LITMIR.BIZ

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he’d had no interest in and he’d fallen for her hook, line and sinker.

      Had part of that driving obsession for her been the fact that he’d actually had to try? That he’d had to play the old-fashioned courting game?

      That she’d made him wait and, in the end, had not slept with him?

      She’d kept him hanging on and he’d allowed it. He’d been happy to wait. The man who played by his own rules and waited for no one had been happy to wait because he’d seen a future for them together.

      He’d been a fool and he’d paid the price.

      But that was seven years ago and now...

      He strolled back to his chair, leant forward and buzzed his secretary to have Oliver Griffin-Watt shown up to his office.

      The wheel, he mused, relaxing back, had turned full circle. He’d never considered himself the sort of guy who would ever be interested in extracting revenge but the opportunity to even the scales had come knocking on his door and who was he to refuse it entry...?

      * * *

      ‘You did what?’

      Sophie looked at her twin brother with a mixture of clammy panic and absolute horror.

      She had to sit down. If she didn’t sit down, her wobbly legs would collapse under her. She could feel a headache coming on and she rubbed her temples in little circular movements with shaky fingers.

      Once upon a time, she’d been able to see all the signs of neglect in the huge family house, but over the past few years she’d become accustomed to the semi-decrepit sadness of the home in which she and her brother had spent their entire lives. She barely noticed the wear and tear now.

      ‘What else would you have suggested I do?’ There was complaint in his voice as he looked at his sister.

      ‘Anything but that, Ollie,’ Sophie whispered, stricken.

      ‘So you went out with the guy for ten minutes years ago! I admit it was a long shot, going to see him, but I figured we had nothing to lose. It felt like fate that he’s only been back in the country for a couple of months, I just happen to pick up someone’s newspaper on the tube and, lo and behold, who’s staring out at me from the financial pages...? It’s not even as though I’m in London all that much! Pure chance. And, hell, we need all the help we can get!’

      He gestured broadly to the four walls of the kitchen which, on a cold winter’s night, with the stove burning and the lights dimmed, could be mistaken for a cosy and functioning space but which, as was the case now, was shorn of any homely warmth in the glaring, bright light of a summer’s day.

      ‘I mean...’ His voice rose, morphing from complaint to indignation. ‘Look at this place, Soph! It needs so much work that there’s no way we can begin to cover the cost. It’s eating every penny we have and you heard what the estate agents have all said. It needs too much work and it’s in the wrong price bracket to be an easy sell. It’s been on the market for two and a half years! We’re never going to get rid of it, unless we can do a patch-up job, and we’re never going to do a patch-up job unless the company starts paying its way!’

      ‘And you thought that running to...to...’ She could barely let his name pass her lips.

      Javier Vasquez.

      Even after all these years the memory of him still clung to her, as pernicious as ivy, curling round and round in her head, refusing to go away.

      He had come into her life with the savage, mesmerising intensity of a force-nine gale and had blown all her neat, tidy assumptions about her future to smithereens.

      When she pictured him in her head, she saw him as he was then, more man than boy, a towering, lean, commanding figure who could render a room silent the minute he walked in.

      He had had presence.

      Even before she’d fallen under his spell, before she’d even spoken one word to him, she’d known that he was going to be dangerous. Her little clutch of well-bred, upper-middle-class friends had kept sneaking glances at him when he’d entered that pub all those years ago, giggling, tittering and trying hard to get his attention. After the first glance, she, on the other hand, had kept her eyes firmly averted. But she hadn’t been able to miss the banging of her heart against her ribcage or the way her skin had broken out in clammy, nervous perspiration.

      When he’d sauntered across to her, ignoring her friends, and had begun talking to her, she’d almost fainted.

      He’d been doing his Master’s in engineering and he was the cleverest guy she’d ever met in her life. He was so good-looking that he’d taken her breath away.

      He’d been also just the sort of boy her parents would have disapproved of. Exotic, foreign and most of all...unashamedly broke.

      His fantastic self-assurance—the hint of unleashed power that sat on his shoulders like an invisible cloak—had attracted and scared her at the same time. At eighteen, she had had limited experience of the opposite sex and, in his company, that limited experience had felt like no experience at all. Roger, whom she had left behind and who had been still clinging to her, even though she had broken off their very tepid relationship, had scarcely counted even though he had been only a couple of years younger than Javier.

      She’d felt like a gauche little girl next to him. A gauche little girl with one foot poised over an unknown abyss, ready to step out of the comfort zone that had been her privileged, sheltered life.

      Private school, skiing holidays, piano lessons and horse riding on Saturday mornings had not prepared her for anyone remotely like Javier Vasquez.

      He wasn’t going to be good for her but she had been as helpless as a kitten in the face of his lazy but targeted pursuit.

      ‘We could do something,’ he had murmured early on when he had cornered her in that pub, in the sort of seductive voice that had literally made her go weak at the knees. ‘I don’t have much money but trust me when I tell you that I can show you the best time of your life without a penny to my name...’

      She’d always mixed with people just like her: pampered girls and spoilt boys who had never had to think hard about how much having a good night out might cost. She’d drifted into seeing Roger, who’d been part of that set and whom she’d known for ever.

      Why? It was something she’d never questioned. Oliver had taken it all for granted but, looking back, she had always felt guilty at the ease with which she had always been encouraged to take what she wanted, whatever the cost.

      Her father had enjoyed showing off his beautiful twins and had showered them with presents from the very second they had been born.

      She was his princess, and if occasionally she’d felt uneasy at the way he’d dismissed people who were socially inferior to him, she had pushed aside the uneasy feeling because, whatever his faults, her father had adored her. She’d been a daddy’s girl.

      And she’d known, from the second Javier Vasquez had turned his sexy eyes to her, that she was playing with fire, that her father would have had a coronary had he only known...

      But play with fire she had.

      Falling deeper and deeper for him, resisting the driving desire to sleep with him because...

      Because she’d been a shameless romantic and because there had been a part of her that had wondered whether a man like Javier Vasquez would have ditched her as soon as he’d got her between the sheets.

      But he hadn’t forced her hand and that, in itself, had fuelled her feelings towards him, honed and fine-tuned them to the point where she had felt truly alive only when she’d been in his company.

      It was always going to end in tears, except had she known just how horribly it would all turn out...

      ‘I didn’t think the guy would actually agree to see me,’ Oliver confessed, sliding his eyes over to her flushed, distressed face before hurriedly looking

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