by Penny Jordan
Fortunately his brother had seen sense at the last minute and returned to Madrid as a single man but things had not been right between them since.
Luis was his only constant. It had been the two of them, facing the world and everything it could throw at them, together, since they had shared the same womb.
Luis waited until they were out of anyone’s earshot before turning to him. ‘You knew we were ripping Benjamin off all those years ago, didn’t you?’
The rage that had simmered in Javier all evening blazed at the mention of his nemesis’s name.
Seven years ago the Casillas brothers had invited Benjamin to invest in a project they were undertaking in Paris, the creation of a skyscraper that became known as Tour Mont Blanc. They had only invited his investment because the seller of the land, to whom they had paid a significant deposit, suddenly told them they had until midnight to pay the balance or he would sell to another interested buyer. They didn’t have the cash. Benjamin did.
‘We didn’t rip him off,’ Javier reminded him icily. ‘He was the fool who signed the contract without reading it.’
‘And you should have warned him the terms had changed as you’d said you would. You didn’t forget, did you?’
Javier might be many things but a liar was not one of them.
Luis had been the one to invite Benjamin onto the project. His investment was worth twenty per cent of the land fee. In the rush of sealing the deal Luis had told Benjamin it meant twenty per cent of the profits. Their lawyer, who drew up the contract in record time, had been the one to point out that the Casillas brothers would be doing all the work and that Benjamin’s profit share should be only five per cent, a point Javier had agreed with.
The contract had been changed accordingly. Javier had emailed it to Benjamin expecting him to read the damn thing and negotiate if the new terms were not to his liking.
‘I knew it.’ Luis took a deep breath. ‘All these years and I’ve told myself that it had been an oversight on your part when I should have accepted the truth that you never forget. In thirty-five years you have never forgotten anything or failed to do something you promised.’
‘I never promised to email him.’ Javier never made promises he didn’t intend to keep. People could say what they liked about him—and frequently did, although never to his face—but he was a man of his word.
‘Not an actual promise,’ Luis conceded. ‘But look me in the eye and tell me it wasn’t a deliberate act on your part.’
Luis had asked him to give Benjamin a heads-up about the changes in terms when Javier emailed the contract. At no point had Javier agreed to this request and Luis should be thankful for it. Benjamin’s failure to read the contract before signing it had made the Casillas brothers richer to the tune of two hundred and twenty-five million euros. Benjamin had still made an excellent profit—profit—of seventy-five million and all he’d had to do for that substantial sum was transfer some funds. That he’d had the nerve to sue them over it was beyond the pale. That Benjamin had refused to accept the court’s judgement when the judge had thrown the case out, and then stolen Javier’s fiancée from him, was despicable.
And the world thought he was the bad man in all this?
Blind, prejudiced fools, the lot of them. He knew what they all thought. The world looked at his face and saw his murderer father.
‘For what reason would it have been deliberate?’ he asked coldly.
‘That is for your conscience to decide. All I know for sure is that Benjamin was our friend. I have defended you and I have fought your corner—’
‘Our corner,’ Javier corrected, his limited patience right at the point of snapping.
Now his own twin was questioning his motives?
What happened to the loyalty that had always bound them together?
‘I assume this burst of conscience from you is connected to that damned woman.’
He’d had a sense of foreboding in the pit of his stomach since spotting Chloe Guillem, Benjamin’s sister, in the audience that night.
Chloe had betrayed them as greatly as her brother had; had aided and abetted his plot to steal Freya and was, unquestionably, the cause of all the tension that had hung between Javier and Luis since Luis’s return from the Caribbean.
A darkness rarely seen on his brother’s face suddenly appeared and before he had time to blink, Luis had grabbed him by the collar of his shirt. ‘If you ever speak about Chloe in that way again then you and I are finished. Do you hear me? Finished.’
‘If you’re still defending her to me then I would say we’re already finished, brother.’ He spat the last word directly into Luis’s face.
Javier knew in his bones that something had happened between Luis and Chloe. Luis had always had a roving eye for the ladies but never had Javier had cause to suspect a shift in his brother’s loyalty from it.
If Luis wanted to be with that bitch after what she had done to him then Luis could get the hell out of his life. Loyalty counted for everything and if Luis had lost sight of that then he was no brother to him.
Eyeball to eyeball, they glowered at each other, the venom seeping between them thick enough to taste.
Then Luis released his hold and stepped back.
Javier stared at the man he had shared a womb with, had shared a bedroom with, had fought with, had protected, had been protected by, had grieved with; the other side of the coin that was the Casillas twins, and watched him take backwards strides until he turned his back on him.
Breathing heavily, his hands clenched into fists, his hardening heart thumping, Javier watched Luis collide with a petite blonde woman in his haste to get away from him.
In all their thirty-five years neither of them had ever turned their back on the other.
It would be the first and last time Luis walked away from him.
In the periphery of his vision he saw the woman his treacherous brother had bumped into come towards him but with his gaze on Luis’s retreating back, it was only when she stood a few feet from him that her features came into focus.
Javier stared at the face he had last seen two months before when he had shown her to the door of his house.
Big pale blue eyes stared back, apprehension shining out of them.
The rage inside him ratcheted up another notch. Any higher and there was real danger he would combust.
This was a face he had never wanted to see close-up again.
‘You should be at the after-show party,’ he snapped.
Sophie Johnson was part of Compania de Ballet de Casillas’s corps de ballet and had a contractual obligation to attend the after-show party.
Colour flamed the pretty heart-shaped face, a pained crease forming in her brow. ‘I quit the company two months ago.’
His heart thumped to hear that surprisingly sultry voice again.
Sophie had the sweet looks of an innocent but a voice that evoked thoughts of dark red satin sheets and dim lighting.
She had quit the company…?
He had hardly looked at the stage during the performance.
‘Then what the hell are you doing here?’
But he knew. The pressing weight in his already tightly crushed chest told him the answer. He did not want to listen to it.
Her throat moved.
He’d kissed that throat…
‘I need to talk to you.’
‘Now is the worst time to speak to me.’ And she was the last person he wished to see or speak to. Not now, when he could feel the fabric of his life dissolving around him.
He stepped past her and nodded a dismissal. ‘Excuse me.’
He’d taken no more than two paces when she said, ‘It’s important.’
His heart began to thrum wildly, every nerve ending standing on edge. Memories of their brief interlude surfaced in a wave, memories he’d not allowed himself to think of since showing her out of his home.
Pinching the bridge of his nose, he half turned to her and inhaled deeply.
‘No,’ he
told her harshly. ‘This is not a conversation we are going to have now. Go home.’
‘But—’
‘I said no.’
The vehemence in Javier’s gravelly tone made Sophie recoil.
She watched him stride down the long corridor, clenching her jaw so tightly it stopped the threatening tears from splashing over her cheeks.
She had shed enough tears these past two months.
She staggered on shaking legs to the nearest chair and sank down into it.
Covering her mouth, she forced deep breaths into her choking airwaves and drew on all the ballet training that had been instilled in her since early childhood to stop her frame collapsing.
A glamorous couple strolled past her, hand in hand, the woman giving Sophie a sideways glance.
She tried to give the smile that normally came automatically whenever she met another person’s eye but could barely move her cheek muscles.
She had once thought herself in love with Javier. Fool!
The stories about him being a cold-hearted bastard had all proven themselves to be true.
That she had ignored them, convinced that his was a soul in torment and that his reputation was not formed from a heart set in stone, was her own fault.
Sophie had taken one look at Javier when he’d paid a visit to the ballet company almost a year ago and felt her heart move and all the breath leave her body in a rush.
It had been a visceral reaction unlike anything she had experienced before.
Unlike the sculpted men of the ballet world, Javier was a bone-crusher of a man, enormously tall and broad with a presence that made everyone look twice. He wasn’t handsome in the traditional sense, his nose too wide and with a bend to it, his light brown eyes too hooded and with a permanent look of suspicion etched in them to ever be considered a pin-up, but he had a magnetism that turned those flaws into something mesmerising. He had mesmerised her in more ways than one. Always attuned to others’ emotions, the pain she had sensed in Javier had reached deep into her.
She had spent months longing for a glimpse of him. The times she did—and they were rare times, his involvement with the day-to-day running of the ballet company minimal—her heart would soar. She had known it was a crush that would go nowhere. Javier Casillas was the co-owner of her ballet company, a property magnate with a net worth she could scarcely comprehend, an arrogant, aloof figure who conjured fear and admiration in equal measure. He would never look twice at her.
But he did look twice at Freya.
Freya was her oldest and closest friend, the reason for Sophie being in Madrid dancing for the company that had made Freya a star. Freya was beautiful. Freya was a dancer with the world at her pointe shoes, a dancer who stole the heart of everyone who watched her perform.
Sophie had never shared her feelings for Javier with Freya. It had been too personal and unlikely to share with anyone.
Javier’s marriage proposal and Freya’s acceptance of it had devastated her.
For months she had sat on her despondency, determined to support her oldest friend even if she did have grave misgivings about their forthcoming loveless marriage that had nothing to do with her own breaking heart. She even gamely agreed to be their bridesmaid.
Then, the week before they were due to exchange their vows, Freya had run off with Benjamin Guillem, leaving Javier for dust. A media frenzy had ensued.
Sophie had been trying to do a good deed when she’d gone to Javier’s home. She’d been packing Freya’s stuff for her from the flat they shared and had come across a copy of Freya and Javier’s prenuptial agreement and a file of other pertinent legal documents. Freya didn’t want them and, not knowing what else to do, Sophie had decided the best thing would be to let Javier decide. She was pretty sure he wouldn’t want the documents to reach the public domain.
The day after Freya and Benjamin married, Sophie had braced herself and set off for Javier’s home.
His house was a secluded villa that more resembled a palace than a home. She’d had to speak into a camera before the electric gates had slowly opened and admitted her into his domain.
She remembered walking the long driveway, sick to her stomach with pain for him. He might not have loved Freya but he must be shattered that she had left him for his oldest friend and in such a public fashion too.
The whole world knew about it and had put the blame squarely on Javier’s shoulders without knowing even a basic fact—even she didn’t know a fact about it, Freya’s only communication being the one asking her to pack her belongings together—and was seeming to revel in portraying him as a monster in disguise. Sophie’s heart had twisted to hear the vile rumours about him.
Expecting a member of his household staff to open the front door for her, she had been surprised to find it opened by Javier himself.
What followed had been even more unexpected.
That was when she’d understood his ruthless reputation had been based on truth.
If he’d even given her a single thought since, he would have known she’d left his ballet company, left Madrid and returned to England. In the vain hope he would seek her out she had left her forwarding address on the company files. He could have found her without any effort if he had wanted to.
He hadn’t even noticed her absence from the stage that night.
She’d used those two months of silence to come to terms with the reality of her situation and get herself in an emotional place where she could face Javier again.
She would seek him out again tomorrow; seek him every single day until he was willing to have the conversation they so desperately needed to have.
Only when she was certain she could get back to her feet without her legs crumpling did she stand up, inhaling deeply.
Concentrating on putting one foot in front of the other, Sophie headed back the way she had come. The theatre’s wide corridors were almost deserted now.
When she reached the top of the ornate red-carpeted stairs that led down into the foyer, her heart skipped to see Javier striding up to her, his long legs taking the steps two at a time.
She held tightly onto the gold railing and stared at the emotionless, menacing face fixed on her.
When he reached the top, he inclined his head for her to follow him, leading her to a secluded section of corridor.
He stopped walking and gazed down at her, breathing heavily through his nose.
‘Why now?’ He ran a hand through his hair. ‘Why did you choose tonight of all nights to tell me? Why not approach me in private?’
She kept her gaze steady on him. ‘Because after the way you treated me, I didn’t trust you would agree to see or speak to me.’
He had gone from blazing passion to ice-cold in the whisper of a second.
He had escorted her out of his home.
His face twisted. ‘You are carrying my child?’
How she kept her composure to answer him without bursting into tears she would never know. ‘Yes. We’re going to have a baby.’
Copyright © 2018 by Michelle Smart
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BILLIONAIRE’S BABY OF REDEMPTION
by Michelle Smart,
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ISBN-13: 9781488039454
SO CLOSE AND NO CLOSER
First published in 1989
This edition published in 2018
Copyright © 1989 by PENNY JORDAN
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