But she would not show it. She would never let Luis know how easily and seamlessly he had burrowed under her skin.
Smiling broadly, she pulled out the contract she’d shoved into the back pocket of her shorts. ‘Shall we get this signed?’
Sara and her husband Rodrigo were going to act as their witnesses.
‘You are happy with the terms?’
‘What terms?’ she snorted. There had been only one; the one forbidding her from speaking publicly about any part of their relationship. She would be gagged for ever from speaking about Luis in any shape or form.
It was a term she could live with.
She would never do anything to fuel the poison out there about him.
At some point she would need to speak to her brother and warn him. It would have to be done before she and Luis exchanged their vows. How Benjamin would take it she couldn’t begin to predict. Her brother’s hatred of both Casillas brothers ran so deep she had no way of knowing if he would listen to reason.
Surely he wouldn’t have wanted all this poison for them?
But her brother was wounded. Their betrayal had cut him so deeply that his instinct had been to lash out. Chloe understood that because it had been the same for her.
Had Luis been right when he’d accused her of using it as an excuse to run away from him?
‘Before we sign, let me give you a tour of the house,’ he said, cutting into her thoughts. ‘I need a fresh pair of eyes to help me decide how to redecorate this place.’
‘Isn’t that what interior designers are for?’
‘And I will employ one but right now it’s your opinion I’m interested in.’
Curiosity piqued, Chloe let herself be guided through the magnificent villa that was more than a match in size for her brother’s chateau. But where Benjamin’s chateau was decorated and maintained to the highest possible standard, the deeper into the villa she went, the more its neglect shone through.
‘Marietta inherited it from her father,’ Luis explained as he took her into the library. ‘It had been in the family for generations and Marietta was the end of the line.’
‘Did she not have children?’
‘No. She never married either. She was a socialite who preferred life on the bigger islands and in Manhattan. She used this island as her personal holiday home for her and her closest friends but she never liked living here. She found it too isolating.’
‘Is that why she was happy to sell it to you?’
‘She hasn’t set foot on the island in three years. She lives permanently in Manhattan now. I made her an outrageous offer for the island and the yacht and she accepted on the spot. She’d kept it for so long only out of an old sense of duty. The yacht was just one of her many toys she bored of playing with.’
Chloe looked up at the faded wallpaper fraying away from the ceiling.
To think she had assumed he’d seduced Marietta into selling up...
For some reason to know she had been way off the mark made her feel lighter inside.
A burst of laughter flew from her mouth. ‘I still can’t believe you would spend that much money just to kidnap me.’
‘To make money you have to spend money. In this case, to preserve my fortune and salvage my reputation, I had to spend a good sum. It’s money well spent. And I got a yacht and an island out of it,’ he added with a grin before pulling her in for one of the heady kisses she was becoming addicted to. ‘I’m already thinking ahead to the parties I will host here once I’ve renovated the place and had a runway put in.’
She hooked her arms around his neck and gazed into his eyes. Luis had shaved since he’d left her bed. The scent of his fresh cologne danced into her senses in the dreamiest of fashions. ‘Won’t having a runway ruin what makes the island so special?’
‘I’ll keep the runway small and discreet. There won’t be any jets landing here.’
‘Good.’
He grinned. ‘You should come to one of my parties. You can do the hip-hop dancing I saw you doing on the beach.’
‘By the time you’ve renovated the house and sorted out a runway, you and I will be long over,’ she pointed out.
Instead of the joy she expected to flush through her at the thought of the day her life became her own again, her stomach plummeted.
The gleam in his eyes made the slightest of dims before his grin regained full wattage and he tugged her arms away from his neck.
Keeping a firm hold of her hand, he led her up the winding staircase that creaked on every tread. ‘You should still come. Your hip-hop dancing is very entertaining.’
She forced a laugh.
She much preferred it when they were making love and she could concentrate on the physical side of their relationship, because that was all their relationship would ever amount to and there was no point in allowing the old dreams she’d once had for him rear their head again. She wasn’t a teenager any more. She’d seen enough of life to know dreams did not come true.
‘I’ve never had much rhythm,’ she told him.
‘I remember when you were small. You were always wearing a tutu.’
‘That’s when I was young. I grew up in a house that my brother called a shrine to dance. My mother was crazy about it and had me in dance classes when I was three.’
‘Did you not enjoy it?’
She hesitated before admitting, ‘My dream was to dance like your mother.’
The shrine to ballet that had been her childhood home should really have been called a shrine to Clara Casillas. Pictures of her in dance had framed all the walls, along with tour posters and pictures of the two women, Clara and Chloe’s mother, Louise, together. The latter had been Chloe’s favourite pictures. Her absolute favourite had been one taken in Clara’s dressing room in New York. Clara had been dressed in a red embellished costume, Chloe’s mother on her knees making adjustments to the hem. In the background, sitting squashed together cross-legged under Clara’s dressing table were three small boys all with sulky faces. Benjamin, Luis and Javier. That picture had made her smile for so many different reasons.
When their mother had died, Chloe and Benjamin had gone through all her things together. He had been happy for Chloe to have the ballet memorabilia, all except for that one picture. He’d explained that it had been taken minutes after he and the Casillas twins had been scolded for trying to set off the theatre’s fire alarm. Their mothers had made them sit in silence for ten minutes, threatening the withdrawal of the promised after-show pizza for non-compliance.
Her eyes met Luis’s, the middle child in that long-ago picture. A fleeting sadness passed between them that pierced straight into her heart.
‘What stopped you pursuing ballet?’ he asked after a sharp inhalation.
‘I told you, my lack of rhythm.’ Then she sighed. ‘To be truthful, I lived in denial for many years. I always hoped that one day the rhythm would find me and I would turn from the ugly duckling of dance to the swan but it wasn’t to be.’
‘When did you give it up?’
‘When I was thirteen and my breasts exploded from molehills to mountains. Have you seen a ballerina with large breasts? They don’t exist, do they? I had so little talent that no one bothered suggesting breast reduction surgery for me. I used that as the excuse for giving it up but, really, everyone who had ever seen me dance knew the reason was simply that I wasn’t good enough.’
‘I’m sorry you had to give up your dream.’
She shrugged. ‘There are worse dreams to give up...’
Like the dream of having a father who actually wanted to be a father. Living under his roof for barely a year had been the final proof that dreams really did not come true no matter how hard she wished them.
Her ballet dream had always been more of a wispy cloud than anything concrete.
Her dreams of a miracle cure sudden
ly appearing for her mother... Chloe had seen the cancer ravaging her mother with her own eyes and known that to focus on a cure when the present was all she had left with her would ruin the remaining time they had together. But that dream had still been there, buried deep, getting her through the nights until time had finally run out.
She’d never realised how concrete her dream of wanting her father to be her father had been until she’d learned that it was never going to come true. That was a dream that couldn’t come true not through a lack of talent or a lack of a medical cure but because he didn’t want it to happen.
Dreams did not come true. Chloe would never be Clara Casillas. Her mother had died. Her father would never love her. And Luis would never...
Luis would never what? Love her either?
She didn’t want his love. All she wanted from him was her freedom.
‘And I always liked watching Maman create costumes,’ she continued, blinking back the sting of hot tears that had sneaked up on her without warning. ‘It turned out that costume-making was a talent I did have and the good thing about it is I don’t have to watch what I eat or exercise for a hundred hours a day.’
She’d realised in the first week of her apprenticeship at the London ballet company that she would not have made it as a professional ballet dancer even if she’d had the talent. To reach the top as a ballet dancer required self-discipline and a lot of sacrifice. She’d had the dream but it had never been matched by the needed hunger.
She liked the niche she’d carved as a costume maker, liked that she’d followed her mother’s footsteps, liked the camaraderie and the creativity. She had the best job in the world...
Anger and pride had had her denying to Luis that she cared about losing her career and in that heated moment on his yacht she had meant it. But now, with tempers cooled, it chilled her skin to think how perilously close she had come to throwing it all away.
She had to hope that when this was all over with Luis she would find another ballet company to take her on.
‘It does take dedication to reach the top,’ he agreed, opening another door. As with all the other doors he’d opened, Chloe took only a cursory look at the room behind it, her attention on their conversation.
‘Did you ever dance?’ she asked. Luis was the son of two professional dancers. The masculinity issue that prevented many boys from trying ballet would not have applied in his household.
‘Me? Dios, no. My mother tried to encourage us but neither of us had the slightest interest in it. We just wanted to play.’
She hesitated before asking, ‘What about your father?’
A hardness crept into his voice. ‘What about him?’
‘Did he not encourage you and Javier to follow in his footsteps?’
‘Not that I remember.’ He opened another door and smoothly changed the subject. ‘This was Marietta’s bedroom. I’m debating whether to turn it into my own bedroom. What do you think?’
She thought that she needed to respect his reluctance to speak about his father but that undercurrent was there again and, against her better judgement, she said, ‘What was your father like?’
‘You know what he was like. The world knows what he was like.’
‘If I ever met him as a toddler I don’t remember it. Benjamin never spoke of him. I know what I’ve read about him but I would think only a very small part of it is based on truth.’
‘No, you will find the majority of it is based on truth. I hated him.’
At the widening of her eyes, Luis took a deep breath, fighting for air in his closed-up lungs.
‘Was he always violent towards your mother?’ she whispered.
‘As far as I know—and your mother confirmed this to me—my father was never physically violent to my mother until the night he killed her.’ He relayed this matter-of-factly, hiding the manic thrumming of his heart that even the mildest of allusions to that night always broke out in him. ‘I took the brunt of his anger.’
‘In what way?’
‘In the way that involved belts across naked backsides. It was a form of corporal punishment that was accepted in those days.’
‘Just you?’
He nodded curtly. ‘He never touched Javier. When we got into trouble together the blame would be put on my shoulders.’
‘Even if Javier was at fault?’
‘In fairness to Javier, he rarely instigated any trouble. I was the ringleader. I was drawn to trouble like a magnet. When your brother toured with us he was a far more willing accomplice than Javier.’ He took another long breath and put a hand to the flaking doorframe, ready to put a stop to this conversation immediately. Instead, he found himself saying, ‘Our father was a bitter man. You know he defected from the Soviet Union in the early seventies?’
She nodded, wide-eyed.
‘He was a star to the western world back then, another Nureyev. When he met my mother in London she was an up-and-coming ingénue fifteen years his junior. Her star was not supposed to eclipse his but eventually it did and he hated her for it. Our mother carried us twins and returned to the stage stronger than ever. As her star rose his faded. He was always a drinker and prone to outbursts of temper but when he started fighting choreographers and fellow cast members, he no longer had the star power for companies to turn a blind eye. Work dried up. His resentment towards my mother grew. There were months when we wouldn’t see anything of him—those were the best times—then he would reappear on the scene and act as if he had never been away.’
‘Didn’t your mother mind?’
He shook his head as bile curdled up his throat. ‘Theirs was a strange relationship. The power balance always tilted from one to the other. They both had lovers. They both flaunted it. But then my father found the young lovers he wanted no longer wanted him; and why would they? He was a drunken mess. He couldn’t touch my mother so he took his anger out on me.’
‘Didn’t she stop him?’
‘He was my father. To her mind it was his duty to punish me when it was deserved. She was no disciplinarian herself.’ He felt the smallest of smiles break over skin that had become like marble to remember his mother trying to hide her amusement at their japes by putting on her ‘stern’ face. ‘She never raised a finger to us. If my father’s punishments went too far she would cup my cheeks and tell me to smile through the pain.’
He heard Chloe suck in a breath.
‘My mother understood corporal punishment,’ he said, compelled to defend the mother he had loved. ‘Her own parents would often use it to punish her. To my mother it was normal and, though she couldn’t bring herself to physically punish us herself, she cited it as toughening her up and giving her the tools she needed to succeed in such a competitive world. Her ballet training had taught her to smile through the pain and she wanted me to have that resilience too.’
There was a long period of silence before she asked, ‘Why do you think he chose to punish only you?’
‘He never liked me. There was something in me that pushed his buttons; I don’t know what it was. He adored Javier.’
‘That must have been hard.’
‘Harder for Javier,’ he dismissed. ‘It hurt him to see me be hurt. We are not identical but we are twins and we’ve had each other’s back our entire lives. It is a bond that no one can come between. He suffered in his own way too—our mother loved us both but she doted on me. That was hard on him. He always tried to protect me. He was always trying to save me from the worst of my behaviour because he could always see what the consequences would be.’
‘Couldn’t you see them?’
‘I could but I didn’t care.’ Just as he’d seen that the consequences of keeping silent about the profit share with Benjamin could be dire but had kept his mouth shut through the years rather than rock a friendship that had meant so much to him.
His relationship with his brother w
as like a rock, solid and impenetrable. His friendship with Benjamin, which had been stronger than Javier’s and Benjamin’s, had had the fun element to it. They had broken the rules together, Javier tagging along not to join in with the rule-breaking but to try and stop them going too far.
Benjamin had been his closest friend. He grieved the end of their friendship but in life you had to look forward. Always look forward. Never let the past hook you back.
But the past was hooking him back. He could feel its weight clasped around his stomach, the tentacles digging in tighter and tighter with each hour that passed.
‘Maybe it was because you look so much like your mother,’ she said softly.
‘What was?’
‘Your father... Javier looks so much like him whereas you resemble your mother. Maybe he preferred Javier because he thought of him as a miniature version of himself.’
Her words were a variant of Javier’s attempts to placate him over their father’s cruelty.
Luis moved his hand away from the frame to run it through his hair then caught the flakes of paint on his palm and wiped it on his shorts instead.
The main house needed to be bulldozed and started again from the foundations upwards, he thought moodily.
Unfortunately he had made a promise to Marietta that he would keep the actual structure intact.
He looked back at Chloe, took in the compassion ringing from those beautiful eyes and suppressed a shudder.
Her experiences, different from his as they were, were similar enough that she would have an inkling of what he had felt when growing up.
He needed to keep the structure of their relationship intact too. A marriage that lasted long enough to kill the nastiness circulating about him and his brother. They would have fun and enjoy the time they had together but there would be no bonds between them other than the bonds made in the bedroom.
‘No,’ he denied with more ice than she deserved. ‘It was nothing to do with any physical resemblance. My father disliked me because there was nothing in me for him to like.’
At the parting of her lips, he pressed a finger to them. ‘Enough about my father. He’s dead. The past is over.’ And why he was rehashing long-past deeds with Chloe was beyond his comprehension. His past had nothing to do with their marriage. ‘The future’s what matters now. And now I would like your honest opinion about this room as I am thinking of making it my bedroom.’
Marriage Made in Blackmail Page 11