LITMIR.BIZ

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their moment to converge and create the thunderstorm of events that would land her where she was right now.

      Javier opened his mouth to disabuse her of her girlish illusions and then thought of his own father. There was no way he would ever have had a word said against him, and yet, hadn’t Pedro Vasquez once confessed that he had blown an opportunity to advance himself by storming out of his first company, too young and hot-headed to take orders he didn’t agree with? The golden opportunity he had walked away from had never again returned and he had had to devote years of saving and scrimping to get by on the low wages he had earned until his retirement.

      But Javier had never held that weak moment against him.

      ‘Your father wouldn’t be the first man who failed to spot areas for expansion,’ he said gruffly. ‘It happens.’

      Sophie knew that he had softened and something deep inside her shifted and changed as she continued to stare up at him, their eyes locked.

      She could scarcely breathe.

      ‘Thank you,’ she whispered and he shook his head, wanting to break a connection that was sucking him in, but finding it impossible to do so.

      ‘What are you thanking me for?’

      ‘He was old-fashioned, and unfortunately the people he delegated to were as old-fashioned as he was. Dad should have called a troubleshooter in the minute the profits started taking a nosedive, but he turned a blind eye to what was going on in the company.’

      And he turned a blind eye to your ex as well...

      That thought made Javier stiffen. Her father had been old-fashioned enough to hold pompous, arrogant views about foreign upstarts, to have assumed that some loser with the right accent was the sort of man his daughter should marry.

      But that wasn’t a road he was willing to go down because it would have absolved Sophie of guilt and the bottom line was that no one had pointed a gun to her head and forced her up the aisle.

      She had wanted to take that step.

      She had chosen to stick with the guy even though she knew that he was blowing up the company with his crazy investments.

      She had watched and remained silent as vast sums of vitally needed money had been gambled away.

      She had enabled. And the only reason she had done that was because she had loved the man.

      He turned away abruptly, breaking eye contact, feeling the sour taste of bile rise to his mouth.

      ‘The company will have to be streamlined further,’ he told her curtly. ‘Dead wood can no longer be tolerated.’ He remained where he was, hip against the counter, and watched as she tidied, washed dishes, dried them and stayed silent.

      ‘All the old retainers will end up being sacked. Is that it?’

      ‘Needs must.’

      ‘Some of the old guys have families... They’re nearing retirement—and, okay, they may not have been the most efficient on the planet, but they’ve been loyal...’

      ‘And you place a lot of value on loyalty, do you?’ he murmured.

      ‘Don’t you?’

      ‘There are times when common sense has to win the battle.’

      ‘You’re in charge now. I don’t suppose I have any choice, have I?’

      Instead of soothing him, her passive, resentful compliance stoked a surge of anger inside him.

      ‘If you’d taken a step back,’ he said with ruthless precision, ‘and swapped blind loyalty for some common sense, you might have been able to curb some of your dear husband’s outrageous excesses...’

      ‘You truly believe that?’ She stepped back, swamped by his powerful, aggressive presence, and glared at him.

      The last thing Javier felt he needed was to have her try to make feeble excuses for the man who had contributed to almost destroying her family business. What he really felt he needed right now was something stiff to drink. He couldn’t look at her without his body going into instant and immediate overdrive and he couldn’t talk to her without relinquishing some of his formidable and prized self-control. She affected him in a way no other woman ever had and it annoyed the hell out of him.

      ‘What else is anyone supposed to believe?’ he asked with rampant sarcasm. ‘Join the dots and you usually get an accurate picture at the end of the exercise.’

      ‘There was no way I could ever have stopped Roger!’ Sophie heard herself all but shout at him, appalled by her outburst even as she realised that it was too late to take it back. ‘There were always consequences for trying to talk common sense into him!’

      The silence that greeted this outburst was electric, sizzling around them, so that the hairs on the back of her neck stood on end.

      ‘Consequences? What consequences?’ Javier pressed in a dangerously soft voice.

      ‘Nothing,’ Sophie muttered, turning away, but he reached out, circling her forearm to tug her back towards him.

      ‘You don’t get to walk away from this conversation after you’ve opened up a can of worms, Sophie.’

      There were so many reasons this was a can of worms that she didn’t want to explore. On a deeply emotional level, she didn’t want to confront, yet again, the mistakes she had made in the past. She’d done enough of that to last a lifetime and she especially didn’t want to confront those mistakes aloud, with Javier as her witness. She didn’t want his pity. She didn’t want him to sense her vulnerability. He might no longer care about her, but she didn’t want to think that he would be quietly satisfied that, having walked out on him, she had got her comeuppance, so to speak.

      ‘It’s not relevant!’ she snapped, trying and failing to tug her arm out of his grasp.

      ‘Was he...? I don’t know what to think here, Soph...’

      That abbreviation of her name brought back a flood of memories and they went straight to the core of her, burning a hole through her defence mechanisms. Her soft mouth trembled and she knew that her eyes were glazing over, which, in turn, made her blink rapidly, fighting back the urge to burst into tears.

      ‘He could be unpredictable.’ Her jaw tightened and she looked away but he wouldn’t allow her to avoid his searching gaze, tilting her to face him by placing a finger gently under her chin.

      ‘That’s a big word. Try breaking it down into smaller components...’

      ‘He could be verbally abusive,’ she told him jerkily. ‘On one occasion he was physically abusive. So there you have it, Javier. If I’d tried to interfere in his gambling, there’s no accounting for what the outcome might have been for me.’

      Javier was horrified. He dropped his hand and his fingers clenched and unclenched. She might have fancied herself in love with the guy but that would have been disillusionment on a grand scale.

      ‘Why didn’t you divorce him?’

      ‘It was a brief marriage, Javier. And there is more to this than you know...’

      ‘Did you know that the man had anger issues?’ Javier sifted his fingers through his hair. Suddenly the kitchen felt the size of a matchbox. He wanted to walk, unfettered; he wanted to punch something.

      ‘Of course I didn’t, and that certainly wasn’t the case when... You don’t get it,’ she said uneasily. ‘And I’d really rather not talk about this any more.’

      Javier had been mildly incredulous at her declaration that her descent into penury had been tougher to handle than his own lifetime of struggle and straitened circumstances. She, at least, had had the head start of the silver spoon in the mouth and a failing company was, after all, still a company with hope of salvation. The crumbling family pile was still a very big roof over her head.

      Now there were muddy,

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