‘What about me?’ Javier frowned, eased himself off the desk and returned to where he had been sitting.
‘Have you married? Got children?’ The artificiality of the situation threatened to bring on a bout of manic laughter. It was surreal, sitting here making small talk with a guy who probably hated her guts, even though, thankfully, she had not been subjected to the sort of blistering attack she had been fearing.
At least, not yet.
At any rate, she could always walk out...although he had dangled that carrot in front of her, intimated that he would indeed be willing to discuss the terms and conditions of helping them. Could she seriously afford to let her pride come in the way of some sort of solution to their problems?
If she had been the only one affected, then yes, but there was her brother, her mother, those faithful employees left working, through loyalty, for poor salaries in the ever-shrinking family business.
‘This isn’t about me,’ Javier fielded silkily. ‘Although, in answer to your question, I have reached the conclusion that women, as a long-term proposition, have no place in my life at this point in time. So, times have changed for you,’ he murmured, moving on with the conversation. He reached into his drawer and extracted a sheet of paper, which he swivelled so that it was facing her.
‘Your company accounts. From riches to rags in the space of a few years, although, if you look carefully, you’ll see that the company has been mismanaged for somewhat longer than a handful of years. Your dearly departed husband seems to have failed to live up to whatever promise there was that an injection of cash would rescue your family’s business. I take it you were too busy playing the good little wife to notice that he had been blowing vast sums of money on pointless ventures that all crashed and burned?’
Sophie stared at the paper, feeling as though she had been stripped naked and made to stand in front of him for inspection.
‘I knew,’ she said abruptly. Playing the good little wife? How wrong could he have been?
‘You ditched your degree course to rush into marriage with a man who blew the money on...oh, let’s have a look...transport options for sustainable farmers...a wind farm that came to nothing...several aborted ventures into the property market...a sports centre which was built and then left to rot because the appropriate planning permission hadn’t been provided... All the time your father’s once profitable transport business was haemorrhaging money by the bucketload. And you knew...’
‘There was nothing I could do,’ Sophie said tightly, loathing him even though she knew that, if he were to lend them any money, he would obviously have to know exactly what he was getting into.
‘Did you know where else your husband was blowing his money, to the tune of several hundred thousand?’
Perspiration broke out in a fine, prickly film and she stared at him mutinously.
‘Why are you doing this?’
‘Doing what?’
‘Hanging me out to dry? If you don’t want to help, then please just say so and I’ll leave and you’ll never see me again.’
‘Fine.’ Javier sat back and watched her.
She had never lain spread across his bed. He had never seen that hair in all its glory across his pillows. He had felt those ripe, firm breasts, but through prudish layers of clothes. He had never tasted them. Had never even seen them. Before he’d been able to do any of that, before he’d been able to realise the powerful thrust of his passion and his yearning, she had walked away from him. Walked straight up to the altar and into the arms of some little twerp whose very existence she had failed to mention in the months that they had been supposedly going out.
He had a sudden vision of her lying on his bed in the penthouse apartment, just one of several he owned in the capital. It was a blindingly clear vision and his erection was as fast as it was shocking. He had to breathe deeply and evenly in an attempt to dispel the unsettling and unwelcome image that had taken up residence in his head.
‘Not going to walk out?’ Javier barely recognised the raw lack of self-control that seemed to be guiding his responses.
He’d wanted to see her squirm but the force of his antipathy took him by surprise because he was realising just how fast and tight she had stuck to him over the years.
Unfinished business. That was why. Well, he would make sure he finished it if it was the last thing he did and then he would be free of the woman and whatever useless part of his make-up she still appeared to occupy.
‘He gambled.’ Sophie raised her eyes to his and held his stare in silence before looking away, offering him her averted profile.
‘And you knew about that as well,’ Javier had a fleeting twinge of regret that he had mentioned any of this. It had been unnecessary. Then he remembered the way she had summarily dumped him and all fleeting regret vanished in a puff of smoke.
She nodded mutely.
‘And there was nothing you could have done about that either?’
‘I don’t suppose you’ve ever lived with someone who has a destructive addiction?’ she said tightly. ‘You can’t just sit them down for a pep talk and then expect them to change overnight.’
‘But you can send them firmly in the direction of professional help.’ Javier was curious. The picture he had built of her had been one of the happily married young wife, in love with Prince Charming, so in love that she had not been able to abide being away from him whilst at university—perhaps hoping that the distraction of an unsuitable foreigner might put things into perspective, only for that gambit to hit the rocks.
Then, when he had inspected the accounts closely, he had assumed that, blindly in love, she had been ignorant of her loser husband’s uncontrolled behaviour.
Now...
He didn’t want curiosity to mar the purity of what he wanted from her and he was taken aback that it was.
‘Roger was an adult. He didn’t want help. I wasn’t capable of manhandling him into a car and driving him to the local association for gambling addicts. And I don’t want to talk about...about my marriage. I... It’s in the past.’
‘So it is,’ Javier murmured. When he thought about the other man, he saw red, pure jealousy at being deprived of what he thought should have been his.
Crazy.
Since when had he considered any woman his possession?
‘And yet,’ he mused softly, ‘when is the past ever really behind us? Don’t you find that it dogs us like a guilty conscience, even when we would like to put it to bed for good?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You ran out on me.’
‘Javier, you don’t understand...’
‘Nor do I wish to. This isn’t about understanding what motivated you.’ And at this point in time—this very special point in time when the tables had been reversed, when she was now the one without money and he the one with the bank notes piled up in the coffers—well, she was hardly going to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth when it came to motivations, was she? Oh, no, she would concoct some pretty little tale to try to elicit as much sympathy from him as she could...
‘I’m not asking you to give me money, Javier. I... I’m just asking for a loan. I would pay it all back, every penny of it.’
Javier flung back his head and laughed, a rich, full-bodied laugh that managed to lack genuine warmth. ‘Really? I’m tickled pink at the thought of a Classics scholar, almost there but never graduated, and her sports scholarship brother running any company successfully enough to make it pay dividends, never mind a company that’s on its last legs.’