Kept by the Spanish Billionaire

by Cathy Williams

  Then she skulked her way up to the directors’ floor, avoiding the lift because she had visions of the lift door opening to reveal James and his band of merry men on their way to their Covent Garden restaurant.

  It was quiet. The meeting was definitely done and dusted because she passed by the boardroom, which bore the cluttered detritus of debate. The pads of paper, pens and pencils randomly scattered, the projector still in its position though switched off. By nine the next morning, the room would be pristine, cleaned to within an inch of its life.

  Amy padded past the boardroom, skirted around the small, central foyer, which was arranged as an informal sitting area where casual meetings were sometimes held, and followed her nose and then, eventually, saw the glimmer of light coming from an office at the end. She knew the floor very well indeed and so also knew, immediately, that the office Rafael was occupying belonged to James. Poor old James had been relegated, although. remembering his admiring tone of voice as he had chatted to her about Rafael and his big plans, she didn’t suppose he minded too much.

  She paused when she was standing by the door, out of sight with the chance to change her mind still within reach.

  Before she could take the coward’s way out, she stepped into the doorway and had a few seconds in which to observe him because he hadn’t seen her. His head was bent and he was frowning and tapping on a little pile of papers with the top of his pen.

  Rafael Vives, gardener. Rafael Vives, multimillionaire. He had told her that he was the same man but it was hard not to be disconcerted by the aura of power he exuded, which was crazy, especially when you considered that she had slept with this man, laughed with him, forced him to buy a pair of jeans!

  She gave a little cough and he looked up.

  He was as damn near shocked to see her as it was probably possible for him to be, and in that fraction of time she jumped in before he had time to speak.

  Amy hadn’t actually planned what she was going to say. At least not in any detail. She had just pretty much decided that she would proceed on a wing and a prayer.

  ‘I heard you’d decided to stay on in London for a while,’ she said, stepping into the lion’s den and shutting the door behind her only to immediately wonder whether that had been a bad move. ‘And I was in the area so I thought I’d drop by…’ She looked at his heart-stoppingly sexy face and wondered how she was going to deal with it if he chucked her out. No questions asked.

  ‘Oh, really.’ Rafael pushed himself away from the desk so that he could recline back and give her his full and undivided attention. ‘You were just passing by, were you? On the way to where exactly?’

  ‘Oh…home…you know…’

  ‘No, actually, I don’t but we’ll let that one ride. You’ve dropped in…for what reason?’

  ‘Would you mind if I sat down?’

  ‘You won’t be staying so what’s the point?’

  Amy sagged. ‘You’re right. What’s the point?’

  ‘What did you come for?’ Rafael had cancelled Elizabeth because he had too much work to do. Right now she would be waiting for him at the house, having had a heavy day sightseeing. Two weeks’ vacation, a chance to mend the broken fences between them, and what was he doing? Spending most of his available free time at work. He disliked himself for it but the reconciliation was turning out to be a disaster. Their relationship was flat and he should have left it alone.

  ‘I came to find out how you were and I wish I hadn’t bothered, to be perfectly honest.’

  ‘What did you expect?’ Rafael’s voice was cold and dismissive but he could feel the anger building up inside him and he was annoyed with himself because he didn’t want to feel angry. He wanted her to stay in the box he had made, somewhere at the back of his mind. A nice, safe distance away, somewhere he could label ‘history’. He could control the situation then. ‘Did you expect the red carpet to be rolled out in your welcome?’

  ‘No, but a little politeness might have been nice!’ Shrieking again, Amy thought. What was it with this man? ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have come.’

  ‘How did you know that I had decided to stay on?’

  ‘Claire. Claire told me. Remember her? She came out to the Hamptons on that company trip…’ She had a vivid burst of memories and had to drag herself back to the present and back to the intransigent man sitting in front of her. It was one thing to think about fighting for the person you loved, but it was quite a different matter when the person in question didn’t want the fight. In fact, just wanted to be left alone.

  ‘Company spy.’

  ‘Hardly.’

  ‘You mean you asked her about me?’

  ‘No! She just sort of mentioned it in passing…’ She hoped she wasn’t in the process of landing her friend in a mess, but confessing to reading about him in the newspaper would entail her having to explain that she knew that he was involved with someone, and there was no way she intended letting him know that she had quizzed his brother either. No way.

  ‘I was curious, that’s all. To find out why you had decided to stay on.’

  ‘Because you thought that I had made a trip to London specifically to pursue you?’

  ‘I never thought that! Anyway…I’ll be off.’ She turned around, defeated, and headed back towards the door. If she had sat down like a normal person and thought her crazy idea through instead of just rushing in on impulse, she realised she might have predicted its outcome. She had turned him away and he wasn’t just going to forgive and forget. His ego had probably been wounded and, even if the damage had been temporary, he would still have been hard-pressed to forgive her because men notoriously had very fragile egos. And a rich man’s ego would be particularly fragile, she guessed, because he would be so unaccustomed to having it wounded.

  ‘I’d been thinking of branching out for a while.’ Rafael arrested her in her flight towards the door. ‘London seemed a more controllable market than the US, with more scope of innovation, hence the trip over here.’ He wanted to make that perfectly clear, even though it was a complete fabrication. He had actually planned to return to America immediately, but in the wake of her outraged reaction to his duplicity he had found himself temporarily rudderless, and into the unaccustomed vacuum the idea had taken root and solidified as something very much worth doing. It also, strangely, allowed him to prove to himself that his movements weren’t going to be dictated by some woman he had happened to meet by chance and with whom he had had an ill-advised fling.

  That would have been pretty hard for him to swallow!

  ‘Oh. Good,’ Amy said vaguely, as always losing interest the minute any talk of finance reared its head.

  ‘Yes. Elizabeth thinks so as well…’

  ‘Elizabeth?’ She marshalled her thoughts and tried to sound as though the name meant nothing to her at all. ‘Who’s Elizabeth?’

  ‘The woman I’m going out with.’ Rafael couldn’t help the little kick of satisfaction at Amy’s reaction. Of course he was an adult and a serious one at that, not one to play games, never had been, but he had to admit that embellishing his story was tempting. ‘I knew her over in New York. Went out with her for a while, as a matter of fact, then we decided that we both needed space from one another.’

  ‘Which was when you met me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And now you’ve had your fling with me, you’ve decided that it’s time to get back together with you ex.’ The fighter in her kicked in. She remembered that she was here to try and win him back because without him her life was empty. She nodded sagely and edged towards the chair. Okay, he had told her not to make herself comfortable because she wouldn’t be staying long, but she wasn’t going to have an emotional conversation standing up.

  ‘What does that nod mean?’ Rafael asked suspiciously.

  ‘Can I interest you in a drink somewhere? Or something to eat? If you haven’t eaten already?’

  Rafael had planned on working steadily for the next hour or so, even though he was guiltily a
ware that Elizabeth would be on her own for the evening. However, he hadn’t banked on this little slice of his past dropping in to pay him a visit. And he didn’t know why. He didn’t believe any rubbish about being in the area. Oh, no. She was here for a reason and his curiosity was just too strong to resist. He stood up and nodded briefly.

  ‘I was on my way out, as a matter of fact, so why not? A quick drink for old times’ sake.’

  ‘So, nice for you to have your girlfriend here with you,’ Amy said, just as soon as they were in the lift. ‘Although I do find it a bit odd that you would seek me out and ask me over when, presumably, you were thinking about getting back together with your ex. Why would you do that?’

  Amy had always left the running to the boys. It was ingrained in her that they should be the ones who did the chasing. But really, she thought, why should they? In every other area of her life she had been taught to believe that if she wanted something, then she should pursue her goal because she was capable of getting anything she wanted. Her parents had given her the gift of self-confidence. Why shouldn’t she use that now to pursue the one thing in life she really wanted, which was him? So it wasn’t going to be easy, but she could try, couldn’t she? She could try and win the man she loved and wanted?

  ‘Maybe you did me the favour of making me realise that good sex is one thing but long-lasting companionship is something else and long lasting companionship, for me at least, has to be with a woman who doesn’t spend most of her time shouting.’

  Amy took a deep breath and resolved not to shout even though she wanted to. She hung onto the ‘good sex’ bit of his sentence. It wasn’t what she wanted but, having rejected it, she had now discovered that it was, actually, better than nothing.

  ‘You know, they say that shouting is actually very good for the soul.’

  ‘Really. I haven’t heard that one.’ They were walking now towards the wine bar frequented by the people who worked in the city. Rafael glanced at his watch and knew that he shouldn’t be doing this. He should be heading back to the house where he would doubtless find Elizabeth patiently waiting for him. They would discuss, sensibly, how each other’s days had gone and she would ask him informed questions about the progression of his current deals. He, in turn, would ask her about the two cases she had left behind and which he knew were bothering her.

  She wouldn’t be winding him up.

  ‘Yep. It’s true. Absolutely. If you don’t shout you lose touch with your id, which is, apparently, the bit of us that’s alive and vital.’

  ‘I’ve never heard such a lot of nonsense in my life,’ Rafael told her, but he felt like grinning. ‘Do you want a glass of wine?’

  ‘Okay.’ She watched as he strolled off to the bar. She wondered how she could have reacted so strongly to the fact that he had hidden the truth from her, had led her to believe that he was someone he wasn’t. He had only been trying to protect his brother from someone who could have turned out to be a scheming gold-digger. She would probably have done the same in his shoes! She tried to imagine what it might feel like to be fabulously rich and driven to be suspicious of anyone who hadn’t been carefully vetted, but she just couldn’t get her head around the concept.

  Anyway, there was the more pressing matter of how she was going to retrace her steps and try and persuade him into an affair after all. When he was obviously reluctant. And when there was a girlfriend on the scene.

  However tenacious Amy was, she couldn’t bring herself to think that all was fair in love and war. She thought how she would feel were she stuck in a foreign country, hoping to make a relationship work, while out there some ex-fling was sharpening her hooks and sizing up her man as a potential target.

  But what could be the harm in finding out a little more about this mystery woman? Whether Rafael wanted to admit it or not, he couldn’t be that keen on her, could he? Not if he had already dumped her once! Ha!

  Amy clung to this thought like a drowning man clinging to a lifebelt.

  ‘So,’ she said as soon as he had handed her her glass, ‘what’s she like?’

  ‘Elizabeth? Why are you interested? Is that why you descended on me out of the blue? To find out why I was still around and whether I was seeing anyone?’ He looked at her carefully.

  ‘Okay. I’ll confess. I saw your picture in the newspaper a few days ago. There was a long article about you staying on to do something or other…’

  ‘Still right up there with the financial news, I see.’

  ‘And you had a tall brunette swaying on your arm.’

  Elizabeth, Rafael thought, didn’t sway.

  ‘And so you just gave in to curiosity and poled up at my office to find out what was going on. Even though it’s none of your business.’

  Amy tried and failed to find a reasonable answer to that.

  ‘Well, Elizabeth is…a glamorous, independent woman with a thriving career in law. An attorney, in fact, on course to become a judge before she’s forty.’

  ‘Oh.’ Suddenly the mountain she had set forth to climb seemed impossibly steep. ‘Not the sort, I guess, who watches reality TV and takes two weeks to work out her bank balance.’

  ‘Not that sort, no.’

  ‘How did you meet? Were you…going out with her when…when we…’

  ‘No.’ Rafael’s voice was sharp.

  ‘You must have had a surprise when you met me,’ Amy said with a wistful smile. ‘I guess Elizabeth doesn’t do much tree-climbing.’

  ‘Or getting lost because she’s trying to walk off an agitated frame of mind.’

  ‘No.’ She wondered how she could ever have thought that she could fight for this man! ‘Why did you break up with her?’

  Rafael shrugged. He had a pretty valid argument for saying nothing because his relationship was none of her business, but, hell, it must have taken guts to come to his office when she would have known that his reaction would fall far short of welcoming. And to make it obvious that she wanted him back.

  ‘We needed a break from each other. We both lead high-octane lives and we’d got into the habit of seeing each other on the run. No way for a relationship to work.’

  Amy wondered whether the time they had spent together, when he had abandoned his high-octane life and taken time out, had been instrumental in propelling him back to his ex. She thought that if she was a generous person she would have been pleased to have inadvertently brought two people back together. Instead she decided that she was pretty mean spirited after all because she just wished the wretched woman had remained where she was, safely out of the picture.

  So what if she wasn’t Rafael’s lifetime soul mate? So what if the attorney who never got lost was more his cup of tea? She, Amy, would have just enjoyed what she had got and moved on when he decided that he wanted to go back where he belonged. When he had talked about ‘unfinished business’, instead of jumping up and down and clamouring on about being deceived, she should have realised that he had a point. But as always she had reacted without bothering to think things through.

  ‘I’m surprised she managed to take time out of the high-octane life,’ Amy said sourly. ‘Is she getting withdrawal symptoms?’

  ‘I’m making sure to ease them,’ Rafael said, feeling the thrill of the victor when her expression tightened.

  ‘Would that be by leaving her on her own while you have a drink with me?’

  Rafael looked at the wild blonde hair, the cute, expressive face and marvelled at how she could make him feel so primitive. ‘Which reminds me. I have to go.’ He drained his glass and stood up. The gentleman in him fought to remember that he had a girlfriend waiting for him, an intelligent, decent woman who deserved to be treated with respect.

  ‘But first…’ He stuck his hands in his pockets and waited while she wriggled into her little cropped jacket. It was cold outside but she was still wearing a pair of jeans that sat a few indecent inches below her belly button and a long-sleeved top that refused to stay put and insisted on revealing her flat, smooth sto
mach. Rafael dragged his eyes away. ‘Tell me why you needed to find out about Elizabeth.’

  ‘Because I’ve spent too long…’ she pushed open the door and was rewarded with darkness outside so that he was unable to see the expression on her face ‘…way too long thinking about you. Okay, I admit you…hurt me.’ She looked up at him and was annoyed that the darkness also hid his expression. What if he was stifling a yawn? ‘Nobody likes to feel that they’ve been lied to and nobody likes to feel that someone else thinks that they’re a gold-digger.’

  ‘So what are you doing here?’ Rafael asked.

  ‘Oh, I came to try and win you back,’ Amy said casually. She stuck out her hand to hail a cab. ‘I realised that I could stick to my guns and be too proud to ever make contact with you again or else I could swallow my pride and give us a stab…but that was before…’

  Rafael curled his fingers round her wrist and pulled her hand down to his side. ‘Before what?’

  ‘Before I…talked to you,’ Amy said on a sigh. She did look at him now. ‘I didn’t realise how keen you were on your ex-girlfriend. Actually, when you described her, I could see that she was a woman perfectly suited to you. She even kind of looks like you! Tall and composed and dark-haired. But more important than that, she thinks like you. I bet she actually understands when you start talking about the World Economy!’ This had been a small joke between them, the fact that she knew so little about how world finances worked. At the time she had been amused that he would take such an interest in something so far removed from gardening as economics and had cheerfully believed him when he had told her that that was precisely why he found it so interesting. ‘I bet she doesn’t yawn and her eyes don’t glaze over when you start trying to make her understand that money markets actually make sense!’

  Rafael grunted his agreement with this observation. If his ego had been dented by her refusal all those weeks ago, he should have been feeling pleasantly vindicated by her standing in front of him, eyes wide, happily prostrating herself for his benefit. Well, he was, he decided. He still had his fingers curled around her wrist. She had thin wrists. In fact, he could probably circle her upper arm if he wanted to.