‘I can see what you’re thinking, Cesar, and you’re wrong. They’re head over heels in love and Imogen is one of the nicest people you’re ever likely to meet. I grew up with her and there isn’t a mean, avaricious bone in her body!’
‘Except that now she’s had a baby and presumably was behind Fernando’s sudden urge to get his hands on his trust fund?’
‘That was his idea. He’d been thinking about doing something for himself…’
‘And naturally coming to work for the family business was never one of the plans mooted…’
‘You know how Freddy feels about office work. The thought of sitting behind a desk like you do, staring at a computer screen and going to meetings…well, it was never going to be his cup of tea.’
Cesar had to stop himself from giving her a description of exactly what he did. Instead, he focused on the problem at hand.
‘Anyway, he was going to tell you everything…’
‘I’m sure. Just as soon as I gave him the green light to get his hands on his money. Have you any idea how much he will be worth?’
‘Lots?’
‘And, of course, by the process of association, how much this friend of yours will be worth.’
‘Her name is Imogen.’
Cesar shrugged. ‘Does he intend to put a ring on her finger?’
‘Of course he does!’
‘Dammit! The boy should have come to me before he got himself embroiled in this situation!’
‘He’s not embroiled in anything!’ Jude snapped indignantly. ‘He’s walked into this relationship with his eyes wide open and he’s happy. Doesn’t that mean anything to you? No, it probably doesn’t,’ she said acidly. ‘I guess you’ve forgotten what it was like to be head over heels in love and looking forward to starting a life together.’
‘Marisol was embraced by the family,’ Cesar said. ‘There was no question mark over her head as to whether she had inveigled her way in because she could smell the whiff of bank notes.’ He thought, with some surprise and discomfort, that whereas she had always been at the back of his mind, the rosy picture against which every woman he had ever dated was measured, this had not recently been the case. Recently, his head had been filled with the image of another woman, one who didn’t fit the mould and, he told himself with remorseless iciness, fitted it even less now. A woman capable of sleeping with him and holding her secrets to herself. Her extremely costly secrets.
‘And you’re very fortunate that you found the perfect love match. Did you think that you’d be able to dictate to Freddy whom he should marry? What background she should have? What the colour of her hair should be?’
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
‘I’m not being ridiculous! This is exactly what he was afraid of.’
‘That I would have his welfare at heart?’
‘That you wouldn’t give him a chance! He’s not a kid any more, Cesar! And you liked his jazz club idea. Freddy told me that you did. It’s well thought through and he’s put a lot of effort into costing it. Do you think a kid would have been able to do that? He’s even gone into detail about what sort of acts he would have and he’ll make a success of it because his heart’s there, and he has so many of the right connections.’
‘Where are you going with this?’
‘Give him the benefit of the doubt.’ Jude knew why she was fighting their corner. They weren’t there to do it themselves. Imogen was closer than family to her, and while it might well have been better for Freddy to have spoken to his brother man to man, as Cesar had put it, his priority at the moment had to be the woman he loved and their tiny baby daughter. But she still had her own problems to deal with, her own tortured thoughts to put to rest, her own screwed-up heart to try and piece together. Just sitting opposite him was sending her nervous system into frantic overdrive.
‘Have you ever treated him like an adult, Cesar? Capable of making the right decisions for himself?’
Cesar flushed darkly and scowled at her. ‘I’m beginning to see why he sent you to do his dirty work. You’re like a pit bull.’
‘That’s a horrible thing to say!’ Jude looked away quickly, her eyes filling up. Where was a handkerchief when you needed one? Or even a bit of wretched self-control?
She wiped her eyes harshly with the sleeve of her jumper and then stared down into her half-empty glass of water. She only saw the pristine white handkerchief when it was thrust in front of her and, when she stubbornly refused to take it, she only realised why he had withdrawn it when she felt his fingers on her chin, tilting her face up so that he could carefully dry her eyes.
The breath caught in the back of her throat. His eyes were the colour of dark, bitter chocolate and she felt as though she might drown in them given half a chance.
‘I apologise for that last remark,’ he said gruffly. ‘It was uncalled for.’ She wasn’t a crier. Cesar didn’t know how he knew that but he just did. She might have crazy girlish notions of love and romance but that didn’t make her soppy, which was why the tears still glistening in her eyes had had such an effect on him.
And God, now that he was touching her, he wanted to touch more. He wanted to dip his head and capture her mouth with his, feel the coolness of her lips and the sweetness of her tongue against his. He wanted to slip his hand behind those hideous overall things until he felt the warmth of her breast and then he wanted to touch that ripe pink nipple, stroke it with his fingers until it hardened and made itself ready for his mouth.
He had to make a Herculean effort to drag himself back down to earth.
‘You can keep the handkerchief.’
Jude gathered her scattered wits and tried to think straight even though she could still feel where his fingers had been in contact with her skin, leaving their mark as boldly as if she had been branded.
‘Okay.’ Cesar sat back and looked at her carefully. For a second there, he had been caught up in some rip tide of sensation but he had to remember that he wasn’t born yesterday, whatever sob story he got fed. ‘I admit the jazz club idea might work out if Fernando is prepared to go the distance and do the work and I’m willing to give him credit for trying to get some sort of focus in his life, but I still have serious misgivings about this woman…’
‘You won’t when you meet her,’ Jude told him quickly, sensing the smallest of chinks in his armour and determined to exploit it before it disappeared. ‘Which, hopefully, will be soon.’ Her worry over Imogen and the baby was playing havoc with her emotions and she felt another weeping jag approaching. She diverted it by blowing her nose and standing up. ‘In fact, we should get back to the hospital, see what’s going on. Freddy hasn’t called so I’m hoping that everything is going to be all right.’
In fact, it was another hour before they did, finally, get to see Freddy. The traffic back to the hospital was a nightmare and the car park was an endless line of cars trawling in search of an elusive space.
Jude looked at Freddy’s face and knew immediately that Imogen was through the worst. She also knew, without having to be told, that he wasn’t looking forward to having the inevitable chat with Cesar, but she had done enough to smooth the path and after popping in to give an exhausted Imogen an enormous hug and then stopping in to see the very, very tiny baby with masses of dark hair, which made her want to cry all over again, she headed back to her cottage.
She didn’t know what was being said between the two brothers. Cesar was as hard as granite and with little time for the grey areas that made up most people’s lives. His own life was so ordered and so controlled that he expected everyone else’s to be the same and was intolerant of any deviation.
So why did she…feel so acutely tuned in every time she was around him? Because he was intransigent and autocratic? Because there was a lump of ice where his heart should have been? Because she was in love with him?
The realisation was not accompanied by the clap of thunder or an explosion of fireworks. It just sneaked into her head quietly and unobtrusively, con
firming what she had known in her heart for a while. He filled up every part of her and she couldn’t talk herself out of it or reason it away.
He represented just the sort of person who, on paper, was the last man on the face of the earth she should have been attracted to, but whoever said that love was contained and logical like a game of chess?
Seeing him that afternoon, she had felt as though her world had been tilted on its axis. Now, back in her house, she wondered miserably if it could ever be levered back into position. Even when she had been gritting her teeth and trying not to explode at his all-knowing, all-consuming pigheadedness, she had still felt something inside her melting and taking flight.
And when he had touched her…
She sternly reminded herself that the reason he had touched her in the first place, accidental contact though it had been, was because he had made her cry. She had been emotional, anyway, having to deal with everything that had taken place, and being insulted had just been the final straw. He had called her a pit bull! She masochistically replayed the insult over and over in her head in the hope that she might shore up her weakened defences but she was having little success as she made herself something to eat, when she heard the rap of her front door knocker.
Her immediate thought was that it would have to be Freddy.
Sandwich forgotten, she wiped her hands on the dungarees, which she had yet to get out of, and flew to the door.
She blinked in confusion at the sight of Cesar standing on her doorstep. For a few brief seconds she almost wondered whether her mind was playing tricks on her, but that didn’t last long.
‘I thought you’d want to know what’s been happening at the hospital.’
‘Sure.’
‘Then why don’t you invite me in?’
‘How did you get here?’
‘I borrowed Fernando’s car. He’s going to be spending the night there.’
She felt her heart begin to pound and contemplated telling him that he had caught her at a bad moment, that she was on her way out, but where? And still dressed in her dungarees? And wouldn’t the lie be more of an indication of how much he affected her than if she treated him in much the same manner as she would treat anyone?
‘How is Imogen? The baby? Has there been any improvement? Would you like something to drink? Tea? Coffee?’ She could feel him behind her as she walked back to the kitchen, avoiding the sitting room, which would be too much of a reality check for her.
‘Imogen is steadily improving. The baby is doing as well as can be expected. Better. Apparently, she is a healthy birth weight for…a baby of that prematurity. I’ll have a coffee.’
With her back to him, aware of him pulling out one of the chairs and sitting down, Jude said tentatively, ‘And how was Freddy?’
‘How was he about…what? His girlfriend? His child? Or his cover-up?’
Jude stiffened, but she didn’t swing round to face him. Instead, she continued making them some coffee, only slowly turning around when she could hand him his mug.
‘I thought that maybe you had come here to tell me that you had had a change of heart, had listened to some of what I had to say. If I’d known that you were just going to repeat the same things you said to me earlier on…’
‘I listened to what you said,’ Cesar told her flatly.
‘And?’
‘I naturally expressed my disappointment that he hadn’t seen fit to tell me about…this bit of his personal life…’ He held up one hand to stop her before she could speak. ‘Don’t worry. I’m not the monster you think I am. I appreciate that my brother is going through a difficult time at the moment. I was…very controlled…’
He looked exhausted.
‘Naturally I mentioned that I would have to think carefully about releasing the entire trust fund at his disposal…’
‘Oh, great. In other words, you got your message across loud and clear that you don’t trust the woman he loves and wants to marry.’
‘In other words, I let it be known that I’m willing to sink money into this venture of his—certainly he will get a proportion of his trust fund…’
‘And Imogen? Did you get to meet her at all?’
‘I thought it better to leave her to recover first.’
‘And you’re going to head back to London now? Or are you going to stick around for a few days, moral support for Freddy?’
Cesar hesitated. His sparse retelling of the facts had not allowed for the unexpected empathy he had felt towards his brother nor for the truth, which was that he had paid her words a great deal more attention than she probably assumed. A month ago, he would have dealt with his brother according to the facts as written on a sheet of paper. Namely a blonde stripper, an unknown quantity, had got herself pregnant and, to that effect, his brother wanted to get hold of a vast sum of money in the naive belief that he could throw it at some ill-conceived venture, half of which could feasibly end up in the hands of a woman who had taken advantage of his gullible nature. Ergo, no trust fund.
But something in him seemed to have shifted.
When, for instance, had his brother started fearing him? How had they reached the point where a fundamental life change could be kept hidden?
Cesar had heard the condemnation in Jude’s voice and it had got his back up. It had also given him pause for thought.
Yes, he had been incredibly lenient with Fernando. Indeed, for the first time in many years, they had embraced on parting. And, before he’d left the hospital, he had actually gone to see the baby at the centre of all the fuss and had stood watching it for an inordinately long time in the incubator, amazed that something so small could be so perfectly formed.
Of course, he would reserve judgement until he had met the mother of the child, but he now found himself in the position of being prepared to give the woman both his brother and Jude held in such high regard the benefit of the doubt.
All in all, and hot on the heels of cancelling all his appointments until further notice, his secretary would have been reaching to call the medics were she to see him now.
But underneath it all, and against his better judgement, he could still feel a thread of anger running through him like poison that Jude had deceived him.
He conveniently sidelined the thought that he had justified sleeping with her—seducing her—because he had believed that he might extract whatever she was hiding. The only thing that occupied his mind now was the fact that she had lain in his arms, had made love to him and still managed to conceal something potentially highly damaging to the Caretti empire. She would doubtless call it loyalty to his brother. His experience with the money-grabbing women that circled him like hawks had taught Cesar to call Jude’s secret-keeping a deliberate act of treachery.
And rumbling beneath this was his anger that she had turned him down, had swept aside their love-making as if it had been an unfortunate disease, something passing that needed to be eradicated by pretending it had never taken place.
‘I might just stick around…’ he drawled, looking at her coldly. ‘After all, I’m going to have to make my own value judgements on this person.’
‘I told you…’
‘I know what you told me but surprisingly I’m finding it hard to believe a word you have to say.’
‘That’s not fair!’
‘No? You haven’t got an honest bone in your body, have you, Jude?’
‘I explained to you why I did…what I did.’
Cesar knew that this was a conversation destined to go nowhere. He also knew that he was being unfair, at least to her. And he didn’t quite understand why he couldn’t leave it alone. He shouldn’t have made the trip out here. There was nothing to gain from a pointless confrontation—but he had got into his brother’s car and it had been as though his rational thought processes had closed down.
‘Look at the big picture from my point of view,’ he suggested in a voice that would freeze the fires of hell. ‘You and this woman have been friends since childhood.’
He drained his coffee and stood up, aware that he was on a roll and that he should make an effort to stop. But, looking at her… It enraged him that he could still want her, after all of this. He had never felt so out of control in his life and it wasn’t a good feeling. He didn’t understand it and he didn’t need it. The woman had cast some sort of spell over him and he wanted her conclusively out of his life.
He began walking towards the front door. He knew that she would follow him and she did.
‘You tell me that I should take your word for it that the woman is as pure as the driven snow, innocent of any ulterior motives.’ He turned to look at her and leaned indolently against the door frame. She had that ferocious look on her face—an expression that suggested that, given half a chance, she would have grabbed the largest, heaviest object to hand and slugged him with it. ‘The fact that she met my brother in a nightclub where she works for a living taking her clothes off…’
‘She doesn’t take her clothes off! At least, not all of them…’
‘Immaterial. You get the gist.’
‘I think you should leave.’
‘And I will. When I’m finished saying what I have to say.’
‘I might have guessed that you didn’t come here just to bring me glad tidings,’ Jude said bitterly. ‘I might have guessed that it would have just been too much to have sympathised with Freddy and just be happy for him.’ Had she actually been fool enough to have imagined that he had wiped her eyes with tenderness?
‘Don’t get me wrong. I would be overjoyed if I thought that Fernando was about to embark on a life of undiluted joy and fulfilment with a woman who loved him for the person he was and not the significant amount of money he brings to the equation. And believe me when I tell you that I’m really going to be totally impartial when it comes to sizing up the situation…’
The Notorious Gabriel DiazRuthless Tycoon, Inexperienced Mistress Page 26