by Dani Collins
“I’d like you to stop working.”
Her heart stammered, and she had to dredge up further strength to elevate her chin.
“While we’re throwing around things that won’t happen, I want you and Val to reconcile so I can socialize with my friend and her daughter.”
“Get another job in a few months. Running the estate is too much for you right now.”
“Your concern is noted. I’m fine,” she lied.
“I am concerned. You couldn’t wait five minutes before setting up your desk?” He pointed in the direction of the room where he’d found her. “That sort of workaholic behavior isn’t healthy when you only have yourself to worry about, never mind when you’ve recently delivered a baby. You should be resting more.”
“First of all, the mansplaining of the effects of childbirth is very cute. Thank you. But speak to any new mother. They all look like this.” She pointed at her face, very aware she was wan beneath the makeup she’d put on this morning. “What am I supposed to do if I don’t work? Become a lady of leisure? Perhaps I could take over the running of the villa from your mother? We got off on such a good note, I’m sure she’d love that.”
His jaw tightened.
She snorted. “Hit the nail on the head, did I?”
“She will step aside from her role once we’re married. That was her intention when I was engaged to Regina. So yes, you can take control of the villa. I assure you there’s enough to keep you busy.”
“Keep me busy?” She tucked her chin. “Why don’t you give me a box of crayons and a puzzle book if that’s the goal?”
He sighed. “It’s a real job, Scarlett. Did you oversee Dad’s vineyards? You could do that here.” He waved toward the terrace and the land beyond. “This villa is bigger than Dad’s. We host parties. It’s not a make-work project.”
“Why would I supervise your vineyards when I’m already doing that for your son?”
“Why be reasonable when you can be obstinate?”
“I’m the one being unreasonable? You’re upset that your mother won’t come out of her room and you are taking it out on me. No, Javiero, I will not quit my job. I want to do it and I have to do it. As for marriage, I’ve given you my terms.”
“Your terms are impossible. Even if you invited Kiara, do you think Val would allow her to come? I told you what he did to me, the corner he pushed me into. I don’t want him here and I won’t beg him to let Kiara and Aurelia come here. Did you know Kiara is marrying him? She’s not demanding you attend her wedding.”
“Because she knows I just had a baby and can’t travel. We texted about it.” She was trying not to let the tendrils of hope she detected in Kiara’s texts fill her with envy. Her friend deserved to be happy. “Besides, her situation is different. She and Val are…” She cleared her throat, then stood tall, refusing to be coy about it. “They’re sleeping together.”
He pointed at the massive bed. “That’s where you will be sleeping. With me.”
Her heart leaped into her throat and thrummed there, making it difficult to talk around it.
“And why would I agree to that?”
“So you can tell me when it’s my turn to get up with him.”
That did sound nice, actually. They’d bumped into each other in the hall a few times in Madrid, but she’d always sent him back to bed and dealt with Locke herself.
“You don’t have to,” she dismissed wearily, too conditioned to do everything alone to seriously consider relying on him. “I’ll manage.”
“No, you won’t. You’ll be sitting at a desk half the night if I’m not there to berate you for it.”
“That was one time! And it was a time zone thing!” She wanted to stamp her foot like a child. “I’m not giving up my job.”
“You don’t have to work. Do you realize how insulting it is that you won’t trust me to support you? You’re acting just like him, hanging on to that rotting pile of gold because what I offer isn’t enough. Exactly how high do your tastes run? Because I make a lot of money.”
“Is that what you think?” She was still angry, but his comparison of her to Niko defeated her. “I’m not saying that at all. Fine. Support me.” She threw out a hand. “In future, I’ll put all my nursing bras and vitamin supplements on your credit card. But I can’t ask you to support my family, Javiero.” She withered into a chair, no longer strong enough to keep this from him. “And that’s why I need to work.”
CHAPTER SIX
HE DIDN’T MOVE, but the dark umbrage in his expression eased to a more concentrated consideration. He pushed his hands into his pockets. “You haven’t said much about your family. Why are they dependent on you? How many are there? Tell me everything.”
“How much time have you got?” she asked with grim humor, glancing at the door in hopes Locke would make his way down here on his own steam. No such luck, however.
“I have all day,” Javiero assured her as he threw himself into the other wingback chair and stacked his feet on the footstool. His one eye packed a punch as he hit her with his intense stare.
She felt him willing her to spill her guts and her middle knotted up. She swallowed the rawness at the back of her throat, but it stayed as a scorched feeling behind her breastbone.
“I don’t want to tell you.” She stared toward the bright blue sky beyond the terrace, eyes stinging. “I don’t want you to hate me more than you already do.” She yearned for him to soften toward her, give her a chance, but this wasn’t the way to do it.
The silence hung between them.
“I don’t hate you,” he finally said. His body was utterly still, his voice quiet and level, yet it wrung her out even more than the silence that had preceded it. “My mother hated my father and he showed very little respect toward her and absolutely no affection. I refuse to raise my son in such a toxic atmosphere. I will never forget what you had to go through to birth him. I’ll never slander you to him or force him to choose between us. But you can’t expect me to trust you. Not until you’ve earned it.”
“Ha.” The sound was knocked out of her. “Such warm sentiments. I’ll be sure to talk you up to him as well, tell him how understanding and generous you were during this difficult time.”
“Don’t test me, Scarlett,” he warned.
She wanted to cry, but weeping was a useless waste of energy. No, she had developed skills and strengths and strategies to get herself through trying times. She just didn’t remember where she’d put them.
Javiero’s feet clapped back onto the floor and he leaned his elbows on his knees, pushing into her space. “You’re the one who said we needed to get to know one another before we could discuss marriage. Talk.”
She took a breath that hurt. It just hurt. It was effort and weight and guilt and shame.
“I’m the oldest, then there’s my brother and our little sister. Marcus does his own thing these days. Went to America. Ellie catches up with him online sometimes, but I haven’t heard from him in more than a year.”
“Your sister upset you earlier. Why?”
She sighed, hurt all over again. “She saw the press release. Niko expected me to keep my pregnancy a secret so I only told Mum and that was just a few weeks before he was born. I didn’t tell her who the father was, either. I just wanted her to know that I was expecting.”
Her mother’s reaction had been mostly about her job and Scarlett’s ability to send money. There’s a lawyer who thinks he can arrange an early release for your father.
“Ellie was upset I didn’t tell her, too. That I didn’t trust her.”
“Do you?”
She hated to say it aloud. “No.”
“Where are they? London?”
“Near Leeds.”
“And your father?”
Here she had to take another bracing breath.
“Dad’s in prison. Dr
unk-driving accident. Thankfully only property damage, no one was hurt or killed, but he was a repeat offender and assaulted a police officer when he was arrested. He has another year.” Her stomach turned to knots every time she thought about what would happen when he was released, so she tried not to.
“Is this why you don’t want to marry? You think I can’t handle a bit of bad press? That’s why I have PR teams, Scarlett. His behavior isn’t yours. People who judge you by association aren’t the kind of people who matter.”
She couldn’t help her disparaging snort at that.
“It’s not your association with my father that I judge. It’s your loyalty to him.”
It still stung. “You’ll judge me even more harshly when I tell you why I was so loyal.” She chewed the corner of her thumbnail, a bad habit she had kicked in adolescence. “It all ties to why I refused to stay that day and why I let Niko dictate when I would tell you about Locke.”
He withdrew, physically, by leaning back into his chair.
That hurt, too. The way he had been reaching out with unconditional compassion had been nice. Now he was back to being absent of it.
“I presume he threatened to fire you, and you were afraid of being unable to support your family.”
“Not exactly. It was complicated. I really did feel a duty to go back to him. He was very sick and couldn’t run things without me. It was a job I’d devoted years to achieving. I didn’t want to throw it away. Also, Kiara and I were the only family he had left. I’m not saying that to make you pity him or feel guilty for not being there. He made his choices and lived the consequences, but he was the grandfather of our children. Kiara and I felt it was the least we could do to nurse him through his final days. I won’t apologize for that.”
“Your heart was in the right place?” he asked with disdain. “I’ll accept you had more sentiment than sense, and I still think he deserved to die alone.”
She rolled her lips inward, aware it was futile to try to change his mind. Her mouth felt unsteady as she continued. She was coming to the part where she judged herself.
Her mother had been hurt by her silence, by her refusal to come home for a visit, then by learning she’d hidden her pregnancy. Scarlett felt horrible about all of it, but she had also embraced using Niko’s wishes as a much-needed excuse to distance herself from her family.
Abusive relationships were very complex, she knew that, but her mother had had three years without her husband—enough time to attend the counseling Scarlett had arranged for her, to gain financial independence and form a healthy circle of friends. Yet she still talked about how soon her husband would be home.
Scarlett couldn’t bear watching that slow-motion collision, couldn’t withstand another fruitless argument. Mostly when she talked to her mother, she wanted to bawl her eyes out with frustration and helplessness, so she stood apart from it as much as she could.
Which soaked her in guilt. She felt in the wrong all the time, especially now that Locke was here and she didn’t have Niko and Kiara as a distraction. She kept wondering what sort of mother her son actually had. A good one? She doubted that. Her view of herself was dark and contemptuous. Not healthy, but she didn’t know how to improve it when she felt so guilty.
“Scarlett?” Javiero prompted.
“When I began working for Niko, I promised him I wouldn’t turn my back on him. That my loyalty wouldn’t falter.”
“A pledge of fealty? How quaintly feudal. Or is the word futile? Because he never rewarded vows. My mother can attest to that.”
“The reward came first. He did something for my family.”
“It’s starting to sound like a transaction, not a favor. He never did anything out of kindness.”
“That’s true.” She frowned at her ragged nails. Niko had always ensured he benefitted as much or more from anything he did. “What he did for me—us—was quite big. My, um, father sold him our family home. Stonewood. It’s an old farmhouse on a modest property, but it has a lovely view. It had been in my mother’s family for generations. She didn’t want to give it up, but it had fallen into disrepair and we couldn’t afford to fix it.” They’d barely been eating, mostly because her father drank all his income. “For Niko it was a place to park his money. He didn’t even see it. His agent handled the transaction then came after us when he realized how bad the condition really was.”
“Sounds like an incompetent agent.”
“My father can be very persuasive.” Manipulative. She found herself playing with the pendant Javiero had given her, fingering the key, which felt smooth and lovely on one side, like a worry stone. “Dad was in real estate and misrepresented the whole thing. Long story short, the agent knew Dad was cheating Niko and encouraged Niko to file a lawsuit. It ruined us. Mum had never had a job and Dad’s agent license was suspended. The money he’d got for the sale of the house was put into a holding account while the suit was pending. We had no house, no money from the sale, and no income to pay rent on the place Mum and Dad had moved into. I had to drop out of university to go home and work. Help out. We all five wound up living in a tiny caravan. Things were very dire. Then Dad learned Niko was in London. He told me to go see if I could talk him into dropping the suit.”
“Your father told you to do that.” He knew where this was going. She could see the repulsion in his cold eye.
“You’re judging,” she pointed out with a fire of humiliation burning hot. “What choice did I have? My father wasn’t going to save us. No one was.”
“How old were you?”
“Twenty-one.” She dropped the pendant to tangle her fingers in her lap. “Things were bad, Javiero. My brother was smoking drugs. My sister was shoplifting. Mum was… Dad was abusive when he was drinking and he drank when he was stressed.”
“Violent? You should have let Niko send him to jail. Did he hurt you or your siblings?” His hands fisted, but when he caught her gaze flicking to them, he splayed his hands on his thighs. His tension remained palpable, though, coming off him in waves.
“Mum and my brother caught the worst of it,” she mumbled. “Through most of my life, Dad would stay sober often enough and long enough we would convince ourselves it was behind us. Then something would happen and… After I went to work for Niko, things stabilized. They were back in Stonewood, but Dad was working a janitor job, resenting it and drinking because of it. It was a huge relief when he got picked up on that driving under the influence charge. He told Mum to tell me to hire a better lawyer. I refused, even though I could afford one.”
“Good.”
It hadn’t felt good. It had felt cold-blooded. Cruel.
“Mum was beside herself. She’s codependent, I guess. She keeps my sister very close, even though Ellie is like Dad, drinks and gets nasty. It’s difficult for me to be around them. I support them, and keep an arm’s length. Maybe I’m enabling. I don’t know anymore.”
“So you did sleep with my father.” She’d never heard anyone sound so sickened. “To persuade him to go lenient on your family.”
“No.” Her voice rasped with anger. “I was prepared to. I told him I would do anything to help my family.”
“Anything.” His hands fisted up again.
“Anything,” she confirmed, holding his gaze, holding it even as the tension pulled like a taut metal string between them, sharp enough to sever flesh.
“I have no way of proving it didn’t come to sex. You’ll have to believe me and I know you won’t.”
“How can I? Why else would he help you?”
Although she had braced herself, his ugly conclusion was still a slap in the face. She blinked and looked away, trying to clear the dampness that matted her lashes.
“Because he was impressed by how far I was willing to go for a man I hated. You and I have something in common,” she added with a bitter smile. “My loathing toward my father is as deep as yours
toward Niko.” There was no humor in her, only despair as she added, “I used to think you and Val were such spoiled rich infants, throwing a tantrum at Niko when he had never hit you. Never sold your home out from under you or told you to throw yourself at a stranger and beg for mercy.”
Javiero’s nostrils flared right before he jumped to his feet and paced away. “When will your father be released? He’s safer in prison. I hope he knows that.”
“He’s not your problem. He’s mine,” she said miserably. “And Niko was a dream by comparison. He said his sons hadn’t shown him such fidelity and if I gave him that sort of allegiance, he would drop the charges and sell Stonewood back to me. He put the title in my name, then took the mortgage payments from the salary he paid me.”
“So generous,” he muttered.
“My mother got to live in her home and my father couldn’t sell it out from under her. It was an absolute triumph as far as I’m concerned.”
“It’s indentured servitude, Scarlett, and it’s illegal. What else did you have to do?”
“Nothing like you’re implying.” She rose, willing to suffer his disparagement over poor choices, but she wouldn’t stand for being vilified over crimes she hadn’t committed. “I had to work all hours crunching numbers and find rare Scotch at midnight in dry countries and face the scathing sarcasm of his recalcitrant sons.”
He crossed his arms, tracking his one eye from the top of her head to her feet and back, much the way he had the first time she’d turned up in front of him on Niko’s behalf.
“He must have been giddy when you said you were pregnant with my child.”
“Not exactly. He insisted on tests, obviously. Then he was pleased, but…” She moved to the opening to the terrace, hugging herself, still miserable over the way Niko’s hard-won regard for her had shifted. “He was disappointed in me.”
“Disappointed? You made the ultimate sacrifice.” Still so scathing he made her flinch.
“He didn’t agree with me for making that final effort to bring you and Val to see him. He had his heir in Aurelia and didn’t care if that shut out you and your mother. I knew I would be on the hook to have to defend that after he was gone, though. We would all be sitting through litigation for a decade. I couldn’t betray his plans to you, but I had to give you both an opportunity to discover what he intended. I had to give you that. Because what he was doing was wrong.”