‘Could you please inform your staff that there’s absolutely no need to bother with the whole “Lady Calthorpe” thing?’ she said brusquely. ‘I never use the title myself, and I prefer it if other people just address me by my name.’
Alejandro looked up from the share report. ‘Of course. If that’s what you prefer, I’ll pass it on.’
His face didn’t betray a flicker of emotion, so why did Tamsin get the distinct impression that he was laughing at her? The irritation that had been simmering inside her for the last hour now came bubbling up, like milk coming to the boil.
‘Do you have a problem with that?’
He leaned back in his seat, apparently totally relaxed, but his hooded gaze stayed fixed to her face with a sharpness that belied his laid-back body language. ‘Not at all,’ he said smoothly, throwing the report onto the seat beside him and unfolding a snowy-white linen napkin. ‘I just find it slightly … ironic that you’re suddenly so keen to play down your aristocratic connections.’
‘Ironic?’ she snapped. ‘In what way ironic?’
Alejandro took an unhurried mouthful of wine. ‘Well, you clearly have no problem with using them when it suits you, to get what you want.’
Alberto appeared again, carrying two white plates as big as satellite dishes, each bearing a delicate arrangement of pale-pink lobster and emerald-green salad leaves in its centre. He set these down on the table with elaborate care, giving Tamsin the chance to beat back the fury that instantly flamed inside her. She waited until Alberto had retreated again before answering.
‘Let’s get this straight from the outset, shall we? I love my family. I’m proud of who I am and where I come from, but I have never used it in any way to open doors for me in my professional life.’
Toying lazily with a rocket leaf, Alejandro reflected that that wasn’t what the guy he’d had dinner with last night had said. A board member of the RFU, he had confided over an extremely good port that there had been no other contenders for the England-strip commission, that the design brief from the chairman’s daughter had been the only one under consideration.
‘You don’t believe me, do you?’
He smiled. ‘Not really. I’m prepared to believe that you might think that because you have a flat and a job that your life is just like everyone else’s. But your family background—’
She cut him off with an incredulous gasp. ‘You hypocrite! We’re having this conversation on board your private jet, for God’s sake! What do you know about living like everyone else?’
He felt himself tense, giving a small indrawn hiss of warning. ‘The difference is,’ he said with quiet venom, ‘I’ve worked for this. For everything I have. I came from nothing, remember.’
He expected her to back down then, to understand that she—the pampered heiress who had never known what it was like to be without anything, particularly not an identity—was on very, very dangerous ground here. But she didn’t. Instead she laid down her fork and looked at him through narrowed eyes.
‘OK,’ she said softly, pausing to suck mayonnaise off her thumb. ‘You had it tough. So that made you need to prove yourself, didn’t it?’
Her words were like a punch in the solar plexus. A very hard, accurate and unexpected punch.
‘Which I’d say,’ she went on in the same quiet, even tone, ‘means that you’re just as much shaped by your family background as I am.’
‘Wrong. I have no “family background”.’
His voice was like gravel, and the warning in it was blatant. She ignored it. A small frown creased her forehead beneath her sleek platinum hair, but other than that her expression was completely calm as she said, ‘Of course you do. Everyone does.’
He gave an icy smile. ‘Maybe in your world, but my family background was wiped out when I was five years old, when I came to England.’
Her frown deepened. ‘Why did you come?’
The pressurised, climate-controlled air seemed suddenly to be charged with tension. Tapping one finger against the polished table top, Alejandro looked out at the blue infinity beyond the window of the plane. He wanted to tell her to back off, that she had strayed into territory that he kept locked, barred and guarded with razor wire, but somehow to do so felt like a denial of who he was and where he’d come from; a betrayal of his father.
And hadn’t his mother betrayed Ignacio D’Arienzo enough for both of them?
He kept his tone neutral and his explanation brief. ‘Argentina was a troubled country at the time that I was born. There was a military dictatorship. My father and uncles were taken for their involvement with a trade union, and my mother was afraid that we might be next. She was half English, on her father’s side, and she booked us on a flight to London the next day. We took nothing with us.’
‘What happened to your father?’
The pure, clear sunlight filtering in through the moisture-beaded window of the plane lit up Tamsin’s face, turning her skin to translucent gold. She leaned forward, resting her elbows on the table and propping her chin upon them. Her eyes were the cool, shady green of an English woodland in summertime, and they seemed to draw him into their quiet depths.
‘Who knows? He’s one of thousands of los desaparecidos: the disappeared. Neither living nor dead.’
‘That’s an awful thing to have had to live with,’ Tamsin said softly. ‘Not knowing …’
He shrugged. ‘It allowed me to believe that he was alive.’ His smile was brutal. ‘Unfortunately my mother didn’t share that view. She remarried quite quickly—the man she worked for as a housekeeper in Oxfordshire.’
‘Oh,’ Tamsin said, and it was more of a whispered sigh than a word. She hesitated, biting her lip. ‘But it can’t have been easy for her.’
Alejandro rubbed a hand across his forehead. Of course, he should have realised that Tamsin Calthorpe would see it from his mother’s side. They were two of a kind. Loyalty and faithfulness weren’t on the program. It was all about expedience.
‘Oh, I think it was,’ he said with brittle, flinty nonchalance. ‘I think it was very easy, in the end, to completely reinvent herself and behave as though the past had never happened. The only thing that was difficult was living with the reminder of where she’d come from. Which was where my long incarceration in the British public-school system began.’
While he was speaking she’d been playing absently with the stem of her wine glass, but suddenly she wasn’t doing that any more, and her hand was covering his. Her touch seemed to burn him, to sear flesh that already felt exposed and flayed raw.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said in a quiet voice.
He’d waited six years for that, and the irony of the circumstances in which he was finally hearing it took his breath away. What was she sorry about—his mother’s betrayal, or her own?
He moved his hand from beneath hers.
‘I doubt it,’ he said getting up and giving her a twisted smile. ‘Yet.’
Well, actually, he was wrong. She was sorry. Very sorry.
Sorry she’d agreed to come with him, sorry she’d ever set eyes on him, sorry she’d made the mistake of responding to him like he was a decent, well-adjusted human being. It wouldn’t happen again any time soon.
She was only trying to break down the awkwardness that seemed to exist perpetually between them. She was trying to be nice. She couldn’t help it if he was bitter, emotionally arrested and had major trust issues.
Tamsin sighed and looked out of the window into nothingness.