Lush Money (Filthy Rich)

by Angelina M. Lopez

  But he was distant in his dark gray suit, as cold and humorless as a statue of a classical god.

  Roxanne heard the echo of Sofia’s words: I don’t know what he’s so afraid of. Shoulders back, she looked King Felipe square in the eye. Bring it, she thought.

  “At last, we meet in the flesh,” said the king, who’d positioned himself so he could literally look down at her. She could see traces of Mateo in the man’s heavy, dark brows and the cleft in his chin. But the whispers of a once-handsome man were overshadowed by the gut stretching his shirt front, the over-tanned hue of his skin, the unnatural tautness around his eyes, and the gel slicking back his dyed black hair. That he said the word “flesh” while working his gaze down her body didn’t help his cause either.

  Roxanne merely nodded. “It’s an honor, your majesty.”

  “That’s a lovely dress,” Queen Valentina said without lowering her nose. Like the king, the queen had made it difficult to see any natural beauty through everything she’d tucked, pulled, injected, and altered. Her hair was a shining frost and her breasts in her body-hugging sheath were as high and round as a prom queen’s. “Last year Gaultier?”

  Roxanne looked down and shook out the creamy, floor-length chiffon. “Theallet.” She smiled at the queen. “Custom.”

  “Well, it’s fine for tonight’s gathering,” the queen sniffed. “But you’ll need to wear something more appropriate when we present you.” Mateo had informed her that a banquet would be held in her honor in three days. “People already assume so many unsavory things about you.”

  Roxanne didn’t let her spine move a millimeter. “Oh?”

  Mateo’s father waved a thick hand. “Don’t misunderstand my wife,” he said. “We’re thrilled you’re as beautiful in real life as you are in pictures. When someone has to purchase a husband, you’re never sure what you’re going to get.”

  Without looking at him, Roxanne quickly put a constraining hand on Mateo’s shoulder. “I see the gloves are off,” she said.

  Queen Valentina narrowed her eyes at her. “We thought some plain speaking would be best before we join our dinner guests. My husband made an arrangement with you in good faith and you’ve dragged his name through the mud.”

  The ludicrous, self-centeredness...as if the son they’d sold off wasn’t worth mentioning. “I’ve apologized to Mateo and I’ve put the full weight of my influence behind improving the image and fortunes of the Monte.” She clasped her hands at her waist and took in both the king and queen. “Some of the rumors about the legitimacy of our marriage have been so persistent, though, it’s almost as if someone doesn’t want the image of the Monte to improve.” Roxanne smiled with teeth. “But don’t worry, my investigators will find the source of the rumors. And I’ll shut him up; those with big mouths usually have such small...everything else, don’t you think, Alteza?”

  The king’s skin turned florid with temper. “I wonder who bends over who at night,” he sneered.

  Mateo pivoted on a heel, startling Roxanne. With his back to his parents, he offered her an arm, which she gingerly took, and then walked with her at a steady pace out of the room. “That’s right, Mateo,” his father called, smugness echoing off the room’s high wood beams. “Inform our guests the king and queen will join them soon.”

  Mateo closed the heavy door behind them and slipped his arm free of hers, burying his hands in his pants pockets as he stood in the doorway.

  Roxanne wanted to smack herself. “I’m sorry,” she murmured. The last thing he needed was her sinking as low as his parents.

  “You have nothing to be sorry for,” he said. He looked straight ahead, a bit of pomade keeping his waves off his forehead, staring at the ancestral portraits that lined the low-lit hallway. He spoke without emotion. “I’m ashamed they’re a part of me.”

  Oh. That. Shame about your origins. She knew that shame better than anyone. “Mateo, you’re not responsible for—”

  He stepped away from her and motioned down the hallway. “We should join the dinner guests in the drawing room,” he said tightly. “It’s not fair to leave Sofia alone with those jackals.”

  Roxanne nodded and once again slipped her arm through his. But rather than the warm strength he’d pressed up against her side when he’d met her at the airport, Mateo was now stiff and formal, keeping inches away from her. Roxanne wasn’t offended; she was surprised. Surprised that he let his incompetent and morally deficient father get to him, sad that that gross man could make Mateo wall up his humor and brilliance and inherent lust for life. For the first time, Roxanne fully understood how Mateo had created such a gulf between himself and his beloved Monte.

  As they walked on centuries-old terracotta, Mateo gave the impression of a man who wished himself very, very far away.

  April: Night One

  Part Two

  Hours later, they were quiet as they entered Mateo’s hilltop home. At least, they were quiet until Mateo, in the dark of the entryway, cracked his shin against something. “God fucking dammit!” Mateo yelled in both Spanish and English, hopping around on one foot and cursing until he reached a wall to slap on the overhead light.

  Roxanne’s suitcases, stacked by her staff in the entryway, had been the culprit. “Oh God, sorry,” Roxanne said, throwing her clutch on a side table and sliding out of her wrap. “Helen wasn’t sure where to put my things. Can I get you some ice?”

  “That gorgon is here?!” Mateo said, still hopping and cursing. “Did you bring your centerfold bodyguard, too? Are they going to jump out and mug me just to make the night more perfect?” He sank down on her stack of suitcases and leaned over to rub his shin.

  Roxanne looked down at his golden head. “My staff is staying in town,” she said quietly. “Please don’t call them names. They’re working hard for both of us.”

  “Then why didn’t they put everything in my bedroom?” he groused. “Where in the hell else would it go?”

  Roxanne stayed quiet as she watched him. The dinner had been legitimately horrible, a multicourse barrage of barely concealed insults, inflated name dropping, and exaggerated tales of the king and queen’s success and social standing in front of Sofia and a few of the king and queen’s closest “friends,” tittering hangers-on and sycophants. They were intentionally trying to make Roxanne flee, as if a few not-remotely-clever insults could do that. She and Mateo had stomached through it, like crawling through the mud of a military exercise. The only time Mateo had raised his voice was when they were leaving, when he’d argued with his sister about staying at the castle—he’d wanted her to come back to his house with them. But Sofia had insisted he and Roxanne needed time alone.

  Roxanne wished she’d come, too.

  “Joder,” Mateo said under his breath. He let up on his shin and shoved to standing. “Which suitcase do you need now? I’ll carry everything else in tomorrow when I’m less hobbled.” He looked drawn and exhausted in his perfectly tailored suit.

  “Mateo,” Roxanne sighed.

  “What?” he barked.

  She met his tired, stormy eyes. “I think it’s best if I sleep in my own room while I’m here.”

  He stared at her for a full tension-building ten seconds before exploding. “Jesus fucking Christ!” he yelled. “This again?”

  “Mateo...” she attempted.

  “I’m sick and tired of this power play. Can’t we fuck like normal people? I want you. You want me.” He stomped around. “So why does this have to be so fucking complicated?”

  “Mateo, you need to stop...”

  “Stop what!”

  Roxanne finally let her voice raise. “Stop yelling at me!” she replied.

  “I’m not—” Mateo shouted at the top of his lungs. Then he swallowed. “Yelling.”

  He slumped back down to the suitcases. “Sorry.”

  She twined her fingers together to keep from stroking
them through his hair. “You’re forgiven. It’s been a rough night.”

  He sighed heavily in agreement as he stared at his boots.

  “Got any booze?”

  He motioned with his elegant fingers toward a doorway without looking up.

  Roxanne ventured forward into the next dark room, slid her hands over a cool, limestone wall until she felt switches, and slowly slid them up. She stood agog as a massive room with a peaked cathedral ceiling and a nighttime vision of the Monte was revealed. The two-story wall that fronted his great room was glass; in the bright blue moonlight she could see a few glowing lights of the town and the snow-capped peaks of the mountain. She imagined the view was spectacular during the day. An image came to her of a tawny haired little girl running out of her bedroom to see that spectacular morning view.

  Roxanne would never get to see the look on her daughter’s face as she watched the sun come up over her kingdom. She rubbed at a sudden pang under her breastbone.

  Must be something she ate.

  Roxanne forcefully pushed the image away and stepped farther into the room. She noted the doorway into a modern-looking kitchen on the left, a hallway on the right, the sunken pit of comfy couches and chairs, the raised dining-table-and-chairs dais with a gorgeous metal sunburst chandelier. She headed to a sideboard and its collection of liquor and wine bottles. She grabbed two cut-crystal glasses, poured several fingers of good bourbon into each of them, and then walked down the gleaming hardwood steps into the living room pit in the center of the room. She slipped off her heels and slid onto the leather couch, tucking her feet under her and pulling a cashmere throw from the back of the couch around her.

  She heard the tap of Mateo’s boots as he joined her in the room. From her nest, she held one of the glasses out to him.

  His eyes took her in as he slowly walked down the steps toward her. “For someone who doesn’t want to sleep in my bed, you sure do make yourself at home,” he said as he took the glass and settled on the leather next to her.

  Roxanne shrugged. “I like your place.”

  “Yeah?” he leaned back against the sofa as he looked around. “I do, too.” He took a sip of the bourbon as he let his shoulders relax.

  “When did you buy it?” she asked, sipping her own drink.

  “Built it. I had it built the moment I got my hands on my trust fund,” he said, leaning forward to shrug out of his suit jacket before settling back. Roxanne admired the pull of his fitted shirt over his defined shoulders. He loosened his tie around his neck. “An architect who grew up in the Monte helped me design it. Not that...” Mateo looked down at his drink. “He doesn’t live in the Monte anymore.”

  “What’s your favorite thing about it?”

  Mateo turned his head to peer at her from under the wave of his hair.

  “What do you like about the house?” She refused to let him slide back into his moroseness.

  He sipped as he considered. Then he lowered his glass. “The light. The view. The shower pressure. There’s a goat path winding through the thick woods just out my study window and it reminds me how impenetrable the Monte once was, how protected it was from the rest of the world. I like the wood floors—they’re so much warmer than stone. I like...” He swallowed as he looked at his glass. “I like that it’s an example of how the Monte can evolve, how we can use the talents of our people to celebrate what we’ve been given and create something new.”

  Roxanne stroked the glass across her lower lip. “Once the vineyards have been invigorated, I imagine your architect friend can find lots of work here building houses.”

  Mateo said nothing as he sipped his drink. Sitting this still and close to him, Roxanne could smell the warm sun and green earth of him.

  “I’m sorry for that shit show at the castle,” he said, looking out at the night.

  “Me, too,” Roxanne murmured, apologizing for her part in antagonizing his parents. “It’s a wonder you and your sister turned out as sane as you did.”

  He gave a laugh without humor and his heavy, expressive brows crinkled in pain. “Oh, belleza, that was easy. Our parents were such a glorious fucking example of what we didn’t want to be. We have negative polarity; my father goes right and I go left. What he wants is what I despise; the more he shouts, the quieter I get.” He looked down at his glass. “Any decency I have is just my own desperate attempt to prove that I am the polar opposite of my father.”

  Roxanne knew the way it stripped one bare to reveal the horrible truths about your parents. She understood the shame of it, the way an injured child always felt responsible, regardless of the amount of therapy, for a parent’s deficiencies. The child always believed, deep down inside, that she must have done something to cause a parent to be so monstrous.

  But the last thing Mateo needed right now was pity. She remembered the words of his sister: He isolates himself in California... He ignores the needs of his people. “That negative polarity thing... Do you ever worry your father has driven you too far away?”

  He looked at her, those brows quirked.

  “I mean, you do live in California.” She took a slow sip of her drink and swallowed. “I guess you could move to the southern hemisphere if you wanted even more distance.”

  “My lab is there,” he said defensively.

  “Oh, right, and there’s no way you could have set up a viticulture lab in Spain.”

  “Not with the resources and talent that UC Davis—” He smacked his crystal glass down on a wood-topped coffee table and turned to face her. “What the fuck, Roxanne?”

  He didn’t need this now, not after the night he’d endured. She knew that. But if not now, when he barely held on to his kingdom, then when? If not her, the temporary wife he seemed to trust, then who?

  She set her glass next to his and folded her hands in her lap. “Have you ever considered that in your efforts to distance yourself from your father, you’ve also distanced yourself from the Monte?”

  His beautiful eyes narrowed on her. “I give this valley my heart,” he said, jabbing his finger at the window. “My blood.”

  “I know you do,” she spoke slowly and soothingly. “Sometimes, as a caretaker, what you’re caring for doesn’t need all that. What it needs is your time. Your attention. When you were young, how much more valuable would it have been if your father had spent time with you rather than showing you off at press conferences?”

  He shot to standing, tall and angry over her. “No. You don’t get to do this. You don’t get to refuse my bed and then burrow into me as if you care about the outcome. You’re either my wife or you’re not.”

  She untucked her feet from beneath her and stood as well. On bare feet, she felt so much smaller than him. She took his white-knuckled fist into her hands.

  “I’m not your wife. Not really.” She grabbed on when he tried to drag his hand away. “But I am your friend.”

  Arrested, he stared down at her.

  “Mateo, do you believe that I care about the Monte?” He nodded. “Do you believe that I care about you?” She saw the tension in his stubborn jaw. Then, slowly, he nodded again. “I like you and I respect you. That’s why I want my own bedroom. Things have become...” She felt her speech stutter on her lips as she looked up into his beautiful face, felt the full weight of his undivided attention. “They’ve become muddled this month. And we have so much on the line: the child I want, the kingdom you need to save. We can help each other; right now we both trust that we want to help each other. But if this becomes romantic... One of us is going to hurt the other person. One of us is going to hurt. And then what do we do? We have so much at stake.”

  At some point, she didn’t know when, her clasp on his fist had become their fingers entwined, their palms locked. He stared, down and into her, and she stared right back, into the man with the golden skin and horrible parents and big brain and tendency to mope and willing
ness to laugh. She didn’t see a prince. She just saw Mateo.

  Her Mateo. And because it was so unfamiliar, Roxanne Medina had no idea that it was at that moment she tumbled head over heels in love with him.

  Mateo continued to look down at her as his thumb gently stroked over the back of her hand. “This has to be the first time a wife has implored her husband not to be romantic.”

  Roxanne smirked as they lowered their joined hands, keeping their fingers entwined. “Certainly in Spain.”

  “So friends?” he asked. They were so close she could see that intriguing dark ring around his irises.

  “Friends with benefits.”

  “A kid and enough money to save a kingdom,” Mateo teased with a slow smile. “We’re rife with benefits.”

  “Oh,” Roxanne said a little breathlessly. Standing this close to him, that smile did something to her insides. “I was just talking about the really hot sex.”

  His move closer to her was almost imperceptible, but Roxanne felt it in her bones, sensed it in her blood. “So tomorrow will be our day of conversation,” he murmured.

  “That’s right.” Her lips tingled, like she could feel his eyes tracing over them. “We need to get everything back in order.”

  “But tonight?”

  His big hands stroked up her naked arms, tickled like feathers.

  Roxanne felt out of breath and lost for words. “I...I guess...” She licked her dry lips, felt the blaze of his eyes at the motion. “If we’re only working on getting pregnant two days a month, we should probably work extra hard.” She looked into his glorious eyes like they were the only thing that could save her. “Shouldn’t we?”