by Lynne Graham
Where were her wits? Lucy asked herself fiercely. What had she so far done to try and sort out this gruesome situation concerning Fidelio’s money? One big fat nothing, she conceded, shame and guilt engulfing her. This very day she had seen Joaquin on two separate occasions and she hadn’t even raised the subject, never mind tried to talk him round into agreeing to a workable solution. Tomorrow, she promised herself, she would do what she should have been doing from the start…
As soon as Lucy had had breakfast the following morning, she got dressed. The contents of the suitcase that had been left behind at the bar at San Angelita now hung in the wardrobe, freshly pressed and pristine.
Lucy chose a pale blue suit. The skirt was short, the jacket very fitted, but it was a smart combination and infinitely better than wafting around in skimpy nightwear, she told herself censoriously. No wonder Joaquin had picked up the wrong signals from her! She could scarcely condemn him for assuming that she was the sort of woman who was willing to employ sex as a persuader. Now that she was properly garbed, he would naturally take her far more seriously.
Her strappy shoes were so perilously high that it was a challenge to descend the stairs with grace. Yolanda was crossing the magnificent big hall below, looking stunning but also a little startling in an incredibly tight scarlet skirt and a beaded crop top adorned with strategic cut-outs.
‘Good morning,’ Lucy said awkwardly to attract the brunette’s attention. ‘Could you tell me where I could find your brother?’
Yolanda whirled round with a frown. ‘In his office, down there…’ She stabbed the air with an imperious hand to indicate the branch corridor at the rear of the hall. ‘But I don’t think it would be a good idea to bother him right now!’
‘Why?’
The volatile brunette focused smouldering dark eyes on her and ignored the question to ask another. ‘Do you have a father, Lucy?’
‘He’s dead—’
‘A brother?’
Lucy shook her head in denial.
Yolanda’s sultry mouth compressed. ‘Then how could you ever understand our macho-dominated culture?’ she demanded with unconcealed bitterness. ‘A Guatemalan woman must obey first her father, then her brother, and finally her husband. All male relatives take precedence over her. What I want doesn’t come into it. No, I must still do as I am told, like a little child! Have you any idea how that feels?’
Involuntarily, Lucy heard the echo of her late mother’s constant controlling criticisms which had marked out very effective boundaries in every area of her own life.
‘Lucy, you’re not a teenager any more and you look ridiculous in that dress…’
‘Lucy, only street-walkers wear make-up like that…’
‘Lucy, you’re not bright enough to go to university…’
‘Lucy, how can you expect me to sit here on my own while you go to some silly evening class…how can you be so selfish?’
‘I know exactly how it feels,’ Lucy heard herself whisper.
In the act of already moving away, Yolanda turned back in surprise at that confirmation.
‘My mother was rather…er…domineering,’ Lucy confided in a rush.
Their eyes met in a moment of shared understanding. This time Lucy turned away first, feeling horribly disloyal for having expressed that opinion.
‘My mother remarried soon after my father died and had a new family,’ Yolanda framed curtly. ‘I was in the way, so I was sent off to school.’
Lucy stilled, and would have responded, but Yolanda grimaced. ‘Poor little me!’ she completed with cool self-mockery, and started up the grand staircase.
As Lucy headed in the direction which Yolanda had indicated, she recalled that brother and sister had been arguing the previous night as well. At least, the brunette had been arguing, she adjusted, for Joaquin had stayed cool as ice. But Lucy’s sympathy quite naturally lay with Yolanda. Since she herself found standing up to powerful personalities an enormous challenge, she assumed Joaquin’s sister had a similar problem, worsened by a cultural bias which suggested that women were not the equal of their male counterparts. And there was no denying that Joaquin Del Castillo laid down the law like a born autocrat.
She knocked on the door and then, after waiting a moment, opened it. The room was large and imposing, more of a library than an office, with the bookshelves and the darker decor imposing a pervasively male ambience.
Joaquin had already risen from behind an immaculately tidy desk. Across the room, French doors stood wide on the lush grounds. Sunshine flooded in, gleaming over his black hair, luxuriant as polished silk. Even in the more casual garb of a short-sleeved white shirt and cream chinos, Joaquin contrived to look incredibly exclusive. The beautiful cut of his clothing exuded faultless designer tailoring and elegance. His deep-set bright eyes arrowed in on her and narrowed, his lean, dark forceful face settling into impassivity.
Lucy’s heart sank in the forbidding silence which he allowed to continue. Her nervous tension increased. She dragged in a foreshortened breath. ‘We need to talk about Fidelio’s money,’ she pointed out tautly, hating the note of apology she could hear in her own uncertain voice.
‘I have already said all that I have to say on that subject,’ Joaquin countered with intimidating authority and finality. ‘When you sign that document, you may go home. You have no other options.’
‘But there’s got to be another option…it would be impossible to come up with that much money all at once!’ Lucy protested in a burst of desperation.
Joaquin looked hugely unimpressed by that plea of poverty.
Lucy bit at her lower lip. ‘Surely the offer of a substantial first payment followed by instalments would be sufficient proof of good intentions?’
‘Without a legal agreement, you would back out on the promise as soon as you got back to London,’ Joaquin responded very drily.
‘No, I wouldn’t. There’s actually a property of…er…mine up for sale at the moment—’
‘The only property you own is the one you live in, and it’s not on the market.’
So he didn’t know about the flat which Cindy had bought for her mother and her sister. No, of course he didn’t know! Had that connection been made, he might well have discovered that Cindy had an identical twin. So persisting on the subject of that property could be downright dangerous. Lucy closed her restive hands together in front of her, for the first time admitting how much she hated the necessity of pretending to be her sister. But Joaquin had personally ensured that telling the truth was out of the question when he had all but threatened to tell Cindy’s bridegroom what she was really like. At least what he thought her sister was really like, which would be a very biased and cruelly unjust report!
‘The remainder could be repaid in instalments,’ Lucy proffered a second time, standing her ground and squaring her slight shoulders.
‘At Fidelio’s age, such an arrangement would not be viable.’
‘But I can prove that it was all a horrible misunderstanding and that there was no intent to cheat anyone out of anything!’ Lucy exclaimed, thrusting up her chin. ‘If I had known that Fidelio was working as a ranch foreman, why would I have been under the impression that he was wealthy enough to give away large amounts of cash?’
‘Specious,’ Joaquin styled that argument, a sardonic ebony brow elevating at her persistence. ‘Naturally Mario must have told you that my father had left Fidelio a legacy in his will.’
Lucy paled as she finally understood how Fidelio Paez had amassed such a healthy sum for his retirement years. He had inherited the greater part of it from Joaquin’s late father, which no doubt gave Joaquin an even more personal stake in the affair. His family resources had ensured the comfort of the older man’s retirement, only for Cindy to take it away. But her sister had been guilty of selfish and opportunistic greed, not of fraud! There was a distinction and he had to be made to see it. Cindy would not having knowingly injured Mario’s father.
‘But Mario never menti
oned that legacy!’ Lucy argued, curling her taut fingers into fists. ‘You seem to forget that Mario and…’ She stumbled, as she had almost slipped and said her sister’s name. ‘Mario and I,’ she stressed, ‘were only together for a very short time.’
‘Not even long enough for you to play the grieving widow,’ Joaquin agreed, studying her with immovable calm.
‘If that’s another one of those nasty cryptic remarks angled at making me uncomfortable, I’m not listening!’ Lucy shot at him in shaken reproach.
‘Start facing the fact that I know you for the con-artist you are,’ Joaquin countered with unblemished cool, letting his brilliant green eyes roam with insolent thoroughness over her small stiff figure.
Beneath that appraisal Lucy squirmed, with an awareness of his raw masculinity that filled her with furious self-loathing. She could feel the heat rising in her cheeks and the sudden dryness of her mouth but she couldn’t afford to stop focusing on the subject at hand. ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about—’
‘Don’t I? The pre-Raphaelite hairstyle, the big dark blue eyes and the schoolgirl blushes must go down well with men who only see what they want to see…a cute little porcelain doll, the very image of fragile femininity!’ Joaquin specified with silken derision. ‘But I’m in a rather different league, querida.’
‘How dare you compare me to a doll?’ Lucy launched at him with angry incredulity at such a scornful image. ‘I came in here to have a perfectly sensible and serious conversation with you—’
Joaquin lounged back against his desk with fluid grace and continued to survey her. ‘Did you really? Is that why you’re all dressed up in that short skirt, those towering heels, and wearing only a jacket next to your beautiful bare skin?’
Lucy ran out of breath and speech simultaneously. She stared at him, totally thrown by that sudden attack of her appearance.
‘I’m enjoying the view. I’m a man…’ Joaquin trailed out the last word with sardonic cool. ‘Yet I’ve already warned you that I’ll accept the invitation but that I won’t pay for the privilege. I will not settle your debt to Fidelio Paez for you.’
Lucy was engaged in frantically unbuttoning her jacket to display the fine camisole she wore beneath, but then she remembered that she wasn’t wearing a bra and just as hurriedly began to button herself up again.
‘Oh, not another one of those sudden attacks of unconvincing modesty when you blush and lower your eyes and lock your knees together?’ the Guatemalan tycoon delivered with withering scorn. ‘You’re dealing with a true cynic, and let’s face it, there was nothing subtle about your visit to my bedroom last night. That was a pretty crude, up-front offer—’
‘If you don’t shut up, I’ll swing for you!’ Lucy suddenly exploded back at him, goaded beyond bearing into finally losing her temper. ‘You just don’t listen to one word that I say. You just won’t stop making inappropriate personal comments—’
‘On a scale of one to ten, lying on my bed under me is at least a nine in the personal stakes. Leaving me aching for the rest of the night made the chances of you attaining a sympathetic hearing this morning doubtful to say the least.’
Oh, how could he say that right to her face? How could he be so graphic? Lucy was startled to find herself actually looking wildly around herself for something to hit him with! Freezing to the spot then, she crammed shaking hands to her mouth, appalled by the promptings he roused in her. ‘You make me feel violent!’ she gasped accusingly.
‘I’m not a patient man. Your pathetic attempts to portray yourself as being as pure as driven snow are beginning to irritate me,’ Joaquin responded without remorse.
‘I-Irritate you?’ Lucy stammered, at what struck her as a grotesque understatement for his feelings when it was obvious to her that he utterly despised her. Her looks, her clothing, her character. And somehow accepting that reality emptied her of anger and fight and only pride kept her backbone straight.
‘So far I have been very reasonable—’
‘Reasonable?’ Lucy spluttered. She felt like someone who had been ground into the dust by a large unstoppable truck and then asked to apologise for getting in the way. ‘You won’t agree to any sort of compromise, even though I’m willing to repay the money in instalments and do whatever it takes to reassure you as to my reliability—’
‘Reliability?’ Crystalline green eyes widened and shimmered over her in rampant disbelief at her use of that particular word to describe herself. ‘Infierno! What sort of a fool do you think I am? At this moment you don’t even have employment on which to base such promises!’
Once again Lucy cursed her lack of foresight in appreciating just how much Joaquin knew about her sister. Cindy’s well paid but temporary contract to work as a television make-up artist had indeed ended, just a few weeks back. But her sister had been promised permanent employment as soon as a vacancy arose.
‘In fact over the past five years you have spent only eight months actually working for a salary,’ Joaquin Del Castillo informed her with considerable contempt. ‘I cherish serious doubts that you have any ambition to subject yourself to the rigours of daily employment. You’re lazy and you’re frivolous. If you can find a man to keep you, you don’t bother to work—’
Listening to that assessment, Lucy was outraged. ‘That’s rubbish. I’m a really hard worker, and if I had a job, I could make you eat every prejudiced word!’
A charged silence fell.
Her spine rigid with offended pride, Lucy tilted her chin.
Joaquin cast her a glittering glance from below lush black lashes. ‘When would you like to start?’
CHAPTER FIVE
‘START?’ Lucy questioned blankly. ‘Start what?’
‘Working for me,’ Joaquin Del Castillo drawled in challenge. ‘What talents do you have beyond the bedroom door?’
Lucy’s soft mouth opened and shut again.
‘I seem to vaguely recall that you once spent a few weeks toiling as a typist,’ Joaquin murmured reflectively, studying her transfixed expression with cynical amusement.
But he had misunderstood the reason for Lucy’s absolute paralysis. A typist? He knew more than she did about her twin! No such skill featured in Lucy’s repertoire. Nor could she get her mind round the enormous shock of him suggesting that she work for him in any capacity. ‘You’re…you’re offering me a job?’ she virtually whispered.
‘So that you can make me eat my prejudiced words and prove how reliable you can be,’ Joaquin supplied softly. ‘Although I’m afraid I couldn’t offer you the meteoric rise to promotion which you enjoyed the last time you worked in an office…’
Lucy frowned. ‘I don’t follow.’
‘What a selective memory you have, querida. After mere days in the typing pool, the managing director made you his secretary. By the following week you were out of the office and a married man’s mistress once more.’
In angry mortification Lucy parted her lips, thought about arguing, clashed with Joaquin’s shimmering jade-green gaze and thought better of it. What was the point of getting into another dispute? Right now, although it galled her to admit it, he had the whiphand. So she gave a jerky shrug, striving to look untouched and indifferent, just as she knew Cindy would have done under such fire.
Joaquin straightened slowly. ‘This is the moment where you tell me that you’re still feeling far too fragile to work.’
Meeting his expectant gaze and reacting to it, Lucy flung back her head and snapped defiantly, ‘I’m feeling terrific!’
Striding past her, Joaquin flung wide the door with an air of strong satisfaction. ‘Then I have the perfect position for you—’
‘Here?’ Lucy stressed with a frown of incomprehension.
Planting a lean hand on her shoulder, Joaquin Del Castillo guided her out into the corridor. Before she could even think, he had shown her through the door at the foot of the passage into a spacious office furnished with what looked to her like the latest in high-tech work stations. ‘I
maintain only a small staff at here. These ladies handle my personal correspondence and coordinate various projects in which I am involved.’
Three female heads lifted. Lucy froze.
Joaquin spoke in Spanish to the older woman who had come forward to greet him. ‘This is my secretary, Dominga…Dominga, this is Lucy Paez.’
Lucy received a frigid nod of acknowledgement from the stern Dominga. Like a schoolgirl dragged up in front of the headmistress for some wrongdoing, she quailed inside herself. One glance was sufficient to warn her that Joaquin’s secretary knew all about her supposed career as a heartless fraudster. Oh, dear heaven, what had her foolish attempt to defend herself plunged her into now? Joaquin was calling her bluff by offering her the chance to work for him.
‘Dominga will keep you occupied,’ Joaquin informed her with a slow smile that told her that he had already picked up on the level of her discomfiture.
What followed over the next few hours was one of the most mortifying experiences of Lucy’s life.
Cold the older woman might be, but Lucy could not have faulted her fairness. However, finding work to occupy Lucy was not easy. She could not answer the phone or organise documents because she could neither speak nor read Spanish. She had never had access to a computer before either. Asked to fill up the printers with paper, Lucy put the wrong paper in one and provoked a paper jam in the other. Not a woman to give up easily on a challenge, Dominga then went to the trouble of having a typewriter brought in and installed while Lucy hovered, pale as death, unable to muster sufficient courage to admit that she couldn’t type.
But the moment of awful revelation was not long in coming. Joaquin’s secretary stood like a stone image watching Lucy’s desperate two-fingered attempts to pass herself off as a rotten typist but nevertheless a typist. Then the older woman just left her to her foolish charade while the other two women laughed and whispered to each other until Lucy was the colour of a beetroot.