Mills & Boon Stars Collection: Passionate Bargains. Michelle Smart

Raul had given him short shrift. After that, he’d kept his distance. As soon as Raul was out of the picture he’d swooped straight back in.

      ‘So how does your father moving to Spain coincide with you visiting my sister?’ he demanded to know, pulling them back on track.

      ‘I went to visit my dad when he moved in and I dropped by to give Marta her books back,’ she said.

      ‘When did you borrow books from Marta?’ He didn’t think he’d ever seen Charley with a book in her hands.

      ‘Lots of times. She thought it would help me learn Spanish if I read books in the language.’

      ‘Why did you never tell me this?’

      ‘I thought you’d laugh at me.’

      ‘Why on earth would you think that?’

      ‘You laughed at me whenever I tried to speak it.’

      Had he? He’d always thought her attempts at speaking his language were cute. If he’d laughed it had been with pride that she was trying to master it. Had she really interpreted it as him making fun of her? ‘I wasn’t laughing at you.’

      She didn’t answer.

      What did it matter anyway? Those days were gone.

      ‘And after you dropped the books back, then what? You decided to carry on seeing each other?’

      ‘It wasn’t like that. I just got in the habit of meeting up with her whenever I visited my dad, that’s all. We’d have a coffee and something to eat and then I’d leave. We were hardly conducting a high-level conspiracy.’

      ‘Yet you kept it a secret from my mother. And from me.’

      Raul shook his head, unable to believe the treachery conducted between his wife and sister. To think they’d been conspiring to see each other behind his back made his brain burn.

      Where did family loyalty come into his sister’s thinking? When Fabio had ended his relationship with Marta, Raul had been ready to kill him, not suggest they share cosy lunches together.

      But then, Marta hadn’t had loyalty drummed into her as he had. For Marta, childhood and life itself had been a charm; she’d been doted upon by the father who only spoke to his son to pick fault with him.

      ‘Marta didn’t want to upset you,’ Charley said softly. ‘She said you would think she was being disloyal.’

      ‘You’re damn right she was disloyal. But I’m not upset.’

      ‘Then what are you?’

      He forced his features into neutrality and glanced at her. ‘I’m not anything.’

      Silence rang out, not even a whisper of sound to be heard until Charley said, ‘Nothing changes, does it?’

      ‘What are you talking about?’

      Her voice was sad. ‘Nothing is allowed to be less than perfect, not even your own feelings.’

      The silence suddenly filled with a roaring noise. It took a moment for him to realise the sound was in his own head.

      His grip on the steering wheel tightened.

      ‘How much did you have to drink tonight?’ he asked, his voice tighter than he would like.

      ‘See? Rather than confront what I’ve said, you deflect it.’

      He expelled a long push of air from his lungs and flexed the tension from his fingers. He would not allow her to provoke him into an argument. All arguing did was bring about a loss of control, which solved nothing. Raul had learned that at a young age. His father had seen to that.

      He remembered once sitting at the dining table while his father had read through his school report, slowly picking it apart, demanding to know why he’d only received the second highest grade on his end-of-year maths exam. Raul had argued his point that he’d spent the month leading up to that exam in bed with a bacterial infection but his reasons had been met with a fist thumped on the table and the school report had been ripped into pieces and burned. For his nerve in arguing back he’d received a two-week grounding. Nothing was mentioned about the top grades he’d received in all his other subjects.

      Marta’s report had been less than glowing academically but had been received by their father as if it were the best report ever written. Raul had been incensed at this double standard and, although Marta had begged him to keep quiet, he’d asked, reasonably, why they were being treated so differently. His insolence had been rewarded with an extra fortnight’s grounding.

      He’d been eleven.

      ‘There’s nothing to deflect,’ he said, his vocal cords loosening under the force of his will. ‘I’m perfectly in tune with my feelings.’ To compound his point he flashed her a grin. ‘Especially my baser ones.’

      * * *

      Charley undressed and quickly readied herself for bed while Raul made a phone call in his study.

      She stared at the emperor-sized bed, at its plush seductiveness with the black sheets and plump pillows, inviting her to enter.

      She wondered how many other women had been invited to enter it, before she could turn the thought away.

      Turning the sheets back, she climbed in and lay down on her side of the bed. Strange to think that since leaving him she could have slept dead centre when in her own bed but had still favoured ‘her’ side.

      She turned off the bedside light, flattened her pillow and burrowed herself into the sheets. The Spanish summer was hitting its stride but you wouldn’t know it in this room where Raul had set the air conditioning to arctic.

      Hopefully he would be kept busy making his phone calls and she would be fast asleep when he came up.

      As was the contrary nature of sleep, it wouldn’t come, her brain far too wired to switch off.

      She found her mind turning over the evening’s meal with his family. Maybe it was because she knew there was a time limit to the number of times she would share a meal with them but tonight she’d observed everything like a distant spectator, the fear of doing something wrong, something less than perfect, gone.

      In all the years of their marriage she’d always thought Raul lucky to have such a close family and had envied him. How had she never noticed the undercurrent of poison there, especially between Raul and his father? Polite, gracious poison for sure, but poison all the same.

      Her stomach clenched when she thought of her own family, the half-brothers she so wished would accept her as one of their own. What would Raul say if he learned she’d bought them a home each too? He’d accuse her of trying to buy their love and he would be right because that was exactly what she’d done. Except, as with everything else she did, she’d failed. She was more like her father than she’d ever thought possible. But she didn’t want to be like him. She wanted to be like her mum, her sweet, naïve, hardworking mum who deserved everything good life had to offer.

      She shut her eyes, trying to shake the direction of her thoughts and all the misery she’d thought she’d escaped when she’d married Raul, the man who’d made her feel like a princess even if only at the beginning...

      A noise caught her attention and she heard the tread of his approach, followed by the creak of the bedroom door opening.

      Squeezing her eyes together even more tightly, she concentrated on making her breathing deep and even. Hopefully he would assume she was asleep and leave her alone.

      She heard him go into the bathroom, listened to the muffled sound of water running as he brushed his teeth. A slant of light came into the bedroom when he stepped back in, and she opened one eye a fraction. It took a few seconds for that eye to adjust to what it was seeing—Raul stripping off.

      In the beat of a moment her mouth ran dry.

      In no time at all he was down to his