‘And telling you how I got this thing will help?’
‘I think so. It might help explain some of a past which you seem determined to keep hidden.’
He turned around, the movement seeming slow, his green eyes hard and flinty as they surveyed her.
‘Please, Alej,’ she added quietly.
There was a pause. A long pause. And then he gave a long and ragged sigh. ‘I was attacked,’ he said finally. ‘By a man with a razor. Or, to be more accurate—by several men.’
He saw her flinch, as if a steel blade had penetrated her tender flesh. Her fingers flew up to her lips in shock and she looked about eighteen again.
‘Oh, my God,’ she breathed. ‘What happened?’
He wondered afterwards what made him continue with his story because he’d never told anyone else. Was it the afterglow of the delicious sex they’d recently shared? Or because living with someone was way more intimate than he’d anticipated, with the inevitable erosion of all the barriers you tried to erect around yourself?
Or maybe it was simply because it was Emily and she had always been the one to burrow beneath his skin.
And suddenly he was right back there. A different time and a different place. And a very different man. He unlocked the memory and it floated free.
‘I’d been playing in Argentina and my team had won the last match of the season, as we were expected to do,’ he began slowly. ‘I even scored the winning goal.’
‘That must have been a good feeling,’ she said.
He gave a bitter laugh. ‘Not really. I’d been approached to fix that match, but, like every other time it had happened, I’d refused.’ There was a pause as he looked at her. ‘But the offer still left a bad taste in my mouth and it added to my growing disenchantment with some aspects of the sport.’
She nodded, but she didn’t speak. She was an astute woman, he acknowledged—one who had learned to use silence to her own advantage. Because he could have stopped the story there. Told her he’d had a few drinks and got into a fight but didn’t bother reporting it because he didn’t want the negative press of some barroom brawl. Explained how he’d found a backstreet medic to suture it for him on the quiet—hence the resulting scar. All these things were true, and Alej was a man with a powerful aversion to lies. But there had been other reasons for him not wanting the truth behind the brawl to emerge, hadn’t there? He wondered if it was the soft expression in Emily’s deep blue eyes which made him want to confide in her, or the sudden realisation that some secrets were so dark that they had the power to eat away at your very soul, if you let them.
‘I was in a bar,’ he continued. ‘A rough, simple kind of place not far from where I’d grown up, where a man can go unbothered and drink his beer in peace.’ But it hadn’t been like that. Word had got out that he was there and someone had come to find him. The oily thug in the cheap suit Alej had recognised instantly. His face had been ugly with anger, his words uglier still. ‘I was approached by a man,’ he said, his eyes fixed unblinkingly on Emily’s face. ‘The same guy who’d tried to get me to fix the match. He blamed me for refusing and for all the money he’d lost as a result. And then he told me that my mother was nothing but a cheap hooker and that he’d “had” her.’
She flinched again, but this time a dull red flush stained her cheeks and he saw the way she clenched her hands into tiny fists. ‘How dare he say that?’
He almost smiled at the fervour of her instant denial because hadn’t he felt exactly the same, when for a few foolish and naïve moments he’d thought the man was lying? ‘He even tried to explain how and where, in very graphic detail, and that’s when I hit him.’
‘Good! I’m glad you hit him. He deserved it!’
Another sigh left Alej’s lungs. The crack of bone and the pliant dip of giving flesh had satisfied him, but only for a moment. Nothing ever lasted for longer than a moment, he reflected bitterly. ‘And that’s when two of his gorillas came charging in, picked me up and carried me out of there and nobody tried to stop them. And behind that bar, in a dark and stinking alley, they each took turns to trace patterns on my back with a rusty blade, so I would never forget them.’
‘Oh, Alej.’ She jumped to her feet and scooted towards him, the earnestness on her face seeming at odds with the unusual glamour of her new black dress as she put her arms around him. ‘Get off,’ he bit out from between gritted teeth as he tried to shake her away.
But still she held him, rubbing at his shoulders as if he had just come in, frozen from the snow. ‘No, I won’t get off,’ she said fiercely. ‘You let me touch you whenever we’re having sex—well, maybe I want to touch you now, when you need my sympathy.’
‘I don’t need your damned sympathy,’ he growled, dislodging himself from her grip at last, despite her objections.
‘I’ll be the judge of that. Please, Alej. Tell me what happened.’
He walked over to the window and watched as an enormous vintage Rolls-Royce pulled up outside the Ritz hotel opposite. ‘I left polo the very next day.’
‘Why?’ she questioned quietly.
He didn’t answer for a moment and when he did his words sounded as if they’d been dipped in some corrosive liquid. ‘Like I said, I’d been growing disenchanted for some time and the blade attack was the last straw. The cuts those men inflicted on me took a long time to heal—which meant it would be even longer before I could get back to match fitness. And I’d had a severe life shock in learning that my mother was a prostitute. I needed something different to think about. A new direction. And so I left the sport which had devoured my every waking thought for as long as I could remember and went into business instead.’
‘And no one stopped to question why?’
She was a public relations officer, Alej reminded himself—of course that would be the first thing she thought of. He turned away from the window and stared at her. ‘No. There were no more matches and it was nearly Christmas. I took myself off to the Caribbean to recover and people just thought I was recuperating. It was while I was there that I got an email from the guy who had come up with the idea of the MiMaté drink, asking if I wanted to invest some money in his venture, and, seamlessly, my business career was born.’ His mouth twisted. ‘And ironically I discovered that fame—or notoriety—still had me in its clutches. That making vast amounts of money breeds its own kind of celebrity.’
‘And that was the end of it?’ she persisted. ‘You weren’t scared of being attacked again?’
He shook his head. ‘I took courses in martial arts. I learned how to protect myself. Put it this way—I never went into a backstreet bar ever again.’
‘And did you talk to your mother?’ she questioned slowly. ‘About the accusations?’
She was looking puzzled and Alej wondered if she guessed he was holding something back or whether he was crediting her with more astuteness than she actually possessed. But even though he was still questioning his sanity in having started all this, he knew he was going to complete the story. Because wasn’t it a relief to let it out at last—like a bitter and poisonous mix which had been living inside him for too long, before finally bubbling to the surface?
‘No. It isn’t an easy subject to bring up, when you stop to think about it. So I just buried it. Deep.’ His voice was rough as he pushed out the words from lungs which suddenly felt dry. ‘You see, after my mother was sacked by your stepfather, she never worked again. I’d bought her a little house in the country and she grew vegetables and for a while she seemed almost happy. But then she was diagnosed with lung cancer. She had a full-time carer living with her, and I used to visit her regularly.’