He’d been doing his Master’s in engineering and he was the cleverest guy she’d ever met in her life. He was so good-looking that he’d taken her breath away.
He’d been also just the sort of boy her parents would have disapproved of. Exotic, foreign and most of all...unashamedly broke.
His fantastic self-assurance—the hint of unleashed power that sat on his shoulders like an invisible cloak—had attracted and scared her at the same time. At eighteen, she had had limited experience of the opposite sex and, in his company, that limited experience had felt like no experience at all. Roger, whom she had left behind and who had been still clinging to her, even though she had broken off their very tepid relationship, had scarcely counted even though he had been only a couple of years younger than Javier.
She’d felt like a gauche little girl next to him. A gauche little girl with one foot poised over an unknown abyss, ready to step out of the comfort zone that had been her privileged, sheltered life.
Private school, skiing holidays, piano lessons and horse riding on Saturday mornings had not prepared her for anyone remotely like Javier Vasquez.
He wasn’t going to be good for her but she had been as helpless as a kitten in the face of his lazy but targeted pursuit.
‘We could do something,’ he had murmured early on when he had cornered her in that pub, in the sort of seductive voice that had literally made her go weak at the knees. ‘I don’t have much money but trust me when I tell you that I can show you the best time of your life without a penny to my name...’
She’d always mixed with people just like her: pampered girls and spoilt boys who had never had to think hard about how much having a good night out might cost. She’d drifted into seeing Roger, who’d been part of that set and whom she’d known for ever.
Why? It was something she’d never questioned. Oliver had taken it all for granted but, looking back, she had always felt guilty at the ease with which she had always been encouraged to take what she wanted, whatever the cost.
Her father had enjoyed showing off his beautiful twins and had showered them with presents from the very second they had been born.
She was his princess, and if occasionally she’d felt uneasy at the way he’d dismissed people who were socially inferior to him, she had pushed aside the uneasy feeling because, whatever his faults, her father had adored her. She’d been a daddy’s girl.
And she’d known, from the second Javier Vasquez had turned his sexy eyes to her, that she was playing with fire, that her father would have had a coronary had he only known...
But play with fire she had.
Falling deeper and deeper for him, resisting the driving desire to sleep with him because...
Because she’d been a shameless romantic and because there had been a part of her that had wondered whether a man like Javier Vasquez would have ditched her as soon as he’d got her between the sheets.
But he hadn’t forced her hand and that, in itself, had fuelled her feelings towards him, honed and fine-tuned them to the point where she had felt truly alive only when she’d been in his company.
It was always going to end in tears, except had she known just how horribly it would all turn out...
‘I didn’t think the guy would actually agree to see me,’ Oliver confessed, sliding his eyes over to her flushed, distressed face before hurriedly looking away. ‘Like I said, it was a long shot. I actually didn’t even think he’d remember who I was... It wasn’t as though I’d met him more than a couple of times...’
Because, although they were twins, Oliver had gone to a completely different university. Whilst she had been at Cambridge, studying Classics with the hope of becoming a lecturer in due course, he had been on the other side of the Atlantic, going to parties and only intermittently hearing about what was happening in her life. He’d left at sixteen, fortunate enough to get a sports scholarship to study at a high school, and had dropped out of her life aside from when he’d returned full of beans during the holidays.
Even when the whole thing had crashed and burned a mere few months after it had started, he had only really heard the edited version of events. Anyway, he had been uninterested, because life in California had been far too absorbing and Oliver, as Sophie had always known, had a very limited capacity when it came to empathising with other people’s problems.
Now she wondered whether she should have sat him down when he’d eventually returned to the UK and given him all the miserable details of what had happened.
But by then it had been far too late.
She’d had an engagement ring on her finger and Javier had no longer been on the scene. Roger Scott had been the one walking up the aisle.
It didn’t bear thinking about.
‘So you saw him...’ What did he look like? What did he sound like? Did he still have that sexy, sexy smile that could make a person’s toes curl? So much had happened over the years, so much had killed her youthful dreams about love and happiness, but she could still remember, couldn’t she?
She didn’t want to think any of those things, but she did.
‘Didn’t even hesitate,’ Oliver said proudly, as though he’d accomplished something remarkable. ‘I thought I’d have to concoct all sorts of stories to get to see the great man but, in fact, he agreed to see me as soon as he found out who I was...’
I’ll bet, Sophie thought.
‘Soph, you should see his office. It’s incredible. The guy’s worth millions. More—billions. Can’t believe he was broke when you met him at university. You should have stuck with him, sis, instead of marrying that creep.’
‘Let’s not go there, Ollie.’ As always, Sophie’s brain shut down at the mention of her late husband’s name. He had his place in a box in her head, firmly locked away. Talking about him was not only pointless but it tore open scabs to reveal wounds still fresh enough to bleed.
Roger, she told herself, had been a learning curve and one should always be grateful for learning curves, however horrible they might have been. She’d been young, innocent and optimistic once upon a time, and if she was battle-hardened now, immune to girlish daydreams of love, then that was all to the good because it meant that she could never again be hurt by anyone or anything.
She stood up and gazed out of the patio doors to the unkempt back garden which rolled into untidy fields, before spinning round, arms folded, to gaze at her brother. ‘I’d ask you what he said...’ her voice was brisk and unemotional ‘...but there wouldn’t be any point because I don’t want to have anything to do with him. He’s...my past and you shouldn’t have gone there without my permission.’
‘It’s all well and good for you to get sanctimonious, Soph, but we need money, he has lots of it and he has a connection with you.’
‘He has no connection with me!’ Her voice was high and fierce.
Of course he had no connection with her. Not unless you called hatred a connection, because he would hate her. After what had happened, after what she had done to him.
Suddenly exhausted, she sank into one of the kitchen chairs and dropped her head in her hands for a few moments, just wanting to block everything out. The past, her memories, the present, their problems. Everything.
‘He says he’ll think about helping.’
‘What?’ Appalled, she stared at him.
‘He seemed very sympathetic when I explained the situation.’
‘Sympathetic.’ Sophie laughed shortly. The last thing Javier Vasquez would be was sympathetic. As though it had happened yesterday, she remembered how he had looked when she had told him that she was breaking up with him, that it was over between them, that he wasn’t the man for her after all. She remembered the coldness in his eyes