LITMIR.BIZ

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Javier, who was macho to the very last bone in his body.

      ‘I’m afraid there’s not a great deal of food.’ She turned away because her heart was beating so fast she could barely breathe properly. His presence seemed to infiltrate every part of the apartment, filling it with suffocating, masculine intensity. This was how it had always been with him. In his presence, she’d felt weak and pleasurably helpless. Even as a young guy, struggling to make ends meet, he’d still managed to project an air of absolute assurance. He’d made all the other students around him seem like little boys in comparison.

      The big difference was that, back then, she’d had a remit to bask and luxuriate in that powerful masculinity. She could touch, she could run her fingers through his springy, black hair and she’d had permission to melt at the feel of it.

      She’d been allowed to want him and to show him how much she wanted him.

      Not so now.

      Furthermore, she didn’t want to want him. She didn’t want to feel herself dragged back into a past that was gone for good. Of course, foolish love was gone for good, and no longer a threat to the ivory tower she had constructed around herself that had been so vital in withstanding the years spent with her husband, but she didn’t want to feel that pressing, urgent want either...

      She didn’t want to feel her heart fluttering like an adolescent’s because he happened to be sharing the same space as her. She’d grown up, gone through some hellish stuff. Her outlook on life had been changed for ever because of what she’d had to deal with. She had no illusions now and no longer believed that happiness was her right. It wasn’t and never would be. Javier Vasquez belonged to a time when unfettered optimism had been her constant companion. Now, not only was the murky past an unbreachable wall between them, but so were all the changes that had happened to her.

      ‘I wasn’t expecting company.’ She half turned to find him right behind her, having followed her into the kitchen.

      The kitchen was big, a clever mix of old and new, and she felt utterly at home in it.

      ‘Smells good. What is it?’

      ‘Just some tomato sauce. I was going to have it with pasta.’

      ‘You never used to enjoy cooking.’ Yet again, he found himself referring to the past, dredging it up and bringing it into the present, where it most certainly did not belong.

      ‘I know.’ She shot him a fleeting smile as he sat down at the table, angling his chair so that he could extend his long legs to one side. ‘I never had to do it,’ she explained. ‘Mum loved cooking and I was always happy to let her get on with it. When she got ill, she said it used to occupy her and take her mind off her health problems, so I never interfered. I mean, I’d wash the dishes and tidy behind her, but she liked being the main chef. And then...’

      She sighed and began finishing the food preparation, but horribly aware of those lazy, speculative eyes on her, following her every movement.

      Javier resisted the urge to try to prise answers out of her. ‘So you learned to cook,’ he said, moving the conversation along, past the point of his curiosity.

      ‘And discovered that I rather enjoyed it.’ She didn’t fail to notice how swiftly he had diverted the conversation from the controversial topic of her past, the years she had spent after they had gone their separate ways. His initial curiosity was gone, and she told herself that she was very thankful that it had, because there was far too much she could never, would never, tell him.

      But alongside that relief was a certain amount of disappointment, because his lack of curiosity was all wrapped up with the indifference he felt for her.

      She suddenly had the strangest temptation to reach out and touch him, to stroke his wrist, feel the familiar strength of his forearm under her fingers. What would he do? How would he react? Would he recoil with horror or would he touch her back?

      Appalled, she thrust a plate of food in front of him and sat down opposite him. She wanted to sit on her treacherous hands just in case they did something wildly inappropriate of their own accord and she had to remind herself shakily that she was a grown woman, fully in control of her wayward emotions. Emotions that had been stirred up, as they naturally would be, by having him invade her life out of the blue.

      She heard herself babbling on like the village idiot about her culinary exploits while he ate and listened in silence, with every show of interest in what she was saying.

      Which was remarkable, given she had just finished a lengthy anecdote about some slow-cooked beef she had tried to cook weeks previously, which had been disastrous.

      ‘So you like the apartment,’ Javier drawled, eyes not leaving her face as he sipped some wine. ‘And the job? Now that the work of trying to repair the damage done over the years has begun?’

      ‘It’s...awkward,’ Sophie told him truthfully.

      ‘Explain.’

      ‘You were right,’ she said bluntly, rising to begin clearing the table, her colour high. ‘Some of the people my father trusted have let the company down badly over the years. I can only think that employing friends was a luxury my father had when he started the company, and he either continued to trust that they were doing a good job or he knew that they weren’t but found it difficult to let them go. And then...’

      ‘And then?’ Javier queried silkily and Sophie shrugged.

      ‘Getting rid of them never happened. Thankfully the majority have now left, but with generous pension payments or golden handshakes...’ Yet more ways money had drained away from the company until the river had run dry.

      ‘The company is in far worse shape than even I imagined...’

      Sophie blanched. She watched as he began helping to clear the table, bringing plates to the sink.

      ‘What do you mean?’

      ‘Your father didn’t just take his eye off the ball when he became ill. I doubt his eye had ever really been fully on it in the first place.’

      ‘You can’t say that!’

      ‘I’ve gone through all the books with a fine-tooth comb, Sophie.’ He relieved her of the plate she was holding and dried it before placing it on the kitchen counter, then he slung the tea towel he had fetched over his shoulder and propped himself against the counter, arms folded.

      Javier had always suspected that her father had been instrumental in her decision to quit university and return to the guy she had always been destined to marry. Even though she had never come right out and said so; even though she had barely had the courage to look him in the face when she had announced that she’d be leaving university because of a family situation that had arisen.

      He had never told her that he had subsequently gone to see her parents, that he had confronted her father, who had left him in no doubt that there was no way his precious daughter would contemplate a permanent relationship with someone like him.

      He wondered whether the old man’s extreme reaction had been somehow linked to his decline into terminal ill health, and scowled as he remembered the heated argument that had resulted in him walking away, never looking back.

      This was the perfect moment to disabuse her of whatever illusions she had harboured about a father who had clearly had little clue about running a business, but the dismay on her face made him hesitate.

      He raked his fingers uncomfortably through his hair and continued to stare down at her upturned face.

      ‘He was a terrific dad,’ she said defensively, thinking back to the many times he had taken the family out on excursions, often leaving the running of the company to the guys working for him. ‘Life was to be enjoyed’ had always been his motto. He had played golf and taken them on fantastic holidays; she recognised now that ineffective, relatively unsupervised management had not helped the company coffers. He had inherited a thriving business but, especially when everything had gone electronic, he had failed to move with the times and so had his

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