The traffic was horrendous but eventually they cleared it and, after a series of back roads, emerged at a square of elegant red-bricked Victorian houses in the centre of which was a gated, private park.
There had been meals out but neither she nor her brother had ever actually been asked over to Luiz’s house.
This was evidence of wealth on a shocking scale. Aside from Maria’s expensive bags, which she’d laughingly claimed she couldn’t resist and could afford because her family was ‘not badly off’, there had been nothing to suggest that not badly off had actually meant staggeringly rich.
Even though the restaurants had been grand and expensive, Aggie had never envisioned the actual lifestyle that Luiz enjoyed to accompany them. She had no passing acquaintance with money. Lifestyles of the rich and famous were things she occasionally read about in magazines and dismissed without giving it much thought. Getting out of the car, she realised that, between her and her brother and Luiz and his family, there was a chasm so vast that the thought of even daring to cross it gave her a headache.
Once again she was reluctantly forced to see why Maria’s mother had asked Luiz to watch the situation.
Once again she backtracked over their glossing over of their circumstances and understood why Luiz was now reacting the way he was. He was so wrong about them both but he was trapped in his own circumstances and had probably been weaned on suspicion from a very young age.
‘Are you going to come out?’ Luiz bent down to peer at her through the open car door. ‘Or are you going to stay there all night gawping?’
‘I wasn’t gawping!’ Aggie slammed the car door behind her and followed him into a house, a four-storey house that took her breath away, from the pale marble flooring to the dramatic paintings on the walls to the sweeping banister that led up to yet more impeccable elegance.
He strode into a room to the right and after a few seconds of dithering Aggie followed him inside. He hadn’t glanced at her once. Just shed his coat and headed straight for his answer machine, which he flicked on while loosening his tie.
She took the opportunity to look round her: stately proportions and the same pale marbled flooring, with softly faded silk rugs to break the expanse. The furniture was light leather and the floor-to-ceiling curtains thick velvet, a shade deeper in colour than the light pinks of the rugs.
She was vaguely aware that he was listening to what seemed to be an interminable series of business calls, until the last message, when the breathy voice of a woman reminded him that she would be seeing him tomorrow and that she couldn’t wait.
At that, Aggie’s ears pricked up. He might very well have accused her of being shady when it came to her and her brother’s private lives. She now realised that she actually knew precious little about him.
He wasn’t married; that much she knew for sure because Maria had confided that the whole family was waiting for him to tie the knot and settle down. Beyond that, of course, he would have a girlfriend. No one as eligible as Luiz Montes would be without one. She looked at him surreptitiously and wondered what the owner of that breathy, sexy voice looked like.
‘I’m going to have a quick shower. I’ll be back down in ten minutes and then we’ll get going. No point hanging around.’
Aggie snapped back to the present. She was blushing. She could feel it. Blushing as she speculated on his private life.
‘Make yourself at home,’ Luiz told her drily. ‘Feel free to explore.’
‘I’m fine here, thank you very much.’ She perched awkwardly on the edge of one of the pristine leather sofas and rested her hands primly on her lap.
‘Suit yourself.’
But as soon as he had left the room, she began exploring like a kid in a toyshop, touching some of the clearly priceless objets d’art he had randomly scattered around: a beautiful bronze figurine of two cheetahs on the long, low sideboard against the wall; a pair of vases that looked very much like the real thing from a Chinese dynasty; she gazed at the abstract on the wall and tried to decipher the signature.
‘Do you like what you see?’ Luiz asked from behind her and she started and went bright red.
‘I’ve never been in a place like this before,’ Aggie said defensively.
Her mouth went dry as she looked at him. He was dressed in a pair of black jeans and a grey-and-black-striped woollen jumper. She could see the collar of his shirt underneath, soft grey flannel. All the other times she had seen him he had been formally dressed, almost as though he had left work to meet them at whatever mega-expensive restaurant he had booked. But this was casual and he was really and truly drop-dead sexy.
‘It’s a house, not a museum. Shall we go?’ He flicked off the light as she left the sitting room and pulled out his mobile phone to instruct his driver to bring the four-by-four round.
‘My house is a house.’ Aggie was momentarily distracted from her anger at his accusations as she stared back at the mansion behind her and waited with him for the car to be delivered.
‘Correction. Your house is a hovel. Your landlord deserves to be shot for charging a tenant for a place like that. You probably haven’t noticed, but in the brief time I was there I spotted the kind of cracks that advertise a problem with damp—plaster falling from the walls and patches on the ceiling that probably mean you’ll have a leak sooner rather than later.’
The four-by-four, shiny and black, slowed and Luiz’s driver got out.
‘There’s nothing I can do about that,’ Aggie huffed, climbing into the passenger seat. ‘Anyway, you live in a different world to me … to us. It’s almost impossible to find somewhere cheap to rent in London.’
‘There’s a difference between cheap and hazardous. Just think of what you could buy if you had the money in your bank account …’ He manoeuvred the big car away from the kerb. ‘Nice house in a smart postcode … Quaint little garden at the back … You like gardening, don’t you? I believe it’s one of those things you mentioned … although it’s open to debate whether you were telling the truth or lying to give the right impression.’
‘I wasn’t lying! I love gardening.’
‘London gardens are generally small but you’d be surprised to discover what you can get for the right price.’
‘I would never accept a penny from you, Luiz Montes!’
‘You don’t mean that.’
That tone of comfortable disbelief enraged her. ‘I’m not interested in money!’ She turned to him, looked at his aristocratic dark profile, and felt that familiar giddy feeling.
‘Call me cynical, but I have yet to meet someone who isn’t interested in money. They might make noises about money not being able to buy happiness and the good things in life being free, but they like the things money can do and the freebies go through the window when more expensive ways of being happy enter the equation. Tell me seriously that you didn’t enjoy those meals you had out.’
‘Yes, I enjoyed them, but I wouldn’t miss them if they weren’t there.’
‘And what about your brother? Is he as noble minded as you?’
‘Neither of us are materialistic, if that’s what you mean. You met him. Did he strike you as the sort of person who … who would lead Maria on because of what he thought he could get out of her? I mean, didn’t you like him at all?’
‘I liked him, but that’s not the point.’
‘You mean the point is that Maria can go out with someone from a different background, just so long as there’s no danger of getting serious, because the only person she would be allowed to settle down with would be someone of the same social standing as her.’
‘You