Wasn’t that rigid clinging to tradition one of his reasons for turning his back on his family?
He kept his gaze dead straight, refusing to turn his head to glance at the miles of rolling paddocks that usually held his family’s prized thoroughbreds and foal training ground. Even then, he couldn’t help but notice, as his chauffeur drove him towards his ancestral home, that the normally teeming landscape was now curiously empty, the dozen or so gauchos usually in each corral nowhere in sight.
He brought his wandering thoughts back under control. There would be no indulging in nostalgia on this visit. In fact, Emiliano intended the trip to the renowned Castillo Estate just outside Cordoba, Argentina, to be as brief as the summons that had brought him here.
He had only come out of respect for Matias, his older brother. Had Matias been in a position to speak, Emiliano would’ve made sure his brother relayed his refusal of the summons he’d received in London loud and clear to their parents.
Sadly, Matias wasn’t in a position to do any such thing.
The reason for that tightened his jaw, even as a brief tinge of sadness assailed him. Thankfully, there was little time to dwell on it as the car drew up in front of the extensive luxury villa in which several generations of proud, intractable Castillos had lived.
Oak double doors opened as he stepped out of the car.
Emiliano tensed, for a moment forgetting that neither his father nor his mother had deigned to open doors of their own accord for as long as he could remember. Not when they had servants to do it for them.
Mounting the steps, he nodded curtly at the ageing butler’s greeting. This particular member of staff wasn’t one he remembered and for that he was marginally thankful. He wanted no more memories triggered, or to go down the lonely, dismal path he’d done his best to try to forget.
‘If señor would like to come with me, Señor and Señora Castillo are waiting in the drawing room.’
Emiliano allowed himself the briefest of glances at the walls that surrounded the home he’d grown up in, the sturdy bannister he used to slide down as a child, the antique cabinet he’d crashed into and earned himself a long-since-healed fracture on his collarbone.
He’d had time to do all that because he hadn’t been the firstborn son. His time had been his own to use or misuse as he pleased, because only one person had counted in this household: Matias. But it was only as he’d entered his teenage years that he’d grown to fathom exactly what that meant.
Securing the button on his single-breasted suit, he refocused his gaze and followed the butler into the wide, sunlit reception room.
His parents were seated in twin wing-backed chairs that wouldn’t have been out of place in the throne room at the Palace of Versailles. But, even without the heavy accoutrements and almost-garish displays of wealth to punctuate their success, Benito and Valentina Castillo carried themselves with near-royal pride.
They both eyed him now with equal expressions of hauteur and indifference—both expressions he was used to. But Emiliano glimpsed something else beneath the brittle exteriors.
Nerves. Desperation.
He tucked that observation away, walked forward and kissed his mother on both cheeks.
‘Mama, I hope you are well?’
Her expression twitched only for as long as it took for her to give him a once-over, before settling back into prideful superiority. ‘Of course. But I would be better still if you’d bothered to answer us when we first reached out to you. But, as usual, you choose to do things in your own time, when it suits you best.’
Emiliano gritted his teeth and curbed the urge to remind them that it was the legacy of forgetful indifference they’d bestowed on him which had dictated his actions. Instead he nodded to his father, received a curt nod in return and selected an armchair to settle in.
‘I am here now. Shall we get on with why you summoned me?’ he said, then refused the offer of a drink from the butler.
His father’s mouth twisted. ‘Sí, always in a rush. Always, you have somewhere else to be, don’t you?’
Emiliano slowly exhaled. ‘As a matter of fact, I do.’ He was in the middle of a bidding war for a revolutionary social media programme back in London. The programme’s creators were being courted by at least half a dozen other venture capitalists. Despite his company being the biggest and most powerful of them all, he reminded himself that he’d been the underdog once, before a daring move had set him on his way to stratospheric success. This wasn’t a time to take his foot off the pedal.
He also had to approve the finishing touches for the birthday celebration his event planner had put together for Sienna Newman.
His vice-president of Acquisitions.
His lover.
Thoughts of the woman whose intellect kept him on his toes by day and whose body thrilled his by night fractionally allayed the bitter memories of his childhood. Unlike his past liaisons, she hadn’t been an easy conquest, her reluctance even to give him the time of day beyond the boardroom was a challenge that had fired his blood in the months before she’d even agreed to have dinner with him.
In his quiet moments, Emiliano still silently reeled at the changes he’d made in his life in order to accommodate his lover. The few who presumed to know him would agree—rightly, in this instance—that this behaviour wasn’t like him at all. His own disquiet in the face of the reservation he sometimes felt from Sienna made him question himself. But not enough to disrupt the status quo. Not yet, anyway. Although, like everything in life, it, too, had a finite shelf life. It was that ticking clock which made him even more impatient to be done with whatever this summons was all about and get out of this place.
He stared at his parents with a raised eyebrow, letting the silent censure bounce off him. He’d long ago learned that nothing he said or did would ever change their attitude towards him. He was the spare they’d sired but never needed. His place would be on a shelf, fed, clothed, but collecting dust and nothing else. So he’d left home and stopped trying.
‘When was the last time you visited your brother?’ his mother enquired, her fixed expression breaking momentarily to allow a touch of humanity to filter through at the mention of Matias.
The question brought to mind his brother’s current state. Comatose in a hospital bed in Switzerland with worryingly low signs of brain activity.
Emiliano weathered the punch of sadness and brushed a speck of lint off his cuff. ‘Two weeks ago. And every two weeks before that since his accident four months ago,’ he replied.
His parents exchanged surprised glances. He curbed the urge to laugh. ‘If this is all you needed to know, you could’ve sent me an email.’
‘It isn’t. But we find it...reassuring that family still means something to you, seeing as you abandoned it without a backward glance,’ Benito stated.
The fine hairs on Emiliano’s nape lifted. ‘Reassuring? I guess it should be celebrated that I’ve done something right at last, then? But, at the risk of straying into falsehoods and hyperbole, perhaps let’s stick to the subject of why you asked me here.’
Benito picked up his glass and stared into the contents for a few seconds before he knocked it back and swallowed with a gulp. The action was so alien—his father’s outward poise a thing so ingrained it seemed part of his genetic make-up—that Emiliano’s jaw threatened to drop before he caught himself.
Setting the glass down with a brisk snap, another first, Benito eyed him with fresh censure. Nothing new there.
‘We’re broke. Completely destitute. Up the proverbial creek without a paddle.’
‘Excuse me?’ Emiliano wasn’t sure whether it was the bald language that alarmed