Mills & Boon Stars Collection: Passionate Bargains. Michelle Smart

chin rose, her pretty nostrils flaring. ‘Yes. I accept your terms but with one condition of my own: I won’t be sharing your bed until the deeds of the building are in my hands.’

      ‘The building will be in the Cazorla name by the end of the week.’

      ‘Then you’ll have to wait until then before you can touch me again.’

      ‘You are not in a position to make any demands, cariño.’

      ‘Of course I am.’ She swallowed but didn’t waver. ‘You can always go running back to your girlfriend if the frustration of waiting four days gets too much for you.’

      ‘That relationship is over.’ It hadn’t even started.

      Her lips curled into an expression that most closely resembled a sneer, but it was a fleeting look, quickly replaced by the loathing he was becoming familiar with.

      Another four days?

      He could force the issue if he wanted. It wouldn’t be hard. All he had to do was touch her and she’d be putty in his hands.

      Another four days?

      The anticipation would be delicious.

      He knew his wife and what an earthy, sexual creature she was. The chemistry between them was just as potent—if not more—as it had always been.

      After four days of living together, Charley would be begging him to take her.

      He’d managed almost two years. Another four days would be nothing.

      * * *

      ‘What time do you finish?’ Raul asked when he pulled the car to a stop outside the building that currently housed the Poco Rio day care centre.

      ‘Five o’clock,’ she answered shortly. ‘Wait for me to call—I might be late.’

      ‘I’ll be here at five o’clock and you will be ready.’

      Not bothering to argue or say goodbye, she shrugged a shoulder, grabbed her bag and got out, slamming the passenger door behind her. She might not be able to see his face but could easily imagine her handsome husband’s wince at her treatment of his precious Lotus.

      When they’d first met, her manners had been somewhat rough around the edges. She’d been taught to say please and thank you, and not speak with her mouth full, but that had been the extent of it and those few manners had been drilled into her by her primary school headmistress, not her parents. Her mum had been too busy holding down two jobs to find the energy while her dad had hardly been there, flitting in and out of their lives as and when it suited him, which had never been enough, not for her.

      She’d never lived with her father, had never spent a night under his roof and had lived for the days when he would visit his only daughter.

      She remembered once begging her mum to move so they could be closer to him, remembered the anxiety on her mother’s face at this impossibility. Her mum would do anything for her but to move the fifty miles would mean uprooting from the support network of her own loving and hardworking family.

      Before they’d married, Raul had employed various people to ‘help’ Charley assimilate into Spanish high society. At the time it had felt as if she were starring in a rags-to-riches film and she’d been happy to embrace the elocution and deportment lessons, the drills on social niceties.

      When she was growing up, meals at home had been spent beside her exhausted mum, with trays on their laps in front of the television, the pair of them happily arguing about whatever reality television programme they’d been into at that time. They’d hardly tasted the food. Their one proper meal of the week had come every Sunday when they would go to her grandparents’ for a roast dinner, everyone squashed around the small kitchen table with huge mugs of tea in front of them.

      Raul’s world, with meals around a fully laid dining table with jugs of iced water, expensive wine, the savouring of food and the correct order of cutlery...it had been a different world. A fantastical dream come to life. Learning all these new things had been fun! At first.

      It had taken a long time for her to realise that Raul had set out from the off to improve her so he could stand beside her without her being an embarrassment to the Cazorla name.

      Their whole marriage had been about him moulding her into the sort of woman he believed she should be, the perfect wife he so desired.

      She might have missed him terribly these past six hundred and thirty-six days but she had also been able to reclaim herself.

      Leaving him had let her breathe again. She didn’t have to introduce herself to people as Charlotte any more. She could simply be who she’d always been: Charley, the name Raul had never once addressed her by.

      Whatever happened over these next four months, she would not allow herself to lose sight of who she really was. Charley. Charlotte was merely the name on her birth certificate.

      Inside the centre, she was greeted by Karin, a nine-year-old girl who’d been in a car crash as a baby. The crash had killed her father and left her with one functioning lung and severe brain damage. Yet, however locked in her own world Karin seemed, she always appeared to know when Charley was on the rota to work and would hang around the door of the day room until she arrived.

      Charley scooped the skinny child up and planted a kiss on her cheek then gently set her back down and took her hand. Karin would be her shadow for the rest of the day, her easy affection something that warmed her heart.

      A lump came to her throat as she looked at the dozen children in the day room, many locked in their own worlds, most of them here and alive against all the odds. This was what she was fighting for, these beautiful children. This was what she had to hold onto over the next four months.

      For these children she would do anything. Even suffer living with her husband again.

       CHAPTER FOUR

      RAUL SAT IN his car scowling at his phone. It was almost five-thirty and Charley hadn’t yet come out. Nor was she answering his calls.

      He looked at the building again, debating for the tenth time whether or not to go inside and get her. To his eyes the place looked like nothing but a load of concrete blocks slapped together. The only spot of colour was a faded sign above the door that read Poco Rio. Little River. The name would have amused him—for a start, the Turia had run nowhere near this part of Valencia even before the devastating floods of 1957, which had caused the authorities to divert it to skirt the city rather than run through it—but instead he shuddered. Who would want their child to spend their days in a place like this? Far from the sunny exterior most day care centres projected, this building, with its drab grounds...everything about it shouted ‘institution’.

      His mind flickered to the care home his father had spent time in after his stroke while his mother had turned a wing of the family home into a facility able to manage his twenty-four-hour needs. That care home had been more akin to a hotel, a beautiful villa set in luscious grounds with first-class staff.

      The care home could have been as opulent as the very first Cazorla hotel, built by Raul’s grandfather, Nestor Cazorla, in 1955, and Eduardo Cazorla would still have hated it, even if he couldn’t vocalise his thoughts or feelings. That hotel, built in Madrid, had been a shot in the eye to the Ritzes and Waldorfs of this world, a statement that anything they could do, the Cazorlas could do too.

      Under Eduardo’s reign, the Cazorla Hotel Madrid fell from its lofty heights, as did the other thirty-eight hotels in the chain. Investment became a dirty word, Eduardo preferring to spend the dwindling profits on maintaining his lifestyle.

      Raul clearly remembered the day when he’d sat down with his father to discuss the shocking decline of the family business. He’d graduated from university with a mile-long list of ideas for improvement. He’d mistakenly thought that gaining a first-class degree from MIT would finally garner his