‘Show me a woman who doesn’t,’ Amy quipped, looking up at him and grinning, even though he still looked as sombre as a judge, ‘and I’ll show you a liar.’
It was virtually impossible not to smile back at her.
‘Let’s get some lunch.’
‘Okay, but I have an idea. Let’s grab some swimsuits and head for the beach with a picnic.’ Everyone else would be doing it. Maybe on another of the beaches, but still out in the glorious sunshine, having fun, swimming. She mournfully thought how far she had travelled in the space of a few short hours. From looking forward to wearing her little turquoise bikini in an attempt to show James that she was more than just a convenient caterer, she was now making do with a perfect stranger who made no bones about letting her know that she was, by and large, a nuisance, someone who looked as though a foul temper was just part and parcel of his personality, just the sort of person she would, by nature, avoid at all costs, in fact!
She almost expected him to shoot her idea dead in the water, but to her surprise he agreed without hesitation.
‘A long lazy lunch on a beach somewhere,’ Rafael murmured, ‘sounds like a very good idea to me…’ And a very effective way of finding out just what you’re all about…
CHAPTER FOUR
IMPULSIVE by nature, Amy was accustomed to deciding on a course of action only to belatedly consider the drawbacks. A spontaneous picnic on a beach would have meant time wasted wondering what swimsuit to wear, what clothes to take to the beach, what food to buy and how to transport it. She was unprepared for the stunning efficiency with which Rafael proceeded. He gave her five minutes to fly inside the house and get whatever gear she needed, including, he told her, ample sunblock because he had no intention of driving her to the nearest emergency ward should she get sunburn.
‘Oh, charming,’ Amy muttered, but she did exactly as he had ordered. From there, the entire trip seemed to be wrapped up in under five seconds. He left the engine running while he sprinted to his house, returning in the requisite five minutes wearing swimming trunks, a baggy tee shirt and a towel slung over one shoulder. And sunglasses. Dark sunglasses that brought out his Mediterranean heritage.
Then onto a gorgeous little deli. She would have liked to have gone along with him and enjoyed a good, long browse at the exciting array of food, but, as if reading her mind, he told her to wait in the car for him. Typical caveman, she thought disgruntledly, probably a legacy of that macho heritage of his. It didn’t escape her notice that a fair number of women seemed to quite like that caveman look!
Amy pointedly looked away as he slipped into the seat next to her and said that all that was left now was to hit the beach. And there were a lot to choose from, depending on how long they wanted to spend in the car.
‘I don’t mind the drive,’ he murmured in a voice that told her that he was laughing at her. ‘Might just as well make use of the sports car before I have to sell it to support the wife and kids.’
‘Glad you’re coming around to my point of view,’ Amy said loftily, refusing to be needled into a response. But she did feel needled, and not by anything he said but by the way he looked. It was ridiculous, crazy. The man wasn’t her type. The macho types had never held much appeal for her, too much in the muscle department and too little in the sense-of-humour department, and, above all else, Amy liked a guy with a sense of humour.
But some of the things the gardener said…She stole a quick glance at the strong profile with just the ghost of a smile playing on his lips and blinked in confusion.
‘Guess you probably have the same problem as well…’
‘What problem would that be?’
‘Knowing that your luxuries in life will have to go when you get married and give up work…’
Amy burst out laughing. ‘First of all, I don’t intend to “give up work” the minute I get married! Sure, I might use it as an opportunity to break out on my own instead of working for a company, but that would depend on who I marry, wouldn’t it? And secondly, I don’t have any luxuries along the lines that you’re thinking! Not all of us are lucky enough to have a grace and favour residence at our disposal!’ Enraptured by the sight of sand dunes rolling down to the ocean, Amy embarked on a series of excitable questions, but Rafael was having none of that. For the moment, his tour guide hat was going to remain off.
He pulled up to the beach, to which he seemed to have automatic resident’s access, and watched her run ahead of him, kicking the sand between her toes. She had changed into a pair of faded denim cut-offs and a thin white tee shirt, which she proceeded to take off while on the move, revealing a small turquoise bikini top. An extremely small turquoise bikini top. Rafael drew his breath in sharply. From the looks of it, she certainly had come equipped to knock the socks off James. He wondered what else was in her wardrobe and the speed with which his mind filled the gaps brought a dull colour to his cheeks. He frowned, irritated with himself for being sidetracked, but then he had been irritated with himself since his decision to abandon his laptop this morning.
All for a good cause! he reminded himself.
She was racing back towards him now, breathless with apology for not helping carry some of the picnic. Behind his sunglasses, Rafael’s eyes drifted to the pert breasts barely covered by her top, and to the washboard-flat stomach. She had a slender graceful figure with small breasts and he found the flair of her hips from her tiny waist mesmerizing.
Feeling a treacherous sense of arousal, Rafael quickened his pace.
‘Fine, Mr He-Man! It’s absolutely all right by me if you want to prove how big and strong you are!’ Except he was big and strong. Very big. Amy paused and then continued in his wake.
He had thought to bring a rug, something he kept in the boot of his car, as did most people who lived in any place where white-out conditions could occur in winter. He laid this out now, dumped the bags of food on it and waited for her to join him.
‘Short legs,’ Amy told him. ‘Not good in sand.’ She looked out to the sea, anywhere but into those disconcerting dark shades. ‘Fantastic. I haven’t been to many beaches in my life, but this is one of the best.’ They were both standing and she was beginning to feel a little ridiculous and very conscious of her sparingly cut bikini top. It would never have stood out in a group of people, with the girls sporting similar beachwear, but in front of Rafael she suddenly felt exposed. She promptly spread out her towel and sat on it, relaxing back on her elbows.
To her relief he did likewise, and she had to admit as he stripped off his shirt that gardening had certainly worked for him when it came to endowing him with a pretty impressive physique. There was not an ounce of spare flesh on the man and with every small movement she could see the definition of sinew and muscle. She felt her mouth go dry.
Surely he hadn’t been right when he had implied that she was shallow? That she had shrugged off the small matter of a broken heart in record time because she was some kind of airhead who fell in and out of love for fun?
‘I wonder where they’ve all gone…’ Amy mused aloud, thinking that she might just steer the conversation onto James and try and emerge in a positive light, because it was fast occurring to her that what she had felt for James had been nothing more lasting, she was ashamed to admit, than a summer cold.
‘Why?’ Rafael said bluntly. ‘Your mission no longer is to try and charm your boss into the sack. Unless, of course, you’ve already jumped into bed with him and this is just a consolidation exercise…?’
Amy shot up and twisted round to look at him, her cheeks red with outrage.
‘How dare you?’ She jumped to her feet and began striding off. When she felt his hand bear down on her arm, she didn’t bother to look around. She just attempted to shrug him off, but it was like trying to shrug off a ring of steel and in the end she was forced to turn around.
‘You make a habit of this, don’t you? Is that how you deal with tricky conversations? Or tricky situations? By walking off as fast as you can in whatever
direction your feet might take you?’
Having twice landed on his doorstep for that very reason, Amy struggled to come up with a snappy riposte. ‘Do you mind? You’re hurting me!’ It was the best she could do and he released her immediately. She could see him visibly regain his composure. ‘I don’t intend to sit on a beach with you and eat…bloody sandwiches on the sand while you insult me!’ She took a couple of steps back and glared at him. ‘You owe me an apology!’
‘I beg your pardon?’ In his entire life, no one had ever demanded an apology from Rafael. He was, literally, astounded by the request.
‘You heard me, buster! I want an apology from you! You just insulted me, in case you’d forgotten!’
‘I did not insult you.’
‘You accused me of being the sort of girl who sleeps around.’
‘I made an educated guess.’
‘Well, it was the wrong educated guess and I’m not budging from here until you apologise!’ Amy didn’t know why on earth she was getting so steamed up. She knew the truth and wasn’t that all that mattered? But she could feel her eyes pricking from the effort of holding back a sudden onset of tears. She had a sudden vision of James with his mystery woman and was overcome by a sense of pathos.
‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ Rafael muttered stiffly. ‘I apologise if you found my remark offensive.’
‘Good—’ Amy sniffed ‘—because I did.’
‘I really don’t know what you see in him,’ Rafael said, once they were back on the rug with a state of temporary truce between them. Amy had made her mind up that she wasn’t going to let the man get under her skin. She would never be in this part of the world again and she was determined to enjoy the experience. She gave Rafael a withering glance.
‘Would that be because you know him so well?’ she asked scathingly. ‘I know he’s your boss, but he spends all his time in London. In fact, I bet he’s hardly out here at all! When he comes to America, he probably heads straight for the New York office!’
Rafael stifled a grin. Whenever James came to America, the first place he visited was their mother’s house in the Hamptons. The office was just that glass building he popped into to show his face.
‘He occasionally comes out to the house,’ Rafael said diplomatically. He lay flat on the rug, hands behind his head, the dark shades protecting his eyes from the glare of the sun. He felt pleasurably relaxed and realised that it was the first time in years that he had done nothing. It seemed ironic that it would be in the company of a woman who rubbed every nerve in his body the wrong way. But still…He watched as the sun forced her out of her cut offs, revealing a neat, but perfectly proportioned body. And the bikini bottom was just as skimpy as the top.
‘Oh, and from the occasional visit, you think you know him?’
‘You think you do?’ Rafael turned the question over to her. He had the whole day and he intended to use it to his advantage. He would find out just what her intentions were and he foresaw no problem in unearthing the information. The woman was hardly backward at coming forward, and, anyway, he was an expert when it came to extracting what he wanted.
‘Of course I do!’ Amy snapped, rolling over onto her side and propping herself up so that she could direct the full force of her scowl at Rafael’s harshly beautiful profile. ‘Not that it’s any of your business!’ She fulminated silently as he continued to stare upwards, apparently oblivious to her presence.
‘He’s very funny and incredibly popular. In fact, I don’t think there’s anyone who doesn’t fall for James’s charm!’
‘And how often did you actually get to talk to him?’ Rafael asked curiously.
‘We joked around. I handle all of the catering for the directors. Most of the time it’s just a case of deliver, but ever, so often James would commission me to do something special for friends. Actually, I’ve even been to his place to do private functions.’
‘So he’s friendly towards you and, on the back of that, you decide that you’ll fall in love.’
Amy felt herself rush towards anger, then she considered what he had said, the starkly ridiculous thumbnail image he had presented, and sighed. ‘He caught me when I was vulnerable,’ she admitted. There was something solidly reassuring about the brute lying on the rug next to her. Sensitive he most certainly was not, but his unadorned honesty didn’t seem like such a bad thing just at the moment.
‘Vulnerable…from what?’
‘How are you when it comes to listening?’ Amy asked, resuming her horizontal position on the rug, so that they were both now staring towards the heavens, Amy with her eyes closed.
Rafael, with his line of perfectly groomed, perfectly controlled, high-powered ex-girlfriends, wondered what exactly listening entailed when asked by the woman lying next to him.
‘Inexperienced,’ he said deflatingly, although he was aware that he was being gifted a golden opportunity to find out what, if any, were her intentions towards his brother.
‘Really?’ Amy was distracted. He seemed to have that effect on her, she had noticed. One minute she would be going along just fine, and then the next minute he had managed to swing her off onto a tangent until she forgot what she had been talking about in the first place. ‘Is that because you don’t have many opportunities to…meet women?’ The thought seemed ludicrous now that she had voiced it. Women had stared at him wherever they went. She had noticed it. Sidelong, interested glances. She was pretty sure that the man could get a woman if he only emerged once a year from that house of his under cover of darkness. ‘No, forget I said that. You meet lots of women; you just don’t much care what’s going on in their heads.’
Rafael flushed darkly. ‘I meet lots of women who don’t see it as their duty to keep me advised of their every thought on a minute-by-minute basis,’ he corrected through gritted teeth.
‘Okay.’ Amy wondered what sort of women such a species would be.
‘But,’ Rafael said heavily, ‘we were talking about you. You said that you were…vulnerable.’
The word ‘vulnerable’ emerged from his mouth as though being aired for the very first time. It made Amy want to laugh.
‘I’d just broken up with my boyfriend of two years,’ she explained, frowning at the memory. ‘We’d met on the same catering course, would you believe?’ She smiled at the memory. ‘He was good fun. He wanted to be a TV chef, make a name for himself.’ Amy sighed. ‘Backroom catering wasn’t good enough for Freddie. He tried it for a while but he really felt that he was too big for just cooking behind the scenes. He could have carried on with his training, gone to work for a big cheese in the hotel business, climbed up the ladder like any other aspiring chef, but Freddie wanted it all and he wanted it sooner than yesterday.’
Rafael was intrigued in spite of himself.
‘At first, I just found it funny that he was so obsessed with wanting to make it big, but then we started arguing about it. I hated that. My sisters were very wary of him but I clung on until he dumped me.’
Rafael heard the catch in her voice and didn’t have to see her to know that her face would be clouding over. She had the sort of face that clouded over. ‘You were well rid of him.’
‘Well, yes, but still…he dumped me by text message! Said that he’d found someone else. Later I discovered that the someone else was twice his age and loaded! He lives in Italy now. He has a brand-new restaurant. Maybe I’ll drop in one day and give him the fright of his life.’
‘So…then you met James…’
‘At work. He made me laugh.’
And he was safe, Rafael worked out. Having a crush on the boss was like hankering behind the impossible, which was why it had only ever remained a crush. Had she decided to take it one step further now that she had seen with her own two eyes exactly how much money was wrapped up in him?
‘He makes a lot of people laugh.’ Rafael shrugged. ‘Did you think that you were special because of that?’
‘No, I did not!’ Amy flushed guiltily.
‘Be
cause you would be a fool if you had.’
‘I really don’t need you preaching to me when you don’t know the first thing about me and probably not much about James either.’
Rafael reluctantly took a step back. He had a hell of a lot more to say on the subject of why she would be mad to even think about getting involved with his brother. James’s idea of the ideal woman was one who played hard and had no desire for commitment on any level. He mixed with the fast crowd, the people who enjoyed winter holidays yachting down the Grenadines and wild parties in country houses. He had only been living in London for a matter of a few years but in that short time he had accumulated more contacts than most people did in their entire lifetime. It was James’s gift, why he was so brilliant at what he did. But she was on the defensive and that was not where he wanted her.
He brought the subject back to her catering, which seemed a natural topic of conversation as he began to unpack the individual packets of food.
‘You don’t do this often, do you?’ Amy eventually said, interrupting her own monologue, which, to her ears, was beginning to sound like a very boring CV for a job interview. She couldn’t think he could possibly be interested.
‘Do what?’ Rafael looked across at her. She was on all fours and leaning towards him as she inspected the contents of a disposable tub. There he went again, being distracted by her breasts, the shadow of her cleavage, their neat plumpness. He frowned, annoyed with himself, and looked away.
‘Have picnics.’ She looked up at him. ‘I mean,’ she clarified, ‘you bought loads of spreads but nothing to spread them with, and bread but nothing to cut it with, and what are we supposed to put all this stuff on?’
Rafael was nonplussed.
‘Very boring, you know. I mean, you don’t look boring,’ she hastened to add, feeling a little odd quiver as she stared into those infuriatingly dark sunglasses, ‘but I guess you’re just not accustomed to eating outdoors. Weird, considering your line of work!’
Kept by the Spanish Billionaire Page 6