‘We’re being watched,’ Luiz murmured.
‘Mmm,’ Caroline replied. ‘I know.’ She had felt the eyes piercing her flesh from behind leaded glass windows from the moment they climbed out of the car. ‘So, what do you want to do now?’ she asked. ‘Bang on the door and claim ownership? Or do we take the more civilised approach and wait until we are invited in?’
But even as she put the two lightly mocking suggestions to him the great door behind Neptune was drawing open. Her heart skipped a beat. On the other side of the car she heard Luiz’s feet scrape against gravel. Without thinking twice about it, she walked around the car and went to stand beside him.
As she did so a man appeared in the doorway, small, thin and quite old, his expressionless face giving no hint as to whether they were to be made welcome or simply grudgingly allowed to enter the castle’s hallowed inner sanctum.
‘It looks like it’s showtime,’ Caroline said softly.
‘Looks like it,’ Luiz agreed, and although he reached out to catch hold of her hand, as if he needed to feel her presence for moral support, she was relieved to see that the implacable Luiz Vazquez was back in place again and the other, tense and uncomfortable one had been firmly shut away.
Together they walked around the fountain and up to the door. With a slight bow of his dark head, the man murmured, ‘Welcome señor—señorita,’ with absolutely no inflexion in his voice whatsoever. ‘If you would kindly come this way?’
The man stepped to one side in an invitation for them to precede him inside, and as the door closed quietly behind them they found themselves standing in a vast hallway built of oak and stone, with an eight-foot-wide solid stone stairway as its main feature. The rough plastered walls were painted in a soft peach colour, adding warmth to what could quite easily appear coldly inhospitable.
Caroline felt her tummy muscles begin to flutter. Beside her, Luiz’s fingers tightened their grip on hers. He was used to big reception halls. He was used to standing in beautiful surroundings. But this was different. This was his past meeting head-on with his present. Even she, who had always known the place where her roots were planted, was acutely aware of how significant this moment must be for him.
Yet his voice was smooth and as calm as still water when he turned to speak to the old man. ‘And you are?’ he enquired, sounding every inch the noble Conde. Considering what she knew he was feeling inside, Caroline was proud of him.
‘Pedro, sir. I am the butler here,’ the old man replied—
and there was respect in his tone. He for one wasn’t condemning Luiz for being the Vazquez bastard. ‘Please,’ he invited. ‘If you will follow me…’
He began leading them across a polished stone floor past two suits of armour that were guarding the stairs. There were artefacts scattered about this hall that made Caroline’s head whirl as it went into professional mode.
Maybe Luiz knew it. ‘Enough soul here for you?’ he questioned lazily.
‘Interesting,’ she shot back with a smile, then moved a little closer to his side when Pedro opened a pair of huge wooden doors and bowed them politely inside.
‘Señor Luiz Vazquez and Señorita Newbury,’ he announced, to whoever was waiting for them. And Caroline hadn’t missed the fact that the butler had not referred to Luiz as el conde once since they had arrived.
If Luiz noticed the omission, he didn’t show it. His expression was relaxed, his grip on Caroline’s hand secure, and his stride was as graceful as always as he strode into what turned out to be a beautifully appointed drawing room, with a huge stone fireplace that almost filled one wall—where a woman stood, awaiting their arrival.
Black-haired, black-eyed, slender and petite, she was wearing a silver grey silk suit that was as steely-looking as the expression she was wearing on her face as she stared directly at Luiz, while he stared coldly back.
For a long, dreadful moment after Pedro had quietly retired, closing the door behind him, nobody uttered a single word while these two main protagonists studied each other, and Caroline stood witnessing it happen without taking a single breath.
Then, ‘Welcome,’ the woman said.
‘Tía Consuela,’ Luiz replied stiltedly.
Caroline hid the urge to frown. Tía? she was thinking. Why was Luiz referring to this woman as his aunt? Surely if she was anything to him then she was some kind of stepmother?
‘You look like your father,’ the woman observed.
‘And you have a look of my mother—though you look in much better health than she did when I saw her last.’
Incisive, cold enough to freeze the blood, it was also a puzzle solved for Caroline. This woman was Luiz’s mother’s sister. It was no wonder his grip was suddenly biting into her fingers. What had gone on here thirty-odd years ago?
Feuds and fortunes, he’d said, she recalled suddenly. And she began to get a sense of what had probably happened, most of it revolving round two sisters, one man, and all of—this…
The slight hint of pallor had touched the other woman’s face. But her eyes did not waver. ‘Serena was a romantic fool, Luiz,’ she responded. ‘You will not make me feel guilty for picking up what she so stupidly trampled upon.’
At which point Caroline did actually wince, as her fingers were crushed almost to the bone. Fearing that Luiz was about to do something violent, she burst into speech. ‘Introduce me, Luiz,’ she prompted lightly.
For a second she thought he was going to ignore her, then he complied, tersely. ‘Caroline, this is my mother’s sister and my father’s widow, Consuela de Vazquez,’
‘Hello.’ She winged a bright smile across the room towards his stiff-faced aunt. ‘I’m so excited about coming here. The castle is so beautiful, isn’t it? But I don’t think it’s as old as it would like to be,’ she said, knowing she was babbling like a fluffy blonde idiot, but she didn’t care so long as she could overlay the cold hostility threading through the other two. ‘It wants to be eleventh century, but I would hazard a guess at only sixteenth century.’
‘Seventeenth,’ another voice intruded. ‘In a fit of pique, when his biggest rival for the hand of a certain lady won the lady’s heart because of the size of his home, our ancestor came home here to the valley and built himself his own impressive structure—then married the lady’s younger sister. History has a habit of repeating itself in this family—as you will soon learn, I predict.’
Caroline had frozen where she stood, the voice familiar enough to send her floundering in a sea of confusion as a tall, dark, very attractive man appeared from way down at the other end of the long drawing room.
He paused and smiled at her stunned expression, and—completely ignoring Luiz—went on in that same light, self-assured way which had repelled Caroline so much the first time she’d met him.
‘Felipe de Vazquez,’ he announced himself. ‘At your service, Miss Newbury.’ It was the man from the lift in Luiz’s hotel in Marbella. ‘We never did get around to introducing ourselves, did we?’ he added with a lazy smile.
‘Señor,’ she acknowledged. And it was only entrenched good manners that made her accept his outstretched hand.
His fingers closed around hers, cool and smooth and infinitely polite. ‘Felipe, please…’ he invited. ‘We are going to be related very soon, after all…’
Instinctively her other hand tightened in Luiz’s and she moved a small fraction closer to him.
It was strange in its own way, but as she found herself making comparisons between Luiz’s bone-crushing grip on one of her hands and his half-brother’s light clasp, on the other, she knew which grip she felt safer with. But then she was remembering the last time she’d met the man, and the suspicion she’d had then that if she’d tried to break away his grip would have tightened painfully—a sensation that was attacking her again right now.
‘Felipe,’ she acknowledged politely, and used the moment to slip her hand free and place it flat on Luiz’s chest. It was such an obvious declaration of intimacy that no one,
not even Luiz, missed that fact. ‘Luiz, isn’t this a coincidence?’ She smiled, keeping her tone light with effort. ‘I met your half-brother in the hotel only the other evening, and had no idea he was related to you.’
‘Yes,’ Luiz drawled. ‘What a coincidence.’
It was too soft, too smooth, too lazy to be nice. She knew Luiz, knew the way he worked, the angrier he got the quieter he became.
Did Felipe recognise that? she wondered, when his dark eyes eventually moved to clash with his long lost half-brother’s eyes. ‘So we meet at last.’ Felipe smiled ruefully.
At last? The words hit Caroline like a punch to her solar plexus. Because surely if she had first seen Felipe at the hotel then Luiz must have known he was there?
Obviously not, she concluded, when Luiz replied dryly, ‘Not before time, maybe.’
The atmosphere suddenly became very complicated as a confusion of rather unpredictable emotions went skittering around all three of them.
There was ice—a lot of ice. There was curiosity. There was mutual antagonism born from an instant burst of sibling rivalry where both men carefully judged the weight of the other.
She wasn’t sure which one of them actually came out on top in that short silent battle, but she certainly knew which one of them held the position of power—no matter what the mental outcome.
‘Welcome home, Luiz.’ With a slightly wry smile that told her Felipe was acknowledging the same thing, he conceded the higher ground to his half-brother. ‘May your next twenty years be more fortuitous than your first twenty…’
It was such an openly cruel thing to say that even his mother released a gasp. So did Caroline, her fingers curling tensely into Luiz’s shirt in sheer reflex, as if she was trying to soothe the savage beast before it leapt into action.
But Luiz, to everyone’s surprise, laughed. ‘Let’s certainly hope so,’ he agreed. ‘Or this place could be in deep trouble—as we all know.’
Tit for tat. Cut and thrust. Luiz had won that round. And he hadn’t finished, not by a long shot. ‘Which reminds me,’ he went on in the brisk cool voice of a true business tycoon, ‘I have a lot I need to get through here before our wedding takes place next week. So can we start with a tour of the place, before I settle down to some good old-fashioned household accounting…?’
CHAPTER NINE
CAROLINE was sitting quietly in the window of her allotted valley-facing guestroom when a light tap sounded at her door. For a few precious moments she seriously contemplated not answering.
It had been a horrible few days. Days filled with wariness and tension and eyes watching everything she did and everywhere she went as if they were worried she might decide to run off with the silver!
On top of that, Luiz had taken on the mantle of responsibility here as if it was just another new acquisition in his multinational group. He was quiet, he was calm, he was cool and he was exceedingly businesslike. People—staff, mainly—were already in complete awe of him. They scuttled about like little rabbits earnestly eager to make a good impression. And, all in all, the changes he had put into place already were enough to make the average person gasp.
But this wasn’t a business proposition, was it? It was a home—though admittedly a very unusual home. But how did you attempt to point something like that out to a man who barely acknowledged your existence?
Luiz wasn’t talking to her. He was angry about something, though she didn’t know what. It was difficult to find out when he seemed to have locked himself away inside a suit of armour that wouldn’t look out of place in the castle hallway!
She had an itchy feeling his mood stemmed from the fact that she’d met his half-brother before he had. He’d quizzed her about that chance meeting. No—grilled her was a better word.
‘Where did you meet? How did you meet? What did he say? How did he say it?’
When she’d grown angry and demanded to know why it was so important, he’d simply walked away! Five minutes later she’d seen him standing in the castle grounds with a cellular phone clamped to his ear. Whoever he had been speaking to had been receiving the lash of his angry tongue. Even from up here in this room, looking down into darkness, she had been able to see that.
Since then she had hardly set eyes on him, except to share meals across a dining table with others there to squash any hope of meaningful probing into what was rattling him. They even slept in separate rooms. Now if that was a simple case of maintaining some old-fashioned values here in this time-lock of a valley, then Caroline could understand and accept that. But his cold attitude towards her on every count hurt, even though she kept on telling herself that it shouldn’t.
The tap sounded again. On a sigh she got up, and went to answer it. It was one of the little doe eyed maids. ‘Excuse me, señorita,’ she murmured. ‘Doña Consuela send me to tell you that the padre is here wishing to talk to you?’
The padre. Her heart sank. ‘All right, thank you, Abril. Will you tell him I’ll be down in a few minutes?’
Where was Luiz? she wondered heavily as she crossed to her bathroom. But she knew where Luiz was—or least where he wasn’t, she amended. Because Luiz certainly wasn’t here in the valley. In fact, Luiz had flown off in the helicopter that had arrived to pick him up early this morning and hadn’t been seen or heard of since.
The helicopter landing pad was just one of the changes Luiz had brought into being since they’d arrived here.
He’d had ten men from the village clearing a spot over in the far corner of the garden before Caroline had even got out of bed on that first morning. Another addition he’d had put in at incredible speed was the telecommunications mast erected at the top of the valley—to improve satellite reception, he’d explained over dinner. Apparently you couldn’t run a multinational group without good communication.
Shame he didn’t apply the same principles to his personal life!
But he didn’t, so she now had to go and face the padre without knowing a single thing about the wedding proposed for next week, because Luiz hadn’t bothered to discuss it with her!
It was going to make her look really good in the padre’s eyes if he discovered that he knew more about it than the bride herself!
I’m going to kill you very soon, Luiz Vazquez, she promised him silently as she checked over her cream skirt and lavender top—which were beginning to look a little the worse for wear now, along with the other things she had brought to Spain with her.
When she’d left London she had packed for a three-day short break in a hotel. She had not packed for parties in villas and cross-country travelling, or exploring the many admittedly interesting rooms inside a castle!
She found the padre waiting for her in the small sitting room the family tended to use during the day because it opened directly into the garden. Tía Consuela was waiting with him, but once she had introduced Caroline to Padre Domingo, she left them alone.
In truth, Caroline felt sorry for Consuela. In the last few months she had lost her husband, seen her own son being disinherited of everything she must know he had every right to consider his, and was about to lose her right to live in the home that had been hers for the last thirty-odd years. Yet the way she had remained on here, taking whatever Luiz wanted to throw at her, had in Caroline’s view been rather impressive.
Personally she couldn’t have done it. Pride alone would have sent her running for cover well before her estranged nephew could show his face. But, cold and remote though she always was, she had answered all Luiz’s intense, sometimes acutely detailed questions about the running of the castle, and was quick to refer him on to those who knew more about the running of the rest of the estate.
While her son did nothing, offered no information and kept himself very much to himself by riding one of his beautiful Andalusian horses out each morning and not coming back until it was so dark that he had to.
Felipe had gone from charmer to brooder in a couple of very short phases. And he might have remained on here, like his mothe
r, but unlike her he did nothing to hide his simmering resentment.
Not that Caroline could really blame him for feeling like that. For, no matter what legal right Luiz had to be here, Felipe, had every excuse for feeling angry and bitterly betrayed by his father.
She just wished she could like him more on a personal level, then maybe she could become a kind of go-between for the two half-brothers, give them a fine line of communication which might help bring them closer together.
‘Señorita Newbury,’ Padre Domingo greeted her smilingly. ‘It is a great pleasure to make your acquaintance at last.’
Taking his proffered hand, Caroline smiled in answer. ‘I called to see you yesterday but missed you.’
‘I was visiting a compadre in the next valley.’ He nodded. ‘We like to get together once a week to—compare flocks. But I was sorry to be out when you called.’
Pleasantries over, it was a bit difficult to know where to go from there. so she covered her own feeling of awkwardness by inviting him to sit down. ‘Can I get you a drink?’ she offered. ‘Tea, coffee—or something cooler, perhaps?’
But he shook his white head and with a slight wave of one beautifully slender hand invited her to sit before he would allow himself to do so.
‘You liked our little church?’ he enquired when they had both settled into Louis the Fifteenth chairs still wearing their original upholstery.
Caroline smiled. ‘It’s the prettiest church I’ve ever set foot in,’ she answered honestly. ‘But then this whole valley is the prettiest I’ve ever stepped foot in,’ she added with a warm twinkle in her eyes.
‘But very isolated,’ the father pointed out.
‘Part of its charm,’ Caroline immediately defended, with that same teasing twinkle.
‘And also very—Catholic…’
Ah, she thought, losing the twinkle. ‘Is that going to be a problem?’ she asked. ‘Luiz and I marrying in your church with me not being a Roman Catholic, I mean?’ she went on, thinking silently—where are you Luiz? You should have seen this problem arising!
Exotic Affairs: The Mistress BrideThe Spanish HusbandThe Bellini Bride Page 29