‘Is there a difference?’ Javier remembered his mother once telling him sharply to stop being jealous of Luis and Benjamin’s friendship when she’d caught him sitting on his own, scowling as he’d watched them plot ways to put itching powder in the corps de ballet costumes.
She hadn’t understood that he was watching over Luis, ready to step in if things went too far.
Benjamin had brought Luis’s worst instincts out in him. They’d egged each other on in their troublemaking, leaving Javier to cover for their messes as best he could, terrified his father would hear and mete out punishment.
Their father had needed little excuse to punish Luis.
Had Javier been jealous of Luis and Benjamin’s friendship as his mother had accused?
No, he assured himself. He’d been looking out for his brother.
Every mark their father had made on Luis’s body Javier had felt as if it had been delivered on his own skin.
‘Sure there’s a difference,’ she answered with a rueful smile. ‘I would have loved to dance as well as Freya did but I would never hate her for it. I felt so sorry for her and the way those mean girls treated her that I wanted to protect her. I became her shadow. The poor thing couldn’t get rid of me.’
‘You weren’t worried they would turn their cruelty on you?’
‘It didn’t cross my mind and I wouldn’t have cared if they did. I could never sit back and watch someone suffer if it was in my power to help them.’
‘What are you, some kind of saint?’
Her answering laugh was as mocking as his words. ‘Hardly.’
Maybe not a saint, he thought, gazing at her, noting for the first time that she had not met his eyes once since getting on the bed, but there was an inherent goodness about his new wife.
His heart thumped loudly against his ribcage as the strangest impulse to gather this beautiful, compassionate creature into his arms filled him.
He closed his eyes and breathed deeply, willing the impulse away, not knowing where it had come from, just knowing that nothing good could come from it, not for her, pampered and cosseted all her life as she had been.
It was easy to be a good person, he thought scathingly, when you’d known nothing but love and indulgence in your life.
What troubles had his wife had? Not being the best dancer in the school was the extent of it and that wasn’t something that had bothered her, strange though the concept of a professional dancer happy to settle for being less than the best was to him. Even their unplanned baby she considered to be a blessing.
The harsh, cruel realities of the world had never touched Sophie on a personal level. She had only ever observed it, had no concept of what it was like to feel it and live it.
He quite understood why Freya had felt compelled to warn her of him. Look at her, sitting there, not caring of the danger she was in just to share a bed with him.
She wanted to know why Freya and Benjamin hated him so much? He would tell her. Let her eyes be opened by the truth.
‘Benjamin hates us because we approached him for the investment in the Tour Mont Blanc project on the day his mother’s cancer was diagnosed as terminal.’
Now her eyes did rise to meet his.
‘He doesn’t just believe we ripped him off but believes we took advantage of him,’ he added for good measure.
‘And did you?’ she asked with a whisper.
‘We did not rip him off.’ Of that he was vehement.
‘What about taking advantage of him? Did you?’
‘Not deliberately. We’d paid the seller of the land a huge deposit. He then came to us and gave us twenty hours to pay the remainder or he would sell to another interested buyer. We didn’t have the ready cash for it, so we asked Benjamin if he wanted to invest. Neither Luis nor myself were aware that Benjamin had just received that diagnosis. He’d been minutes from calling us with the news. His mother had been best friends with our mother.’
Their friendship had seen the two women raise their children as family. When Javier and Luis’s mother had been killed, Louise Guillem had been the one to break the news to them. Afterwards, she had taken them under her wing as much as she could.
Javier had felt little in the way of emotion since his mother’s death but when he’d carried Louise’s coffin he’d felt the weight in his heart as on his shoulder.
‘He signed the contract that same day?’ she asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Thinking he would receive twenty per cent of the profit?’
‘Yes. I didn’t know he hadn’t read it until after it was signed.’
‘You didn’t warn him?’
‘Why should I have done? I thought he would read it or get his lawyer to.’
‘That’s cold.’
‘Just starting to realise that, are you?’ he mocked. Let her see the truth because so far she’d seemed determined to keep herself blind. ‘Business is business. He didn’t have to say yes to the investment.’
‘So you did take advantage of him.’
‘Not initially and not deliberately. When I realised he hadn’t read the contract my feelings on the matter were simple; it was his own fault. It was business, not personal.’
‘But Benjamin doesn’t see it like that,’ she supposed, rightly. ‘And I would guess that he wouldn’t have entertained the idea of doing any business that day if it hadn’t been you and your brother doing the asking.’
‘Maybe he wouldn’t have but he did. Do not forget, Benjamin made seventy-five million euros in profit on that investment. He has been handsomely rewarded.’
‘But not as handsomely rewarded as he’d thought he would be.’
‘If he’d read the contract he would have seen the terms had been changed. If he’d been unhappy about that he could have negotiated.’
‘If you didn’t warn him the terms had changed he didn’t know to read it. He trusted you.’
The stab in his guts at this truth hit him hard.
He refused to let it take hold, just as he’d resisted it for seven years.
He allowed no room for sentimentality in his life, never mind his business, and he would not allow Sophie’s soft chastisement to breach that.
Throwing the covers off, Javier climbed out of bed and grabbed his boxer shorts off the floor. ‘Trust should not have come into it. Not with business. I would never sign a contract without reading it first, no matter who presented it to me.’
‘You were not in his shoes. Couldn’t you have made an allowance on this occasion? For his state of mind about his mother? Torn the contract up and renegotiated?’
‘No one made allowances for me after my father killed my mother.’
Even under the dim hue of the bedside light he saw her face drain of colour.
Good. She needed to wake up to the truth.
He was his father’s son, his father’s favourite, his father’s mirror image inside and out.
Shaking his trousers out first, he pulled them up. ‘Luis and I had to fight to get the business world to take us seriously, to get credit, to get investment...we’ve had to fight for everything. We live with the legacy of our mother’s death every day of our lives and if that has made me cold and ruthless then so be it. It’s called survival, something you with your unicorn-and-rainbow-filled childhood know nothing