Kept By The Spanish Billionaire. Cathy Williams

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      ‘Spit what out?’

      ‘Whatever’s eating you up. We might as well forget about getting any sleep tonight.’

      Rafael leaned against the doorframe and stared down at her. And this, he thought, was precisely why he didn’t go for the emotional types. They poured their hearts out, they sobbed, they lacked restraint.

      Amy’s blue eyes tangled with his deep, deep, almost black ones and she felt momentarily giddy.

      ‘I need to sit down,’ she said shakily.

      Rafael stood aside and made a sweeping gesture in the direction of his bed, which, to Amy, looked unbelievably tempting. To hell with prudish, maidenly qualms. She was suddenly exhausted.

      His bed smelt of him, a clean, masculine smell that made her want to close her eyes and inhale deeply because it was a weirdly comforting smell. And why pretend? She had grown up bunking down and sharing beds. Her mother had sworn that it did the immune system a world of good. She slipped under the luxurious, silky soft quilt and yawned.

      ‘I just can’t believe it,’ Amy said, just as Rafael was about to leave the room and head back downstairs so that he could resume the conference call to Australia that had been so rudely interrupted. He turned around and narrowed his eyes on the small figure now propped up against the pillows. She looked ridiculously fragile, he thought, which seemed incongruous considering the size of her mouth.

      ‘Can’t believe what?’ Rafael was not a man who was accustomed to the emotional complexities of women. He had always listened to James’s tales of woe with a certain amount of amusement and privately congratulated himself on his wisdom in going for women who didn’t play games or have moods or weren’t, in short, a mess. He didn’t sleep around and his breakups had never been messy. At thirty-four, which didn’t exactly qualify him as The Old Man of the Sea, he nevertheless considered himself pretty much together emotionally. A man who knew what he wanted in life, and that included women.

      ‘Can’t believe how I could ever have been so stupid. I mean…’ Amy’s voice wobbled as she considered the depth of her stupidity ‘…just because he looked at me once or twice and chatted now and again…how could I have got it into my head? I mean…has that ever happened to you? Has it? You just completely misread someone else’s signals and then fabricate a whole fairy tale in your head that’s just way, way off target?’ ‘No.’

      ‘What…never?’ Amy asked, temporarily disconcerted.

      ‘Never.’

      ‘Oh. So I guess you wouldn’t really know what it’s like to be…to be…’ ‘No. I wouldn’t.’ He was fairly sure he was about to find out, unless, of course, he put a stop to this nonsense, shut the bedroom door firmly and only resurfaced when she was about to leave in the morning. ‘But I can tell you that he’s not worth it.’

      Amy tried to focus on James, his charming, boyish face, his blond hair that always managed to look ever so slightly tousled, though out of the corner of her eye she couldn’t help but notice Rafael’s brooding presence by the door. He was probably sick to death of her, she couldn’t help thinking, but for some reason she didn’t want to be on her own. She felt too vulnerable.

      ‘You can’t say that. You don’t know him.’

      ‘I know that no one is worth shedding tears over.’

      ‘Oh!’ Reluctantly she abandoned the temptation to wallow and frowned at Rafael curiously. ‘I guess you’ve never been in love…’

      Rafael was fast regretting his impulse to listen to the woman because he had momentarily felt sorry for her.

      ‘I’m not entirely sure I believe in the concept,’ he told her abruptly. ‘Romantics hang onto the idea for dear life because they think it makes sense of life, but for me…no. I think I’ll avoid it like the plague if the net result is what I’m looking at right now.’

      Amy got up the energy to glare but it didn’t last long. ‘At least we Romantics have fun!’

      ‘If fun is lying on a stranger’s bed at one-thirty in the morning blubbing…’ Rafael said dryly and Amy was forced to concede defeat.

      ‘Okay. You win. I’m a fool. Maybe next time lucky.’ She gave him a watery grin and it was such a brave pretence of a smile that Rafael found himself reluctantly smiling back. ‘Maybe,’ she mused, ‘next time I won’t fall for the boss…’

      CHAPTER THREE

      OKAY. Rafael was man enough to admit it to himself the following morning. He was curious. He could only assume that that was what enforced solitude did to a person, because his contact with the outside world, for the past three days, had been limited to telephone conversations or, more often than not, communication via e-mail.

      At the time, he had not envisaged this as a problem. Work could be done as easily via computers and fax machines as it could be done face to face and he had made damned sure that he had total access to the outside world thanks to the telephone people who had installed everything he could possibly need for speedy connection to the Internet. At the click of a button he had been able to give his secretary all the instructions she needed to ensure that the numerous tentacles of his highly profitable companies were operating perfectly.

      He had even, in the deepest corners of his mind, used the uninvited situation to his own advantage.

      He paused for a few seconds, frowning into the distance as he thought about Elizabeth, the eminently suitable Elizabeth, and their very civilised parting. One that he had instigated although, when he thought about it logically, he couldn’t quite understand what had prompted his decision because she was everything he wanted, at least on paper.

      He had met her when she had been heading the team of lawyers they had used eight months previously to sort out some complex legal problems on a takeover he had been finalising. He had been impressed, first, by her immense competence and her cool, self-assured manner. Later, by the many things they had in common, ranging from opera to theatre, from jazz music to fine wines.

      And to complete the perfect picture, she was just the sort of leggy brunette he favoured, with short, tailored hair and an elegant appreciation of everything cultured.

      It had been a little unnerving that his mother had taken an instant dislike to the woman, but Rafael had not allowed that to trouble the very real ideas he had been nurturing about taking the inevitable plunge into matrimony. As arrangements went, it would have been perfect simply because they were so alike in so many ways.

      He wasn’t quite sure when doubts had set in, but eventually the very perfect nature of their relationship had started to feel just a little dull. Three weeks ago he had been visited by an unsettling vision of Elizabeth and himself twenty years down the road, an elegant but essentially boring middle-aged couple still frequenting the opera, having raised their very perfect but essentially boring children to do exactly the same.

      He had withdrawn from the relationship and finally broken it off knowing that ten days in the Hamptons, away from any company dos that they might mutually attend, would be beneficial for both of them.

      Which brought him back to his curiosity about the creature still lying upstairs in his bed, having fallen asleep on him just when she had revealed the object of her unrequited passion.

      He СКАЧАТЬ