Kept by the Spanish Billionaire

by Cathy Williams

  ‘Oh, any old good bread shop can sell a bagel that’s not half bad,’ Amy teased, personally thinking that she had yet to taste anything quite so delicious in her life, ‘and any old person can go along and buy it. The test of the real man is whether he can rustle one up himself!’

  ‘Oh. You mean real men bake bread!’

  ‘Exactly!’ Oh, but this was bliss! The banter. The easy camaraderie. Just this weird feeling that she could trust this man to the ends of the earth.

  Not that she would get the chance, given that she was leaving the country in the blink of an eye.

  ‘Well, that sorts out my nagging doubts about my gender,’ Rafael returned without skipping a beat. ‘I’m a mouse.’

  Amy laughed and marvelled that someone could be so tuned in to her quirky sense of humour! And later on, she marvelled that a man could have such physical stamina and then, close on the heels of that thought, that he could arouse her so quickly, so thoroughly and so often that she just couldn’t seem to get enough of him!

  Of course, she cautioned herself the following day, as they explored more nooks and crannies along the coast, this was just a holiday romance. In fact, not even a romance as such. More of a fling. A fling without guilt or conscience.

  In fact, as they enjoyed dinner her way, which meant jeans for him at a busy pizza bar that served the biggest pizzas she had ever seen, she told herself firmly that it was just as well their little dalliance was destined to be short-lived because it helpfully removed all those silly happy-ever-after romantic notions.

  She could enjoy his company without looking for more. Looking for more was boring, she decided. The harder you looked for a future, the greater the chance that you were missing out on the present. And the present, two days later, was another trip to Manhattan, which was even more fantastic than the first because this time they were lovers. No arguments, no bristling, just the corny business of holding hands and thirstily fishing for information. And yet again he had managed to nab James’s company apartment, which was very handy to say the least.

  It was only as her departure day became more than just round the corner that certain frightening home truths began to creep beneath her convenient layer of self-assurances.

  The first self-assurance to go was that what she felt was only skin deep. It wasn’t.

  The second was that leaving would be a blessing because it would eliminate pointless dreams. It wasn’t and it didn’t.

  And then there was the small matter of just enjoying the moment. As her penultimate day drew to a close, she found that she just couldn’t enjoy the moment when she knew full well that there were no more moments to come.

  She had been fed on a diet of amazing and now, as she stared down the road to a future of mediocres, she realised that she was greedy. She wanted more.

  He had cooked for her. At his house. Nothing fancy but she got the feeling that it was something he seldom did, which made it special. It also made her wonder whether there might just be a slim chance that she actually meant something to him.

  It hadn’t escaped her notice as the days had passed by that he had never, not once, not even in the heat of the moment when men, supposedly, said all sorts of rash things, talked about a future for them. She wasn’t asking him to bring out his diary and fix a date for two month’s time. She wasn’t asking him to start selling off his valuables so that he could spend the money on flights across the Atlantic. On the other hand he had not once mentioned even the slightest possibility that one day he might just decide to visit London.

  Even after she had exhaustively dangled all the wonderful things there were for him to see there, all the fabulous places to visit. All the historical sights, some of which she fabricated as her knowledge of history was a little thin.

  ‘Don’t you ever…hmm…’ Amy aimed for the casual approach ‘…have the urge to leave this place?’

  ‘This place being…’ Rafael knew where the conversation was leading. Well, sooner or later it was going to happen because, however different she was from the women he had known, she wasn’t so different that she would be immune to the same desire to build a relationship.

  And the conversation was surely bound to happen at a moment like this, when they had finished making love and were enjoying the pleasurable warmth of its aftermath. He shifted so that he could look at her and she curved round so that she could remain lying in the crook of his arm while being able to see his face. She wanted to search it for clues although she was pretty sure she would find none there.

  ‘This house. I mean, it’s a very nice house, but still…don’t you ever want to go gardening somewhere else? The world is full of big, challenging gardens, after all.’

  ‘This is a very big garden.’

  ‘I know it’s big, Rafael, but you must know it like the back of your hand. The trees, the plants, the rose bushes…’

  ‘You seem obsessed with rose bushes.’ He nuzzled her hair, which smelt of shampoo and sun. It had to be said that she was a funny little thing. It was incredibly easy to tease her. Why? He supposed because she was so lacking in gravitas. He guiltily had to admit that there was something refreshing about her easygoing nature. But no, he told himself, she was a novelty and novelties wore off. The women he needed and wanted were the Elizabeths of this world, as fiercely competitive as he was, as understanding of his mammoth working hours as he was of theirs, as deeply interested in the stock markets as he was. And anyway, he uneasily reminded himself that he had only involved himself with the woman because she posed a possible threat to James, of whom he was very protective.

  He vaguely recalled some plan or other to lull her away from any ideas she might have had of rekindling her interest in his brother once they had returned to the normality of England. Now, as she gazed at him, he resurrected all those healthy thoughts.

  Because there was no way he had any intention of leading her up any garden paths.

  He had taken time off, had deviated from his usual routine and, yes, he had enjoyed it, but it was time for him to get his normal, ordered, high-octane life back.

  Communicating with his office via e-mail and phone calls was fine but it had to stop. As did their pleasant but passing little fling.

  ‘Don’t you yearn to…see the world?’

  ‘I might if I didn’t think that the familiar is as important as the unknown.’

  ‘You’re doing this deliberately, aren’t you?’

  ‘Doing what?’ He inserted his thigh between hers and slowly moved it back and forth. She inhaled sharply and half closed her eyes.

  ‘No. Don’t.’ Amy untangled herself from his erotic caress and firmly placed her leg over his. ‘I want to talk, Rafael. And I don’t want you confusing me. You’re clever with your words but I don’t want clever, I want honest. Do you realise that I leave tomorrow? This is the last night we’re going to spend together and…’ she breathed in deeply and said in one fast rush ‘…I promised myself that I wasn’t to ask you any of this, but here goes…what’s going to happen to us? I’m not asking for commitment from you, Rafael, but do we have any kind of short, very short, future? Obviously, you’ve got responsibilities here…those rose bushes….’ She tried her hand at a weak joke but she could already sense him pulling back.

  ‘Okay. Forget I said anything,’ she whispered, wriggling away from him.

  ‘No.’ Rafael sighed and then did the one thing that brought home to her, like a hammer blow, just how ridiculous she had been to have started having those crazy things called hopes and dreams.

  He got out of bed.

  ‘We’ve had a good time over the past few days and you want to talk, then talk we shall. But I don’t think bed is the best place for the conversation.’

  ‘I don’t want to talk,’ Amy said miserably.

  He didn’t answer. He started getting dressed. Just his dressing gown, but it might as well have been a suit for the distance it suddenly placed between them.

  Amy scrambled to do the same. It helped that
he had disappeared into the bathroom, that place that had seen many a shared shower. She hurriedly slipped on her clothes and was fully dressed by the time he returned.

  ‘Coffee?’ he asked.

  It’s over, she heard. ‘Okay.’

  She watched in silence as he made them both a mug of coffee. Just in the space of a few days, she seemed to have become familiar with all his mannerisms, the way he lounged against the kitchen counter when he was waiting for the kettle to boil, the way he frowned and raked his fingers through his hair just before he said something he considered important, the way he rubbed the back of his neck when he was tired. It was a horrifying realisation because it showed just how much he had got under her skin.

  ‘You want to know where this is going. That’s what all these “don’t you long to travel and see the world?” questions are leading.’ She had sat at the kitchen table and Rafael now swivelled his chair and straddled it so that he was directly facing her. She could see that look on his face, that I’m-about-to-let-you-down-gently look. Poor Amy. Time for the Good-bye Talk.

  ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, Rafael. There’s no need to make such a song and dance about it!’ She was going to work her way quickly through the coffee, while giving a speech of her own. ‘I wasn’t trying to arrange a date for you to come to England!’

  ‘No? Then what about the short, short future?’

  ‘Oh.’ Amy shrugged. ‘I guess it’s what anyone would say in my shoes. It doesn’t mean I’m hearing wedding bells. I mean, it’s been a laugh but, as we established from day one, we’re not soul mates, are we?’ She laughed to emphasise the silliness of such a notion. ‘But, hey, I just thought we could keep in touch by e-mail…you could come over some time if you ever had a craving to visit Kew Gardens and see how we English do the gardening scene. To be honest,’ she felt emboldened to continue, ‘I was just being polite. I didn’t intend to spark off an international incident. But as we know, you take life way too seriously so I should have known how you would react!’

  Rafael didn’t say anything. She had pre-empted what he had intended to say. And that was good. They understood one another. There would be no need for him to wrench her off him when the time came to part. Good! Couldn’t be better.

  He surfaced to realise that she was fidgeting, saying something about leaving.

  ‘Already?’ His eyebrows shot up in surprise as their last night became rapidly condensed into their last few minutes. A groundswell of something seemed to gather apace inside him and he quickly buried it.

  ‘It’s late, Rafael.’

  ‘Would you have stayed if I had decided that we did have some sort of short, short future?’

  ‘I haven’t finished my packing. And I’d really like to get back for at least part of the last night’s festivities. James is planning on fireworks.’

  ‘You could watch them here.’

  It was tempting. Sitting outside with him, arms around each other. Tempting but pointless. She needed to get away as fast as she could.

  ‘I could but I’m not going to.’ She sighed and moved towards him, just one last hug, just something for her box of memories. She placed her arms around him. In her flats, she only reached the top of his shoulder. He buried his head in her hair and squeezed her. To his horror, he wanted to beg her not to go, to stay the night. Very gently he pushed her away and firmly reined in his galloping thoughts.

  ‘That’s fine.’

  The back of her throat began to ache from the effort of holding back the tears.

  ‘I’ll drop you.’

  ‘No! Please don’t. I…’ She turned away and began walking towards the front door. ‘I know the way back to the house. I know all the short cuts! And the fresh air would be nice.’ She reached for the door knob and gave him one last glance. ‘Been fun, Rafael. Take care of those rose bushes. You know I’m obsessed by them.’

  Rafael was seriously beginning to regret that he hadn’t made agreeable noises about the short, short future she had mentioned. But it was too late now. He couldn’t retrieve the situation without sounding weak. He watched her look around to see if she was forgetting anything, then he watched as she walked out of the door and out of his life for good.

  Mission accomplished, he told himself. There was no way she would ever look twice at James again. He knew her well enough by now to know that she would be as honest with herself as she possibly could and that honesty would force her to admit that, on the back of what they had enjoyed, anything she might have felt for James would have been an illusion.

  Along the way he had had a very nice time. What more could he ask for?

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  AMY had never been backward at learning lessons. From Freddie, she had learnt to avoid men who placed personal ambition over everything and everyone. Men like that viewed other people as stepping-stones, women included. And from James, her unavailable crush, she had learnt that rich men liked women who melded into their lifestyles. They didn’t want the challenge of a woman who thought holidays every three weeks were a waste of time after a while or whose social consciences were pricked by the extravagance of people who had houses scattered across the globe, half of which they never got around to visiting.

  She knew that because she had ended up spending the flight back to London next to him. It had been the first time she had spent more than ten minutes conversing with him. He had been as sweet and charming as she had expected, asking her all the right things, trying his best to get her to reveal how exactly she had spent her time in the Hamptons, because he hadn’t seen much of her at the organised social events.

  Amy had valiantly avoided mentioning Rafael. Okay, so it wasn’t as though it would have made any difference, but it had still felt like an invasion of her privacy. She hadn’t want to share those moments with anyone else, least of all James. She hadn’t known how he would react to the fact that his gardener had had a fling with a guest and she hadn’t been about to be responsible for anyone getting fired.

  In the face of her stubborn vagueness, he had eventually dropped his questioning, and Amy had had no trouble in getting him to talk about himself. James enjoyed talking about himself and he was very good at it. He involved his listener. In fact, it was easy to forget that ninety per cent of the conversation, if you analysed it, was about him. What he did, the places he had been, the sights he had seen and of course what he thought about…well, just about everything. Reading between the lines hadn’t required too much effort. At the end of seven hours or so, Amy had had a pretty clear idea of what made James tick and it wasn’t a driving curiosity to discover what lay outside the confines of his own gilded life.

  Rafael had been spot on when he had told her that she was out of James’s league, although she rather thought that they just didn’t share the same space at all.

  Unlike she and Rafael…

  Amy had perfected a technique when it came to thinking about Rafael. She avoided it by immediately thinking about something else. She was pretty sure it was beginning to work.

  Now, she thought about how far she had come in the space of two months. Two long months during which she had paid attention to what her experiences had taught her and changed her life accordingly.

  The first thing she had done was to quit working for James. Not because she didn’t want to see him. Quite frankly, she didn’t care much one way or the other. What she didn’t want was to be reminded of Rafael and James was a link to Rafael. She didn’t trust herself not to ask him, casually, in passing, how that gardener of his was doing. Her pride would never have recovered if she were to be tempted down that road because one thing she had realised pretty quickly was that she had meant nothing to Rafael. He had had no intention of pursuing their relationship. Amy told herself that the Atlantic Ocean was a pretty big obstacle anyway, and he had probably been astute enough to realise that from the word go, but in her heart she knew that he could have made a meaningless promise to keep in touch.

  When she thought back to the way she ha
d asked him about a future, she cringed in embarrassment.

  She told herself that it should be easy to forget him because of the way he had casually dismissed her after the most wonderful few days of her life, but her heart struggled to listen to her head.

  The radical change of lifestyle had helped, though.

  Not only had she quit James’s company but she had gone back to college to specialise. She would never have Freddie’s pie-in-the-sky dreams about becoming a celebrity chef, but that didn’t mean that she should remain stuck in a groove, doing low-key catering for companies when she knew she could achieve more.

  A healthy new start, she told herself.

  Her mum was helping her out with the finances and she was filling the gaps by doing the occasional spot of catering for friends of friends of friends, people who were happy enough to allow her to try out some of her experimental dishes on them.

  So she wasn’t too surprised when she got a call from a woman, to whom she had been recommended, asking whether she could do something on the weekend for her boss who was having a little private gathering at his house in London.

  ‘He’s not often over,’ she said, ‘and you’ll be paid well if you agree to the job.’ She named a figure that made Amy gasp.