The corridor he walked through on his way to the aftershow party forked. About to turn left with the group he was with, which included members of the Spanish royal family, Javier felt a hand settle on his shoulder and steer him firmly in the other direction.
No one other than his twin would have dared touch him in such a manner.
‘What’s the matter?’ Javier asked, staring at his brother with suspicion as they walked.
‘I wanted to talk to you alone,’ Luis replied.
There was something in his brother’s tone that lifted the hairs on the nape of his neck.
Tension had simmered between them since his twin’s foolhardy trip to the Caribbean. How Luis thought that marrying Benjamin’s sister would restore their reputations was still, well over a month on, beyond Javier’s comprehension. Although wildly different from him in both looks and personality, his brother usually had excellent judgement. His opinion was the only one Javier ever thought worthy of consideration.
Fortunately his brother had seen sense at the last minute and returned to Madrid as a single man but things had not been right between them since.
Luis was his only constant. It had been the two of them, facing the world and everything it could throw at them, together, since they had shared the same womb.
Luis waited until they were out of anyone’s earshot before turning to him. ‘You knew we were ripping Benjamin off all those years ago, didn’t you?’
The rage that had simmered in Javier all evening blazed at the mention of his nemesis’s name.
Seven years ago the Casillas brothers had invited Benjamin to invest in a project they were undertaking in Paris, the creation of a skyscraper that became known as Tour Mont Blanc. They had invited his investment only because the seller of the land, to whom they had paid a significant deposit, suddenly told them they had until midnight to pay the balance or he would sell to another interested buyer. They didn’t have the cash. Benjamin did.
‘We didn’t rip him off,’ Javier reminded him icily. ‘He was the fool who signed the contract without reading it.’
‘And you should have warned him the terms had changed as you’d said you would. You didn’t forget, did you?’
Javier might be many things but a liar was not one of them.
Luis had been the one to invite Benjamin onto the project. His investment was worth twenty per cent of the land fee. In the rush of sealing the deal Luis had told Benjamin it meant twenty per cent of the profits. Their lawyer, who drew up the contract in record time, had been the one to point out that the Casillas brothers would be doing all the work and that Benjamin’s profit share should be only five per cent, a point Javier had agreed with.
The contract had been changed accordingly. Javier had emailed it to Benjamin expecting him to read the damn thing and negotiate if the new terms were not to his liking.
‘I knew it.’ Luis took a deep breath. ‘All these years and I’ve told myself that it had been an oversight on your part when I should have accepted the truth that you never forget. In thirty-five years you have never forgotten anything or failed to do something you promised.’
‘I never promised to email him.’ Javier never made promises he didn’t intend to keep. People could say what they liked about him—and frequently did, although never to his face—but he was a man of his word.
‘Not an actual promise,’ Luis conceded. ‘But look me in the eye and tell me it wasn’t a deliberate act on your part.’
Luis had asked him to give Benjamin a heads-up about the changes in terms when Javier emailed the contract. At no point had Javier agreed to this request and Luis should be thankful for it. Benjamin’s failure to read the contract before signing it had made the Casillas brothers richer to the tune of two hundred and twenty-five million euros. Benjamin had still made an excellent profit—profit—of seventy-five million and all he’d had to do for that substantial sum was transfer some funds. That he’d had the nerve to sue them over it was beyond the pale. That Benjamin had refused to accept the court’s judgement when the judge had thrown the case out, and then stolen Javier’s fiancée from him, was despicable.
And the world thought he was the bad man in all this?
Blind, prejudiced fools, the lot of them. He knew what they all thought. The world looked at his face and saw his murderer father.
‘For what reason would it have been deliberate?’ he asked coldly.
‘That is for your conscience to decide. All I know for sure is that Benjamin was our friend. I have defended you and I have fought your corner—’
‘Our corner,’ Javier corrected, his limited patience right at the point of snapping.
Now his own twin was questioning his motives?
What happened to the loyalty that had always bound them together?
‘I assume this burst of conscience from you is connected to that damned woman.’
He’d had a sense of foreboding in the pit of his stomach since spotting Chloe Guillem, Benjamin’s sister, in the audience that night.
Chloe had betrayed them as greatly as her brother had; had aided and abetted his plot to steal Freya and was, unquestionably, the cause of all the tension that had hung between Javier and Luis since Luis’s return from the Caribbean.
A darkness rarely seen on his brother’s face suddenly appeared, and before Javier had time to blink, Luis had grabbed him by the collar of his shirt. ‘If you ever speak about Chloe in that way again then you and I are finished. Do you hear me? Finished.’
‘If you’re still defending her to me then I would say we’re already finished, brother.’ He spat the last word directly into Luis’s face.
Javier knew in his bones that something had happened between Luis and Chloe. Luis had always had a roving eye for the ladies but never had Javier had cause to suspect a shift in his brother’s loyalty from it.
If Luis wanted to be with that bitch after what she had done to him then Luis could get the hell out of his life. Loyalty counted for everything and if Luis had lost sight of that then he was no brother to him.
Eyeball to eyeball, they glowered at each other, the venom seeping between them thick enough to taste.
Then Luis released his hold and stepped back.
Javier stared at the man he had shared a womb with, had shared a bedroom with, had fought with, had protected, had been protected by, had grieved with, the other side of the coin that was the Casillas twins, and watched him take backwards strides until he turned his back on him.
Breathing heavily, his hands clenched into fists, his hardening heart thumping, Javier watched Luis collide with a petite blonde woman in his haste to get away from him.
In all their thirty-five years neither of them had ever turned their back on the other.
It would be the first and last time Luis walked away from him.
In the periphery of his vision he saw the woman his treacherous brother had bumped into come towards him, but with his gaze on Luis’s retreating back, it was only when she stood a few feet from him that her features came into focus.
Javier stared at the face he had last seen two months before when he had shown her to the door of his house.
Big pale blue eyes stared back, apprehension shining out of them.
The rage inside him ratcheted up another notch. Any higher and there was real danger he would combust.
This was a face he had never wanted to see close-up again.
‘You should be at the aftershow party,’ he snapped.
Sophie Johnson was part of Compania de Ballet