by Tara Pammi
His clever console, which had calculated the quickest route for him, said he was an hour’s drive to her position from his home in the north of Madrid, if he kept to the speed limit.
Provided traffic wasn’t too heavy this Saturday evening, Luis estimated he could make it in forty, possibly even thirty minutes.
He always kept to the speed limit in built-up areas. The temptation to burn rubber was often irresistible but he always controlled the impulse until on the open road. Today, with thoughts of Chloe stranded in the mountains on his mind, he wove in and out of the traffic ignoring the blast of horns hailing furiously in his wake.
Chloe Guillem. A funny, attention-seeking, pretty child who had grown into a witty, fun-loving, beautiful woman. Truly beautiful.
It had taken him a long time to notice it.
An old family friend, he hadn’t seen her for four or five years when she had called him out of the blue.
‘Bonjour, Luis,’ she had said in a sing-song tone that had immediately suggested familiarity. ‘It is Chloe Guillem, little sister of your oldest friend, calling to ask you to put friendship ahead of business and give me a job.’
He had burst into laughter. After a short conversation where Chloe had explained that she’d completed her apprenticeship in the costume department of an English ballet company, spent the past two years working for a Parisian ballet company and was now seeking a fresh challenge, he’d given her the name and number of his Head of Costume. Recruitment, he’d explained, was nothing to do with him.
‘But you own the company,’ she had countered.
‘I own it with my brother. We are experts in the construction business. We know nothing of ballet or how to make the costumes our dancers wear. That’s what we employ people for.’
‘I have references that say I’m very good,’ she had cajoled.
‘That is good because we only hire the best.’
‘Will you put in a good word for me?’
‘No, but if you mention that your mother was Clara Casillas’s personal costume maker, I am sure that will work in your favour. Provided you are as good as your references say you are.’
‘I am!’
‘Then you will have no trouble convincing Maria to hire you,’ he had laughed.
Luis had thought nothing more of the conversation until around six months later when he’d attended a directors meeting at the old theatre to discuss preparations for the company’s move. A galloping gazelle had bounded up to him out of nowhere with a beaming smile and thrown her arms around him.
It had been Chloe, bright and joyous and, she had delightedly told him, loving her time in Madrid. Luis had been pleased to see this face from his past but he’d been too busy to take much notice of his old friend’s little sister.
When Luis and Javier had pooled their meagre inheritance to form Casillas Ventures almost two decades ago, they had decided from the start that one of them would always be the ‘point man’ on each project. This would simplify matters for contractors and suppliers. Luis had taken the role of point man for the construction of the new theatre and facilities. In this venture he had been far more hands on than he would normally be but this was a special project. This was for their mother, a way for the world to see the Casillas name without automatically thinking of Clara Casillas’s tragic end at the hands of her husband.
The closer it got to completion, the more hours he needed to put in, overseeing the construction and ensuring Compania de Ballet de Casillas was prepared for the wholesale move to its new premises.
From that embrace on though, whenever Luis visited the old crumbling theatre he somehow always managed to see Chloe.
She always acknowledged his presence, with either a quick wave if working on an intricate costume or a few words exchanged if on a break, her cheeks turning the colour of crimson whatever reception she gave, a little quirk he’d found intriguing but never given much thought to...not until he’d walked past a coffee shop a few months later and caught a glimpse of a raven haired beauty talking animatedly to a group of her peers. Spring had arrived in his home city and she’d been wearing a thin dress that exposed bare, milky-white arms, her thick raven hair loose and spilling over her shoulders.
He would have stopped and stared even if he hadn’t recognised her.
How had he not seen it before?
Chloe Guillem radiated. Sunlight shone out of her pores, sexiness oozed from her skin. Her smile dazzled.
She must have felt his stare for she had looked up and seen him at the window and the full power of her smile had been unleashed on him and this time it had hit him straight in his loins. He had never in all his thirty-five years experienced a bolt of pure, undiluted, unfiltered lust as he had at that moment.
He’d taken her out to dinner that very night. It had been the most fun and invigorating evening he could remember. Chloe was funny, full of self-deprecating wit, a raucous laugh never far from her voluminous lips. And she was sexy.
Dios, was she sexy. He had been unable to tear his eyes away, greedily soaking up everything about her, all the glorious parts he’d been oblivious to. It was incredible to think he’d been blind to it for so long.
And the desire was mutual. Luis knew when a woman wanted him and Chloe’s body language had needed little interpretation.
But when they had left the restaurant she had rebuffed his offer of a nightcap by hailing a taxi.
He had never been rejected before. It had intrigued rather than discouraged him.
‘If not a nightcap how about a goodnight kiss?’ he’d asked before she could escape into the cab, taking her face into his hands and gently rubbing his nose to hers. Her scent had filled his senses, reminding him of English strawberries and cream.
Her eyes had been stark on his, the flirtatious glimmer that had been prevalent the whole evening suddenly gone, her beautiful plump lips drawing together.
‘Next time, bonita,’ he had whispered, inhaling her scent again.
All the confusion on her face had broken into a smile that had shone straight into his chest. She had stepped back and nodded. ‘Yes. Next time.’
‘You will let me kiss you?’
The smile had widened, baby-blue eyes glittering with promise. ‘Yes, I will let you kiss me.’
But there had been no next time and no kiss. Two days later everything had gone to hell with her brother. Chloe had cancelled their planned date and stopped accepting his calls. When he visited the ballet company she kept her head down and pretended not to see him.
They hadn’t exchanged two words in almost as many months.
Why the hell he was tearing down roads at an average speed of a hundred miles an hour to rescue a woman who had dropped him like a hot brick he could not fathom, and especially on this night of all nights.
A curse flew from his lips when, thirty-four minutes after leaving his home, he reached the co-ordinates Chloe had given him.
It was a passing place on the winding road, with a flat grassy area for day-trippers to enjoy the spectacular view over a picnic. There was no one there. And no broken-down car.
He brought the car to a stop and grabbed his phone from the passenger seat. In his haste to get to her he’d forgotten to turn the ringtone up and only now did he see he had three missed calls from his brother.
He called Chloe. It went straight to voicemail.
Getting out of the car to search for her, he called Javier back.
‘Where are you?’ his brother snapped, picking up on the first ring.
‘Don’t ask. I’ll be there as soon as I can.’
‘I’m grounded in Florence.’
‘What?’ Javier was supposed to be at the gala already. In Madrid. Not Florence.
‘My plane’s been grounded on a technicality. It passed all the safety checks this morning. Not a single issue of concern. Something’s not r
ight.’
Luis disconnected the call, a real sense of disquiet racing through him. The sun was descending over Madrid in the far distance but the orange glow it emitted did nothing to stave off the chill that had settled in his bones.
His brother was grounded in Florence and suspected sabotage.
Luis had been lured to the middle of nowhere in the Sierra de Guadarrama in his dinner jacket, on a rescue mission where the damsel in distress had disappeared.
He checked the co-ordinates again.
This was definitely the right place.
So where the hell was she? And why was his sense of disquiet growing by the second?
* * *
Chloe Guillem took a seat in the first-class lounge at Madrid-Barajas airport and removed her phone from her carry-on bag.
She had six missed calls and seven text messages, all from the same number. She deleted the messages without reading them and fired off a message to her brother.
Mission accomplished. Waiting to board flight. x.
The glass of champagne she’d asked for when entering the lounge was brought to her table and she took a large sip of it at the moment her phone rang.
Cursing to herself, she switched it to silent and threw it down.
Two minutes later it vibrated in a dance over the table.
She had a new voicemail.
Her gut told her in the strongest possible terms not to listen to it.
She pressed play.
Luis Casillas’s deep, playful voice echoed into her ear. ‘Good evening, Chloe. I hope you are safe wherever you are and have not been kidnapped by a gang of marauding youths. You might wish you had been though because I will find you. And when I do...’ Here, he chuckled malevolently. ‘You will wish you had never crossed me. Sleep well, bonita.’
It was the emphasis on his final word rather than the implied threat that lifted the hairs on her arms.
Bonita.
The first time he had called her that she had thought she would never stop smiling.
Now she was overcome with the urge to cry.
He was not worth her tears, the two-faced, treacherous, conniving, evil bastard.
Thank goodness she’d had the sense to resist his offer of a nightcap...
Chloe downed the rest of her champagne and grimaced.
It hadn’t been sense that had stopped her accepting his offer or his goodnight kiss. It had been fear.
Her date with Luis had given her a sense of joy she hadn’t felt since her early childhood where she had spent innocent, happy days climbing trees and running around with friends, cocooned with love, blissfully unaware life could be anything other than wonderful. Luis was tied up in those memories.
Once upon a time she had been smitten with him.
She’d wanted to be sure his feelings for her were genuine and that he wasn’t looking at her only as a potential conquest. As hard as it was, she’d wanted to trust him. She’d wanted his respect.
At the end of their date when his nose had rubbed against hers and every ounce of her being had strained on an invisible leash to escape her brain and kiss him, she had almost given in. She’d spent their entire date imagining him naked, something she’d blamed on the erotic dream she’d had of him the night before but which she’d known, deep down, was her own hidden sexuality breaking free for this man who’d stolen into her teenage heart and now demanded to be heard.
What had she been thinking?
Luis had no respect.
He had made a mockery of her brother’s trust in him and by extension made a mockery of her and her dead mother. He was as bad, no, worse, than her pathetic father.
She knew his brother was equally culpable for ripping her brother off but Javier hadn’t been the one to embrace her tightly at her mother’s funeral and promise that one day the pain would get better. That had been Luis. Witty, sexy, fun-loving Luis, the only man who had ever captured her feminine attention. The only man in her twenty-five years she had ever dreamed of.
Whatever Benjamin had planned for him could not come soon enough.
The board on the wall with the constantly updated list of all departures and arrivals showed her own flight was now boarding.
Hurrying to her feet, Chloe made her way to the departure gate.
Now she knew what Luis Casillas was capable of she had to take his threat to hunt her down seriously.
Only when she looked out of the window of her first-class seat on the flight paid for by her brother and watched Madrid shrink from view did her lungs loosen enough to breathe easily.
Luis thought he’d be able to find her? Well, good luck to him. She would be the needle to his haystack.
* * *
The Grand Bahaman suburb of Lucaya was, Chloe could not stop thinking, a paradise. Her brother had set her up in a villa in an exclusive complex where all her needs and whims were taken care of and all she had to worry about was keeping her sun lotion topped up.
She had spent her first six days there doing nothing but lazing by the swimming pool and refreshing her social media feeds, her worries slowly evaporating under the blazing sun. As far as boltholes went, this was the best. It had exclusivity but also, should Luis carry out his threat to hunt her down, the comfort of safety in numbers.
She doubted he was sparing her a moment of his thoughts. The fallout in Madrid and the rest of Europe was growing in intensity. Chloe read all the news and gossip torn between glee and heartbreak.
It should never have come to this. Luis and Javier should have done the right thing and paid her brother the money they owed him, all two hundred and twenty-five million euros of it.
Seven years ago, on the day Chloe and her brother were told their mother’s cancer was terminal, Luis had called Benjamin for his help, dressing it up as an investment opportunity.
The Casillas brothers had paid a large deposit on some prime real-estate in Paris that they intended to build a skyscraper on that would eclipse all others. The owner of the land had suddenly demanded they pay the balance immediately or he would sell to another interested party. He’d given them until midnight. The Casillas brothers did not have the money. Benjamin did.
He gave them the cash, which amounted to twenty per cent of the total asking price. It was an eye-watering sum.
Tour Mont Blanc, as the skyscraper became known, took seven years to complete. Two months ago, Benjamin had received his copy of the final accounts. That was when he realised he’d been duped. The contract he’d signed, which he’d believed stated his profit share to be twenty per cent as had been verbally agreed between him and the Casillas brothers, had, unbeknown to him, been altered before he signed. He was entitled to only five per cent of the profit.
His oldest, closest friends had ripped him off. They’d taken advantage of him at his lowest point. They’d abused his trust.
When they’d refused to accept any wrongdoing Benjamin had taken them to court. Not only had he lost but the brothers had rubbed salt in the wound by hitting him with an injunction that forbade him from speaking out about any aspect of it.
Chloe would never have believed Luis could be so cold. Javier, absolutely, the man was colder than an ice sculpture, but Luis had always been warm.
Now the press was alive with speculation. Benjamin whisking Javier’s prima ballerina fiancée away from the Casillas brothers’ gala and marrying her days later had the rumour mill circling like an amphetamine-fed hamster on a wheel. An intrepid American journalist had discovered the existence of the injunction and now that injunction was backfiring. So far only the injunction itself was known about but a frenzy of speculation had broken out about the cause of it, none of it casting the Casillas brothers in a favourable light.
Let them be the ones to deal with it, Chloe thought defiantly, shoving her beach bag over her shoulder and slipping on her sparkly flip-flops. S
he was safe here in the Bahamas and her brother was safely cocooned with Freya in his chateau.
Leaving the tranquillity of the complex for only the third time since her arrival a week ago, she spent an enjoyable fifteen minutes strolling in the early-morning sun to Port Lucaya, very much looking forward to a day of island hopping on the complex owner’s yacht.
The invitation had been hand delivered by the manager the evening before, the man explaining it was an excursion the owner provided for favoured guests whenever she visited. A guest had been taken ill so the invitation was Chloe’s if she wanted it. Thinking she couldn’t come to much harm if it was a woman hosting the event—she’d read too many horror stories about young women and rich men on yachts to have been comfortable with it being run by a rich male stranger—she had been delighted to accept. She couldn’t spend a fortnight in the Bahamas hiding away.
Chloe liked to keep busy. She liked to be with people. Being alone with only her thoughts for company meant too much time to think. Better to let the past stay where it was by always looking forward and keeping her mind busy and her life full.
She found the port easily, the pristine yachts lined up in the small bay an excellent giveaway. Opposite it was the Port Lucaya Marketplace she’d heard so much about and which she had promised herself a visit to. Looking at the quaint colourful tourist trap bustling with life and exotic scents brought a big smile to her face. She would go there tomorrow.
Turning her attention back to the yachts, Chloe scanned them carefully, looking for the one named Marietta. Her excitement rose when she finally located it. At least four decks high, the Marietta was the biggest and most luxurious-looking of the lot. Not quite cruise-ship size, it looked big enough to accommodate dozens of guests with room to spare.
But where was everyone? The metal walkway for passengers to board had been lowered but she saw and heard none of the sounds and sights you would expect of a large party going off on an all-inclusive day trip.
As she hesitated over whether to step onto the walkway, a figure wearing what she assumed was captain attire appeared on deck.