would have a girlfriend. No one as eligible as Luiz Montes would be without one. She looked at him surreptitiously and wondered what the owner of that breathy, sexy voice looked like.

‘I’m going to have a quick shower. I’ll be back down in ten minutes and then we’ll get going. No point hanging around.’

Aggie snapped back to the present. She was blushing. She could feel it. Blushing as she speculated on his private life.

‘Make yourself at home,’ Luiz told her drily. ‘Feel free to explore.’

‘I’m fine here, thank you very much.’ She perched awkwardly on the edge of one of the pristine leather sofas and rested her hands primly on her lap.

‘Suit yourself.’

But as soon as he had left the room, she began exploring like a kid in a toyshop, touching some of the clearly priceless objets d’art he had randomly scattered around: a beautiful bronze figurine of two cheetahs on the long, low sideboard against the wall; a pair of vases that looked very much like the real thing from a Chinese dynasty; she gazed at the abstract on the wall and tried to decipher the signature.

‘Do you like what you see?’ Luiz asked from behind her and she started and went bright red.

‘I’ve never been in a place like this before,’ Aggie said defensively.

Her mouth went dry as she looked at him. He was dressed in a pair of black jeans and a grey-and-black-striped woollen jumper. She could see the collar of his shirt underneath, soft grey flannel. All the other times she had seen him he had been formally dressed, almost as though he had left work to meet them at whatever mega-expensive restaurant he had booked. But this was casual and he was really and truly drop-dead sexy.

‘It’s a house, not a museum. Shall we go?’ He flicked off the light as she left the sitting room and pulled out his mobile phone to instruct his driver to bring the four-by-four round.

‘My house is a house.’ Aggie was momentarily distracted from her anger at his accusations as she stared back at the mansion behind her and waited with him for the car to be delivered.

‘Correction. Your house is a hovel. Your landlord deserves to be shot for charging a tenant for a place like that. You probably haven’t noticed, but in the brief time I was there I spotted the kind of cracks that advertise a problem with damp—plaster falling from the walls and patches on the ceiling that probably mean you’ll have a leak sooner rather than later.’

The four-by-four, shiny and black, slowed and Luiz’s driver got out.

‘There’s nothing I can do about that,’ Aggie huffed, climbing into the passenger seat. ‘Anyway, you live in a different world to me … to us. It’s almost impossible to find somewhere cheap to rent in London.’

‘There’s a difference between cheap and hazardous. Just think of what you could buy if you had the money in your bank account …’ He manoeuvred the big car away from the kerb. ‘Nice house in a smart postcode … Quaint little garden at the back … You like gardening, don’t you? I believe it’s one of those things you mentioned … although it’s open to debate whether you were telling the truth or lying to give the right impression.’

‘I wasn’t lying! I love gardening.’

‘London gardens are generally small but you’d be surprised to discover what you can get for the right price.’

‘I would never accept a penny from you, Luiz Montes!’

‘You don’t mean that.’

That tone of comfortable disbelief enraged her. ‘I’m not interested in money!’ She turned to him, looked at his aristocratic dark profile, and felt that familiar giddy feeling.

‘Call me cynical, but I have yet to meet someone who isn’t interested in money. They might make noises about money not being able to buy happiness and the good things in life being free, but they like the things money can do and the freebies go through the window when more expensive ways of being happy enter the equation. Tell me seriously that you didn’t enjoy those meals you had out.’

‘Yes, I enjoyed them, but I wouldn’t miss them if they weren’t there.’

‘And what about your brother? Is he as noble minded as you?’

‘Neither of us are materialistic, if that’s what you mean. You met him. Did he strike you as the sort of person who … who would lead Maria on because of what he thought he could get out of her? I mean, didn’t you like him at all?’

‘I liked him, but that’s not the point.’

‘You mean the point is that Maria can go out with someone from a different background, just so long as there’s no danger of getting serious, because the only person she would be allowed to settle down with would be someone of the same social standing as her.’

‘You say that as though there’s something wrong with it.’

‘I don’t want to talk about this. It’s not going to get us anywhere.’ She fell silent and watched the slow-moving traffic around her, a sea of headlights illuminating late-night shoppers, people hurrying towards the tube or to catch a bus. At this rate, it would be midnight before they cleared London.

‘Would you tell me something?’ she asked to break the silence.

‘I’m listening.’

‘Why didn’t you try and put an end to their relationship from the start? I mean, why did you bother taking us out for all those meals?’

‘Not my place to interfere. Not at that point, at any rate. I’d been asked to keep an eye on things, to meet your brother and, as it turns out, you too, because the two of you seem to be joined at the hip.’ He didn’t add that, having not had very much to do with his niece in the past, he had found that he rather enjoyed their company. He had liked listening to Mark and Maria entertain him with their chat about movies and music. And even more he had liked the way Aggie had argued with him, had liked the way it had challenged him into making an effort to get her to laugh. It had all made a change from the extravagant social events to which he was invited, usually in a bid by a company to impress him.

‘We’re not joined at the hip! We’re close because …’ Because of their background of foster care, but that was definitely something they had kept to themselves.

‘Because you lost your parents?’

‘That’s right.’ She had told him in passing, almost the first time she had met him, that their parents were dead and had swiftly changed the subject. Just another muddled half-truth that would further make him suspicious of their motives.

‘Apart from which, I thought that my sister had been overreacting to the whole thing. Maria is an only child without a father. Luisa is prone to pointless worrying.’

‘I can’t imagine you taking orders from your sister.’

‘You haven’t met Luisa or any of my five sisters. If you had, you wouldn’t make that observation.’ He laughed and Aggie felt the breath catch in her throat because, for once, his laughter stemmed from genuine amusement.

‘What are they like?’

‘All older than me and all bossy.’ He grinned sideways at her. ‘It’s easier to surrender than to cross them. In a family of six women, my father and I know better than to try and argue. It would be easier staging a land war in Asia.’

That glimpse of his humanity unsettled Aggie. But she had had glimpses of it before, she recalled uneasily. Times when he had managed to make her forget how dislikeable he was, when he had recounted something with such dry wit that she had caught herself trying hard to stifle a laugh. He might be hateful, judgemental and unfair, he might represent a lot of things she disliked, but there was no denying that he was one of the most intelligent men she had ever met—and, when it suited him, one of the most entertaining. She had contrived to forget all of that but, stuck here with him, it was coming back to her fast and she had to fumble her way out of her momentary distraction.

‘I couldn’t help overhearing those messages earlier on at the house,’ she said politely.

‘Messages? What are you talking about?’

‘Lots of business calls. I guess you’re having to sacrifice working time for this … unless you don’t work on a weekend.’

‘If you’re thinking of using a few messages you overheard as a way of trying to talk me out of this trip, then you can forget it.’

‘I wasn’t thinking of doing that. I was just being polite.’

‘In that case, you can rest assured that there’s nothing that can’t wait until Monday when I’m back in London. I have my mobile and if anything urgent comes up, then I can deal with it on the move. Nice try, though.’

‘What about that other message? I gather you’ll be missing a date with someone tomorrow night?’

Luiz stiffened. ‘Again, nothing that can’t be handled.’

‘Because I would feel very guilty otherwise.’

‘Don’t concern yourself with my private life, Aggie.’

‘Why not?’ Aggie risked. ‘You’re concerning yourself with mine.’

‘Slightly different scenario, wouldn’t you agree? To the best of my knowledge, I haven’t been caught trying to con anyone recently. My private life isn’t the one under the spotlight.’

‘You’re impossible! You’re so … blinkered! Did you know that Maria was the one who pursued Mark?’

‘Do me a favour.’

‘She was,’ Aggie persisted. ‘Mark was playing at one of the pubs and she and her friends went to hear them. She went to meet him after the gig and she gave him her mobile number, told him to get in touch.’

‘I’m finding that hard to believe, but let’s suppose you’re telling the truth. I don’t see what that has to do with anything. Whether she chased your brother or your brother chased her, the end result is the same. An heiress is an extremely lucrative proposition for someone in his position.’ He switched on the radio and turned it to the traffic news.

London was crawling. The weather forecasters had been making a big deal of snow to come. There was nothing at the moment but people were still rushing to get back home and the roads were gridlocked.

Aggie wearily closed her eyes and leaned back. She was hungry and exhausted and trying to get through to Luiz was like beating her head against a brick wall.

She came to suddenly to the sound of Luiz’s low, urgent voice and she blinked herself out of sleep. She had no idea how long she had been dozing, or even how she could manage to doze at all when her thoughts were all over the place.

He was on his phone, and from the sounds of it not enjoying the conversation he was having.

In fact, sitting up and stifling a yawn, it dawned on her that the voice on the other end of the mobile was the same smoky voice that had left a message on his answer machine earlier on, and the reason Aggie knew that was because the smoky voice had become high-pitched and shrill. Not only could she hear every word the other woman was saying, she guessed that if she rolled down her window the people in the car behind them would be able to as well.

‘This is not the right time for this conversation …’ Luiz was saying in a harried, urgent voice.

‘Don’t you dare hang up on me! I’ll just keep calling! I deserve better than this!’

‘Which is why you should be thanking me for putting an end to our relationship, Chloe. You do deserve a hell of a lot better than me.’

Aggie rolled her eyes. Wasn’t that the oldest trick in the book? The one men used when they wanted to exit a relationship with their consciences intact? Take the blame for everything, manage to convince their hapless girlfriend that breaking up is all for her own good and then walk away feeling as though they’ve done their good deed for the day.

She listened while Luiz, obviously resigning himself to a conversation he hadn’t initiated and didn’t want, explained in various ways why they weren’t working as a couple.

She had never seen him other than calm, self-assured, in complete control of himself and everything around him. People jumped to attention when he spoke and he had always had that air of command that was afforded to people of influence and power.

He was not that man when he finally ended the call to the sound of virulent abuse on the other end of the line.

‘Well?’ he demanded grittily. ‘I am sure you have an opinion on the conversation you unfortunately had to overhear.’

When she had asked him about his private life, this was not what she had been expecting. He had quizzed her about hers, about her brother’s; a little retaliation had seemed only fair. But that conversation had been intensely personal.

‘You’ve broken up with someone and I’m sorry about that,’ Aggie said quietly. ‘I know that it’s wretched when a relationship comes to an end, especially if you’ve invested in it, and of course I don’t want to talk about that. It’s your business.’

‘I like that.’

‘What?’

‘Your kind words of sympathy. Believe me when I tell you that there’s nothing that could have snapped me out of my mood as efficiently as that.’

‘What are you talking about?’ Aggie asked, confused. She looked at him to see him smiling with amusement and when he flicked her a sideways glance his smile broadened.

‘I’m not dying of a broken heart,’ he assured her. ‘In fact, if you’d been listening, I’m the one who instigated the break-up.’

‘Yes,’ Aggie agreed smartly. ‘Which doesn’t mean that it didn’t hurt.’

‘Are you speaking from experience?’

‘Well, yes, as a matter of fact!’

‘I’m inclined to believe you,’ Luiz drawled. ‘So why did you dump him? Wasn’t he man enough to deal with your wilful, argumentative nature?’

‘I’m neither of those things!’ Aggie reddened and glared at his averted profile.

‘On that point, we’re going to have to differ.’

‘I’m only argumentative with you, Luiz Montes! And perhaps that’s because you’ve accused me of being a liar and an opportunist, plotting with my brother to take advantage of your niece!’

‘Give it a rest. You have done nothing but argue with me since the second you met me. You’ve made telling comments about every restaurant, about the value of money, about people who think they can rule the world from a chequebook … You’ve covered all the ground when it comes to letting me know that you disapprove of wealth. Course, how was I to know that those were just cleverly positioned comments to downplay what you were all about? But let’s leave that aside for the moment. Why did you dump the poor guy?’

‘If you must know,’ Aggie said, partly because constant arguing was tiring and partly because she wanted to let him know that Stu had not found her in the least bit argumentative, ‘he became too jealous and too possessive, and I don’t like those traits.’

‘Amazing. I think we’ve discovered common ground.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Chloe went from obliging to demanding in record time.’ They had finally cleared London and Luiz realised that unless they continued driving through the night they would have to take a break at some point along the route. It was also beginning to snow. For the moment, though, that was something he would keep to himself.

‘Never a good trait as far as I am concerned.’ He glanced at Aggie and was struck again by the extreme ultra-femininity of her looks. He imagined that guys could get sucked in by those looks only to discover a wildcat behind the angelic front. Whatever scam she and her brother had concocted between them, she had definitely been the brains behind it. Hell, he could almost appreciate the sharp, outspoken intelligence there. Under the low-level sniping, she was a woman a guy could have a conversation with and that, Luiz conceded, was something. He didn’t have much use for conversation with women, not when there were always so many more entertaining ways of spending time with them.

Generally speaking, the women he had gone out with had never sparked curiosity. Why would they? They had always been a known quantity, wealthy socialites with impeccable pedigrees. He was thirty-three years old and could honestly say that he had never deviated from the expected.

With work always centre-stage, it had been very easy to slide in and out of relationships with women who were socially acceptable. In a world where greed and avarice lurked around every corner, it made sense to eliminate the opportunist by making sure never to date anyone who could fall into that category. He had never questioned it. If none of the women in his past had ever succeeded in capturing his attention for longer than ten seconds, then he wasn’t bothered. His sisters, bar two, had all done their duty and reproduced, leaving him free to live his life the way he saw fit.

‘So … what do you mean? That the minute a woman wants something committed you back away? Was that what your ex-girlfriend was guilty of?’

‘I make it my duty never to make promises I can’t keep,’ Luiz informed her coolly. ‘I’m always straight with women. I’m not in it for the long run. Chloe, unfortunately, began thinking that the rules of the game could be changed somewhere along the line. I should have seen the signs, of course,’ he continued half to himself. ‘The minute a woman starts making noises about wanting to spend a night in and play happy families is the minute the warning bells should start going off.’

‘And they didn’t?’ Aggie was thinking that wanting to spend the odd night in didn’t sound like an impossible dream or an undercover marriage proposal.

‘She was very beautiful,’ Luiz conceded with a laugh.

‘Was that why you went out with her? Because of the way she looked?’

‘I’m a great believer in the power of sexual attraction.’

‘That’s very shallow.’

Luiz laughed again and slanted an amused look at her. ‘You’re not into sex?’

Aggie reddened and her heart started pounding like a drum beat inside her. ‘That’s none of your business!’

‘Some women aren’t.’ Luiz pushed the boundaries. Unlike the other times he had seen her, he now had her all to himself, undiluted by the presence of Mark and his niece. Naturally he would use the time to find out everything he could about her and her brother, all the better to prepare him for when they finally made it to the Lake District. But for now it was no hardship trying to prise underneath her prickly exterior to find out what made her tick. They were cooped up together in a car. What else was there to do? ‘Are you one of those women?’ he asked silkily.

‘I happen to think that sex isn’t the most important thing in a relationship!’

‘That’s probably because you haven’t experienced good sex.’

‘That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard in my life!’ But her face was hot and flushed and she was finding it difficult to breathe properly.

‘I hope I’m not embarrassing you …’

‘I’m not embarrassed. I just think that this is an inappropriate conversation.’

‘Because … ?’

‘Because I don’t want to be here. Because you’re dragging me off on a trek to find my brother so that you can accuse him of being an opportunist and fling money at him so that he goes away. Because you think that we can be bought off.’

‘That aside …’ He switched on his wipers as the first flurries of snow began to cloud the glass. ‘We’re here and we can’t maintain hostilities indefinitely. And I hate to break this to you, but it looks as though our trip might end up taking a little longer than originally anticipated.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Look ahead of you. The traffic is crawling and the snow’s started to fall. I can keep driving for another hour or so but then we’re probably going to have to pull in somewhere for the night. In fact, keep your eyes open. I’m going to divert to the nearest town and we’re going to find somewhere overnight.’




CHAPTER THREE


IN THE end, she had to look up somewhere on his phone because they appeared to have entered hotel-free territory.

‘It’s just one reason why I try to never leave London,’ Luiz muttered in frustration. ‘Wide, empty open spaces with nothing inside them. Not even a halfway decent hotel, from the looks of it.’

‘That’s what most people love about getting out of London.’

‘Repeat—different strokes for different folks. What have you found?’ They had left the grinding traffic behind them. Now he had to contend with dangerously icy roads and thickly falling snow that limited his vision. He glanced across but couldn’t see her face because of the fall of soft, finely spun golden hair across it.

‘You’re going to be disappointed because there are no fancy hotels, although there is a B and B about five miles away and it’s rated very highly. It’s a bit of a detour but it’s the only thing I’ve been able to locate.’

‘Address.’ He punched it into his guidance system and relaxed at the thought that he would be able to take a break. ‘Read me what it says about this place.’

‘I don’t suppose anyone’s ever told you this but you talk to people as though they’re your servants. You just expect people to do what you want them to do without question.’

‘I would be inclined to agree with that,’ Luiz drawled. ‘But for the fact that you don’t slot into that category, so there goes your argument. I ask you to simply tell me about this bed and breakfast, which you’ll do but not until you let me know that you resent the request, and you resent the request for no other reason that I happen to be the one making it. The down side of accusing someone of being black-and-white is that you should be very sure that you don’t fall into the same category yourself.’

Aggie flushed and scowled. ‘Five bedrooms, two en suite, a sitting room. And the price includes a full English breakfast. There’s also a charming garden area but I don’t suppose that’s relevant considering the weather. And I’m the least prejudiced person I know. I’m extremely open minded!’

‘Five bedrooms. Two en suite. Is there nothing a little less basic in the vicinity?’

‘We’re in the country now,’ Aggie informed him tersely, half-annoyed because he hadn’t taken her up on what she had said. ‘There are no five-star hotels, if that’s what you mean.’

‘You know,’ Luiz murmured softly, straining to see his way forward when the wipers could barely handle the fall of snow on the windscreen, ‘I can understand your hostility towards me, but what I find a little more difficult to understand is your hostility towards all displays of wealth. The first time I met you, you made it clear that expensive restaurants were a waste of money when all over the world people were going without food … But hell, I don’t want to get into this. It’s hard enough trying to concentrate on not going off the road without launching into yet another pointless exchange of words. You’re going to have to look out for a sign.’

Of course, he had no interest in her personally, not beyond wanting to protect his family and their wealth from her, so she should be able to disregard everything he said. But he had still managed to make her feel like a hypocrite and Aggie shifted uncomfortably.

‘I’m sorry I can’t offer to share the driving,’ she muttered, to smooth over her sudden confusion at the way he had managed to turn her notions about herself on their head. ‘But I don’t have my driving licence.’

‘I wouldn’t ask you to drive even if you did,’ Luiz informed her.

‘Because women need protecting?’ But she was half-smiling when she said that.

‘Because I would have a nervous breakdown.’

Aggie stifled a giggle. He had a talent for making her want to laugh when she knew she should be on the defensive. ‘That’s very chauvinistic.’

‘I think you’ve got the measure of me. I don’t make a good back-seat driver.’

‘That’s probably because you feel that you always have to be in control,’ Aggie pointed out. ‘And I suppose you really are always in control, aren’t you?’

‘I like to be.’ Luiz had slowed the car right down. Even though it was a powerful four-wheel drive, he knew that the road was treacherous and ungritted. ‘Are you going to waste a few minutes trying to analyse me now?’

‘I wouldn’t dream of it!’ But she was feverishly analysing him in her head, eaten up with curiosity as to what made this complex man tick. She didn’t care, of course. It was a game generated by the fact that they were in close proximity, but she caught herself wondering whether his need for absolute control wasn’t an inherited obligation. He was an only son of a Latin American magnate. Had he been trained to see himself as ruler of all he surveyed? It occurred to her that this wasn’t the first time she had found herself wondering about him, and that was an uneasy thought.

‘Anyway, we’re here.’ They were now in a village and she could see that it barely encompassed a handful of shops, in between and around which radiated small houses, the sort of houses found in books depicting the perfect English country village. The bed and breakfast was a tiny semi-detached house, very easily bypassed were it not for the sign swinging outside, barely visible under the snow.

It was very late and the roads were completely deserted. Even the bed and breakfast was plunged in darkness, except for two outside lights which just about managed to illuminate the front of the house and a metre or two of garden in front.

With barely contained resignation, Luiz pulled up outside and killed the engine.

‘It looks wonderful,’ Aggie breathed, taken with the creamy yellow stone and the perfectly proportioned leaded windows. She could picture the riot of colour in summer with all manner of flowers ablaze in the front garden and the soporific sound of the bees buzzing between them.

‘Sorry?’ Luiz wondered whether they were looking at the same house.

‘ ’Course, I would rather not be here with you,’ Aggie emphasised. ‘But it’s beautiful. Especially with the snow on the ground and on the roof. Gosh, it’s really deep as well! That’s the one thing I really miss about living in the south. Snow.’

On that tantalising statement, she flung open the car door and stepped outside, holding her arms out wide and her head tilted up so that the snow could fall directly onto her face.

In the act of reaching behind him to extract their cases, Luiz paused to stare at her. She had pulled some fingerless gloves out of her coat pocket and stuck them on and standing like that, arms outstretched, she looked young, vulnerable and achingly innocent, a child reacting to the thrill of being out in the snow.

Beside the point what she looks like, he told himself, breaking the momentary spell to get their bags. She was pretty. He knew that. He had known that from the very first second he had set eyes on her. The world was full of pretty women, especially his world, which was not only full of pretty women but pretty women willing to throw themselves at him.

Aggie began walking towards the house, her feet sinking into the snow, and only turned to look around when he had slammed shut the car door and was standing in front of it, a bag in either hand—his mega-expensive bag, her forlorn and cheaply made one which had been her companion from the age of fourteen when she had spent her first night at a friend’s house.

He looked just so incongruous. She couldn’t see his expression because it was dark but she imagined that he would be bewildered, removed from his precious creature comforts and thrown into a world far removed from the expensive one he occupied. A bed and breakfast with just five bedrooms, only two of which were en suite! What a horror story for him! Not to mention the fact that he would have to force himself to carry on being polite to the sister of an unscrupulous opportunist who was plotting to milk his niece for her millions. He was lead actor in the middle of his very worst nightmare and as he stood there, watching her, she reached down to scoop up a handful of snow, cold and crisp and begging to be moulded into a ball.

All her anger and frustration towards him and towards herself for reacting to him when she should be able to be cool and dismissive went into that throw, and she held her breath as the snowball arched upwards and travelled with deadly accuracy towards him, hitting him right in the middle of that broad, muscled, arrogant chest.

She didn’t know who was more surprised. Her, for having thrown it in the first place, or him for being hit for the first time in his life by a snowball. Before he could react, she turned her back and began plodding to the front door.





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